David DeSteno

And work by a colleague of mine, Pierre Carlo Valdezolo, shows when people feel awe,

they actually slightly become more open to spiritual explanations from things.

It's not going to make a hardcore atheist suddenly a believer, but when you feel that emotion on, you ask them, how likely is it that there's something greater than yourself in the universe?

Those odds go up a little bit.

And I think that emotion is, again, you can think of it as a spiritual technology, right?

If you want people to feel...

that beautiful feeling of transcendence, what can you do in the environment to help them feel it?

Music and architecture, right, are two ways to help put the brain in that state.

Sure.

Spiritual technologies are exactly that.

They are practices that work on our minds and bodies.

And I want to be clear when I use this term, I'm not trying to be reductive.

I can't tell you.

if the rituals and practices of certain faiths were divinely inspired by a God who cares for its creations and wants to give them a way to live a better life, or they're the result of people figuring stuff out through trial and error over millennia.

I don't know.

But in some senses, we don't have to answer that question to study how they work and how they affect people.

So, you know, for example,

We talked about meditation, but what's another spiritual technology?

One is contemplating your own mortality.

Almost every faith does this.