As far as I know, the brain wave patterns of people during Transcendental Meditation have been measured and there is a quantitative difference between the meditative state and the non-meditative state. The measurable thing is the brain waves. This isn experience that can be called mystical without stretching things too much.

 I have never seen an excorcism. Nor would I suggest demon possession is real

Excorcisms are a ritual present in many societies all of which are (usually) performed wildly different but with the same results. They all invoke the same brain wave patterns regardless of how they are done. All this shows is that such a ritual enduces odd brain functions

I know you are saying the same thing, but I've got a feeling that it leads somewhere. All meditation, excorcism and other would-be supernatural phenomena do nothing but trick the brain into believing it's under a certain stimulus when it really isn't.  It's very similar to WILD'ng in the sense that you trick your brain to stay "awake" and aware while you sleep... which leads to lucid dreaming.

It's not leading anywhere at this point. I am trying to find a framework that fits my own experiences that doesn't have a bunch of woo woo involved.  One of my trains of thought is that logic and empiricism cannot fully describe reality. The type of experience often called mystical can be measured by a viewer (i.e. brain waves) but this does not describe the experience from the practioneres point of view. And in fact, non-verbal states of conciousness CANNOT be described BECAUSE they are non-verbal. So what I see is an actual experiential phenomenon that while we know it is real and reproducible, the experience itself falls outside the capacity of any language to give an adequate description. It must be experienced, it cannot be described. There is a common "cop out" used "I can't explain it, you just have to believe me". I am suggesting that there are definite, reproducible mental states that CANNOT be described because they explicitly divest the mind of the verbal tools necessary for description.  

Let me preface by saying I'm not anti-subjective. I won't force you to account for things you make no objective claims about. Science, logic, and rationality are a reliable way for people to communicate with each other; but I think personal experiences, especially strange ones, occupy an ambiguous place for the individual: real to our perception, but empirically insubstantial. A person can find value in it, but can't for now relate that to another person. As long as it doesn't involve an objective claim, it doesn't bother me. Sometimes I wake up in a state similar to what I understand as nothingness. Aware of things, but free from worry and attachment, feeling nothing but warmth for everything around me. I'm not spiritual, so I don't attribute it to anything, and I don't know anything about neuroscience: so I set it aside as an interesting experience.
Now that all that contextualizing is out of the way, I'm going to put this as gently as possible. In my experience, the simplest way to reconcile two seemingly contradictory points is not to know enough about either of them to recognize the contradiction. I've seen this time and again with the 'spiritual' people in my life. It doesn't concern only philosophical matters either; it's an attitude of petulant ignorance they apply to everything from technology to their relationships. I would hold off on considering double-think a desirable state.

Isn't claiming that atheists require a god-detector a straw man argument itself? 

I do appreciate what you are trying to do here, but I am not convinced that the verbal vs. non-verbal state means anything.  I am not talking about the existence of gods here. I simply mean that talking about a "non-verbal" state of consciousness seems meaningless in general. 

If you cannot describe an experience it is because you:

A.  Cannot remember it clearly

or

B.  Lack the language skill to convey it.

I am not saying that your memory or language skills are lacking.  Many things are difficult for most people to describe.  That's what poets are for.  Rumi described mystical experience so well that I went nuts for two years trying to believe in a god.  That's another discussion, but I just want you to know that there are atheists out there who have had very strong mystical experiences that are as indescribable or "non-verbal" as yours.  I just don't see where this common framework gets us.  I wish you well in your soul searching.

If you ever do acquire this skill and knowledge, you yourself will be the philosopher.  I'm sure that if you work hard enough to develop your skills you will increase your effectiveness in discussion with non-theists.  You may continue to impress and befriend them in greater numbers.  As to answering their questions however, no amount of skill will change the mind of a similarly skilled thinker.   It comes down to knowledge, the other attribute you mentioned.

 Knowledge and experience are two different things, my friend.  Which one is more important can be a language game.  The difference between "knowing the path" and "walking the path" is experiential, yet each one contains the other (uh oh, taoism.)  Anyone can say this, but unless there is actually some knowledge there, it is meaningless.  Theism contains no knowledge, only experience.

After thousands of years, religion has produced nothing new.  No knowledge.  Nothing new to add to our experience (with the possible exception of those who study meditation, which does not depend on theism.)  Some of us have moved on.  Until the rest of us do, the dialogue is important to our social evolution and our survival. 

What survival or replication value would mystical experiences have? What pressures, and therefore why, would be have evolved them?

My answer is this: they're a side effect of our attentive and dream state mechanisms.

For an empirical viewpoint I suggest you could refer to existing data on psychaedelic substances. mind-altering chemicals are frequently an ingredient of traditional mysticism which ensures that neurological activity is basically duplicated among mystic groups, as you suggested, and it does tend to correlate experientially too. 

As to your question about the gourmet vs the lay-taster, I'd extend on what Hamby was saying, there is inherent uncertainty about all our experiences, even when we are at our most objective, let alone mystical, but I will say if you taste artificial vanilla and real vanilla one after the other the odds that you'll prefer the real thing are pretty high, no matter who you are.

So your saying that through religious contemplation and meditation we can change our brain state to experiance something new? Thats great. I would not disagree. I could also drop some acid  and experiance something new. I could do all sorts of other things to alter my perception, brain chemistry or what ever. So what? It does not matter if its repeatable so what? One bhuddist monk can repeat the same sate of meditative enlightenment again and again but there is no way of knowing whether this is the same state any other monk doing suposedly the same thing. More to the point there is no way of showing that the "insights" gained from such meditations are in any way relevant to the world.

Dropping acid is a good example. In my youth I had many trippy insights on acid, I've felt like I was on the verge of working it all out, that I was just on the tip of some comic understanding of the universe. Many others have felt the same. But when one grows up a bit one realises that all the "insights" when tripping are a load of old bollocks brought about by a chemical fucking with your synapses. Whilst it all feels very cosmicly significant it isnt, its just a trip. 

The important thing is that there is no way to verify any of the "insights" externally they are entirely subjective things. Without any objective way of verifying these insights the Bhuddists monk meditating himself into a stupor is merely tripping. Its no worse or better than altering ones brain by dropping a load of acid.  

I think I see where you're coming from, but I might projecting my own opinions here a little, so let me know if I'm off the mark.

There are somethings in life that can be described in others.
E.g. If I tell someone I saw a blue pig, they know what a pig is, they know what it would like for the pig to be blue so they know what I'm talking about when I say that I saw a blue pig.
When we try to introduce someone to a new food, we do have a vocab of taste concepts like spicy and tangy, but often we'll agree that you have to taste it for yourself to understand.

I think that Wave is trying to make a similar claim about religious thought and religious experience cannot be explained in terms of something else, it's something you have to directly experience for yourself if you want to understand it. I agree. That's why I kind of sympathise with mystics as they recognise they have something that cannot be expressed in scientific terms and treat it accordingly.

I think the way to get around this is to recognise that we use the word 'truth' in a lot of different ways. Sometimes we mean truth as a fact about the world, which is how it is used in science. However, we also use the word 'truth' in other contexts.
Advice, for instance, doesn't describe the world so is a different context but there can still be truth an falsity. We can talk about truth and falsity when describing personality characteristics. E.g. it's true that I'm a nice guy and false that I'm nasty.
Nice and nasty don't have a place in our scientific language either.

So there can be 'truth' about God, but it's truth in the way that scientific facts are truth, and when talking about the world then I don't think that any statement about God can be meaningful let alone truth. But when we use the word 'truth' in the more general sense where it kind of means 'relevent', God's existence can be true indeed... if you see where I'm going with this...?

So then the question means, what does atheism mean?
Is it the belief that God doesn't exist in the sense we use when describing the world? If so, many Christians are implicitly atheistic, and I reckon that you'd be an atheist too.
If it's a question of whether God is relevent, then atheists are those who find the concept of God distasteful to their worldview while theists are those who find the concept wonderful.

Thoughts?

Precisly. Neurons can't tell the difference between neural electricity and an electrode. A signal is a signal is a signal. Brain waves are merely the collective patterns of fireing.

You could think of the brain as a huge circuit. You can insert batteries into the circuit and change its operation (brain stimulation). You can remove parts of the circuit (lobotomy). You can hold a super sensitive radio reciever up to it and listen to it (EEG). Does the circuit act any differently if you use external energy? No.

You don't have to stimulate the brain with electrodes either. You can even do it non-invasively via induction. The experiences are rough analogues of some of the experiences people have. The brain is far from a perfect circuit, and it is more than plausible it can malfunction and create these experiences on its own.

One example is meditation, which I will call waking overfocus. Think of deaming as a screen saver for your mind, after a certain period of inactivity it goes into sleep mode. Waking overfocus is when you sit around and concentrate on a single thing, causing the rest of your mind to "go to sleep." Only instead of you observing the dream from the inside, you will observe it from the outside.

Here's an experiment you can try. Get lots of sleep so that it will be hard for you to fall asleep. Now, drink a whole mess of coffee but not so much that you're restless and twitchy. Now, climb back into bed and try to sleep.

It may take a few tries but you'll eventually end up in a state of semi-sleep. First it will feel something like having warm water poured over your body, but not over your head. Once you begin to feel this, concentrate on it and try to make the sensation more vivid. You're essentially paralyzing yourself so that you don't go off sleepwalking. Scientists counteracted this process once with cats, and they ended up walking around bumping into things.

Now, open your eyes and look at your room without the aid of your subconscious. Don't freak out or you'll start to have a sort of waking nightmare. If you do freak out, try to turn your head. You will not be able to move anything but your head and trying to do so will eventually wake you up, but it takes a lot longer. Once while doing this I hallucinated getting up 3 or 4 times before finally moving my head. Mildly frustrated was I.

Feh.

You should know me better than that, wave.  I'm saying we both had a dream.

Anyone who has used psychoactive substances knows that this is untrue.  Speaking while under the influence can suddenly shift you out of your state, or deeper into it.  Also, there are people who meditate or pray in a waking state through years of concentrated practice.  Is their experience different from yours because they can simultaneously speak about it?  You'll never know, and so the analogy stands.

"Even if..."  You may be right here.  Even if you levitated, I'd look for an explanation before jumping to magic.  I think the greater point is that this has NEVER happened. 

I don't know which god you believe in.  I don't know what characteristics you have assigned to it, but I have yet to hear a definition that does not include fantastic claims.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinay evidence, but I'm not even asking for that.  The standard is not set too high for a god of any definition.  Is one piece of solid evidence too much to ask?  Is that what you mean by a high standard?  If something as small as levitation (which we humans can do with magnets now) is beyond your god, why call it god? 

Here's where you're making the mistake, wave.  We don't set the standard.  The standard is there, and we acknowledge it.

I'm not going to pontificate on this because deludedgod and todangst have covered it over and over.  I'm sure you've read all the threads about the foundations of logic and science, and understand that they are the way they are simply because there's no other option!

We aren't setting any standards.  We're simply observing the standards that lead to valid conclusions.  We don't have any more control over the standards than theists.  We just choose to actually abide by them.

Wave, you're a smart guy. Don't be dense. Logic is the way that we think. Logical proofs are valid. We identified and codified logic, but we didn't invent it. Same for science. The scientific method was identified by people. We didn't invent a way of discovering truth that worked, we discovered it. It's a very, very big difference.

No. Think about this carefully. The reason that we can add 2+2 and get 4 is that regardless of consensus, 2 and 2 are 4. The reason we know we exist is that we can't ask the question without retorting it. No matter what the consensus, retortion proves axioms. In science, it doesn't matter if 60% of the population disagrees with you. Truth is truth. (Or, have you forgotten that 60% of America is not on board with the truth of evolution. Good thing it's not about consensus!)

Wave, I'm not trying to be mean to you. You know I respect you and that I don't try to just lay on insults when you're trying to learn, but this is one of the weakest threads you've posted in a long time, and your lack of logic is really disturbing me.

Yes, there are events that could be considered evidence of god, but you have two problems: 1) If god is natural, that evidence would be scientific in nature, and would conform to the standards of logic and science, by definition! 2) If god is supernatural, you know good and well what the results would be for any and all knowledge of anything and everything.

Let me rephrase your statement for you and see if that illuminates the absurdity of it:

"What I mean by the standard of evidence as being too high is illustrated by the the denial of the miraculous (unexplained) even in the absurdity of human levitation (James Randi would sure love to document this actually happening!)."

or, put another way, "The standard of evidence is so high that scientists don't accept the explanation that we can't explain something, and always go about looking for an explanation, rather than attributing it to magic, thus committing an appeal to ignorance."