Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices
The below isn't even remotely trying to be comprehensive, but this is I think an important angle on some common features both in spiritual traditions and in human experience in general.
"Practices"?
Practice, or especially practices evoke discrete activities performed deliberately, with time set aside for them specifically. Obviously I'm including that, but I'm using the word in a broader sense here, that's fairly common among at least Western meditators.
Often practice includes attitudes and qualities of mind that can diffuse into other activities or non-activity or just-hanging-around. Even when pretty distinct, practice can also occur spontaneously, eg. countless reports of falling into meditative states during ordinary activity, or into prayer or devotion.
Imaginal practice
Imaginal practice as a concept I get through Rob Burbea, though he didn't originate it. Firstly, yes, imaginal, not imaginary, though there's certainly some overlap.
Imaginal practice concerns exploration of and relationship with images. Images in this sense are patterns of resonance in relationship with, usually, internal images, as well as internal sensations of touch, movement, sound, etc. Images might be deliberately evoked, or organic or spontaneous.
For example, with respect to sexual and romantic fantasy, a person might experience images in a variety of ways:
- Spontaneous, sometimes intrusive reverie, of a past lover or a current crush
- These can often be phenomenally intense and rich, not narrowly restrictected to visual imagery but including rich internal touch sensation, etc. etc.
- Often these are extended and engrossing
- Sex dreams
- Deliberately evoked fantasy, in the context of masturbation
- Most often this is consciously "controlled," though often control is nebulous, and sometimes such fantasies are experiences as playing out "on their own."
- Brief flits of internal imagery and feeling
- Extended extemporaneous romantic storytelling in one's mind, eg. often stereotypically done by teenage girls in our culture
Again, these are often quite rich phenomenally, and despite the unfortunate name they usually aren't even mostly about visual imagery. Broadly speaking I would say imaginal practices involve an exploration of the resonances that a person's relational/affective attitudes define, most saliently in the absence of "real" (physical, enacted) experiences that would align with them.
Imaginal qualities can often be experienced in distinct states of mind, and separately often delibrately, but often is diffused into a much broader set of practices. In a broad sense storytelling is usually concerned with images, it's seldom mostly about the words but about evoking images and their resonances. Even fairly technical discussion can include a kind of imaginal backdrop, eg. I see old discussions of transhumanism, even when they get pretty far in the weeds, as an expression of yearning, excitement, and anxiety, and an imaginal negotiation of those feelings.
Imaginal practices from world traditions and independent practitioners are often much weirder. One common cluster of reports is of images "taking on a life of their own," where they have access to wisdom that the person feels they don't possess, or even that they have access to specific knowledge that a person did not have access to themselves. Eg., there are countless reports of people calling upon the memory of a beloved relative, and finding that the image speaks back with creativity and spontaneity which is felt not to be "invented" or "orchestrated." Similarly with many traditional religious practices of communing with spirits or deities, the entities in question are commonly reported as experienced as independent, spontaneous, and real.
Many traditional spiritual systems will construe these experiences metaphysically as real in the sense that those entities are actually independent, have their own experiences, persist outside of your practice, etc. etc. Some modern hippies (as did, as it happens, 19th century German philosophers) similarly claim that one can tap directly into a cosmic wisdom through these and other practices. I'm pretty confident these are all false, and I'll talk about this again later.
One more cluster I'll mention briefly is known as "deity yoga" (not anything about physical postures, that's afaict mostly a modern innovation within "yoga"). Some of what's known as deity yoga is not so dissimilar from forms of prayer that will be familiar to Westerners. The more interesting forms include eg. Yidam practice in Tibetan Buddhism, and I believe there's some similar stuff in Hindu Tantra and some kinds of modern Western esotericism. In Yidam practice, the practitioner visualizes themselves as a deity, usually with an involved collection of symbols, but importantly feeling and seeing as the deity would. The ways of seeing of these deities are supposed to be bizarre or alien (Tibetain Bodhisattvas are quite weird), but advanced Yidam practitioners are meant to take on these ways of seeing in their more ordinary experience. I think this points to what the broader space of imaginal practice can be.
I'll also mention here, imaginal practice isn't necessarily positive or pleasant, and many traditional and modern imaginal practices are quite the opposite, eg. literally imagining capital-h-Hell, or reflecting on and empathizing with the suffering of factory farmed animals.
Prayer
I would call almost all prayer different kinds of imaginal practice. In particular most prayer as taught in eg. Western Christianity is a framework for working with a particular set of images in a deliberate way. This kind of prayer usually involves a pattern of usually performative external action alongside internal motions, including eg. internal speech, arousing specific emotions, or much subtler moves.
The role and attitudes of prayer can often be self-gratifying or transactional. However, many traditions teach prayer as a practice of "meeting" and entering into relationship with an energy or image, and this is the kind of attitude often reported from the most serious practitioners in these sorts of traditions. Such image are often reported to take on a shape that a person doesn't want, whether to make demands of them or to show things they flinch away from.
To be clear, sometimes people can have a kind of masochistic or at least self-punitive attitude towards prayer, and in this sense prayer can be an upside-down kind of self-gratification, where a person will fairly consciously control or puppet the image to tell them what think they should hear.
As with imaginal practice more broadly, most traditions construe these experiences metaphysically as "literally real," or something close enough. Agnostic of the metaphysics, or at least even in my metaphysics, there's a distinction that's important to track here, with respect to a. the resolution and detail of the image, b. its richness, and c. its flexibility or dynamism. In particular, I most trust (in some sense) reports of prayer which seem spontaneous, alive, sensitive, etc. as opposed to "scripted," stereotyped, etc.—even if I don't believe in the metaphysics in which they're presented. Note that many reports which I "buy" are thin or nebulous when it comes to any visual aspect, but which are very rich and dynamic relationally/emotionally/etc.
Devotion
The term devotional practice is used to refer to a broad collection of practices and models across traditions, broadly speaking oriented towards surrender and devotion to a figure, symbol, etc. Devotion is usually a large aspect of prayer, but the two are only partially overlapping.
The central stereotype of devotional practice is the performance of gestures, affect, and utterances associated with fealty, reverence, or submission. These can often combine performance of both the "attraction" type of status as well as the "aversion" (fear, anxious submission, etc.) type. Besides straightforward deities, commonly this involves veneration of spirits, ancestors, saints, etc. "Original Buddhism" almost certainly contained Buddha-worship as a fundamental feature, some later schools innovated on this pattern to include devotion to the path as more fundamental than Buddha-worship. There are reports eg. from Orthodox Christianity and some Hindu schools of a kind of "devotion without an object."
Imaginal practice and prayer as convergent features of religious traditions is mostly unsurprising to me, but it's somewhat confusing the extent to which devotion is at least a very common feature in especially "world religions," though probably not a universal feature of world human spirituality.