Are shamanistic practices common to some religions? Which sort of religions are they common to? I'd pick up on Greta's peak experiences together with her feeling of awe towards "Earth, the Sun, mountains, rivers, volcanoes, giant trees and the like as gods ", quoting Greta.Greta wrote: ↑December 8th, 2020, 4:41 pmYes, it's impossible to grow up without having heard of the world's second biggest celebrity after King Donald I - God. So, if we were to construct an experiment, we'd need to find an indigenous tribe that hasn't already imagined gods or a god. Personally, I understand why indigenous people thought of the Earth, the Sun, mountains, rivers, volcanoes, giant trees and the like as gods because that's how I see them - huge, powerful and influential entities that make one feel puny and insignificant by comparison.
Having been lucky enough to have enjoyed a couple of peak experiences in the past, I feel confident that transcendent experiences would have originally pre-empted religion. In fact, religion was most likely a response to transcendental experiences. Alas, as we all know, once you have a group of people, you have politics - hierarchies and an in-group / out-group mentality. That is the emergence of immense political lobbying organisations and tax havens, whose political influence is based on social groups that they organise in every suburb and town, ie. "religions".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana