Yes, I'm very secular. But the fact that these things happen with such regularity and there is remarkable consistency and precision in them really lends itself toward the religious interpretations. Also, the skeptic in me says it's unreliable, but those glimpses of actual visual light (flickering at first, then steady) coupled with feelings of (for lack of a better word) divinity, are still hard for me to reconcile with a purely secular interpretation.

One big takeaway I had was realizing that outside the west, these types of things are well known. Here though, it seems almost no one who purports to be a "teacher" knows much about them or what to do with them.