Yoke on the Wall, MTSOfan, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Yogis, in “classical” Hindu texts, are practitioners with goals of supernatural powers, rather than liberation or salvation. A passage in the Mahabharata, one of the major Sanskrit Hindu epics says:
“Yogis who are without restraints [and] endowed with the power of yoga are [so many] masters, who enter into [the bodies of] the Prajapatis, the sages, the gods, and the great beings. Yama, the raging Terminator (Antaka), and death of terrible prowess: none of these masters the yogi who is possessed of immeasurable splendor…A yogi can lay hold of several thousand selves, and having obtained [their] power, he can walk the earth with all of them. He can obtain [for himself] the [realms of the] sense objects. Otherwise, he can undertake terrible austerities, or again, he can draw those [sense objects] back together [into himself], like the sun [does] its rays of light. Without a doubt, the powerful yogi who is a master of binding [others] is [also] possessed of the absolute power to release [others from those same bonds].”1
In the so-called classical Hindu texts–including the Upanishads, Vedas, Mahabharata, and Yoga Sutra–we find a direct link with yoga and “yoking”. Prior to 16th century, these texts are dominated by yoga practitioners who left their bodies to “yoke” or hitch themselves to the sun, or to other bodies or selves. They may have done so for benevolent reasons; for example, to initiate disciples (diksha) and thereby prepare them for salvation; this is the main purpose of the guru-disciple relationship in South Asia. They can also take over bodies whose owners have left them (because they died), a practice that harms no one. Or, by yoking themselves to the sun, they can effect their own liberation, dying to this world at a time of their choosing to cheat death (kala-vancana). This yoking is the precise meaning of the Sanskrit term yoga.2
See my post Shankara: The King and the Corpse for another Sanskrit account of yoking (the yoga as practiced in classical Hindu texts)
Notes
1 Mahabharata 12.289.24-28
2 For an in-depth expose of the history of yogis see xi-xiv in Sinister Yogis by David Gordon White University of Chicago Press, 2009. This book provides an exhaustive history of yogis, where our author demonstrates that “classical” yoga has very little to do with meditation and is mostly about the “yoking” practices of taking possession of bodies.
And yet, in the Yoga Sutras, Yoga is simply defined as “complete cessation of mind-fluctuations.”
All of the above “powers” become possible, according to various accounts, due to yoga, but they aren’t important to the person who who has “attained” yoga (enlightenment) and being overly concerned about them is less than futile because that is just another mind-fluctuation.
The Yoga Sutras devote an entire chapter to the siddhis, but most gurus warn people to not bother engaging in such practices.
On the other hand, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi started teaching various siddhis to the public in the form of the TM-SIdhis program, which he held was an adjunct practice that would speedup and enhance the growth towards enlightenment of people who already were practicing TM.
His status within the hierarchy of his own guru’s tradition was such that he convinced the Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, Swami Viṣṇudevānanda Sarasvatī, a fellow disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, to preside over the first “International Yogic Flying Competition” before 10,000 people at the Indira Ghandi Sports Arena in New Deli:
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM9UpoR64Wg
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In addition to the shankaracharya, you can see people like B.D. Triguna, President of the All-Indian Ayurveda Congress (India’s largest association of ayurvedic physicians) in attendance. You can also see an amazingly young and sincere Deepak Chopra speaking to the crowd.
The competition in New Deli was followed later by a demonstration by the “world champion” yogic flyers in Washington, DC before 110 journalists and 32 TV crews (some of the video footage is from that event). This was followed a month later by a demonstration of Yogic Flying to the press and invited guests in approximately 1,000 (one thousand) cities around the world on the same weekend by local practitioners of the TM-Sidhis.
The purpose of the “competition” was to alert the general public to the existence of such practices and the purpose of their practice and to give a sense of the state of the collective consciousness of the world, because the old monk believed that it was the collective consciousness of the entire world that was preventing anyone from advancing past the stage of “hopping like a frog.”
At that time, the intent was to hold annual competitions to allow the public to physically see how rising enlightenment in the world was physically manifest, first by people hopping ever-higher, and eventually, by people actually starting to float.
In order to raise the collective consciousness of the world, the old monk called for the creation of large groups of people practicing TM & TM-Sidhis. He expected that such groups would be formed in short order and that it would then merely be a matter of time and patience until the world could actually see the potential inherent in humans.
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Of course, it’s almost 30 years later, and yogic flying competitions are only held sporadically and the TM organization is STILL trying to create the first permanent collection of “TM-Sidhas” to practice together in a group large enough to have a noticeable effect on the entire world:
http://vedicpandits.org/peace-creating-group/
As a side effect of this growth in world consciousness, Maharishi believed that world peace would spontaneously arise.Maharishi suggested that progress towards world peace needed several things to happen simultaneously.
1) creation of at least one group of TM-SIdhas to practice their techniques daily. For the world, the number they calculated required turns out to be about 9,000 people currently.
2) creation of at least one group of TM-SIdhas in every country, in order to help stabilize collective consciousness on a country level. For the USA, this number is about 1,800 currently.
3) creation of at least one group of TM-SIdhas in every major city. For a city the size of New York City, the number required would be about 300.
Maharishi predicted 50 years ago that even if a small percentage of a population practiced TM, the entire society would benefit. They eventually hit on 1% as the figure required, and performed studies that seemed to confirm their prediction. Maharishi predicted that when people practiced TM and the TM-SIdhis in a group, their would be a synergistic effect, and physicists suggested that this was a familiar phenomenon where radiators operating collectively in a coherent way had an N-squared effect, so the formula to calculate the number required for a large population was: the square-root of (1/100 * the population), which is used to calculate the various group sizes required for the above proposal.
The TM organizations in various countries are engaged in attempting to create “coherence creating groups” for their respective countries, but few are as well-organized as the effort in the USA, where you can get paid up to $700 a month to participate in the group meditation in Fairfield, Iowa: http://invincibleamerica.org/faq.html
The most ambitious project, currently, is taking place in South America, where the presidents of both Brazil and Colombia happen to practice TM and TM and TM-SIdhis instruction for tens of thousands of people is currently underway in various countries. The intent is to train 50,000 TM-Sidhas over the next few months, and collect sufficient funds to ensure that they can practice together in groups regularly. This will, the reasoning goes, allow at least the requisite 9,000 to always be practicing at the same time, if you take the aggregate of all groups in the same time-zone, even allowing for students who take various holidays and would otherwise drop the numbers below the requisite size -since people living in various countries, including entire Mexican and South American Indian tribes who are starting to participate, don’t all take holidays on the same day, there should always be at least 9,000 practicing at the same time, even during Christmas and other widely-recognized holidays. This article from 2 years ago gives a hint of the extent of the participation at that time: http://www.mangalorean.com/news.php?newstype=broadcast&broadcastid=366529#.UNbos6YNJts.facebook
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The point is that you talk about “powers” on an individual level as being something for the individual to do for the sake of the individual. From Maharishi’s perspective, the regular practice of the TM-SIdhis is a potent tool to help gain enlightenment, and when practiced regularly in sufficiently large groups, will help bring about world peace as a side-effect of the growth towards enlightenment of the individuals who are participating. The enlightenment of the individual and the enlightenment of the world go hand in hand -you literally cannot have one without the other.
@saijanai:
1) Yoga, citta, vritti, niroda. Sanskrit scholars interpret the Yoga Sutras (YS), right? Translations of translations. Meanings get lost in translation. Not much different from Greek Bible Gospels in thousands of versions, so is YS in 100s versions. Posts to come on this blog.
2) 25% of the YS is dedicated to Siddhis, how to obtain occult powers. When you go back to the yogi stories and literature pre-Modern Yoga (19th century) yogis are primarily seeking powers. See my post Shankara: The King and the Corpse. More posts to come on this topic as well.
3) Yogic Flying? Bouncing on mattresses using your body momentum? Watched. 🙂
4) Enlightenment? How about we keep it simple? Call it human maturity- emotional, mental, physical. Marketers use buzzwords to create desire to buy a product we don’t need. Enlightenment, mindfulness, yoga–all buzzwords. Makes good marketing copy, sells product. Be suspicious of words. Dive into a book’s, ideas’s, word’s history, meaning, and origins.
@saijanai:
1) Yoga, citta, vritti, niroda. Sanskrit scholars interpret the Yoga Sutras (YS), right? Translations of translations. Meanings get lost in translation. Not much different from Greek Bible Gospels in thousands of versions, so is YS in 100s versions. Posts to come on this blog.
Of course, but… When I respond, I’m responding with respect to a specific school of Yoga, if you will. The school founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi based on his interpretation and enhancement of his own teacher’s interpretation of things. You know, the guy who managed to be named the first Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath in 165 years. So… it’s Maharishi-brand Yoga, just as it is Maharishi-brand Ayurveda, etc. You obviously don’t accept Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and by extension, his teacher, as anything worth paying attention to, but at least keep in mind where I am coming from, eh?
2) 25% of the YS is dedicated to Siddhis, how to obtain occult powers. When you go back to the yogi stories and literature pre-Modern Yoga (19th century) yogis are primarily seeking powers. See my post Shankara: The King and the Corpse. More posts to come on this topic as well.
Indeed, and I have practiced a version of many of the siddhis found in the YS for more than 3 decades -TM itself, for more than 4 decades. I’m well aware of the, at least in the context of MMY’s interpretation of things the significance of the siddhis found in teh YS. I’ve been doing them for 30+ years.
3) Yogic Flying? Bouncing on mattresses using your body momentum? Watched. 🙂
And, as I have pointed out, the Shiva Samhita and other commentaries on Yoga explicitly say that the “Passage through the Skies” siddhi (AKA “levitation”) comes in various stages, one of which is “hopping like a frog.” I believe that Yogananda himself mentions this.
4) Enlightenment? How about we keep it simple? Call it human maturity- emotional, mental, physical. Marketers use buzzwords to create desire to buy a product we don’t need. Enlightenment, mindfulness, yoga–all buzzwords. Makes good marketing copy, sells product. Be suspicious of words. Dive into a book’s, ideas’s, word’s history, meaning, and origins.
How about we keep to the published research, which I have already linked to several times and you apparently still aren’t willing to read:
Transcendental experiences during meditation practice
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.12316/full
From the TM perspective, the first stage of enlightenment is where the nervous system is sufficiently low-stress that a strong, uninvolved sense of self becomes noticeable and present at all times, whether the person is waking, dreaming or in deep sleep.
This is due to the EEG signature of samadhi during TM becoming strong enough outside of meditation that the “pure self” that is all that is present in samadhi becomes noticeable outside of samadhi.
Having this pure sense of self present at all times is the internal correlate of having a strong, low-stress, resilient-against-stress, central nervous system. They are two different ways of describing the same thing -one based on attempts to describe internal processing, and one based on objective physiological measures.
Practice of TM, alternated with normal activity, gives rise to this situation. Adding the TM-Sidhis techniques into one’s daily routine can allow the nervous system to become stronger and more resilient faster than simply doing TM + normal activity.
The very name of the technique used in the Yoga Sutras siddhis practices, samayama is a tip-off of what is going on: samayama means “active samadhi” or “samadhi in motion” and that is literally what they are meant for: training the nervous system to maintain some kind of activity while in a near-samadhi state.
Since that is the very definition of “enlightenment” ala MMY’s lexicon, it shouldn’t be a surprise that, long-term, incorporation of these techniques into one’s mental practices, leads to the TM-style enlightenment, where activity of any kind doesn’t overshadow samadhi…
…in fact, the average number of hours of mental practice that the enlightened subjects in the above study had engaged in was about 15,000 hours –including practice of the TM-Sidhis.
Your refusal to understand teh significance of these practices and how they affect people is stunning, by the way. They are so beneficial, at last when one is already sufficiently stable, that Father Gabriel Mejia has been able to defend his decision to teach them to the orphans in his facilities to his own archbishop.
Imagine: a Roman Catholic Archbishop accepting the teaching of the ancient Hindu technique of levitation to children by a prominent Roman Catholic priest because of how positive an impact the practice has had on their lives.
This isn’t a lie, or something I have made up. This is what is going on in South America in 60 orphanges. Your ongoing inability to process this information is astounding, as I have said, and suggests that you aren’t really reading anything I have said with new eyes, but only through a very thick filter.
@Saijanai:
My responses to your numbered sections (thanks for organizing your comments better)
1: I understand where you are coming from. Do you know where the Yoga Sutra sources the gurus teachings are coming from? Which translation? Do you know about the Yoga Sutra’s history in general? Scholarly and historical assessments? It’s like biblical scholarship or history– there’s people out there doing the heavy lifting but you have to be willing to look for their books and such. Those who take their Sutra serious ought to check them out. If it’s worth basing your life or time on, it’s worthy of serious study and scrutiny. I’ll post more on my findings from critical scholars and historians.
2: Feel free to share your experiences of siddha powers sometime.
3. Yogananda never mentioned hopping like frog or passage through skies in published materials.
Good works or good to world is good. No knocking of that from me. I’m challenging your assumptions about Sutra’s and the words, etc. Ideas don’t get a free pass. People get respect, but ideas are open season for challenge on this blog. See my comment Policies page.
At #4 I stopped here. You ought to break long posts into shorter ones. Sorry, I’m not able to respond to all of a long, rambling post. Short, concise works. I recommend you start your own blog if you need to write long. I’d follow your blog. But I can’t keep up with long posts or keep up with lots of abstract articles. Summarize if needed. And if it pulls me in I’ll dig deeper. Otherwise, share and know it’s your responsibility to draw the reader in. Not mine to read.
Cheer mate.
Scott@SkepticMeditations
@Saijanai:
My responses to your numbered sections (thanks for organizing your comments better)
1: I understand where you are coming from.
Ummm….
Do you know where the Yoga Sutra sources the gurus teachings are coming from
Someone like Swami Brahmananda Saraswait, who acording to story ran away from home at age 10 in order to find a guru, is his own best translator and commentator on such stuff, didn’t you know?
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in turn used his own teacher’s lectures as the inspiration of his teachings, and augmented that by working with run-of-the-mill Sanskrit scholars like Vernon Katz, who helped him with his translation of the Bhagavad Gita.
Which translation? Do you know about the Yoga Sutra’s history in general? Scholarly and historical assessments? It’s like biblical scholarship or history– there’s people out there doing the heavy lifting but you have to be willing to look for their books and such. Those who take their Sutra serious ought to check them out. If it’s worth basing your life or time on, it’s worthy of serious study and scrutiny. I’ll post more on my findings from critical scholars and historians.
It’s immaterial to my point, which is a repetition of Maharishi’s point. If you really have to have direct exegesis, a Sanskrit scholar named Thomas Egenes has published a translation of the Yoga Sutras using Maharishi’s interpretation to guide him:
http://www.amazon.com/Maharishi-Patanjali-Yoga-S-Tra/dp/1421891328
2: Feel free to share your experiences of siddha powers sometime.
Whatever for? What good is reading about such things on the internet do you? Yoga is meant to be personally “experienced” and is not some set of ego-boosting stories to be shared.. If you want inspiration, look at the changes that took place in the kids who learned them in Father Gabriel’s orphanages that are so dramatic that the Roman Catholic church stays silent about him teaching such things as levitation.
Look at the claim by President Chissano of Mozambique, who says that TM and TM-Sidhis practice by he and his military and police officers caused such dramatic changes in Mozambique that he eventually received the African equivalent of the Nobel Prize. How are those not sufficiently inspiring already?
3. Yogananda never mentioned hopping like frog or passage through skies in published materials.
Huh. Did you never read chapter 7, “The Levitating Saint” in Autobiography of a Yogi?
“How does he remain in the air, defying the law of gravitation?”
“A yogi’s body loses its grossness after use of certain pranayamas. Then it will levitate or hop about like a leaping frog. Even saints who do not practice a formal yoga have been known to levitate during a state of intense devotion to God.”
The Yoga Sutras mention this particular pranayama as “turiya” -the fourth.
The Shiva Samhita goes into great detail, in vs 40-45ish, chapter 3, I believe.
Turiya is the “pranayama” that occurs when breath is spontaneously suspended. Which is, of course, how you would describe samadhi in terms of pranayama: that state where breath is spontaneously suspended –“turiya”, which comes from the Mandukya Upanishad, and is hailed as containing the essence of all of the Vedas in a few short verses, abbreviating all expositions of stages of samadhi, enlightenment, etc., in one single word: “turiya” -the fourth.
And of course, siddhis come about during the practice of samyama -dhrana, dhyana and samadhi aka “turiya” the fourth [pranayama] mentioned in the Yoga Sutras in the section on pranayama as the one where breath spontaneously suspends.
At #4 I stopped here.
OK
[Important references on enlightenment omitted]
@saijanai: I stand corrected on your “hop about like a leaping frog” reference in Yogananda’s Autobiography. I’d forgotten that leaping frog. I have to read Yogananda’s book again to refresh my memory.
Isn’t “frog leaping” and levitating siddhic powers? I’m confused why modern yogis both denounce siddhis and embrace supernatural power when they suit there ideologies (eg. levitation, telepathy, (de)materialization, etc– are these not siddhic powers?). Is not transmigration of soul or projecting spiritual “power” into bodies or the world a siddhic power?
My point is to get readers to look outside the bubble of their teachings or assumptions. If you read the same books, the same teachers, the same schools you may have some useful education or information–but one is sure to be lopsided and limited in understanding. This blog is about challenging assumptions as a way to natural liberation, natural enlightenment–no magic required.
Thanks
The entire Yoga Sutras is simply about “subsidence of mind-fluctuations.”
During meditation, that is samadhi which we TMers call “pure consciousness.”
The stabilization of the ability to think and act from the level where mind-fluctuatons converge into the silence of “pure consciousness” is what we TMers call “enlightenment.”
Cultivation of “super-powers” for the sake of “abilities” is a fool’s errand. Cultivation of the ability to operate at all times in mode of functioning of the nervous system where such powers can manifest is called “growth towards enlightenment.”
In Zen-speak, “meditate and then chop wood” becomes “meditate, then levitate, etc., and then chop wood.”
But even so, worrying about such abilities as abilities is always silly. They are the Yogic equivalent of pushups.
@saijanai: I agree “super-powers” are fool’s errands.
I’m studying the history and critical interpretations of the Yoga Sutras. The Sutras, as they are in the original, are not simple at all. Some interpretations of them may be. These are many popular hagiographic interpretations. Modern Yoga and the Sutras, as taught the last 150 years, is quite different from the yoga practiced prior to 19th century.
I recommend reading The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography by David Gordon White, Princeton University Press 2014. I’m currently reading this and other books on the history of Sutras.
Well, leaving aside whether or not siddhis actually exist, the purpose for which Maharishi taught them appears to be valid. The EEG changes that take placde during practice (Yogic Flying is the only one with a physical component, so it is trivial to measure EEG with all the rest because you don’t have to worry about muscle contractions contaminating the readings), are very much inline with the EEG of pure consciousness, and long-term TM-Sidhis practice DOES appear to enhance the EEG during meditation to make the pure consciousness EEG more “complete.”
What does that mean?
In people who don’t practice the TM-SIdhis, pure consciousness mostly involves coherence in the alpha EEG. In people who practice the TM-SIdhis regularly for years, pure consciousness during TM produces higher EEG coherence in all frequencies, including higher alpha EEG coherence than that found in the non-sidhas.
This translates into much quicker stabilization of alpha EEG coherence AND coherence in all other frequencies outside of meditation, which is the correlate for “stabilization of PC outside of meditation,” aka “enlightenment.”
Most of the subjects that Fred Travis studied in his enlightenment research had been doing TM + TM-Sidhis for about 15,000 hours. It’s hard to find anyone who has been doing TM alone for that amount of time as TM-by-itself isn’t that healthy as it is a purely resting practice, and people need activity to balance the rest during TM.
ALL TM-SIdhis involve activity on some level and of course, Yogic Flying involves physical as well as mental activity, so somone who is doing 8 hours of TM + TM-Sidhis as probably engaged in physical activity for more than an hour per day if they are engaged in 3 “rounds” of TM + TM-Sidhis, every day. The point being that 15,000 hours is quite doable, assuming you have a good place to practice such as the Invincible America course.
Here’s a video of EEG of a long-term meditator (the speaker’s wife, I believe). The last 5 or 6 minutes is the EEG of someone else, before and after participating in the above 8-hours/day meditation project for several years:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd_bLS6SzQ&list=UU0iwNoV7Sptxi1qqWz_R9IA
The EEG trace in the first part is the pair-wise coherence between 4 different leads. The EEG in the last part is only the pair-wise coherence of 2 leads for the front of the brain. Too primitive for publication as research, but shows the general change that everyone shows to some extent or another when they practice TM and the TM-Sidhis.
By the way, the next generation of TM research is starting. They’re pretty much going to do gene-expression measures and how they change after long-term TM/TM-Sidhis practice for any new research they do, as the changes appear to be stunning AND the measurements are now relatively cheap to perform. E.G., this new PTSD study they hope to do:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25066921
I’m also hearing that ever since the American Heart Association came out with its report saying that only TM had good enough and consistent enough research to say that doctors could recommend TM for the treatment of high blood pressure, the number of researchers willing to collaborate on new TM studies has jumped substantially, so I expect more TM studies to start appearing. This is important, as 25x as many mindfulness studies get published every month as TM studies (but see the AHA’s observation that there’s no good evidence that mindfulness has any long-term, consistent effect on blood pressure, despite there being 25x as many studies published every month).
@saijanai: Thanks for your insights. Let’s see if the future studies improve our understanding or produce compelling results. Cheers.
By the way, in our discussion, I had forgetten about the following…
Back in the day, Herbert Benson was attempting to study paranormal abilities in Yogis and Buddhist monks. He explicitly asked the Dalai Lama about levitation and this was the result:
Timeless Healing by Herbert Benson
…On other expeditions, my colleagues and I tried to confirm legendary reports that Tibetan monks levitate, rising and hovering above the ground during meditation. But when we were allwed to view the levitation of monks in the mountain hamlet of Chail, it appeared only to be an act of considerable physical agility in which monks, leg-locked in lotus position, sprang several inches off the floor. They did not hover. I was told through a translator that the sages of old had done so. When I asked, “Is it possible today?” the monk replied, with a twinkle in his eye,” There is no need. Today we have airplanes.”
Whether it is the result of practicing the Yoga Sutras technique for levitation, or some Buddhist practice with the outcome in mind, frog-hopping, as shown in that video I linked to, seems to be the most common result.
And of course, I’ve explained why TMers indulge. Benson never mentioned why the Buddhist monks he was talking to indulge but one might assume it is for the same general reason: spiritual growth.
@saijanai: I forgot that TM equated levitation or frog-hopping with “spiritual growth”. Seems like a lot of effort and I thought “spirituality” was an inner, invisible force. Not something that is typically encouraged by the gurus to show off. Despite that Patanjali and many other yogic traditions sought siddhis–supernatural powers.
Levitation seems to be equated with sanctity. Claims that a person “floats in the air” seems to me to be sign for a religious person that their person is blessed by the higher power, lighter than matter, or rising to the heavens, or some other such vague, grandiose notions.
Until my mid-teens, I was a practicing Catholic with indoctrination into stories of levitating saints like St Francis, St. Teresa, and many others. And as a young adult, after I was an ordained SRF “hindu” monk, our guru told us stories of levitating yogis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_and_levitation
Levitation is quaint folklore. I would hardly call “hopping” off the ground a few inches something extraordinary. At best if there was at least “hovering” (as the stories in the Catholic church or Autobiography of a Yogi) that might be a little more impressive.
Unrelated to levitation but related to “mind-wandering”, I wanted to let you know about a recent article ‘Businesses on the mindfulness bandwagon’ at ft.com. I thought of you because in the article the author talks about mind-wandering is claimed to be the problem. Let’s not discuss that topic in this post about yoga. I just wanted to tell you about the article in case you are interested. Hope to add value to your interests.