You made some valid points which I accept. The last thing I want to do is give the impression that I am in any way an authority in this area or set myself up as such. That would just be a testimony of stupidity.
Having said that we cannot simply accept everything as reality simply because people have experienced and reported it. Not even Seth, Buddha, Silver Birch or Jesus are an authority because reality is not a static institution but a dynamic flowing river, continuously finding new paths.
I tried to hint at this in an earlier post, how hard it is to decide what is real even whilst fully awake in physical consciousness and yet there is a consensus which allows us to get by, communicate with each other, close deals, invent technology and build houses etc. How do we manage that? Because there is an inner judgement or knowing, build on experience, learning and taking the changing dynamics of reality into account. To go out and say, yes, this has been reported under hypnosis, drugs, channeled, dream, lucid dream, NDE, OBE and so on so it must be the way it has been reported and hence real. Institutionalizing experience is not going to allow us to arrive at an authentic understanding of reality, especially as there is a whole universe of illusion, delusion, misrepresentation, personal fantasy and so forth at work. Where does this leave us? I cannot simply accept that I am a ball of light or part of a group soul simply because somebody says so. This is totally meaningless unless I say so myself. Books are not going to really teach us, they just fill our heads with information. That's not the way of arriving at truth, it's not even nearly as good as taking Ayahuasca for example which at least gives us first hand experience if only for a moment and then goes out again (I don't discount the red pill at all btw - and yes - in my modest, limited way I had my mind opened by spending altogether three and a half years of the last forty years of my life in deep meditation, enough so to share it by going public, though not enough in any way to represent myself as any kind of authority).
In the end we will have to do better than relying on other people's testimony, including my own. We need to find the experience for ourselves and develop our essential powers of discrimination which need to be put in place and nurtured in order to cut through the dense undergrowth of experience. We can't just simply say "that's my experience, hence it must be real." That leads us to the point where everything becomes acceptable and we can not longer map out a path to truth or lead a meaningful constructive life or function as a society. Science is very good at this by simply deciding what works and what doesn't. What doesn't work is discarded and what works leads to applied technology. When entering the realm of non-physical reality the best we can do is to report our experience and for the time being to see if statistics lead to some kind of conclusion, but this alone is not going to give us a deeper understanding of the nature of consciousness.
In the end we will need to find the golden piece of string on which all experiences are threaded and that can only be achieved when consciousness moves into the unbiased, clear space of awareness which allows us to discriminate between what is a mirage of the mind and the unconscious and what is its underlying base and substance. Adopting this viewing platform we will at least be able to see "what causes these fuzzy balls of light", what causes these "confabulations and fantasies" and why they are perceived as such and why certain things are taken for real by some and not by others.