this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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I really like churches, they are a good way to find a strong community. It can be really hard as an adult in a new area to meet people, and a church can basically solve that for you. I'm in a very religious area too where they desperately want me to go to one.
Also I've kind of understood "praying" now. I meditate a lot, and the goal to focus on your inner breath and be one with the present moment. Praying is kind of the opposite, instead of focusing on your inner self, you're focusing on something greater outside of you, like trying to connect your body to the universe. It's like trying to imagine you're part of something greater and it's kind of comforting.
100%! Cathedrals and Temples especially are some of the most amazing pieces of architecture. You can't walk in to a historic European cathedral with the ceiling reaching to the sky and stained glass windows and not feel something.
Both are meditation, vipassanā vs. jhāna, though that encompasses a flurry of potential objects/concepts/qualia of focus.
That sounds roughly like the fifth jhāna, infinite space. I just can't resist to comment here that our intelligence, mammal intelligence in general, is largely based on repurposed/expanded spatial awareness circuitry. That we use terms like "mind map" is anything but coincidental.
Is that why we are able to visualize? Or at least most of us?
Kinda... yes and no? Visualisations aren't necessarily spatial, as in representing a map of a space. Random example I get a different erm quality for the qualia for "fish tank" and "interaction of fishes in a tank", only the latter has that space-like quality the other is a mere image representation of an idea. It cannot have, as a singular object there's nothing to set it in relation to.
But back to practice: Close your eyes, and consider where you are. You're probably still "seeing" the room around you in your mind's eye, and could navigate to, say, the door reasonably accurately (and the inaccuracy is due to lack of practice, blind folks excel at that kind of stuff). Navigation through terrain you're not directly seeing (whether that be because of closed eyes or a forest obscuring it) is the original function of the circuitry and other uses of it have a similar quality to it.
What is almost certain is that that circuitry is the reason why we have a very hard time visualising anything higher-dimensional than 3d space: It's just not in its feature set because little warm-blooded critters living alongside dinosaurs had no use for it.