So you don't believe that this trancelike state is a result of certain chemical processes going haywire combined with the power of suggestion? I mean, people make up some weird shit for stuff they can't explain - there being a 'rain god' is a good example before meteorology was understood.
I used to think this, used to be a very scientific person who didn't believe in life after death, until I had some of these profound experiences. If you study it as much as I have, there is no chemical explanation. Sure, you can say the closed-eye visuals from say LSD which are rainbow patterns in an ever-varying way are just chemicals, but when you start to get beings that are animated, beings that are outside your window walking around, only for you to leave for half an hour and return (they are still there), it makes you question that hypothesize. Furthermore, you begin to realize that consciousness itself has no chemical explanation at all, especially not various states of consciousness that constantly change throughout your life in ways that cannot ever be described or observed.
Even more strange that you and your friends both see the same hallucination, and eliminating the power of suggestion is that you both decide see a being in the same color without telling the other first, how is that even possible?
The way you felt when you went through a forest a few days ago against the food you ate yesterday, compared to other examples of being in the same forest or eating the same food, but your perception was far different. It gets even stranger when you start to realize the electric storm that occurs in the brain, as electricity itself is beyond our ability to measure or understand, but all physical matter has electric mass associated with it, yet what about this electricity that comes and goes in an unobservable way? Even if you just think of us as a bunch of atoms, what happens when you die? I mean your atoms don't just vanish, they go somewhere else, re-combining to new things, to which I would wonder, where does consciousness begin and end? Especially this is a question when you are seeing all this stuff with your eyes closed, because where the hell are you actually seeing it?
In the brain's cellular memory? What happens to those cells when the brain dies, is the memory lost, or does it proceed to merge with the bacteria that eat it and millions of years later evolve into another consciousness? What about the big bang and heat death of the universe, what about the sun going super nova, what happens to all the matter and energy then, what about black holes? I mean think about it, you might say you had no perception before you were born, but do you remember what you ate last thursday, what clothes you were wearing one year, nine months, four days ago, a license plate of a car you passed on the way to work today? I mean your memory of those events is the same as before birth, but you somehow still know you experienced those things or do you?
It gets even more bizarre if you've ever had a blackout or been put under anesthetic or overdosed on say methamphetamine like I have, as with the blackouts you just "wake up" in a place you don't remember how you got there, with a no memory of time, not even a memory of how long has past till you look at a clock and calendar, and anesthetic or coma is like no perception of time at all, whereas the meth overdose was like super-slowed down time, and just the most insane experience I can remember. I mean really, at what point where you not part of your mother's conscious mind when you were part of her body or your father's sperm? Think about it, every person born was always conscious, as they were part of their conscious mother's body always, and her mother before that, or is it that consciousness was always part of the father as he could always be conscious of sperm, perhaps why an orgasm feels so good as the start of new consciousness or is it when one is impregnated by the merging of two conscious minds, furthermore, then whence come our abstract-thinking if we were from more primitive conscious forms of life, or where did conscious life at all come from if from non conscious life, or is all matter and energy one giant form of consciousness that just has the illusion of separation, perhaps the wind itself is conscious.
Finally, if that doesn't make you think a little bit, then perhaps going by your example, our entire reality is the chemical process of some stoner's brain going haywire, perhaps we are all just someone else's trip, man, or perhaps our entire memory is a lie and we've always been alive and never died nor were born.
EDIT: I'd even argue the rain god might be more accurate than you might think. If we are mostly made up for water molecules and we drink water and piss water, and all the water just gets re-cycled, at what level does our consciousness come from and go to the water itself?
EDIT 2: If you want to go even further down this rabbit hole, at what point is consciousness in energy and in matter or chemical reactions? If you say something to me at what point are you conscious of it and it is part of you? If nobody hears it, what happens to that energy, if I hear and remember it, but you later forget it, which one really happened? When I see you at what point is it energy or matter that you are seen as? The energy of the light captures your energy and is stored in the matter-based eye by a chemical reaction or does it get saved in energy forever, does the energy just change, is it altered? What about someone with "phantom limb syndrome", does the arm's memory exist in their head or as energy, and is the memory of the physical matter or the energy that caused it to move or the memories of it interacting with other forms of matter and energy?
The more you think and study it, the less it makes sense.
