There is science that supports yoga. So I can do yoga for scientific reasons. I can meditate for scientific reasons.
Here's an example. I bought some healing crystals. The look nice, but they just sit there, looking nice. They don't do any healing.
Or, I pray. Nothing changes. I pray, I don't pray. It is all the same.
Ah, you are asking how to distinguish marketing hype, fakery, misguided people etc from the very few who are real. This is a real problem and one that has been faced in India for uncounted centuries. One of my favorite quotes is about the sea of hypocritical "saints". Tukaram is reported to have said
Let their dead conscience be burnt; it is no sin to thrash them. Others have commented on the same issue noting how few are genuine.
The second real question is asking how long the process takes. As I understand the history, the Higgs boson was proposed 50 years before the prediction was verified. There are really good reasons it took that long. Or to use other examples: how much effort does it take for someone with ordinary talent to become a world-class chess player, an Olympic-class gymnast or a top tennis player.
And while this is from Jewish spirituality, It applies to every spiritual path. And I know it's been the work of decades and will be the work of the rest of my life. Rabbi Tzvi Freeman:
Look deeply within each person you encounter, no matter how brilliant or dull, refined or crude, righteous or wicked you judge this person to be.
Beyond their clothes, beyond their skin, beyond their behavior, beyond their words.
Beyond the emotions they show, the personality in which they dress, past whatever masks they don to conceal their inner woes.
Look deeply and see the vicious war each one fights inside, the battle to remain human in a maddening world—a world you will never know, for no two of us are placed in the same world and no two of us confront the same challenges—
—the sickness at knowing one’s own failures and deficiencies, the yearning to be more, the disappointment at not being that, the struggle to fight every sorrow, every pain, every plummeting, disastrous trauma of life…
True, perhaps not everyone fights every battle. Some have long surrendered.
But the very fact that this person was assigned this battle tells us more than can be spoken, for the One who created him knows he has the power to prevail and win.
That alone is enough to admire, and to be humbled, asking yourself, “Do I fight a battle nearly as fierce as the one I expect this person to win? In what way am I any better?”
