I've always found the Japanese adoption of Zen to be very interesting historically. As a "technology" or body of techniques, the advantages one can gain from meditation, enhanced awareness, and asceticism are well-documented.
Where I would caution practitioners is to be very wary of religious invitations to ego death and loss of control over chakras (Never "open" your chakras - which are a physiological metaphor for very important aspects of your Self. These aspects should be disciplined and controlled, never "opened.")
Everything below your heart represents your base passions and failure to discipline these most of all turns you into an easily manipulated slave.
Plato's model in the Republic, when read as a manual for elites wishing to control society on every level, is revealing in how people are enslaved through their own lack of discipline.
This clicked, for me, with the physiological metaphor in my previous comment when I realized that self-discipline often follows a path upward from control over sexual desires, to control over hunger, to control over one's emotions (the heart) and on up as you master each lower level.
Conversely, failure to exercise discipline over the upper levels, over time, slides you down into the basest level, like an infant, where you lack control even over your own biological functions. Apply the microcosm of your own self to the macrocosm of society and the same principles are in effect.
Where I would caution practitioners is to be very wary of religious invitations to ego death and loss of control over chakras (Never "open" your chakras - which are a physiological metaphor for very important aspects of your Self. These aspects should be disciplined and controlled, never "opened.")
Everything below your heart represents your base passions and failure to discipline these most of all turns you into an easily manipulated slave.