There are also personal reports of people hearing voices in their heads but we classify those as mental disorders most of the time. In the end, none of those are really verifiable and when people have used their personal spiritual experiences to make predictions about the world, they have turned out to be wrong.
Most religions claim that in the past people have had collective spiritual experiences that they could have verified together, but those don't seep to happen in modern times. In a way, all the miracles disappeared with the invention of the camera.
There is an assumption here that the pathologising of these experiences is correct. The WHO commissioned longitudinal studies over more than 3 decades whichshow that developing countries have better mental health outcomes than countries that employ modern psychiatry. These countries instead continue to employ folk medicine techniques, which include awareness that the experiences the person is having may be real on some level but aren't able to be experienced by everyone.
I put it to you that the labelling of these expereinces as sickness is a majot contributing factor to what turns them into an actual sickness.
Consider a person in a voluntary non-ordinary state such as those induced by psychedelics. Psychedelic therapists who say success in using these substances in spychotherapy for decades before they were banned, and in modern day clinical trails site set and setting as the primary factors in influencing the experience. What is the mindset of the person before they take the substance and what is the setting that could influence that mindset during?
So to simplify... imagine a person of medical authority telling a person who is on acid, for example, that they have a mental illness and they will have it for the rest of their life. This would be deeply irresponsible as the person is highly vulnerable to influence and could cause all kinds of psychological problems.
Why then would we do exactly this when a person is going through the same kind of experience involuntarily?
Without making any accusations, it certainly would be good for business.
Coming back to the claim of people being wrong about the things they learned during mystical experience / psychosis, I point you to Carl Jung who described these experiences as the dream world overlapping reality.
If we choose, we can learn about ourselves though our dreams. Let's assume there are no multidimensional realities beyond the physical for a moment. This dream content can reveal to us information about our own subconscous mind.
If the dream world starts to overlap reality, it can contain content that can help us learn about ourselves. It can also allow us to process trauma and more.
The problem comes when we live in a culture that devalues these non-ordinary states and instead of having clear information and training for people, as well as cultural awareness from childhood, we have nothing. Worse than nothing. Ridicule and fear.
If we existed in a culture which celebrated these experiences and understood how to guide them to a healthy conclusion, people wouldn't get stuck in them, which is the essence of the WHO discovered in the developing world.
In this instance I feel that scienctific bias towards the need to not allow the possibility of a spirit world is in fact contributing to a global mental health epidemic.
Whatever these experiences are, suppressing them is making people sick. Whenever people are given permission to explore the mythological content they have a better chance of coming through.
Perhaps a compramise is for science to recognise the power of myth, the power of fiction, the power of storyteling. Psychology has seen Narrative Therapy emerge as an effective model. But on a much larger scale, if science doesn't believe storytelling is powerful then they should look to the money being invested and made in the the film and tv industry. Or even better, look to advertising. If stortelling doesn't affect behaviour then why do advertisers spend billions and billions on it. They wouldn't do it if they didn't get return on investment.
My point is that confronting individuals who are experiencing the dream state overlapping consensus reality with 'this isn't real and you are sick' is not a medically effective story. Telling our entire culture that 'none of this stuff is real and anyone who experiences it is sick', in my opinion is making our culture sick.
So the compramise could be science saying 'mythic content is powerful and should be respected.
From an atheist point of view, perhaps 95%of thepopulation is suffering from some form of mental illness. If this is the case, if you want them to be healed of their delusion I suggest accepting the content as Myth (read fiction) but also accepting that Myth is powerful and engaging with these myths on their own terms instead of suppressing them may lead you to your goal more effectively.