Brain is conditioned by the sensory input augmented with "verbal knowledge" (how it is encoded is irrelevant).

Religious and mystic experiences work exactly the same way. When many other people around you do strange things they start to make sense.

So, basically, it is fooling of neural nets by giving strong cues or whatever you might call them.

In religion such strong cues are other people's facial expressions and body language.

The brain's neural networks recognize strong signals of "taking positive actions" or whatever.