Mystics throughout history have claimed to experience visions and trance-like states they say come directly from God. There's now speculation that these visions may have been hallucinations brought on by epilepsy. Jess Hill writes about her own experiences, and speaks to others who say their seizures come in the form of intensely mystical experiences.

When it happened to Zac Ernst, it felt like someone was using a wire to feed a belief into his brain. To Lucinda Edwards, everything seemed interconnected, like she finally understood the meaning of the universe. Sharon Powell describes hers as ‘precious’, despite the pain and fear that can come with them.

Their experiences are unique, but their condition is the same: they all have epilepsy, and their transcendent experiences are actually seizures. However, they’re not the kind of seizures we usually associate with epilepsy.

One of history’s most famous epileptics, the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, had described his seizures as blissful: a ‘happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it… I am in perfect harmony with myself and the entire universe’.

Normally when we think of epileptic seizures, we think of someone convulsing and losing consciousness. But that’s just one type of seizure—and it’s not even the most common kind. There’s a whole other category of seizures, known as partial seizures, that can cause a kaleidoscope of symptoms, from the sense of oneness Lucinda experienced, through to déjà vu, complex hallucinations and feelings of fear, depression, and euphoria. Often, these seizures don’t involve any convulsions at all. In some epileptics, a seizure can even invoke the presence of God.

I didn’t feel any of this the first time I had a seizure. I was on a plane, alone and exhausted, and the first awareness I had that I was seizing was the feeling that my mind had dropped into a black hole—a vacuum without language. I grasped blindly in that darkness for a way to articulate what I was feeling, but as language came back, I was suddenly locked in tiny, tight convulsions, unable to breathe or move, ‘knowing’ that unless I could get someone to notice me, I would die. Somehow I managed to hurl myself across the passenger row of seats, onto the lap of a male passenger, who’d been absorbed in his iPad the whole time. Knowing I’d been seen, that I was safe, I let go of consciousness.

The plane I was on was winging me home from Yemen to Beirut, where I was living as a reporter. When I got home a few hours later, I went to the hospital. Two brain scans and one very long night later, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor (an operable one, luckily). Then my neurosurgeon dropped another bomb—because I’d had more than one seizure in the last 24 hours, I was now officially epileptic.

He removed my tumor a few weeks later, but for the next six months, the seizures kept coming. They weren’t the shaking kind I had on the plane—they could take the form of hallucinations, out of body experiences and regular moments of absence, where it would feel like my brain had just rebooted.

These seizures stopped about a year ago, but I still get my brain scanned every few months, because there’s a 90 per cent chance the tumor will come back. It’s not a reality I would have chosen—it’s pretty depressing, really. Despite this, I have this unshakeable feeling that my seizures were meaningful, and I’m grateful to have had them.

A little while ago I started wondering, is it just me? Or have others had similar experiences?

A quick visit to Dr Google revealed some astonishing stories: yes, other epileptics had weird kinds of seizures. In fact, hallucinations were actually a common symptom of epilepsy.

Not only that—some people even enjoyed their seizures, describing them as spiritual or religious experiences. One of history’s most famous epileptics, the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, had described his seizures as blissful: a ‘happiness unthinkable in the normal state and unimaginable for anyone who hasn’t experienced it… I am in perfect harmony with myself and the entire universe’.

I decided to meet people who’d had some of these weird, transcendent or even spiritual seizures. So I put a call out on Twitter.

That’s how I met Lucinda.

Lucinda is 31—the same age as me. She’s a lawyer and she lives in Pymble, on Sydney’s north shore.

Lucinda says her only religion is science, and that once upon a time, she would have called herself a cynic. But 10 years ago, her brain began to behave in a way that not even science can fully explain.

‘I felt like it was almost like a doorway to different ideas that just wouldn't exist in my normal mental patterns. So, you know, alternative worlds, different planes of existence,’ she says.

Her seizures would drift in slowly, starting with a sense of déjà vu, combined with ‘that sinking feeling you feel when you lose your wallet, that something is wrong’. Then a stream of random, translucent images would start to flash before Lucinda’s eyes, and with them, a sense that somehow they were interconnected and were revealing the true meaning of the universe. This would last a couple of minutes; when it was over, Lucinda would be left with a headache.

These were euphoric experiences, and Lucinda began to look forward to them, though she had no idea what they were. ‘I just thought it was just some weird thing that was happening to me, that I didn't try to explain. I'm not religious, so I didn't think it was a religious moment. It just made you feel connected to the earth, to past, present, to future, to everybody else. I don’t think you get that experience unless you're on some sort of drug.’

After months of these episodes, Lucinda’s scientific brain wanted an explanation, so she went to a doctor. Several brain scans delivered the same result—inconclusive—but her symptoms alone were a clear sign. Lucinda had temporal lobe epilepsy.

That’s a term you come across a lot when you Google ‘weird seizure experiences’. It refers to epilepsy that originates in the temporal lobes, the parts of brain on either side of our head, behind our ears. When one or both of the temporal lobes seize, millions of misfiring neurons can wreak havoc on functions like memory, emotional responses, speech, processing sounds and smells—even our feelings of conviction and insight.

This may go some of the way to explaining why temporal lobe epilepsy has become famous for causing mystical or religious seizures.

‘The most striking aspect of these people is that not only during the seizures, but “interictally”— between the seizures—they have tremendous religious experiences and mystical experiences,’ says VS Ramachandran, a renowned Indian neuroscientist who became obsessed with temporal lobe epilepsy in the 1990s.

‘They say things like, “during the seizure, I experience God—I see the meaning of the universe, the true meaning of the universe, for the first time in my life. I understand my place in the cosmic scheme of things.” That’s what they say. Sometimes they’ll actually say, “I’m talking to God”, or “God is talking to me”.’

God didn’t speak to Lucinda—or at least, she doesn’t see it that way—but her seizures are straight out of the mystical visions handbook. I asked her to imagine that she’d been brought up religious.

‘I think it would have been 100 per cent different,’ she says. ‘I probably would have seen it as a sign from God, because it was unlike anything I'd experienced before.’

Why would temporal lobe seizures create a sense of universal oneness, of utter contentment, even a sense of God?

‘I don't have a clean answer for that one,’ says Professor Mark Cook, head of neurology at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital. A specialist in epilepsy, Professor Cook says neuroscience still can’t quite explain why seizures stimulate the kind of mystical experiences that people like Lucinda report, except to say that they do appear to be related to the temporal lobe.

What we do know, thanks to the pioneering work of VS Ramachandran, is that religiosity has a definitive link to the temporal lobes. He was the first to establish clinical proof of this in the late 1990s, based on an experiment he conducted on temporal lobe epilepsy patients.

Ramachandran presented these patients with a range of images and measured their ‘galvanic skin response’; in other words, how much the images made them sweat.

‘Lions and tigers, violent scenes, horrible scenes, they’d get a big galvanic skin response. But we showed them things which were utterly trivial like a bottle of water, a shoe or a pen—nothing happens, as in a normal person. Then they look at sexually provocative images, they don’t get a galvanic skin response, unlike most normal people. And this is consistent with the fact that they actually have hyposexuality; their libido is reduced in temporal lobe epilepsy,’ he reported.

‘But now comes the important finding. When we showed them religious icons—a Star of David, a cross, or the word “God”, the word “Jesus”, the word “Mary”—there’s a big jolt in the galvanic skin response, showing that something is going on in the temporal lobes, in temporal lobe epilepsy; maybe it’s going on in all our temporal lobes. There’s a group of neurons that is firing in a normal manner, which makes you more prone to religious belief. And these neurons are hyper active in these people, hence the propensity to religious belief.’

Ramachandran’s research was the first clinical evidence to link religious experience with the temporal lobes. However, it still doesn’t explain why some people have transcendent or religious experiences during their seizures.

God in a seizure Saturday 6 December 2014 Mystical revelation or epileptic seizure? Listen to the full episode to find out more. More This [series episode segment] has image,

Neurologist Alasdair Coles believes that whatever is causing them must be coming from deep within the temporal lobes, beyond the reach of brain scans. He says the temporal lobes are both concerned with memory, particularly the acquisition and laying down of memory, and the integration of sensory experiences.

‘So that all makes sense for someone that has a complex, mystical experience,’ he says. However, he doesn’t think the seizures themselves are reawakened memories. ‘I don't think people have that experience of all knowingness and union routinely—this often feels as though it has come from outside. I think they are much more core, primordial experiences.’

Lucinda Edwards can’t remember much about her seizures, apart from the feeling. ‘I do miss that feeling. It feels amazing and inspirational, and it just made you feel like anything was possible.’ She says the seizures have changed her outlook on life.

‘I used to be a cynic, and I still am quite cynical when it comes to some stuff, but I think I'm more open to people seeing things in a different way, so, you know, alternative treatments, views on the world, religion… I think I'm more open to understanding them now, because I've had such a weird experience myself. Who am I to discount anybody else's experience that's a bit more unusual?’

Encounter invites listeners to explore the connections between religion and life—intellectually, emotionally and intuitively—across a broad spectrum of topics.