[nprateem]

There's a record of people reaching altered states of consciousness for millenia. However besides drugs the methods aren't widely known or recognised by the scientific community.

So by definition anything that produces an effect not readily accepted by 'science' is pseudo-science. It doesn't make it wrong it just means consensus hasn't caught up with it.

Maybe it's CSF that's pushed up the spine, maybe it's energy. But multiple traditions practice some form of moving awareness up the spine combined with gentle physical contraction as a primary means of creating the conditions for entering mystical states. Those same traditions describe how this method energises the endocrine system. Furthermore the effects of doing this are now documented in scientific papers (search pubmed for kundalini).

None of this negates the validity of the methods. They require firsthand experience for any real benefit, and more study to understand the exact processes at work.