I'm considering fasting on Fridays for Lent this year, not the post-Vatican II "fasting" where you can eat, the real kind. If that sounds unnecessarily judgmental, I assure you it isn't, my personal experience is that even by the end of a single day of not eating/consuming calories, you can an altered state of consciousness that is very spiritual. This is not reproducible by simply not eating as much. That's one of the things I really respect about the Eastern Orthodox church, they fast often. They have a more mystical attitude than the Roman church, was deep influenced by Platonist and Aristotelian thought through the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas of Aquin. As a big fan of classical thought, I like that, and the logic of it, but their
a priori assumptions led them to such weird conclusions as unbaptized babies being sent to purgatory, while the Eastern church is more willing to admit that they're positions on some subjects are merely speculative and their answers to some questions are very psychedelic. However, they're not called Orthodox for no reason, while the Roman church considers them to be merely misguided, they consider Catholics to be heretics. For example, sin as an illness of the soul, rather than the legalistic approach of the RCC, the idea of some of their theologians that heaven and hell are the same place, and that is being in God's presence, which is joyous to the righteous and painful to the wicked. 'course the Romish position is a contemporary innovation, I can't decide whether the dynamism of the West or the more static East is preferable.* On the one hand, maintaining the old ways is in the face of an ever changing world is consistent with the unchanging nature of man, on the other hand, a willingness to adapt oneself to the times and admit one's errors is reflective of the living relationship between the Church and God (for a biblical basis, think of the Old Testament imagery of Israel as the adulterous wife of God, and I must recommend the most mystical book of the Old Testament,
The Song of Songs, it's about two pages long and I daresay it's PD friendly, so give it a read). I try to view these things from the perspective of the faithful, rather than my own worldview I'm full of the hubris of youth, and they educate us to overvalue our own opinions with that critical thinking garbage they teach in schools, but my beef with their replacing the formal logic that was the foundation of a University education from the birth of those institutions in the 12 century until the 19th century when the theories of the French Enlightenment, and the empiricism of the Anglosphere (I mean that not in the sense of the scientific method, but as the ethos of modern thought from a broader perspective) became the new consensus reality, and its proponents decided that the intellectual heritage of antiquity was in fact antiquated. But that's a subject for another day.
Interestingly enough the Eastern church has only one monastic order, while the West has a great variety (we might say that the seeds of pluralist religious practice are endemic to the Catholic church, it's no surprise that it gave birth to the fractal denominational schisms of the last 500 years).
*P.S. I think the Roman Catholic Church's promotion of social justice around the world leaves the bulk of my affection with the West.
And it should be another fun day today. I'm going over to my friend's soon to work on press kit materials for the band, and then we're going to jam and record all day (hopefully). I think I'm going to take some LSD today too, maybe this evening, I've been planning it for a while. I really want to jam on LSD. 
