ABSTRACT
Every religion that develops sufficiently to achieve its own peculiar way of life chooses a distinctive set of methods for gaining its desired spiritual goals under the conditions surrounding human existence. By these methods, which we may call spiritual techniques or disciplines, religions seek in varied form and proportion: some measure of practical welfare, inward calm and assurance despite all outward disturbances, certain feelings or states of mind that are conceived to be of highest worth, and contact with a transcendent reality of some sort. Therefore, if we can isolate and study the characteristic spiritual techniques of a given religion for achieving its desired results, we may learn in such a study some things about a religion that cannot be learned elsewhere, certainly not by a sheerly philosophical study of doctrines. For at the level of discipline or technique we are in the area where the ideal and theoretical values of a religion impinge directly upon the physically actual and individually practical situation. What happens there is both very important and most revealing.
