Prayer is self-hypnosis?

[puzzleannie]

wish it was, then maybe it could help us lose weight or stop smoking.

there are all kinds of prayer and all kinds of people who pray, and possibly there are some methods of prayer (centering prayer or TM come to minds) which could result in self-hypnosis in certain susceptible individuals, but no, in general, prayer is a conscious act of the will so could not be described as self hypnosis.

 

[HarveyL]

A possibly valid experiment to see if prayer has hypnotic powers (and I believe it does) would be to find atheists willing to give prayer to believe in God a good try over time (say 3 months, minimum). It’s important that the subjects say the right words, perhaps individualized for the experiment’s benefit.

It could be interesting to see the results, again given that they honestly give it their all.
I’d suggest that words connecting God to happiness, love, support, constant awareness when outside the hypnotic/prayer state and so forth would help clarify this question.

I know that, for me, prayer was very instrumental in helping me accept God as a real power and I was a real atheist for decades.

I was reading this

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=198820&page=51

and I couldn’t think of any sort of counter. This is really challenging for my faith. Is there any sort of philosophical, psychological, ect argument against prayer being self-hypnosis?

 

[Tis_Bearself]

wish it was, then maybe it could help us lose weight or stop smoking.

I don’t somehow hypnotize myself into loving God through praying.

The whole reason I pray in the first place is because I love God and I want to pay some respects to Him and have a chat.

There are all different forms of prayer…rosary is a calming and traditional sort but not particularly “hypnotic” (at least I don’t find it so), reading scripture or a prayer book is not in the least “hypnotic”. I suppose meditation could be but that’s supposed to be a possible pitfall to doing it, not the reason why one does it. I also pray free form in the “Dear Jesus, I humbly ask this or that” etc fashion which is hardly hypnotic as you have to think of what you want to say to Jesus.