I have a question of the back of some things I've been reading lately which are kind of homages to religion from a non-believers point of view, these tend to be something along the lines of an expansion upon Voltaire's point, which I remember it rightly went something like "If God did not exist it would have been necessary to invent him".
Anyway, the question is if the benefits of what are traditionally thought of as spiritual or quasi spiritual disciplines are largely mental, ie meditation, could they or should they be reframed as mental disciplines and then popularised anew?
In the history of religious or spiritual devotion there are some truly miraculous feats of mental and physical prowess, I'm not talking about pre-modern records either, attributed by those exhibiting or possessing them to a range of doctrines and disciplines, some or less amenable to reinterpretation or divorce from their original context but the miraculous feats are all things which I would suspect anyone benefit from being able to pull of, like regulating your body temperature by the power of thought alone etc.
What do you think?
Anyway, the question is if the benefits of what are traditionally thought of as spiritual or quasi spiritual disciplines are largely mental, ie meditation, could they or should they be reframed as mental disciplines and then popularised anew?
In the history of religious or spiritual devotion there are some truly miraculous feats of mental and physical prowess, I'm not talking about pre-modern records either, attributed by those exhibiting or possessing them to a range of doctrines and disciplines, some or less amenable to reinterpretation or divorce from their original context but the miraculous feats are all things which I would suspect anyone benefit from being able to pull of, like regulating your body temperature by the power of thought alone etc.
What do you think?