Lasted less than five seconds but it felt like 'the hand of God' passed through me - that's the best way I can describe it.
William James described a religious experience as having four qualities: - Ineffable: the experience is incapable of being described and must be directly experienced to be understood. - Noetic: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned. - Transient: the experience is of limited duration. - Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience.
...and that tracks 100% with how I experienced mine.
Yes, it was also a hallucination, as other commenters have pointed out. But if you allow yourself to be affected by ideas, or art (i.e., synthetic visual or audio experiences), shouldn't you be open to being affected by a unique positive experience generated by your own specific mental architecture? Almost definitionally, it's possible that such an experience could impart you with something more meaningful than something generated externally.
Also, to other commenters: such an experience is obviously very difficult to communicate about effectively. It was formulated by and for your own brain, and so will be hard to translate effectively to a different architecture.
https://www.amazon.com/Hallucinations-Oliver-Sacks/dp/030794...
where the author postulates that a decent portion of society experiences hallucinations at least once in their lifetime without any "helpers" like drugs or sleep deprivation. (I don't remember the exact percentage, read that thing ages ago).
I think this is how religions get started.
Not all hallucinations are religious.
And not all religious experiences are hallucinations.
In fact, when we talking about a specific kind of experience, the term hallucination has no meaning.
You're not "seeing things", you're feeling and thinking things. So there's no relevance at all to whether they're "really there".
You could have a religious experience by runinating on something that's actually, 100% there (e.g. an experience with near death from a car accident that makes you appreciate life in a religious way, or even a nice sunset).
What on earth are you reading to get this? The parent is a concise statement of fact:
You don't have to be drunk or high to have hallucinations.
How is that anything like you describe? How is it "tactless" and "disrespectful"? How does it assume anything? Try applying the most charitable view to the comments.