Yes....I am sure there have been brain mapping or other types of research on spiritual experiences.
I'm not sure 'spiritual' is a term that science would necessarily use - brain mapping involves measuring neurological events, which could be tied to claims of experience, memories and emotions.
That is not new. But the moment the experience is recorded on some instrument...all atheists jump up and down in glee.... 'See, it is just something in the brain...nothing spiritual or nonphysical about it'.
No, it's in the brain and I'm not sure that's in any way been disputed in recent times. The question is about - to perhaps oversimplify a little - how it gets into the brain. The mapping will be compared against previous mapping exercises to see if there's a discernible pattern to identify the likely source of any given activity - what's lacking at the moment is any sort of reliable evidence for something as a source which is outside of established recorded sources.
Secondly, 'experience' is not just about some feeling of thrill or joy or whatever.
Again, you're sort of missing the point in this context; generally, yes, there are people looking at the subjective understanding of the experience to try to identify patterns in the measured activity related to it. In this discussion, though, we're looking for the stimuli that cause both the emotional and neurological responses.
There are lots of other things such as a prior knowledge of events,
For which there is no reliable evidence that such a thing has happened, and in the instances where claimants have been tested they have reliable fared at best no better than chance.
...events happening almost miraculously,
Almost miraculously? Ultimately, even 'actually' miraculously is just an admission that we don't know how it happened. By definition it gives us no idea of the cause; if it did, it wouldn't be a miracle, it'd be an explicable event with a defined cause. 'Miracle' is just an attempt to elevate ignorance to profundity.
...the feeling of presence of a superior being and so on.
Again, easily attributable to the established hereditary benefit of Type II errors for human survival, but even failing that the sense of presence of a superior being is not necessarily a reliable indicator of the actual presence of a superior being, or the existence of a superior being. There are other, more viable explanations.
These cannot be researched but only experienced personally.
No, they can be researched. Even events that have previously been experienced but not, say, recorded can be investigated to a degree, which is part of how we can establish that there is a common neurochemical and behavioural link between people who have certain experiences which are not validated by the observable phenomena - then we can get an understanding that certain conditions are characterised by, say, hallucinations. It's not a guarantee that any given example fits, but it accounts for at least some.
Is it really a 'spiritual' experience?
On the available evidence, probably not. You either need to explain how science could investigate that it is (formulate a testable hypothesis) or you need to come up with an alternative methodology to demonstrate that it is. Otherwise, current convention is that it's most likely just some aberrant brain activity.
Where does it originate? Is it God who makes it happen?
If you want to claim it's from 'god', you need to demonstrate god, or you need to demonstrate a reliable, inextricable link between the activity and the scenario in circumstances that rule out aberrant brain behaviour. Or an alternative methodology.
The point is that those who have such experiences feel fulfilled, happy and full of hope and faith. What it actually is we are not likely to know. It probably doesn't matter.
It does matter. It matters enough to you, for instance, to post about it consistently. It matters to others enough that they'll blow people up over it, they'll shoot schoolchildren because of it, they'll perpetrate genocide on other people who feel just as strongly but ever so slightly differently about it, they'll attempt to restrict the lives of others over it. It has real world consequences because the source of those experiences doesn't intrinsically affect how those people that have the experiences decide to express themselves in response to them.
O.
