modern siddhas

[Guest guest]

When I was a kid, I was into magic tricks. Did shows around town and such

things. always wondered if there was real magic and continue to be

intrigued with this subject. Bob Flaws spoke of magics in an earlier post

on aging. How he had belonged to a tibetan sect that used various

practices to accomplish apparently supernatural feats. However in his

opinion, the effort was not worth the reward and the life of renunciates

did not yield as much value to society as did the lives of those who

worked to help others.

 

Several things come to mind here. First, I agree that mastering siddhas

(which is how yogic vedanta texts label these powers acquired through

meditation) is not only not worth the trouble to me, but all my teachers

expressed to me that these powers were powerful distractions from the path

of enlightenment. Nevertheless the fact remains that many traditions

consider the spontaneous arising of such powers to be part and parcel of

the spiritual path. Whether they truly distract from enlightenment is a

question I cannot answer. However I do get a million lifetimes to find

out, I guess. What such practices, if they are valid, do demonstrate is

that the human body can be transformed into into something not limited by

normal laws of biology.

 

Don't get me wrong, I think these are just laws we do not yet understand,

not something mystical. And that means that if one method can lead to

this end, so can perhaps others. While the practices that lead to this

end may be mental and spiritual, it is my position that great powers and

prevention of bodily decay must have physiological changes associated with

them. And thus these changes might be induced in any number of ways.

Including pharmacological. As for accomplishments left to posterity, I

would offer that it would be quite a gift to posterity to show that such

things were possible. It would open up whole new avenues of science and

psychology.

 

Finally, I think it is interesting that many of siddhas described by

Patanjali have been accomplished by modern technology. Flying, creating

fire instantly, communicating invisibly at a distance, lifting great

weights far beyond human capacity. Thus what was once available only to

sages has become part of mass culture. Who is to say that that technology

will not also put off death indefinitely. If humans are capable of

transcending biology, perhaps that is our destiny. All of human history

has been about transcending biology through culture. Why is this the last

step in our collective evolution? Just because we have spent millennia

roaming the woods, millennia more in pagan farming societies and millennia

more in the judaeo-christian-islamic era does not tell us anything about

the shape of our future post-modernity.

 

Perhaps we are meant to be extremely long lived and reproducing sparsely.

If that was the case, society would no longer revolve around the nuclear

family (as it no longer revolves around the extended family or clan).

Perhaps the end of the pathological remnants of clan mentality that

continue to exist even in modernity would disappear if the nature of human

existence changed. Perhaps the nature of human existence must change in

order to achieve these goals of peace and harmony on the planet. Perhaps

living a conventional life in the world tacitly supports the status quo

with all its ramifications and stymies this further evolution. It is

possible that this is true. It is also possible that only a return to

traditional family values will heal society. It is also possible we are

meant to completely transcend physical form. And perhaps technology, not

siddha practice will be the path to these powers for the many. I don't

know. But I don't think the I ching does either. I guess we'll see, at

least those of us who live long enough. :-)

 

 

Chinese Herbs

 

 

" Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre

minds " -- Albert Einstein