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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=71964

http://www.epilepsytoronto.org/people/eaupdate/vol9.html

Dostoevsky had his first seizure at age nine. After a remission which
lasted up to age 25, he had seizures every few days or months,
fluctuating between good and bad periods. His ecstatic auras
occurring seconds before his bigger seizures were moments of
transcendent happiness, which then changed to an anguished feeling of
dread. He saw a blinding flash of light, then would cry out and lose
consciousness for a second or two. Sometimes the epileptic discharge
generalized across his brain, producing a secondary tonic-clonic
(grand mal) seizure. Afterward he could not recall events and
conversations that had occurred during the seizure, and he often felt
depressed, guilty and irritable for days. Epilepsy is a central
source of themes, personalities, and events in his books; he gave
epilepsy to about 30 of his characters.

Dostoevsky has this to say about the Prophet Mohammed, the founder of
Islam, who is also considered to have had the same type of ecstatic
epileptic aura:
"Mohammed assures us that he saw paradise and was inside... He really
was in paradise during an attack of epilepsy, from which he suffered
as I do. I do not know whether this bliss lasts seconds, hours, or
months, yet take my word, I would not exchange it for all the joys
which life can give."

http://www.optionmethodnetwork.com/godspeak.htm

"Mohammed's pitcher?"

"Yes, Dostoevsky talked about the moments just before he would go
into an epileptic fit as having a grand aura of intense illumination
and euphoria. In several of his novels, he likens it to the Islamic
story of how God took Mohammed to all the heavens and showed him
their glory, and all that took place in the time it took for a drop
of water to fall from Mohammed's pitcher into a cup. That's what this
experience was like Amy." He told her the content of the dream, only
it was more than a dream because no dream had ever had the vivid
presentness of that experience.

http://nasw.org/finn/brnstrm.html

The Brothers Karamazov, Alice in Wonderland, Messiah, and Starry
Night are among the cornerstones of cultural history. But if Eve
LaPlante is correct, they are also manifestations of disease. The
creators of these works, she writes in Seized, all suffered from
temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a brain disorder that affects not only
the health but also the personalities of those who are stricken with
it. In her provocative portrait of a little-known disease, LaPlante,
a Boston-area journalist, suggests that Dostoevsky, van Gogh, and a
host of other artistic and religious figures derived their creative
powers from the same brain disorder that caused their seizures.
Hence, she argues, TLE is significant both because it may be an
important cultural force and because, as a shaper of career choices
and creative decisions, it challenges the very concept of free will.

Subject: Epileptic Prophets

When Mohammad first had his visions of God, he felt oppressed,
smothered, as if his breath were being squeezed from his chest. Later
he heard a voice calling his name, but when he turned to find the
source of the voice, no one was there. The local Christians, Jews,
and Arabs called him insane. When he was five years old, he told
his foster parents, "Two men in white raiment came and threw me down
and opened up my belly and searched inside for I don't know what."
This description is startling similar to the alien abduction
experience described by people with temporal lobe epilepsy condition
(TLE, for short). TLE is a brain disorder which is caused by
unusual electrical activity in the brain's temporal lobes. A
significant proportion of people with TLE report that their seizures
often bring on extraordinary experiences of transcendent wonder,
luminous insight, divine encounters, etc. TLE is even called the
sacred disease.

The left-temporal lobe seizure is also called Dostoyevski's epilepsy
as he was another famous epileptic whose works are filled with
ecstatic visions of universal love. The scientists say that some
religious beliefs including that a virgin gave birth to the son of
God qualify as delusions. .Patients have described that with TLE,
they had visions and images that normal people don't have as though
they
have entered another dimension, and experience closeness to
religious or spiritual feelings and even communicated with the
gods. Many TLE patients felt epileptic symptoms just before they
are "captured" by 3 foot aliens.

Scientist LaPlante and many other TLE experts say that the mystical
religious experiences of some of the great prophets were induced by
TLE, because the historical writings describe classic TLE symptoms.

The religious prophets most often thought to have had epilepsy are
Mohammad, Moses, and St. Paul. The writer, Dostoevsky is a famous
epileptic whose works are filled with ecstatic visions of universal
love and terrible nightmares of uncanny fear and radical evil.
Mohammad's visions of God were triggered by epilepsy. Dostoevsky
observes that `Mohammad assures us in this Koran that he had seen
Paradise. Mohammad did not lie and he had indeed been in Paradise,
during an attack of epilepsy, from which he suffered, as I do.'

Over the past 30 years scientists like Prof Max Coltheart who
researched cognitive neuropsychology with its attention to higher-
level cognitive processes, particularly belief formation, and has
been studying disorders typically thought of as psychiatric, such as
hallucination or delusion. The line between psychosis and intense
religiosity is a bit of a difficult one to draw. Many religious
beliefs were triggered by a "religious experience", often produced by
changes in brain activity. It had been shown that when persons go
into deep meditation they experience a sense of "being at one with
the world", and that there is a decreased blood flow to the part of
the brain responsible for concepts of the "self". Contemporary
studies indicate a two-factor theory for delusions which has an
experiential factor and a reasoning abnormality.

Such alien abduction stories can tell us about the workings of the
mind. Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in
Sudbury, Ontario, found that people with frequent bursts of
electrical activity in their temporal lobes report sensations of
flying, floating, or leaving the body, as well as other mystical
experiences. By applying magnetic fields to the brain, he can also
induce odd mental experiences, possibly caused by bursts of neuron
firing in the temporal lobes. For example, he has made people feel as
if two alien hands grabbed their shoulders and distorted their legs
when he applied magnetic fields to their brains. It is no wonder
then that Christianity has more than 200 flying saints.

Our modern fascination with other such phenomena, such as ESP, past-
life regression, and out-of-the-body experiences, may also be the
result of mild, undiagnosed TLE. The overriding emotion
experienced by Mohammed, Moses and St. Paul during their religious
visions was not one of rapture and joy but rather of fear. When
Moses heard the voice of God from a burning bush, he hid his face and
was frightened.

Luke and Paul both agreed that Paul suffered from an
unknown "illness" or "bodily weakness" which he called his "thorn in
the flesh." Many biblical commentators have attributed this to either
migraine headaches or epilepsy. Paul did once have malaria, which
involves a high fever that can damage the brain. Other psychologists
have noted that likely TLE sufferers such as Moses, Flaubert, Saint
Paul, and Dostoevsky were also famous for their rages. The
religious leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical
visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional
sensitivity liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they
have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented
all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as
pathological. Often, moreover, these pathological features have
helped to give them their religious authority and influence.

More recently, several TLE nuns have provided further evidence for an
epileptic root of many mystical religious experiences. For example,
one former nun "apprehended" God in TLE seizures and described the
experience: "Suddenly everything comes together in a moment -
everything adds up, and you're flooded with a sense of joy, and
you're just about to grasp it, and then you lose it and you crawl
into an attack. It's easy to see how, in a prescientific age, an
epileptic or any temporal lobe fringe experience like that could be
thought to be God Himself." Even the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel
had a TLE-like vision reminiscent of modern UFO reports.

TLE is a disease that changed the course of civilization. The
altered temporolimbic electrical activity inside a brain have
radiated far beyond the electric storms of a single cranium in the
case of prophets. Visions were hallucinations caused by health
problems. Whatever it may be it is a tragedy that our civilization
is being controlled by TLE patients who lived a long time ago.

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