The photosensitive receptors in the brain of mammals like us, such as in the pineal gland are considered not to actually be photosensitive beyond infancy. Instead they serve a function as in many other animals, to use the circadian rhythm of day and night to synchronize biological cycles within the body but for us humans only during/around our pregnancy.
If not for that, it could have been explained as a vestigial organ... remember that we have developed through evolution! These non-visual photosensitive receptors may still play a role for us (like I just said), it's possible it played a bigger role in our prehistoric ancestors. Or not.
The fact that the internet is filled to the brink of pages about outlandish theories based on assumptions upon assumptions fueled by how mindblowing the implications would be and losing sight of skepticism very easily.... that says about as little as the fact that television i.e. channels - which used to once be educational and scientific no less - now are filled with the most silly programs about aliens and esoteric things. Programs meant as entertainment but taken way too easily as fact by people who think that there isn't such a thing as being '
too open-minded' (which is pertinently wrong by the way as I discovered from personal experience).
A simpler way to put that is to point out how Rick Strassman's theories about DMT and the pineal gland have been spreaded by people so much in such a way that the fact that it is just a theory (and not one with truly compelling evidence either) has been all but forgotten. That kind of thing happens a lot on the internet, so without proper scepticism things can get pretty hysterical.
Electromagnetic effects in a deceased body can be interpreted in countless ways, actually if you want to talk about science: physics does not support the idea of an immortal soul because there is no electromagnetic carrier medium that could hold that kind of information, and it would have to be such a medium for there to be interaction. So dark energy or something like that (which may very well not exist due to flaws in prevailing models) are not suitable explanations since they do not interact, and that is necessary for any transmission.
Couldn't the phenomenon at 7 minutes be explained by a sort of discharge of the energy in the body when certain biological processes and biochemicals have degraded to a certain point when a sort of chain-reaction of that discharge occurs, like a battery shorting out? Doesn't mean that energy encodes anything whatsoever. If current science has trouble explaining something that does not mean the explanation must lie outside of natural law.
If things could be shown to happen outside of natural law (anything paranormal), James Randi would pay a million for that - nobody ever collected that.
If you read all that and think it's "enough" why don't you make a case for it some more? Especially with things like eidetic memory? (not trying to be aggressive here at all - just challenging)
What is real by the way? How are you defining it? How do you know you are defining it the way Picasso is? Art is about the reality of our creativity anyway, whether in creation or perception.
Seeing entities is commonplace but easily explained by hypogogic and hypnopompic effects, and hallucinations while awake are also relatively common if you read the so-called book by Oliver Sacks. I really see no problem with those phenomena being consistent with neurological effects. And it is the mind that is in ways limitless, accounting for everything you can imagine being real and in
that way it all is real. Obviously not everything is physically real, otherwise why don't we have access to countless bodies of fairies etc?
There are threads in PD about explanations for DMT entities which are undoubtedly the same thing, and again as expected there are people who believe the entities and dimensions they encounter to be as real as our consensus reality, our world here on earth. Seems to me that again if you look at what is plausible (occam's razor!) rather than fantastic, you wouldn't still believe that. Don't mean to sound arrogant but seems like people don't quite get the concept of illusions (nor placebo for that matter) and fall for it even after it is explained to them, it only needs to be convincing enough - which doesn't make it more plausible.
Besides, explanations agreeing with science can be just as amazing and mind-blowing, one would be wrong to think that everything becomes dull and lifeless upon determinism and reductionism. Sometimes, sure - at the wrong moment that kind of thing can totally steal the magic from something, like love, but that is besides the point.
The phrase "I
want to believe" is very apt here, it is also a good reason why discussions between science and belief often ultimately fail: in doing so belief disqualifies itself as a search for truth and reveals itself as a search for fulfillment, or as one might euphemistically call it: 'your own truth'. That is all fine, people just shouldn't pretend they are contesting for truth (you use the word 'proof' showing that for example). Science does not have a monopoly on truth either, it is provisional and should recognize it is limited by it's progress and things can turn out to be wrong just the same yet on the other hand a lot is reliable and reproduceable and shows a whole other level of self-consistency and the ability to successfully predict things.
You can read thousands of books, but the more they are in the same field the less you are actually testing your ideas and the more you are reinforcing them in unhealthy ways (I am not saying I am so perfect either there but do try to challenge ideas including my own as much as of others). Challenge your ideas and beliefs. In esotery for a lack of more empirical testing, suggestibility takes a flight. What people come up with if they think about and study phenomena they can't properly and more incontrovertibly investigate (allowing for tests that are conclusive and repeatable) is superstitions like man before us did with things like lightning, just too early for science to be used.
My experiences with challenging belief of this kind have just been very disappointing, otherwise I would take it more seriously as I don't want to be biased if i can help it.
I do feel spirituality is important, for me and people in general... but that does not have to involve things like immortal souls at all, just rather a holistic approach to one's being and a mystical approach to being in general (like experiencing the ineffable of deep meditation or psychedelics among other practices). Things like that, and also gods, to me are about man's fear of death and inability to reconcile with his ultimate loneliness, and the unbearability of being responsible for giving your own life meaning. I subscribe to the Zen method but not doctrine and wish that we could manage our desire for community and moral guidelines from practice that does not invoke something that gets more deified and horribly anthropomorphized than our idea of 'universe' or 'reality'.
Just like we used to be very self-important about believing that the universe revolved around the earth, just so people still think they are special and must 'deserve' something after life, and some kind of relationship with a creator rather than being abandoned and left up for adoption existentially.
People think that because we can normally ask questions like 'what is the reason and the cause for this to happen?' or 'who made this?' in everyday life those kinds of questions apply to cosmology or existence etc. We don't even see how we utterly anthropomorphize our perception of everything whereas to me it seems more likely that we don't even have the proper terminology to describe the world ultimately... we must unask such questions, at least for the time being.
If I were you I would seriously question yourself not what are the things that have read that have added up to your beliefs but what is the source and history of asking these questions in the first place and how are those shared by countless people before you, and how many of those people have had the chance and made the effort to explain things more soberly? Seems highly suspicious to me.
You don't need the concept of an immortal soul to have humanity, empathy, compassion, feelings or give your life meaning.
We are part of something bigger, well duh...
Our limited understanding is not an argument either side of the discussion can adopt as it's own, if you want to talk in sides rather dialectics.