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Special powers in Buddhism
LostLight
Veteran
Awhile back I had a friend who had an extraordinary ability. He was able to read your past just by being with you. This kid could tell me anything that happened to me in the past, all of which were things I spoke of to no one. It both astounded and scared me (I like some sort of privacy haha).
I'm curious to see the take everyone on the forum has on impossible abilities like this. Is it genetic, is it the brain that enables such abilities, or is it something else?
I'm curious to see the take everyone on the forum has on impossible abilities like this. Is it genetic, is it the brain that enables such abilities, or is it something else?
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It's a practise though, I still sometimes get angry, but this is the kind of special powers I like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal
There's lots of money that is available to win by people with special powers, and this money could be put to some compassionate uses.
And funnily enough, all those prizes remain unclaimed.
The six clear perceptions (Skt. ṣaḍabhijñā; Tib. ngönshé druk; Wyl. mngon shes drug) or the six 'superknowledges', which are included among the twenty-one sets of immaculate qualities, are:
The first five clear perceptions can be achieved through any of the four dhyanas (Tib. samten shyi), but in the case of bodhisattvas they are achieved through the utterly pure fourth dhyana, and the fact that they are combined with non-conceptual wisdom makes them superior to the clear perceptions of practitioners who have not transcended the world and shravakas and pratyekabuddhas.
Here's a page from the Berzin archives as well:http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Six_clear_perceptions
http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/sutra/level2_lamrim/advanced_scope/concentration/5_eyes_6_types_advanced_awareness.html
"He recollects his manifold past lives,[3] i.e., one birth, two births, three births, four, five, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand, one hundred thousand, many aeons of cosmic contraction, many aeons of cosmic expansion, many aeons of cosmic contraction & expansion, [recollecting], 'There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.' Thus he remembers his manifold past lives in their modes & details.
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn51/sn51.020.than.html
There is description how to develop this in the Visuddhi Magga as well.
Cheers
Victor
In Asia, its quite common for a very small strata of society to keep 'toddler ghosts' or ku man tung in Thai speak.
I think its a despicable practice, but the Thai Buddhist tradition or rather certain monks actually do it. ( very common in Thailand)
A lot of mediums and fortune tellers also do this, thats why they can tell certain things about you, DONT be fooled, its not special powers, just mischief!
Some of them can be difficult to control and end up 'consuming' the owner. Its also bad karma.
Hope this helps.
slainte
I can pick up on people's thoughts sometimes. And if I'm doing massage, my hands sometimes go straight to the place of an old injury or surgery the client had, even though the client hadn't mentioned anything of that nature. When we still our minds, we can "hear" all kinds of things that usually get drowned out by our own mental chatter. That's funny!
What's even more amazing is finding out what a fantastic forest of self delusion, unconscious impulses, and how our conscious mind is fooled by our own desires. This is an inward adventure of discovery that never ends when you practice Buddhism.
Relax. Nobody has or will have the power to read your mind, your past or future. But, people can have the power to make you believe they can do that. Sometimes they're honestly convinced they can do it. Sometimes they just enjoy messing with people. Sometimes they do it for a living.
It's so funny--since we are conventional beings, we feel like the ultimate stuff is all woo, when (according to many teachings) in reality, the ultimate stuff is the natural state of things. We wavelets always think we are the ocean
Basically this thought was of a man reaching orgasm and it was a visual thought, like a picture, and then one of the guys I was with disappeared for half an hour (said he was going to call his girlfriend) and when he came back it turned out he'd been watching porn.
I had his thought of orgasm in my head. It was totally strange. It was only that one time, but I do have a bit of a gift for "reading people". I get it wrong sometimes, but I'm generally a pretty good judge of character and quite intuitive when it comes to people. I think that and my experience with someone else's thought are somehow related.
It sounds totally woo woo and I don't usually go in for that stuff, and I still don't believe a person can just read another person's mind on demand or something, but I do think it's possible to "see" another person's thoughts. Whether you can interpret them correctly is another thing altogether. When it happened to me I had no idea what was going on until afterwards.
Well, no. Nor is it anything that anyone has ever been able to demonstrate in a controlled setting ever since researchers actually got smart and brought in magicians to expose and weed out the tricksters like Uri Geller.
But it's still fascinating. For instance, last night I dreamed our car broke down somewhere and I was walking around in a strange neighborhood, looking for help. Now, nothing happened to my car today. But if something had happened to my car, or to my wife's car, or anything involving a car, I would have seized on my dream as meaning something. So how do prove teh occasional match is more than coincidence?
it's always possible I project some sort of "antipsychic" field so my world will never include such things. Since there is no way for me to tell the difference between that and a world that actually works according to the accepted laws of physics, I have to accept the most logical and compelling option for my own beliefs. But, your milage may vary.
Actually, my own immediate family has a history of visions and premonitions they ascribe to their religious beliefs. Belief in psychic powers and events is as widespread as the belief in a particular afterlife, and as unassailable.
Obviously there's a happy medium (ahem) in there somewhere - psychic powers would hopefully be at least somewhat demonstrable, somewhere, somehow; but I wouldn't expect them to be something you could just take to the bank and start selling, any more than any other skill.
Skill or ability in anything isn't a guarantee of success, at least not if success is determined by perfectly reproducing that skill anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances, without fail.
There have been people, though, who have signed contracts a mile long to be used as participants in psychic experiments--U.S. soldiers. Probably soldiers of other countries, as well, though perhaps they lacked the benefit of a contract...
I wonder about the 100th Monkey experiment and the Critical Mass described by James Redfield and other stuff, etc.. I don't believe, per se, but I sure do wonder.
He didn't know I knew, at least, not until afterwards. I had no idea what I was "seeing" or what it meant until we found out afterwards that he had been watching porn and suddenly it made sense.
He came back in the room and we were chatting, a group of us, and we were really talking, you know? Really personal stuff, and he came out with it and I was like, ooohhhh.
The only way it influenced me was that it made me feel confused.
The thought itself was a visual, no words or feelings connected to it, like someone had flashed a photograph in my mind. Well, a bit more like a snippet of a movie. I'm sure you can guess what genre
I guess it might be worth suggesting that "special" is in the eye of the beholder; for example, a family which is very musical might be described by another family as having a "special" ability with music.
So, what is a special power? Do we kind of prejudice ourselves to dividing things into two categories if we talk about special powers (no offense to the OP)?
If we call it "supernatural," how can that be accurate, either, since everything that happens in life is natural? There's really no such thing as supernatural.
It would be interesting to see if there are additional words which could describe the category of powers and abilities we're discussing, which would somehow be less subjective (i.e. one person's "special" is another person's "normal").
Back to some existing terminology, though, the aforementioned "superknowledge" - - Donald Lopez, Jr., in The Madman's Middle Way: Reflections on Reality of the Tibetan Monk Gendun Chopel refers to a bodhisattva's varying "level of superknowledge or realization" (p. 84).
The thought of "power" vs. "special power" or "natural" vs. "supernatural" being instead different levels of realization makes a lot of sense to me.
I guess all there is to say is the world is weird and I'm not awakened enough to make sense of it all.
I really hope they aren't real. They call me emotional vampire and that I commit langenbrenners which are like a bermuda triangle of stench or something that I inflict on them. They also call me sexual deviant. Well when I see a girl jogging I look at her butt, but I don't even have sex so it is so hurtful. I really hope these voices are not real? My mom said to tell them that they are crumb buns.
Genuine siddha seem to arrive according to our capacity to make useful service of them.
Stealing siddha through magical induction, does not require the wisdom component.
So for example the ability to gauge a persons interior life increases in depth as we increase in the desire to benefit others. The same skills are used by intelligence services to manipulate people through NLP or similar technical skills.
The ability to generate an aura of well being, that manifests in others is a natural arising. It is also cultivated by sales people, entertainers, politicians and other snake charmers.
The balance of ethical behaviour is expressed by spiderman.
'With great power, comes great responsibility'
It must be tough. You have my respect.
When Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche was still in the robe I stayed in his monastery.
Rumours were rife about his special powers. He was for example said to float down the corridors late at night two feet above the ground in lotus posture.
I asked him about this.
He looked me in the eye for about ten looong seconds and said " dont be silly, go and do your ngondro practice. "