When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don’t generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn’t really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in “heaven”(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it’s a really nice thought that I don’t want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.
The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don’t want to take that aspect away from anyone.
I use my hands to kind of do the same thing. It’s probably the behaviour they modeled Monk’s “hand thing” after. It still helps even if I’m searching using my memory and spatial awareness to recall and search through something I am not currently looking at. Somehow, narrowing the scope physically with my hands helps. It’s probably a muscle memory or proprioception thing.
For example, if I want to find something to eat in the fridge. I generally won’t be able to think of anything by just opening the fridge and looking through it. Unless there is something super obvious like a leftover pizza box or something else impossible to miss like that. Just trying to search by looking at each shelf only increases the odds of finding something by like 5%. But when I use my hand and slowly move it down the shelves, I can somehow think more clearly about what is on each shelf than I could without using my hand. And, as I mentioned, it also works even if I am no longer looking in the fridge. I can do it with the door closed and still more clearly recall what was on each shelf.
It also helps when scanning through my whole house looking for something, with and without currently having eyes on it. Like scanning through the whole house room by room while still sitting at my computer, I do a much better job if I am pointing my hand at the place I am thinking about as I scan.
I should probably mention I am Autistic, my spatial awareness and proprioception are two areas I have seemed to benefit. But it’s very easy to get confused or distracted if I have too much information at once. So that is mostly what is going on. I can’t just imagine that I am pointing at something in my imagination to gain the benefit, I have to be literally, physically pointing. Although I can translocate, like not be at my house or fridge and still scan my house or fridge by pointing relatively where each thing would be if they were there.
It’s not limited in scope as far as I can tell. Though it is kind of limited in resolution. The bigger the area I am scanning, the less detail I can recall about it when I am not there, or “looking through walls”. But when I am there, I can go as fine grained as the search demands, just takes longer.