RE: epilepsy and religious experience.

The cult leader, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, who had a new age dooms-day sect and claimed to speak for god and being higher than Jesus, had life-long epilepsy with untreated seizures. All the notions she came up with in her delusions were marketed across the world, convincing thousands of people to leave their families and join her group in the USA. People abandoned their jobs, children, countries, education, everything, to follow her, working as unpaid slaves (chelas) living in overcrowded trailers, sleeping on the floor, handing over all their assets to her "new religion".

Yes, if the person is charismatic enough, narcissistic enough, their own hallucinations and delusions can be used to inspire many other vulnerable people who gravitate to what the ideas that are being sold to them.

In the case of Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her Summit Lighthouse A.K.A. Church Universal and Triumphant, Alzheimer's disease eventually killed her, but even now, she still has followers and the cult continues on, because some people just cannot let go of the indoctrination that they believe. Her cult is smaller, but still continuing at its headquarters just north of Yellowstone Park, and still selling itself across the world and drawing new people in.