I think most of us are raised and trained to dramatize the significance of psychophysical changes that occur in contemplative practice. I know I was. It’s sort of one of the last domains in which we allow magical thinking to survive. Not saying you were doing that, but this is what your post made me think of.
There’s a book by Master Nan Huai-jin (rest in peace) called Tao and Longevity. In it, Master Nan describes some of the neurobiological concomitants of meditation and spiritual practice. It’s pretty cool. He’ll talk about how, for example, when qi (or you could think of it kind of as ‘dynamic activation’) reaches the occipital lobe region of the brain, it’s common to see light and color-based phenomena in one’s meditation. Or how when it gets to the temporal lobe area, auditory phenomena are common.
Since our contemplative sciences are pretty primitive in modern times, we’re more prone to frame these kinds of phenomena in very magical terms.
I remember that when i was about 19, after a very interesting series of events, I ended up kind of woozy and having an intensely emotional and mentally-focused period in the middle of one night. At some point, there was a kind of ‘ding’ and it seemed like the whole world went quiet and I felt that I was floating upwards and backwards away from ‘my body’. Blah blah blah. I had an experience, felt that my entire life and world had been reformed and blah blah blah.
But anyway, the point is that at that point in my life, the best frame of reference I had for such an experience was Judaeo-Christian cosmology. So that was basically how I framed it. No crime there, but it’s just that I would frame it quite differently now. Not that I’m any more ‘right’ about these things now. That’s actually the precise point. My point of view now would include much more apophasis and agnosis. Much more acknowledgment of the limits of (my) understanding. For me, personally, that’s growth.
Not really making a specific point here. Just that reading your post kind of reminded me of this aspect of my own experience.