Mystical and the Neurological

In my previous post, I spoke of my own mystical or spiritual experience. Now, briefly, I want to say provide some theoretical context for events like this.

There's a great deal of work being done by neurologists on brain/experience correlation, which is all fascinating stuff. So we can point to how the feelings evoked by an opening, are reflected in the brain chemistry, and blood flow and so on. It's difficult to deny the very real physical effects these have, and also the effects of spiritual practice, like mediation.  None of this is really very surprising, if you have  done a lot of mediation, you will probably notice that this affects your experiences of being in the world, how you think and feel and so on. And given where we currently stand in biology we'd expect to see these changes reflected in the brain.

There are a couple of interesting questions around for me at the moment, the first is simply this: although we see brain changes that correlate to experiences (spiritual or otherwise) - how do we bridge the gap between mechanics and our felt experience, our sense of being in the world? This is the classic 'hard problem' of consciousness studies.

There are lots of theories floating around, for example, the functionalists, Dennett and so on, say there's nothing to bridge, what we expiries is simply the result of brain activity, chemistry biology and physics.  Dr. Marshall, who presented a paper on Saturday, briefly mentioned another - that experience, or consciousness, is fundamental to this universe - as something happens, it is experienced, and the more complex the mechanism (like a brain) the more complex the experience. I quite like this, although there is little evidence to support this.

There really is no consensus at the moment.

What's more interesting to me is how we make meaning of our experiences; (again, spiritual or mundane)  do particularly powerful moments change our lives? Change our understanding of the world? Or do we use them to support our existing metaphysic?