What God does to your brain
telegraph.co.uk
telegraph.co.uk
Is there any human experience, real or not, that can't be described as "mere blips in brain chemistry". Everything we experience is going to have a neural correlate. To a Buddhist this is an affirmation that what they experience is qualitatively unique as they claim. To an atheist this affirmation that it's all just chemistry. What both are doing is re-affirming their own preconceived notions and beliefs. That's not taking a more "critical eye of events".
Looking at dreams and out-of-body experiences is interesting to help answer your question.
There have been studies trying to prove out-of-body experiences were real rather than created inside of the brain by placing phrases above hospital rooms to see if anyone remembers ever seeing these. To my knowledge nobody has seen any of these phrases during an out-of-body experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Parnia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience
Dreams can seem just as real as real life so I'd speculate that there is nothing that happens in our brains that can't be explained by our brains chemistry.
There have also been many types of experiences from taking prescription and recreational drugs. DMT is said to transport you to other sides of the universe and allow you to see machines and beings that you could otherwise never imagine. I've heard of one person saying that they started taking a new medication and could create persistent worlds within their brains that they could visit and continue to build upon each night, then the dream world they created disappeared and never returned once they stopped taking the medication.
Two points on this:
OOBE are a different class of experiences. It's a completely different state characterized by theta wave activity whereas mystical experiences are associated with delta and gamma waves. Having a malleable sense of self and experiencing dream-like states aren't equivalent phenomena.
People experience what is traditionally considered real(physical reality) and have naive interpretations of what that is(flat world, anthropomorphize animals, finite universe, etc...). Same goes for any other state of consciousness. An interesting counter example is shared hallucinations in such dream states. If you and someone else experience the same phenomena within the same state it goes from a 1st person experience to a 3rd person experience. That doesn't mean the hallucination is there in a physical sense but at the same time the experience suggests and underlying "realness" to it.
>Dreams can seem just as real as real life so I'd speculate that there is nothing that happens in our brains that can't be explained by our brains chemistry.
That's my point. Finding neural correlates doesn't prove/disprove anything as both sides of the argument often like to believe. The experience of the world is also just brain chemistry. We only know the world through experience(and by association biochemistry) so it's not a useful distinction.