There's a few common practices across religions, spirituality, and philosophies.
Surrendering/forgiveness, constant reflection on death, and separation of the self tend to come to mind.
Most religions instill these ideas/virtues which may "modulate" the ego. For devout practitioners, they tend to live by these virtues and actually "reduce" the ego to near extinction.
The question is, do people naturally come across these ideas without religion/spirituality/etc? I was raised non-religious and didn't come across many of these ideas until my late 20s when I started to read again. Most of that came from reading religious/spiritual types of texts.
The "Perennial Philosophy" school of thought [1] says that people rediscover these ideas over and over again. It takes a particularly prophetic individual to stumble over them de novo, but once the idea takes root it spreads quickly.
There's a great quote from William James on the cycle of religious discovery, diaspora, corruption, and rediscovery, but I can't find it.
Not sure if this is the one you're talking about, but it rang a bell. I saw it in a Tony Robbins book most recently and then repeated in a book about TV addiction.
“First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.”
- William James
"First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Finally, it is accepted as self-evident."
Surrendering/forgiveness, constant reflection on death, and separation of the self tend to come to mind.
Most religions instill these ideas/virtues which may "modulate" the ego. For devout practitioners, they tend to live by these virtues and actually "reduce" the ego to near extinction.
The question is, do people naturally come across these ideas without religion/spirituality/etc? I was raised non-religious and didn't come across many of these ideas until my late 20s when I started to read again. Most of that came from reading religious/spiritual types of texts.