On a futon near the German ice cream punchbowl, I was dressed in a trench coat and low-brimmed hat, providing Tarot readings. I called myself Richard Psychic the Psychic Dick (that is, forensic psychic). I looked up from under my hat to see the Easter Bunny and Jesus Christ. This had a certain effect on me. I’m not sure if it was the obvious irony, or the brain hemorrhage, which is Irish cream that takes the form of a brain when placed on top of peach schnapps. The finishing touch is a small dollop of bright red grenadine dropped through the center of the Irish cream “brain” with mortal results, and the whole thing tastes bad.

As I looked up from this low futon, the portly Easter Bunny and tall, statuesque Jesus Christ struck me like an overwrought simile from a pulp fiction detective novel.

Jesus Christ had his staff, flowing white garment, long hair, and beard. He cast his compassionate gaze upon the bunny, while Bunny asked, “Do you know what people have been doing in your name, Jesus?”

“Why no, my bunny,” replied Christ. The Easter Bunny rattled off a number of disturbing historical and current events. Jesus said he had no idea this was going on, as he had been away for a couple millennia. He said, “Bring them to me and I will speak with them.”

The Easter Bunny, however, was concerned about Jesus’ welfare, given what had happened the last time he caught extra attention.

This quasi-spiritual voyeurism got me thinking about the micro seizures that are getting the credit for our more legendary spiritual experiences; the out-of-body journeys, rushes of kundalini energy, apparitions, and messages from God. Add to that some of the experiences that are chalked up to bipolar disorder (extended periods of extreme divine inspiration), schizophreniform disorder (socially marginal, but inspired sons and daughters of God), antisocial personality disorder (horny, greedy gurus), and dissociation (channelers), and you have quite a stable of the unstable but divine.

Was Muhammad having a microseizure when the angel Gabriel flew him through the seven heavens and commanded, “Recite”? Was Moses’ burning bush really an aura emanating from a microseizure? I could go on for days.

I wonder if, one day, there will be do-it-yourself kits that use blasts of magnetic force to create your choice of spiritual experiences. Will they make spiritual experiences as trivial as taking a hit of X for a more groovy party did in comparison to the spiritual seeker’s use of LSD or peyote in the hippy-trippy days of yore?

Imagine overhearing your kid telling a friend that he finally got the magnet aimed just so, and he saw an apparition of a spiritual DJ inviting her to dance. “Hey,” you’d ask, “can’t we have a little reverence for mystical experiences here?” Or perhaps, “What! Are you nuts? You know what happened to your brother from doing to much spiritual experience! It affects your memory and motivation.”

We know that some fairly simple tricks can create partial or complete out-of-body experiences, complete with a visual change of perspective. A strong theory regarding this visual phenomenon is that our brains are intensely motivated to have a center of existence as a means of orientation. That’s probably a more fundamental drive than hunger or sex, trumped only by air.

During an out-of-body experience, people report seeing their world from the vantage point of their soul travel. Perhaps the brain creates this change in the scenery of our mind’s eye. With such a strong drive to be oriented, what would a brain do with a displaced sense of center during a microseizure or experimental procedure? Perhaps it generates a vantage point that matches a displaced sense of center. In other words, our brains may be compelled to generate a change in perspective to match where we feel we are.

After all, we know that the mental image we have of our surroundings actually seems much richer than it really is. Experiments have shown that we are really bad at noticing changes in parts of scenes. Our minds are very, very busy creating a sense of seamlessness and completeness in our identities, and richness in our surroundings, but much of it is, well, naturally artificial. And every day we get better adjusting this “reality” in artificially artificial ways as well.

A friend of mind, who had shaved his beard, but not his mustache, was asked if he had grown a mustache. In one day? We are not as “here” as we think we are! Our experience of reality, though we take it for granted, is more vulnerable than we’d care to admit.

So what about spirituality? If you think Jesus and Muhammad were humble, try attributing a message from God to a microseizure. That’s humble.

When it comes to spiritual experiences, search or be inspired, but please live in peace, and please hold onto your personal power, no matter who tells you not to. That spiritual experience might not be worth having a war over. Trust me, I got this straight from the Easter Bunny, and he was sober at the time.

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