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... I think world view may have an impact here, if one was to believe that we are merely projections of the functioning of our brains then Siddhis would be impossible or extremely unlikely. Cause and result. Belief conditions theories, theories condition experience and experiment, experience and experiment condition reality as it appears, reality as it appears condition beliefs....
The paranormal has been researched for many years now... Conclusion: nothing is found.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." ~Carl Sagan
Okay. I think the burden of proof is on the believers not on the skeptics.
It is! But if one is going to claim that it does not exist, then burden of proof lies with the one making that claim too. Otherwise, you are "arguing from ignorance", which is technically an illogical argument.
Sure we can keep the question open; but for how long? How many times do we have to look - find nothing – look again – before we say: it probably isn’t there?
Until technology can prove that it even has the capability to measure such things to begin with. Otherwise, you are working from a baseless assumption because you are assuming that technology can measure it. Which is simply an assumption which may be wrong.
I would like to add this final post on the subject referring to a story I read in a book called 'Tantric Quest-An Encounter with Absolute Love' by Daniel Odier... His Master that called herself Devi once she had finished her learning near her own Master, decided to go to the mountains and practice meditation. Then a guy showed up and started disturbing the ascetics. First they didn't pay attention but after a while they wanted him to leave. He said he would only leave if they would settle a debate about which school is the best, the school of total presence in the phenomenal world or the total transcending of it. After debating he chose Devi to answer and after entering Samhadi she said that both approaches are subjected to duality, and one should transcend this duality...
So my point is either the mind originates from the brain or the brain receives the mind like an antenna, is a dichotomy, a product of duality and one should meditate on this to transcend the dualistic nature of the matter and move into a substantial insight...
Being a Buddhist ìs being a skeptic. We don’t take things for granted we investigate.
I must agree with Zenff, here. In Buddhism, it is regarded as "ignoble speech" to speak of having experiencing things that have not (really) been experienced.
There was a time when I believed siddis could not exist.
Siddhis are described as a byproduct of achieving samadhi in all Buddhist traditions. Since none of us here have done so, it is idle to speculate whether this is true or not. I myself have never seen any despite having hung around with lamas for twenty years.
why you assume this? and what do you mean by "achieving samadhi"? samadhi means meditation, maybe you are refering the jhānas?
What do you thing about the attainment of Siddhis? What is your thesis as Buddhist practitioners?
It's not our thesis, it's the Buddha's. Siddhis come about as a result of dedicated meditation practice, but practitioners are told not to become distracted by them or cling to them. It's just a phase in the development of meditation practice, and it will pass.
We had a member last winter who was frustrated because he had been experiencing siddhis, and found them distracting, and turned to us for advice on what to do. Everyone told him to stay focussed on his meditation, and the siddhis will pass.
I don't know what all the skepticism is about. It's natural that, when one becomes adept at stilling the left brain, the intuitive capacities of the right brain will manifest. This much has been proven by neuroscience. Clairvoyance happens. I don't know what else is on the list of siddhis, but they're all probably related to the properties of the right brain.
It that means that it is true because it was the Buddha who said it, that’s a dogmatic way of thinking. Or it is blind faith. Also I didn’t notice the Buddha was participating on the forum. I mean we only have indirect and unreliable information about his statements and opinions.
C-W:“It's natural that, when one becomes adept at stilling the left brain, the intuitive capacities of the right brain will manifest. This much has been proven by neuroscience.”
Our brain does a lot of work without involvement of conscious processes. There’s a lot of non-verbal communication going on between people. All of that may seem a bit mysterious but it isn’t supernatural. Siddhis are different stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhi Please read the list and recognize them as the childish fantasies they really are.
C-W: “Clairvoyance happens.” No it doesn’t. Cognitive bias happens.
Some of the “great fruit” seem possible. The others are probably delusions. The meditating brain can pull a trick on us. When we suspect some “fruit” occurs it is a very rewarding idea. We’re finally getting somewhere on the spiritual path! That is not going to make us very critical. Our bias is obvious. Of course our realizations are real!
Confirmation bias does the rest. All our mistakes and all our foolishness is forgotten when we (once or twice) had a correct intuition or a lucky guess. Or maybe we were so sure we didn't even check our notion and counted it as a success.
All I ask is proof. No anecdotes, no vague suggestions; no faith; real proof.
All I ask is proof. No anecdotes, no vague suggestions; no faith; real proof.
Mr. Serenity is working on that. He wants to get tested at a lab that does scientific testing of paranormal phenomena.
I take it you haven't investigated clairvoyance much. It's really not a big deal. Is perfect musical pitch paranormal? Rare, maybe, but not paranormal. If we keep our minds closed, we'll never know what our true capacities are. There are a lot of fakes out there, but there are rare individuals who would blow your mind.
The site you linked says that a siddhi can be "any unusual faculty or capability".
I’m having coffee. Could you –or anyone else – please describe my cup? Just tell me what the main color is and describe these little pictures it has. If you see it you’ll know what I mean. :rolleyes:
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personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
Its not actually possible to measure gravity directly, there' only 'anecdotal' evidence that it exsists because we can see its effects on objects. Whats the threshold for the amount of anecdotal evidence it requires before a phenomena is convincing? If you actually take the time to read and investigate the anecdotal evidence for things like past lives, near-death experience, clairvoyance and such there's a large amount of evidence about these things even though they can't be directly measured. It seems to me believing all phenomena are physical is a cognitive bias too.
This is silly, zenff. I didn't say I, or anyone else here, was clairvoyant. Investigating clairvoyance doesn't mean reading about it on wiki. It means checking out clairvoyants. The authentic ones you can usually only find out about through word-of-mouth, they don't advertise. Or you go to another culture where it's more common, and visit some healers.
“Sheldrake is scientific – at least in many respects – but his theory is wrong. So the interesting question is why his books keep on selling.”
“And as for the paranormal, I spent the best part of 30 years trying to find evidence of paranormal phenomena and failed. My initial belief was wrong, I concluded, and so I changed my mind and became sceptical.”
personDon't believe everything you thinkThe liminal spaceVeteran
Yes Sheldrake has a theory of morphic resonance which is highly speculative and lacks any reasonable proof. But the links I provide are genuine scientific studies on clairvoyance. Just because one of his ideas is sketchy doesn't mean everything he does is wrong.
This is silly, zenff. I didn't say I, or anyone else here, was clairvoyant. Investigating clairvoyance doesn't mean reading about it on wiki. It means checking out clairvoyants. The authentic ones you can usually only find out about through word-of-mouth, they don't advertise. Or you go to another culture where it's more common, and visit some healers.
You said clairvoyance is no big deal. It is. It would be a miracle; or a revolution in science.
In the middle ages people were “open minded” in Europe. They burned witches and had plenty of anecdotal evidence to prove the guilt of thousands of innocent women.
The Ending of Mental Fermentations With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, the monk directs and inclines it to the knowledge of the ending of the mental fermentations. He discerns, as it has come to be, that 'This is stress... This is the origination of stress... This is the cessation of stress... This is the way leading to the cessation of stress... These are mental fermentations... This is the origination of fermentations... This is the cessation of fermentations... This is the way leading to the cessation of fermentations. (...) This, too, great king, is a fruit of the contemplative life, visible here and now, more excellent than the previous ones and more sublime. And as for another visible fruit of the contemplative life, higher and more sublime than this, there is none.
this is Nirvana, and it should be noted that as the "highest" (more excellent and sublime) of the phala it is far away from hindu's siddhis.
The Four Jhanas is also something that, when read, seems within reach and not "childish fantasies". Recollection of Past Lives is more personal and subjective, and in the end very difficult to prove to a third party.
This a response from a post on the criticism of Rupert's sense of being stared at experiment.
People really need to read more Korzybski and R.A. Wilson. The paragraph on "confirmation bias" is quite hilarious, as it reveals the author's unwillingness to acknowledge her own "confirmation bias".
"Without exception, the 1's, 2's and 3's were all traditional scientists with mainstream affiliations, whereas the 4's and 5's were all affiliated with fringe and pro-paranormal institutions."
All this actually tells you is that the people who've been trained to think in a certain way, think according to how they've been trained. The words "fringe" and "pro-paranormal" are far from value-free, although it seems obvious to me at least that paradigm-changing ideas come not from the mainstream, but from the fringes.
Another illuminating quote: "Fifth, there is an experimenter bias problem. Institute of Noetic Sciences researcher Marilyn Schlitz--a believer in psychic phenomena--collaborated with Wiseman (a skeptic of psi) in replicating Sheldrake's research and discovered that when they did the staring Schlitz found statistically significant results, whereas Wiseman found chance results. "
Right... and Wiseman, because he found only chance results, is ok: but Schlitz is a BAD SCIENTIST because her results supported her conclusion. Which is only what Wiseman did.
If scientists' results almost always reflect their beliefs, how are we to know who's right?
And following the pdf on the criticism of his animals that know when their owners are coming home my own disection.
"In his recent commentary, RS criticised our use of this criterion and suggested that we should have plotted our data in such a way as to examine the overall pattern of time that Jaytee remained at the porch. However, our experiments set out to test the claim that Jaytee clearly signalled PS’s journey home by going to her parents’ porch for no apparent reason. Testing this claim did not require plotting our data and looking for a pattern, but instead simply involved determining whether Jaytee’s ‘signal’ matched the time that PS started to return home. This was the only claim that had been made about Jaytee’s abilities at the time of our experiment."
So the debunkers claim that Sheldrake's experiment is bogus because the 'signal' of the animal going to the porch would only happen because its owner was coming home. Whereas Sheldrake charts the amount of time that the pet spent at the porch and compared the amounts of time spent there to when the owner was actually coming home and found that the pet spent a substantially longer period of time at the porch when the owner was coming home.
There seems to be alot of cognitive bias on the side of the skeptics in these cases.
In the middle ages people were “open minded” in Europe. They burned witches and had plenty of anecdotal evidence to prove the guilt of thousands of innocent women.
I covered this in the "Do you believe in spirits?" thread. West Europeans were open-minded before the Inquisition and Puritanism came along. They still are in Eastern Europe. In Poland, hands-on-healing has been studied extensively, and healers are registered health care professionals that assist in hospitals post-op. There's a hospital in Seattle that has a healer on-call. A scientist studied a Polish healer living in the US, and found that when he's doing his healing thing, his body has huge power surges that the researcher said were "impossible, and yet, it happens".
Science hasn't caught up with reality yet, though it's getting there. There was an OP here a few weeks ago about quantum physics saying that consciousness is a field, like the earth's electromagnetic field, that permeates the universe. If mind is a field, that could explain telepathy and/or mind-reading.
Comments
No disrespect; just fatigue.
So my point is either the mind originates from the brain or the brain receives the mind like an antenna, is a dichotomy, a product of duality and one should meditate on this to transcend the dualistic nature of the matter and move into a substantial insight...
With metta budding_flower...
There was a time when I believed siddis could not exist.
To be skeptic is the norm & OK.
and what do you mean by "achieving samadhi"? samadhi means meditation, maybe you are refering the jhānas?
We had a member last winter who was frustrated because he had been experiencing siddhis, and found them distracting, and turned to us for advice on what to do. Everyone told him to stay focussed on his meditation, and the siddhis will pass.
I don't know what all the skepticism is about. It's natural that, when one becomes adept at stilling the left brain, the intuitive capacities of the right brain will manifest. This much has been proven by neuroscience. Clairvoyance happens. I don't know what else is on the list of siddhis, but they're all probably related to the properties of the right brain.
It that means that it is true because it was the Buddha who said it, that’s a dogmatic way of thinking. Or it is blind faith.
Also I didn’t notice the Buddha was participating on the forum. I mean we only have indirect and unreliable information about his statements and opinions.
C-W:“It's natural that, when one becomes adept at stilling the left brain, the intuitive capacities of the right brain will manifest. This much has been proven by neuroscience.”
Our brain does a lot of work without involvement of conscious processes. There’s a lot of non-verbal communication going on between people. All of that may seem a bit mysterious but it isn’t supernatural. Siddhis are different stuff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhi
Please read the list and recognize them as the childish fantasies they really are.
C-W: “Clairvoyance happens.”
No it doesn’t.
Cognitive bias happens.
Some of the “great fruit” seem possible.
The others are probably delusions.
The meditating brain can pull a trick on us.
When we suspect some “fruit” occurs it is a very rewarding idea. We’re finally getting somewhere on the spiritual path! That is not going to make us very critical.
Our bias is obvious. Of course our realizations are real!
Confirmation bias does the rest.
All our mistakes and all our foolishness is forgotten when we (once or twice) had a correct intuition or a lucky guess.
Or maybe we were so sure we didn't even check our notion and counted it as a success.
All I ask is proof. No anecdotes, no vague suggestions; no faith; real proof.
I take it you haven't investigated clairvoyance much. It's really not a big deal. Is perfect musical pitch paranormal? Rare, maybe, but not paranormal. If we keep our minds closed, we'll never know what our true capacities are. There are a lot of fakes out there, but there are rare individuals who would blow your mind.
The site you linked says that a siddhi can be "any unusual faculty or capability".
I just did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clairvoyance
I’m having coffee. Could you –or anyone else – please describe my cup?
Just tell me what the main color is and describe these little pictures it has.
If you see it you’ll know what I mean.
:rolleyes:
-The sense of being stared at.
Synopsis http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/staring/sofbstat_abs.html
Full article http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/staring/sofbstat.html
-Animals who know their dogs are coming home.
Synopsis http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/animals/dog_video_abs.html
Full article http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/animals/dog_video.html
-Telephone telepathy (thinking of someone just before they call)
Full article http://www.sheldrake.org/Articles&Papers/papers/telepathy/Nolan.html
Here's a long video presentation of his findings he gives at google.
Investigating clairvoyance doesn't mean reading about it on wiki. It means checking out clairvoyants. The authentic ones you can usually only find out about through word-of-mouth, they don't advertise. Or you go to another culture where it's more common, and visit some healers.
just for the fun of it, the cup has orange in it.
No, guess again.
Here’s a comment from Sue Blackmore on Rupert Sheldrake.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/04/morphic-paranormal-science-sheldrake
“Sheldrake is scientific – at least in many respects – but his theory is wrong. So the interesting question is why his books keep on selling.”
“And as for the paranormal, I spent the best part of 30 years trying to find evidence of paranormal phenomena and failed. My initial belief was wrong, I concluded, and so I changed my mind and became sceptical.”
it is blue!
what's the point of singling out clairvoyance?
It is.
It would be a miracle; or a revolution in science.
In the middle ages people were “open minded” in Europe.
They burned witches and had plenty of anecdotal evidence to prove the guilt of thousands of innocent women.
There's no point in singling out clairvoyance. We can talk about any "phala".
what about the last one? this is Nirvana, and it should be noted that as the "highest" (more excellent and sublime) of the phala it is far away from hindu's siddhis.
The Four Jhanas is also something that, when read, seems within reach and not "childish fantasies".
Recollection of Past Lives is more personal and subjective, and in the end very difficult to prove to a third party.
Yes, we'd better focus on the “Ending of Mental Fermentations”.
This a response from a post on the criticism of Rupert's sense of being stared at experiment.
People really need to read more Korzybski and R.A. Wilson. The paragraph on "confirmation bias" is quite hilarious, as it reveals the author's unwillingness to acknowledge her own "confirmation bias".
"Without exception, the 1's, 2's and 3's were all traditional scientists with mainstream affiliations, whereas the 4's and 5's were all affiliated with fringe and pro-paranormal institutions."
All this actually tells you is that the people who've been trained to think in a certain way, think according to how they've been trained. The words "fringe" and "pro-paranormal" are far from value-free, although it seems obvious to me at least that paradigm-changing ideas come not from the mainstream, but from the fringes.
Another illuminating quote:
"Fifth, there is an experimenter bias problem. Institute of Noetic Sciences researcher Marilyn Schlitz--a believer in psychic phenomena--collaborated with Wiseman (a skeptic of psi) in replicating Sheldrake's research and discovered that when they did the staring Schlitz found statistically significant results, whereas Wiseman found chance results. "
Right... and Wiseman, because he found only chance results, is ok: but Schlitz is a BAD SCIENTIST because her results supported her conclusion. Which is only what Wiseman did.
If scientists' results almost always reflect their beliefs, how are we to know who's right?
And following the pdf on the criticism of his animals that know when their owners are coming home my own disection.
"In his recent commentary, RS criticised our use of this criterion and suggested
that we should have plotted our data in such a way as to examine the overall
pattern of time that Jaytee remained at the porch. However, our experiments set
out to test the claim that Jaytee clearly signalled PS’s journey home by going to
her parents’ porch for no apparent reason. Testing this claim did not require
plotting our data and looking for a pattern, but instead simply involved
determining whether Jaytee’s ‘signal’ matched the time that PS started to return
home. This was the only claim that had been made about Jaytee’s abilities at
the time of our experiment."
So the debunkers claim that Sheldrake's experiment is bogus because the 'signal' of the animal going to the porch would only happen because its owner was coming home. Whereas Sheldrake charts the amount of time that the pet spent at the porch and compared the amounts of time spent there to when the owner was actually coming home and found that the pet spent a substantially longer period of time at the porch when the owner was coming home.
There seems to be alot of cognitive bias on the side of the skeptics in these cases.
:"There seems to be alot of cognitive bias on the side of the skeptics in these cases."
You’re probably right.
We have to be skeptical about the skeptics too…
Science hasn't caught up with reality yet, though it's getting there. There was an OP here a few weeks ago about quantum physics saying that consciousness is a field, like the earth's electromagnetic field, that permeates the universe. If mind is a field, that could explain telepathy and/or mind-reading. You guys are a riot! lol I say orange is close enough to pink. ha! :rolleyes:
If I can produce a picture of a pink cup with little roses, what does it prove?