This is an interesting article from Scientific American about a study on how prayer helps increase one's self-control through social connection. This adds to previous research on the subject. It's a short article and a worth read.
Scientists Find One Source of Prayers Power
by alecholmesthedetective 5 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Perry
It's a shame they didn't find "THE" source. It is available to "whosoever".
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cofty
The authors tested several possible explanations, but found statistical support for only one: people interpret prayer as a social interaction with God, and social interactions are what give us the cognitive resources necessary to avoid temptation.
It confirms the fact that any positive effects of prayer originate in the mind of the one praying and not from any external source.
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THE GLADIATOR
As every school boy knows, prayer is a form of meditation and improves communication with the subconcsious mind. It is also known as quiet reflection, contemplation and drawing on our inner resorces.
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Apognophos
This makes sense to me. As a youngster begging God for help to be a better Witness, I sometimes felt that he was helping me for a while after my prayer. Later on the effect would wear off, which I figured meant that I needed to be praying more often or studying the literature harder.
For a long time, even as I'd largely given up hope of meeting God's standards, I still had faith in God despite the negligible influence he'd had on my life, because of those times that I felt strengthened after prayer. It took until I was 30 before I realized that, when I prayed, I could simply have been reinforcing my own willpower by reminding myself of the standards I was supposed to be living by -- as Gladiator says, like a form of meditation where I focused on what I needed to do differently or how I needed to behave.
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rmt1
I would put prayer with methods of intense visualization and with the hypothesis that dreams are drills or rehearsals. The mother-in-law preaches "Law of Attraction" where you can attract good things if you concentrate on good things but bad things if you concentrate on bad things, with "manifestation" being the related idea that if you picture yourself in the desired circumstance, the law of attraction will pull you towards that eventuality. I put this woo through a distillery and came up with what I think is a rational inventory and instruction set of moving parts: If you intensely vizualize a circumstance you are not in but want to be in, or, if you know what you want to be the end product, the degree of 'reality' with which you visualize it can trigger iterative reverse engineering that probes back through parameter space to the available starting conditions. If you want the job in the shiny building, you visualize yourself in it, you make it so real that you can barely believe your fortune, and you are forced to ask yourself, "How did I get here?!", and that tricks your subconscious problem-solving abilities into grappling with it as if it were a real-life / non-hypothetical problem.
I've got zero tips or insights on making yourself a "better person".