It's neat that so many of these traditions align with neuroscience. My naive expectation would be skepticism of anything that's mysticism adjacent. Many spiritu

It's neat that so many of these traditions align with neuroscience. My naive expectation would be skepticism of anything that's mysticism adjacent. Many spiritual practices are being laid bare by science, and found to be effective in modulating neurochemistry, or directly manipulating parasympathetic immune responses, or a myriad other effects that can improve a person's well-being. There are human superpowers, like increasing or decreasing your core temperature, consciously resisting infections, deliberately triggering the placebo effect, feats of memory, endurance, or cognition. Science is making inroads to the mechanics of many of these feats. Asceticism seems like a clear cut system for improving cognition by letting the baselines of dopaminergic activity settle down. I can see the potential for negative effects of overstimulation, but where there's atrope, there's usually a kernel of truth to be found. Intellectuals and scholars are known to retreat from the world to silence and study for extended periods. Removing external stimulation is about as obvious as it gets when you want to focus on something. However, sensory deprivation- the extreme end of the axis - is known to have extremely negative effects, sometimes within a couple days. There's clearly a minimum threshold of stimulation needed to retain your sanity. Running studies on cognitive performance through the use of deprivation tanks, silent retreats, minimal stimulation lifestyles, and other methodologies would be interesting. If a once weekly tank session provides as much benefit as daily silent retreats, or a month of living in isolation, or something like that, it would give people reasons to improve their well-being. My own suspicion is that infrequent tank use is probably as beneficial as more rigorous asceticism, but that's just opinion. With the doors open to psychedelics research, I'd love to see the comparative results from ascetic practice with and without psychedelics over 6 month periods.