Hi Limbo.
Higher states of consciousness are scientifically treated for the past 30 years by researching Transcendental Meditation
In other words, nothing is mystical about higher states of consciousness.
Hi doronshadmi.
Someone who has never recalled a dream can know that people who claim to experience dreams aren't making it all up when they describe a dream, and by the same token science can show that mystics who claim to experience higher states of being are not making it all up. They are just framing it in esoteric ways we can't easily decode.
There is a set of experiences behind the mystical literature of the world. They aren't making it all up to pick up chicks or scam people out of money or to indulge in wishful thinking. Science shows that much, at least.
Science also shows that these experiences can be framed in the lingo of any culture, even a secular culture. Framing them in scientific terms does not rob higher states of consciousness of their health benefits, just as a statistical analysis of a baseball game does not rob it of the fun and excersise you can have out on the field.
There is no conflict between mysticism and science. People could be practicing it within an atheistic or secular framework, just as Sam Harris does.
"One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.
As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.
So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I’d like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person’s life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents." -Sam Harris
A sports fan can use many tools to analyze a game. But none of them will tell him what it is like to hit a grand slam homerun that wins the game.
A scientist can use tools to learn about higher states of consciousness, but that won't tell him what it is like to go past the usual states of consciousness we are all familiar with.
Oh sure, we can see the differences between the brains of long-term meditation experts and non-meditators. The differences are astounding. We can see the obvious benefits. But just seeing them won't increase our brain power or make our brains more aware.
