I was raised in a cult. Yes, as an Irish Catholic I was taught to have a ferocious devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, or the BVM, as we smug 12-year olds smirked behind our rosary entwined hands. That's Mary the Mother of God, for those poor souls who don't know her saving grace and are destined for hell, according to limited and dull Sister Francis James at St. Luke the Evangelist parochial school, circa 1964.
But as an erstwhile adult, I have to say that the repetition of the prayers counted on the beads of the rosary do provide a comfort that can lead to a meditative state or a form of the quiet mind.
And rituals that are engraved on your bones can be of benefit in times of crisis. As my father lay dead on his bedroom floor and a police officer stood sentry in the small hall, my mother and I said the rosary together, aloud, tears streaming to be sure, but not a prayer was missed.
I have a sense that everything we possess within our own physicality has a purpose but that the knowledge of the purpose of something as simple as our breath rising and falling has been forgotten. But there are threads of ancient knowledge that have survived and can be used to find a way to the whole cloth of an esoteric teaching.
I recently read again a slim volume by Sir Paul Dukes, On a Single Breath, A Lost Interpretation of the Lord's Prayer. On prayer, Sir Dukes transcribes for us what his teacher said to him: "...The three pillars on which prayer is built are all runaway horses. Each has to be trained and disciplined by restraint -- there is no other way because they are all runaway horses..."