If I had a fortune telling business and I had people come sit in a normal looking room and I simply closed my eyes and told them their future, I would assume I would be less successful in convincing them I was for real as opposed to having a very mystic type set up with much more ceremony involved such as using oils, maybe humming things, placing objects and candles in certain forms.
Basically the more complex I make it, the more I think they will be invested in it.
This also seems true for ourselves. The more ceremony we put into a religious act the more we are invested into it and convince ourselves to believe it.
More modern churches do it with praise and worship. Using the emotions driven by music and song to reinforce our feeling for something "spiritual". Older churches, temples, ect do it through more physical ceremony such as lighting candles, having alters set in certain ways, arranging temples in certain ways.
I've observed this in every followed religion I have come across. We like to impart "spirituality" in objects. Trinkets we use in ceremony. Be it keeping miniature statues of deities on our window seals to pictures to whatever imparts a feeling of "specialness". For me, as I have removed the emotional baggage from it, watching a Satanist perform a ritual to conjure up a demon I see no different than any other religion trying to communicate with their chosen deity. The ones that use the more complex ceremonies usually also the ones that appear the most strong in that particular faith. I don't see that as a coincidence.
Ceremony sets a more permanent memory into our brains. I think it also convinces our brains that what we are doing must be really important and real.
If you tell kids to say Bloody Mary 3 times and she will appear behind them, they probably will laugh. If you tell them to go into a dark room with a mirror, be alone, light exactly 5 candles, pour some water into a bowl next to the mirror and add some salt and oil, write Bloody Mary on a piece of white paper and put it in that bowl, turn around clockwise 5 times and chant Bloody Mary 3 times then look into the mirror, they will probably take you more seriously to some degree. It's just inherent human nature.
So obviously all places of worship utilize this, pretty much all followers of any faith also utilize it in their daily lives to some extent. More than anything I think it lends to the idea that no religion is really much "truer" than any other if they all can produce the same types of results. But does it lend to rule out spirituality of any kind?
Or could there be some substance to achieving some type of connected spiritual state in our minds, regardless of what name we give it?
I'm not saying, could it be beneficial because of some placebo effect. I'm asking could there actually be something out there we cannot comprehend that we are able to connect to in some way shape or form that benefits us when we do?
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