When scholars and scientists set out to understand religious commitment, the sensation that gods and spirits are real may be at least as important a target of inquiry as the belief that they are real. The sensory and quasisensory events that people take to be the presence of spirit—the voice of an invisible being, a feeling that a person who is dead is nonetheless in the room—are found both in the foundational stories of faith and surprisingly often in the lives of the faithful. These events become evidence that gods and spirits are there. We argue that at the heart of such spiritual experiences is the concept of a porous boundary between mind and world, and that people in all human societies have conflicting intuitions about this boundary. We have found that spiritual experiences are facilitated when people engage their more porous modes of understanding and that such experiences are easier for individuals who cultivate an immersive orientation toward experience (absorption) and engage in practices that enhance inner experience (e.g., prayer, meditation). To understand religion, one needs to explore not just how people come to believe in gods and spirits, but how they come to understand and relate to the mind.

中文翻译：

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孔隙度是宗教的核心

当学者和科学家着手理解宗教承诺时，神灵真实的感觉可能至少与相信它们是真实的信仰一样重要。人们认为是精神存在的感觉和准感觉事件——一个看不见的存在的声音，一种死人仍然在房间里的感觉——在信仰的基础故事中都可以找到，而且令人惊讶地经常在信徒的生活。这些事件成为神灵存在的证据。我们认为，这种精神体验的核心是思想与世界之间存在多孔边界的概念，并且所有人类社会中的人们对这个边界都有相互冲突的直觉。吸收）并从事增强内在体验的实践（例如，祈祷，冥想）。要了解宗教，我们不仅需要探索人们是如何相信神灵的，还需要探索他们是如何理解并与心灵产生联系的。