This is an open research question, and it is worth saying so plainly before sketching what is known. People report similar inner events from very different starting points: a sense of light, presence, unity, or dissolved boundaries can arise in deep meditation, in hypnosis, during psychedelic experiences, and sometimes with no trigger at all. Whether a brain scan could reliably tell apart an experience that was deliberately induced from one that arrived on its own has not been answered.
Some of the relevant pieces do exist. Neuroimaging of meditative and psychedelic states has fairly consistent findings, including reduced connectivity within the default mode network, the set of regions tied to self-referential thought, alongside broader changes in how distant areas communicate. These patterns line up loosely with the felt sense of the self growing quieter or less fixed.
Hypnosis has its own measurable footprint. Functional imaging finds it can alter activity and connectivity in attention and control networks, including the anterior cingulate cortex and connections involving the prefrontal cortex and insula. What the literature also notes, repeatedly, is that hypnosis lacks a single defining neural signature, which already complicates any hope of a clean fingerprint.
Put those facts together and the limit becomes clear. There is no established neural marker that separates a hypnotically induced spiritual experience from a spontaneous mystical one. The honest description stops at overlap and plausible difference, not at a confirmed boundary.
What might distinguish them, in principle, is more about route than destination. A hypnotic state is reached through structured induction and sustained, directed attention, so one reasonable hypothesis is that executive and control networks stay more engaged when the experience is deliberately produced. A spontaneous state, by contrast, often arrives without that scaffolding. This is a hypothesis to test, not a finding to cite.
Where the uncertainty sits:
- the subjective qualities of the two kinds of experience can clearly overlap
- the underlying brain patterns have not been directly and rigorously compared
- no published signature reliably labels one as induced and the other as spontaneous
So the careful answer is that the question is researchable but unresolved. Imaging can show that these states involve real, patterned brain activity, which is itself meaningful. It cannot yet read a scan and declare how the door was opened, and pretending otherwise would mean inventing a result that the field has not reached.