SFJane

For those interested in more about anti-magic ability, check out these images. Thank you for sharing yourself philbrowser. Thanks for your hug and kind words as well. I return your hug with one of my own.

You know, when I was in second grade I got picked on a lot. This one kid, Dennis, was held back a year and consequently he towered over the other second graders. He took a special disliking to me and threatened to push me around on the playground. I told him he couldn't harm me because I had guardian angels who watched over me. He laughed at me and said “Oh yea?” in your stereotypical schoolyard bully belligerence and promptly pushed me to the ground. “Where is your guardian angel now?” He taunted, laughing at me. “Oh what, you gonna cry?” I was told I had a guardian angel by my mother. It turned out there was no such thing. My AWOL guardian angel didn't seem inclined to protect me from other bullying or child abuse at home. My guardian angel was pretty useless actually and I learned self defense and made the bullying stop on my own. In this thread several of you have condescended to me, hinting that if I trained real methods I'd get real powers. Insinuating that you folks have learned real methods and obtained real powers with them. More than one of you oppose my ontological and scientific experiences and experiments with your conviction that I must simply be doing it wrong. Unfortunately not a one of you who has opposed my ideas has seen fit to provide one shred of proof of your proper training methods or any such powers. Hinting that either you don't need to 'prove' anything, or that my Galileo-like skepticism would be a hostile environment to prove things in or you have gone on to make other equally weak excuses. Not one video of a TTB with powers. Not even any anecdotes. That reminds me so much of so many Christians who post on the net or that I've met in person. “Trust me,” they say, “If you really opened your heart to Him you would not doubt His existence or His love for us.” “Someday, if you are lucky and humble, you'll get it.” Others may state. None of them ever proved Jesus either. They have no proof. They just 'know'. Watch how easy it is for me to turn the tables and do the same thing back to you: I call bollux on the lot of you who have opposed me. I think you need to familiarize yourself with terms such as 'manic', 'delusional' and 'psychotic.' I'd love to be a fly on the wall and watch you try to assure a psychiatrist that you have powers and are not mentally ill. Really, it's that easy to render my judgment on you and say that you're psychotic and delusional. That you claim abilities you can't prove. You claim knowledge of the occult that you can not prove. That you hold unrealistic beliefs about reality and yourself that you can not prove to anyone but yourself or your fellow pre-biased group thinkers. Claims, claims and more unproven, untested claims. And more condescension for someone like me who levies critical thinking and skepticism. You can mock James Randi and other skeptics all you want but you'd be whistling a whole other tune if you were forced to undergo injections of antipsychotics unless you could prove your powers. The thing of it is this. I am an easy sell. I am. All you have to do is prove one ability that you have that is the result of cultivation. I am not going to be deceived easily nor will I succumb to confirmation bias. If you have a genuine power I will know it if you demo it. It really is not that difficult to change my thinking. Just prove it. Put your money where you mouth is and show me what you have got. Otherwise, I am just as comfortable defaulting to my assumption that some of you are really quite delusional as you are comfortable assuming I don't know what I am doing or that I don't 'get it' or am listening but not hearing and all that other bs that has been thrown at me to otherwise intimate that I am just not as awesome and developed as you highly cultivated people.

Ok, you have no idea what you are talking about and enjoy wasting time on the internet. Got it. You rambled and babbled about this thing and that and didn't make a whole lot of sense. Nor did you get anywhere near a point worth talking about. If English is a second language for you and you are not comfortable articulating in it, I totally apologize. Otherwise, I simply ask that you try to come across as lucid and make some sense. Your first post in reply to this thread made no sense to me.

The onus is on you to prove your claims Garry. You have the money to fly to Hong Kong and China and train with who knows who, you have the money to fly to SF and come play with me and find out for yourself. Or you can you pay my way and I'll come to you. You don't have any 'powers' and even if you did, my anti-magic belief will strip your powers away before you get anywhere near me. With your resort to ALLCAPS and profanity, the true depths of your cultivation are clear to me. You have nothing I want and I know my presence of mind is greater than yours. I am dealing with reality. You deal in BS. You have shown your weakness attempting to come across as strong. As far as I am concerned, I'd love nothing more than to put a video of you on youtube failing to do anything meaningful with your chi and just embarrassing yourself. I am proud to be a Kumar student and happy to demo what I know of his stuff. Feel free to PM me and we will take it from there.

Garry, your credentials are interesting but prove nothing. I once bullied a twenty year veteran of tai chi chuan. He was my first teacher. I had zero years of tai chi under my belt, he had two decades. I learned how to do fa jin from BKF and was easily able to boss around my teacher. It was like night and day, the difference that real training and real instruction made in my beginner kung fu at the time. I didn't train with him much after that because it was pretty obvious, once I had seen and felt mastery, that Bruce was the real deal and my teacher was not. As far as I am concerned when it comes to demos of chi or skill, you had better be willing to put your money where your mouth is. That is how I evaluate who is more skilled than whom. Simple touch is all I need to know if you have the abilities you think you do. I take exception to your statement that we all have mental illness. You are entering my area of knowledge with that sentiment. Mental illness as defined by the current experts on the mind consists of detailing a cluster of disabling symptoms and weighing them on a scale of deviance. Diagnosing of mental illness largely relies on patients subjective experiences with their symptoms. Take for example, depression. A certain amount of depression is normal. It's a normal condition that is the part of the human experience. It can happen to us all over the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job or a fortune or even the weather. So does that make everyone who ever experienced depression mentally ill? No. A criteria of mental illness in today's psychology is that the symptoms last for a long time and continue to trouble the sufferer to the point where the sufferer seeks relief from their illness or their symptoms begin to impair their life. If you are so depressed you can barely move week after week after week and there does not seem like there is an obvious reason for it, then you have a mental illness. Don't you dare give me that 'everyone is mentally ill' crap. I've lived with the real deal. I spent time in psychiatric hospitals, residential facilities and group homes. I've lived with the mentally ill and with the illness itself. I know it when I see it and I know how I feel now. Don't you dare try to invalidate me and claim I have mental illness without proof of disabling symptoms and my input on the matter. I reject your premise and I think you have no idea what you are talking about.

If you demonstrated any humility whatsoever and climbed down from your assumed position of superior knowledge of the occult, it might be interesting to take some of your arguments apart. There is no motivation for me to answer because you have a track record of abysmal straw man building in terms of assuming out of thin air what my position and experiences have been. You have done nothing but talk down to me in this thread as though it was an established fact rather than your personal opinion that I am your subordinate or lesser in this topic. You've blown your chance to come across as moderate and thoughtful. You have done your best to insure that I have zero respect for you. In light of your fallacious arguments and your baseless assumptions and your decided reluctance to flash your badge I can not take anything you say about the occult seriously.

What? What are you trying to say here? What are you trying to say here? With all due respect, name one such person, their accomplishment and how it places me in ignorance. What are you trying to say here? Are you suggesting there is someone more experienced with regards to 'powers' that I should be deferring to? You perhaps? Your statement only makes sense if we all agree what powers are or are not and how they are proven and tested. Otherwise, I am going to fall back on my lived experiences with the subject and use those events as my measuring stick.

I have to camp the UPS guy or gal this morning so I have some time to catch up on replies. What can I say to this goldisheavy? I don't think you have any personal, lived experiences of what you are talking about. All your posts reek of intellectual masturbation. You seem like a talker not a doer. I sense this is all theory to you. And you honestly and truly seem to think you have one-uped me and that you know more about this subject than I. Show me your mastery. Show me or indicate to me one shred of evidence that would back up the authority you think you own on this subject. One anecdote of power or healing or advancement. Tell me what your experiences are and how you tested yourself. You talk about coma and death. Have you ever been in a coma or at the edge of death? I've been there and back. All your sophomoric questions I wrestled with in my teens and early 20s. You have built up an incredible straw man and copiously assumed what my premises or experiences are without even doing me the courtesy of asking me if your premise or understanding is correct. Do you even read your own posts? You come across like a narcissist. You really do. I think that not only have you not answered any of those questions you assumed I didn't ask, but you haven't a fraction of the practice or experience I have had. You've shown your contempt from your very first post in this thread when you admitted you couldn't be bothered to read the entirety of my OP before segueing into your judgments and assumptions about my experiences. It's not just me you condescend to. You do it to some of the others as well. The possibility that you might be wrong and that others may have more or differing knowledge based on lived experiences seems alien to you. How trying it must be for you to slog your way through our pedestrian attempts to 'get it' when compared to your colossal achievements of magic and your deep understanding of the nature of reality.

Firstly, I don't appreciate you doing my thinking for me. It's exceedingly disrespectful and arrogant to boot. Secondly, this thread is about me. I posted about my experiences, experiments, their results and answered the question that I posted, “why I am against powers” Thirdly, I did use the scientific method on my own experiences. You just posted something you attributed to me that was completely wrong. That is the problem you encounter when you build straw men for people and try to set fire to them. I did not 'simply' become a convert like 'voila' an overnight transformation. The concept of confirmation bias is one the heaviest burdens I have ever known. To reexamine all my magical/psi/spiritual experiences under the lens of skepticism rather than just 'simply accepting' what I was taught and trained into thinking those experiences really mean. It took a long time to convert and it was anything but simple. Taoist meditation made a skeptic out of me. In learning my own mind I had to ransack through all the things I had learned that were supposedly true and either dump the existing bias or find some alternative way to evaluate what I was doing and experiencing that did not involve a default to my learned prejudices. I had to open my mind even further than it was already in an attempt to determine and judge the real from the false. I had to accept one devastating ego blow after another and dealt with how that new-found skepticism affected me. Ah, so you are another of those TTBers who believe that skepticism=negative energy=magic dampening field. Can't you see what that reveals about your own thinking? If your psi demo can be influenced by simply having a skeptic in the audience you don't have an ability or a power. You don't. You are bullshitting yourself. Granted there are difficulties in testing the ring example. How do you know it wasn't all in your mind? How have you gone about testing the validity of that experience? You are inclined to believe in 'evil' spells, magic, psi and the like. Is it any wonder then that is what you experienced? I think the real reason nobody took the check from Randi was that all those folks were incredibly skilled at self deception and did not want to look like fools when their awesome powers fail to work in a controlled experiment. I'll give an example,(you can chase down the details at the JREF forums) There was a woman who wanted to demo her telekinesis by making a key on a string move with her mind. The JREF assistant wanted to control for possible external factors and in order to keep the experiment honest, requested that a glass dome cover the demo. The woman never followed through with the experiment to claim her million dollars. I am guessing what happened is, she tried to move the key using some kind of barricade herself and realized her powers were nonexistent or so feeble as to not being able to pass through thin glass. I had something similar going on once myself. Sixteen years ago I had over my bed a mobile on a string. It was made entirely of metal and featured long thin metal wires with metal bearing on the ends. I noticed one day that when I was laying on my back and staring up at it that it seemed to rotate in one direction or the other. I tried to control the action by speeding it up with my mind. Sure enough it seemed that when I focused on it, it's turning speed increased. So, I went on to test further. I turned my eyes towards a pen or pencil on the nightstand several feet away and tried to make it come to me. It would not. So why did my power work on the mobile and not the pencil? I tried to figure it out. I wondered if the structure with it's metal rods, wires and bearings somehow augmented my power. I moved to another area of the room further away from the metal mobile over my bed and just watched it patiently. Sure enough, it would move on it's own. After watching it for the better part of an hour I could see that unattended, the mobile would twist and wind and change directions, first slowly, then quicker, then it would slow again, then stop all by itself. Until then I had never bothered to stare at the thing with full attention for so long. Besides, if I was doing TK when the mobile moved, why wouldn't the pencil also move? Why was my TK so limited and so weak? Occam's Razor provides the answer. Gravity and small air currents are all the explanation you need for why the mobile moved the way that it did. My TK power level did not enter the equation. You have no idea what I decided. You just theorized and made up my response out of thin air. More of that whole doing my thinking for me bit. Stating my position before I have done so myself is straw man at it's finest. How should a person interpret that experience? When it happened to me at school, I made a big deal about it. There is nothing really to make a big deal about. Skepticism would require that I at least entertain the notion that I was lucky. That it was simply chance. Looked at over the short and long term, I only 'knew, with total certainty' who was going to get called down one time at school. One incident out of thousands is not a statistically meaningful enough event to get worked up about. It does not prove anything at all. When it happened to me, I believed it was because I was psychic. But as I've gotten older I have also considered and accepted the possibility that it was random chance. This is more of your fallacious thinking at work Tyler. This is the straw man argument again. You have invented a position for me “how did you decide..also was not real after the fact?” I decided no such thing. The fact of which instantaneously reveals your straw man at work and shows that your conclusions are also flawed. That OBE experience was the first of many. They were all very real to me when they happened. Of all the alleged magic and siddhi and other experiences I've had the OBEs remain some of the most vivid and powerful. OBEs are a enormous subject that people have religious level convictions about. It can easily be a topic unto itself. Here is some interesting facts about OBEs: People sometimes have OBE's when they think they are going to die. I read a story about how a soldier dropped a grenade without it's pin and had a spontaneous OBE. The grenade was for training and contained no explosives. But in the mind of the soldier, he was about to be a dead man and that mental shock was enough to trigger an OBE. I have a similar story. One that I wrote about in my MS. During a long depression I took a huge overdose and experienced certain aspects of NDEs and OBEs. My experience was game changing. I totally turned my life around in the year that followed. Another interesting tidbit about NDE/OBE is that fighter pilots sometimes have them when they do heavy G maneuvers. Scientists did a study where they put pilots in a centrifuge and spun them. It turned out this was a reliable way to cause an NDE. You can have an NDE from drug OD, deliberate projection practice, pulling high Gs or dropping a dud grenade. Scientists have made a variety of electromagnetic devices that stimulate various areas of the brain. In some studies, scientists were able to reliably cause experiences similar to NDE to occur to experimental subjects. When I had my OBEs I made a big deal out of them. I thought it was more proof of my success at this kind of training. It built up my ego somewhat. I thought I was cool because these things happened to me. But the real question is what does it mean? What does it mean to have a NDE? Some skeptics would say that OBE are simply the brain firing in odd ways. Others would say that the odd firing of the brain is just what we can see of the process and not explanatory of anything. I have to say that I was both impressed and appalled that you could reproduce OBEs by swinging people around in a 'fuge. It's scientifically pragmatic but I could not help but feel that it cheapened the experience and whatever crisis it was that led to the experience. That was science colliding with mystery. When I analyzed my feelings I realized that I was still hung up on certain terms like spiritual or divine and that I resented science for figuring out or at least replicating such a 'spiritual experience'. It made me feel like my OBE wasn't all that special or meaningful. And then I realized that it was I who colored the experience as meaningful because I had been trained to through expectation and cultural bias. Vortex's primary point here is this (paraphrasing) 'Some psychic stuff is hard to explain away in a controlled study but does not necessarily mean it was not legit.' The knowing of something in advance that turns out to be true is not something that can be replicated on demand. Here are some other examples. I mentioned knowing what song was coming on the radio before it started. It could be a psychic perception. It could also be chance. Chance weighs even more heavily because radio stations often use a playlist. If you listen to your favorite radio station a lot you might subconsciously store the playlist. If the station has 20 different tracks they use during day time programming then you have a 1-20 (5%) chance at guessing accurately what the next song is going to be. A better test would be to randomly stop at stations you don't frequent playing music you don't normally listen to and then try to sense, intuit or know what the next track is going to be. I'd be willing to bet you would fail more often. What a truly open minded person does is weigh both possibilities. Instead of it being a 100% absolute certainty that my perception was a psychic one, I allow for the possibility that I was simply lucky. That's just humility not to mention logic and common sense. I don't practice mentally moving cars or controlling weather anymore nor do I have a babble of voices and noise in my head either. Despite having ceased practicing the occult and psi and having attained a certain amount of internal stillness I still have knowing on occasion. That is, sometimes I know exactly, even word for word, what someone is about to say, I know what song is going to be on the radio, I know who is calling when the phone rings the very instant it rings. Each one of those things has a plausible scientific explanation. I already covered knowing what song is coming next on the radio. Knowing what someone is going to say does not have to be a psychic perception. I might simply be a natural at cold reading. My understanding of language and psychology and my sense of body language might be all I need to take a good guess at what someone is going to say. The point is, knowing what someone is going to say before they say it could just be a subconscious guess. It could be simply chance. It might be psi. But I would not say with 100% conviction that my perception was one of those three solutions. I might be wrong. Knowing your conclusions may be flawed and choosing uncertainty over the bliss of total certainty is a sign of an open and questing mind in my book. Knowing who is calling before looking at the caller ID or picking the phone up could also be explained away using similar criteria. How many people call this number on a regular basis? At this time of day? On this day of the week? Add that number to the number of calls from telemarketers or survey takers and divide by the number of total calls and you could arrive a certain percent chance of a lucky guess. The subjective experience is that I sensed, I knew, who was on the other end of the phone line with certainty and I was right. Subjective validation and confirmation bias leads one to think that it must have been psychic. But science and statistics can show that chance is just a strong a possibility. Only an arrogant fool would conclude that it had to be psychic, end of story. That shows a religious-like naivete about the nature of statistics and chance as a well as a preference to solving the situation with one's own biases. So Tyler, contrary to your baseless assumption that I must have done some kind of skeptic gymnastics and invalidated my own experiences, I have simply opened myself up to other, less larger than life explanations. I also learned that there is nothing to make a big deal about. Do you make a big deal about your other sensory perceptions? Do you ponder the meaning of random smells or sounds that you detect? Your brain takes note of it and moves on and does not get hung up on what you smelled or heard. Likewise, when I get a chance 'hit' and I know who is calling or what someone is going to say and it turns out I am right, I just process the datum and move on. I don't make a big deal about it. I don't try to debunk myself or invalidate my sensory experience. I accept the perception for the data that it gave me. I file it away and give it no further thought. I've learned to incorporate acceptance of such random seeming knowledge and it's neither a good thing or a bad thing. It's not something to be suppressed or ignored nor to get excited about. These kinds of events as vortex pointed out, are very hard to reproduce in a lab on demand. Does it mean I am psychic? Only possibly. If so, it's not very impressive since I can't control it. Humility requires that I entertain the possibility that I am wrong and that I was simply lucky. Neither explanation makes waves in my mind or heart. It's just not a big deal anymore. That is the place I think most people should aspire to. It's a more balanced way of looking at the entire picture instead of just accepting everything you've been told about what these events really mean and stampeding over the cliff of selective thinking into the realm of unquestioning certainty. Look at all the threads on TBB about powers. Kunlun and powers. Kundulini and powers. Chi kung and powers. Cultivation method X and powers. Threads about psi, remote healing, telepathy, and on and on make for some some of the most involved and replied to topics on this board. Cultivation siddhi are a big deal to you folks or the topic would not get revisited again and again and produce so much passionate discussion. All I did with this thread is try to offer some reasons as to why I feel that focusing on seeming cultivation induced powers is the not the road to liberation. I tried to inject some level of candidness here and set a standard for lack of self deceit. What I've found in some of the responses here is that a lot of you are still where I was ten years ago when I thought that siddhi were a big deal. Taoist meditation forced me to evaluate everything I thought was real and everything I assumed was true. The practice of meditation led me to confront myself and my core thoughts about life and how reality works. In that process I unraveled my own thought processes and biases and was able to overcome them. It seems like some of you haven't even started such an inquiry because you don't see the need. You are so sure you have it all figured out and that you are right. You weigh some criteria and evidence as being more valid and toss out dissenting opinions and other, equally plausible possibilities in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. That is what a lot of religious people do. For some folks, proof of divinity is not required and uncritical belief is considered a virtue and a sign of one's purity of devotion. At the end of the day, what I learned is that when something like spontaneous knowing happens, say to myself “So what?” And then move on and not dwell on it or try to impart meaning into it. The data comes, I process it and let it go as I would any other sensory data.

You do understand that I no longer practice such things yes? And that I gave the answer at the beginning. I was scared and I wanted to protect myself and I wanted revenge. What more reason do you need than passion? Passion drove me to train that hard that long in those things. And I often had plenty of forced seclusion or isolation during my childhood and teens with nothing better to do than to try to teleport myself out of a lockdown, walk through it's walls or blast down it's doors with sheer mental power. I believed I had a need for that power and I was certainly open-minded enough to try. This might have something to do with it. Guru's who can't keep their dick in their dhoti. More and more and more... Unfair? These guys do it to themselves. Their siddhi goes to their little head and we see how enlightened they really are.

The second thing I wanted to cover was this. I went out on a limb here, talking about my personal practice and the things I've tried to do in the past. I tried to be as honest as I could. I was willing to test myself, exhaustively so, in order to see if anything in my toolkit could take the million dollar challenge. Then I came forward and admitted in a public forum that I had nothing that could withstand the scrutiny of science. To do that required that I be brutally honest with myself and be fully engaged with reality testing. If you can't figure out what is real psi and what is stage magic or confirmation bias or Darrin Brown style rapport and suggestion then how the heck are you going to find the beginning and end of your own consciousness? How are going to find the mindstream? How are you going to root out your ego and obtain a core of realistic honesty with yourself and your inner world if you can't tell the difference between a power and a trick? Siddhi are treated as spiritual currency. Siddhis are a carrot to entice the student. 'Study my system and you'll get powers like me' is the promise of some teachers. At the end of the day, contentedness and inner equilibrium are not all the exciting nor larger than life. To sex up something like meditation you have to appeal to the little child in everyone that wants magic and psi to be real. You target people who don't even need to be convinced because they already believe in an almost religious way that these abilities are real. Folks like that are asking to be taken for a ride. Look at what the demonstration of siddhi has led to some of those Indian masters. What is it with the gurus from India that they need to have sex with white women, children and men? When you believe in someone that much you are asking to be exploited by someone without scruples. To avoid exploitation and being caught up in the quest for powers you have to be able to discern reality. You have to be able to reality check what you are seeing or what you think you can do. One of the best ways I know to do that is cultivate extreme honesty to the point of uncomfortableness. When you can be so honest with yourself that you encroach your own comfort zone then you are going somewhere. You are going to need that honesty and ability to determine the real from the false if you seriously intend on working with the most subtle levels of consciousness. Otherwise your own mind will take you on a ride and tell you or show you exactly what you expect or want to see. The mind is that powerful that you can enchant yourself against looking too closely at phenomena and avoid asking unconformable questions or engaging in a fierce query. Then you will go nowhere for a long time until you can break that chain of self deception.

When I get a chance I'd like to make some more replies but for now I'd like to address two things. The first: What would I do if had the real deal telekinesis? I would hide it at first and prove it to myself. If I could move a piece of paper it stands to reason with more practice I could move several pieces. I'd practice at different ranges with different barricades. I would make TK training stations and do circuits. When I was absolutely sure I could move reasonably impressive objects such as a cinder-block I would then make a video of me moving a cinder-block from ten feet away with my mind. Then I would contact the press. As That Guy stated, I would have my platform to get Randi's attention pretty quick at that point. Then for my trick, I would have James Randi hold the check or facsimile of in his open hand at ten feet away and then I would take the check right out of his hand as many times as people wanted to see it. Promptly after that I would go before the scientific community having just won Randi's challenge and proudly demonstrate the results of so much concentration practice. Then I would disappear into the bush in Australia after a spirit in a dream told me that the human race was not ready for such knowledge. Ha! Psyche! Just kidding. I would be on hand to demo before the world stage that what so many have imagined and longed for was finally true. I would encourage others to learn how to do it and make my training formula available (for a good price) to those that wanted in on it. I would sell my hard won skill and knowledge and help people train for a future of TKs. And I don't mind telling you all that I would gloat a little in front of Mr Randi and every other skeptic with a 'I told you so' winning smile on my face. If there was even one person with a real power that they could prove, I see no reason why they should not also do as I would do and take that million dollar check right out of his hand with their mind. But alas, it has yet to happen and I highly doubt that it will. But I do hope that it happens someday because I have just enough child left in me to think that that would be wonderful. While I do still hope that someone can pull it off, I am not going to go all googly eyed over TK tricks that can only be done under 'perfect' conditions set up by the TKer. You either have it or you don't. You can do it or you can't. None of this 'your negative chi is turning off my powers' crap.

Compared to religion and superstition, science is in it's infancy. It's very easy to fall back on the weakness of science and say, well, too bad science, you just can't figure it out because you fail. Understand the progress we've made. It used to be we only theorized about extra solar planets. Now we can detect them. Sickness used to be spirits, curses and bad fumes. Now we know about bacteria, viruses and parasites. Have you seen some of the latest brain studies and research about the effects of meditation on the brain? Harvard researchers have shown that meditation causes growth in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that rules over emotional and impulses. If you follow my instructions you will begin to reproduce some of the training I put myself through that led to deja vu, precog, and then if you have close friends that believe in supernormal powers you can tell them in total honesty and sincerity that you have begun meditating on your upper dantien and that it is making you psychic. Depending on your friends they may not question it and then think you are special or skilled and you'll start getting respect and cred for being a psi even though you can't prove it in a moment's notice or on demand. But it does give you this flighty heart palpating rush that makes you think you are more mentally developed than others. And that you've stumbled on The Secret and Quantum Powers and all that stuff. It can go to your head until you've convinced yourself that you are the real deal. As long as you don't go anywhere near skeptics or James Randi your claims may go untested and believed in by you and your friends for years. If that is what you want, follow my instructions to the letter. I read the thread you linked me and I am going to with some of the other posters on the Darrin Brown thing. Also, I can't say with any certainty whether the researchers were in on it or not. I do feel like my intelligence was insulted by having the camera switch from him tearing the newspaper indoors to igniting it outdoors. If they have the missing between footage they need to post it. I am willing to admit that my analysis is limited by not personally interviewing all parties, not having access to all film and only seeing what the camera allows us to see. I feel let down that the researches were intellectually or scientifically dishonest with some or all parts of the demos. Think about it. Can chi stop a bullet? Then he takes an airsoft round in the hand at close range to the barrel? This proves his nei gung and chi is proof against, say, a .45 ACP round from ten feet? Bad, bad science, bad conclusions, poor experimental design. A pellet gun is not the same as a long barreled rifle chambered with a 7.62mm. Why aren't people at least annoyed at having been insulted by those researchers with their flimsy protocols and bad camera work? Thanks for your thoughtful post Vortex.

I don't recognize you as an authority on magic. I don't recognize you as even a talented beginner. I really don't know who you think you are but I don't think you have demonstrable proof of your authority or any credibility to come into my confessional thread to judge my understanding and progress within the 'field' of magic sir. Your level of condescension is really quite something for someone with no proof of mastery or ability of your own. You seem delusional and grandiose to me.

I agree with this sentiment. I am not trying to indict the guy as being criminal but a skilled showman who is demoing one thing and saying it's caused by something else. This. Iyoiyo, I agree wholeheartedly.

You are welcome fizix. I'd like to think that I count among those for whom that false path led to a true path. Thanks for commenting. I did run into more trouble that I posted here. But I suppose it could have been far worse. I am not sure what you mean by true power. For? I guess. I think it's neat. I think this is what happens when people with self professed powers keep in their company only those that are inclined to believe in them in the first place. Please post it by all means. I am not sure how Bruce's doctors have to say about it. In this country you can choose to make health decisions AMA. Re: Kan from Kunlun. Am I to understand that he became paralyzed by Hold the Ball and fixed it or that he fixed ongoing paralysis by Holding the Ball? Yes. Agreed. And of course!

I have a few minutes to post. I should be in the GGPark right now working out but I got a very late start this morning. I'll try to get to MD, 3bob and everyone else but for now, this. I assume that you did not mean for this to come across as insulting. By your account the Water Method of Taoist meditation is not a real method and the ten thousand hours I put into it in the late 90s was not good training. According to your definition of siddhi, I demonstrated more siddhi between the ages of 13 and 19 than most of you will ever witness in your lifetime. Perhaps you missed the part where I stated that I had actual followers. People who wanted to train in the occult and in chi in order to get my 'powers'. Then I rejected the entire lot of them and just worked on the water method. After several years I managed to cure myself of the most severe form of bipolar disorder there is in addition to schizophrenia andpost traumatic stress disorder. None of those illnesses ever returned. Ever. I have been told to my face by supposed 'scientists', medical doctors, psychologists and psychiatrist that there was no cure for those conditions and I would never get over it. Thanks to my long hard and good training with real methods I overcome those genetic and behavioral conditions. My sister and mother both have bipolar as well. My mom chose the rosary and the crucifix and it never cured her. My sister tried lithium and lives as a disabled adult. Neither of those women are happy and content in their life. I beat the odds. I beat the genetics. I beat the prognosis. All thanks to practicing Bruce's material. According to your definitions, the ability to supernormal heal is also a siddhi. Yet I reject any notion that I have siddhi now or before on one simple ground. I can not prove it in the court of science. I could easily prove it with people who are predisposed to believe. I would rather teach one skeptic than an army of uncritical, unskeptical 'believers'. Having mindless followers is not the road to enlightenment or spirituality for them or me. If you really want siddhi, I'll tell you how to get them. You cheat. Screw all that kundulini, lower dantien, auras, transmissions and attunements. Put yourself in a closed room with no distractions for days and just focus on your upper dantien becoming a miniature star. After awhile create an energy grid between the energy gates in your ears, eyes and third eye. This should look like a triangle that surrounds the upper dantien. Follow the light lines from your dantien to your third eye, your eyeballs and your ears and then back to your upper dantien. Things will start happening and you can congratulate yourself on all your new powers that only work occasionally that only your closest friends believe in that you can never prove in a science lab. But you will ' know' that psi is real and that you have it. Except only you know that and of course your unskeptical groupies, students, followers, coven members or what have you. Then you can go to a forum and tell people siddhi is real and that if you train hard with the right methods it will happen eventually. I am not opposed to the idea that a human mind can develop real abilities. I posted that 4.5k wordcount monster partly so I could demonstrate just how openminded on the subject that I have been since I was a child. I simply have higher and harder standards of proof that must be met before I agree that someone has a cultivation induced 'power' than most of you seem to. I am not going to go over easy and show awe, respect or pledge mine because someone put a chopstick through a table. After years of studying psi, magic and siddhi I am not easily impressed anymore.

This simplest reason I can give that John Chang's demos are so problematic is that he is in control of the demo. Doesn't that strike you folks as odd? The scientists listed tested him with a multimeter? I learned how to use a multimeter when I took an electronics class at Voc Tech during high school. You can play with settings and the leads and make all sorts of numbers happen. That was appalling bad 'science'. JC presents the demos rather then having his demos be done under optimal conditions. Let's pretend I am James Randi's assistant trying to set up experiment protocol. I am not going to let JC do prep work out of sight prior to the experiment. Then we go through his list of tricks one by one. LED test. I bring the diodes. I'll pick a variety of LEDs with different resistances or voltage requirements and he can light those up. We do this experiment, not in JC's clinic but in a clean room or as close to one as we can get with cameras covering multiple angles. Chopsticks through tables. I'll bring the chopsticks and different kinds of boards. I think we would find real quick that it only works when JC has a chance to bevel the tip and uses particle board (which has no grain). Newspaper ignition. I'll bring the paper and we'll do the test in a clean room. If he ignites the newspaper, then we move on to Kleenex, fax paper, dried grass. It would be pretty telling if JC can only ignite newspaper that he handled out of sight. The journalists in the JC vid were very intellectually dishonest with their filming. We see JC tear up newspaper. Then we cut straight to outside. Where was the control over JC and the camera footage between the tearing of the newspaper indoors to igniting it outdoors? It's bad journalism and appalling bad science to have allowed JC to choose the time, place and materials for his demos. I don't know why his videos get so much Ooo and Ahhh. Penn and Teller and James Randi would expose that guy so fast under controlled circumstance. Then JC would probably complain that the chi was bad or that the clean room short circuited his chi or that ghosts were interfering. These folks are all alike with their excuses for why their stuff doesn't work under strict protocols to avoid cheating and prep work done beforehand.

I can't say for absolute certainty. Not everyone who seeks finds. Not everyone in hell gets free in their lifetime. Maybe I was just lucky. Hi Ape. Would I be correct in stating that the word 'power' is fully interchangeable with the word 'siddhi' for purposes of describing such phenomena? Would I be correct in assuming that neither you, Enouch, nor you, Ape, disagree with the definition of siddhi currently at Wiki? 'True Siddhis' I assume you know what the moving goalpost fallacy/ No True Scots fallacy is. Rama. No documentation of his alleged feats is available to scrutinize in a moment's notice. He did a few neat tricks with his body under study. With that said, I've slowed my heart and breathing down as well as changed my body temp. I don't say that to denigrate his ability but it's not as awesome as you think. Useful if you got bit by multiple venomous critters and you had to wait for hours before an antidote I suppose. Prahlad Jani has been declared a village fraud by the Indian Rationalist Society. I myself have taken a five day fast without any nourishment under the supervision of a nurse and I was fine. Ten days is not as big a deal as you think and he was losing weight, same I did, during my fast. At any rate, fasting seems to be his one and only trick. Not really impressive. Wim Hoff is a one trick pony. I do not say that to diminish his cold endurance feats but that's all he has. Useful if you survive a plane crash in Siberia I guess. Filed under 'nifty'. Chunny Lyn? Does not produce results on google. John Chang. His chop stick is beveled for crying out loud. Freeze his chopstick video at :16 and it's the best view of the angled tip. I'll give him a chopstick with a flat tip and give him plywood instead of particle board to go through, Guaranteed stopper. Particle board is really easy to drive things through. Try it yourself with a ten penny nail. Watch his thumb move constantly somewhat hidden by his hand. He searched for a good spot to go through and started drilling his beveled chopstick. Come on! Newspaper trick, pure chicanery. Touching someone and making them twitch? I've seen that one with lesser practitioners who were just learning chi kung and acupuncture theory. Then there's another chopstick demo. The tip didn't like the Formica but coming from the bottom it was not a barrier. LEDs require a very small amount of voltage to light up. I am sure Penn and Teller could demo the LED trick with a little prep time .Would have been nice to see the chopstick and table from all angles before the demo though. JC is the easiest one to debunk because he over did it with the clever tricks. That's not nei kung. It's showmanship. JC is a cultivation fraud but a skilled sleight of hand artist. Then a ghost told him to stop doing demos? Please. How convenient. Come on guys! Look, my dad has lived in Hong Kong or in the Phils his entire adult life. Malaysia and the Phils are known for their fake magicians, fake doctors and fake psi tricks. Your average Malaysian and Philippine villager is not the most educated person walking around out there and is easily impressed by skilled showmanship. Any one of you TBers with a year of chi kung training and a knowledge of cool 7th grade science class tricks could go to Malaysia and impress the hell out of the locals. Of all the names you dropped enouch, only Wim Hof impresses and he only has one trick. While the siddhi of the gentlemen you listed may be accepted by some. I assure you, not by all. I don't consider those things as 'powers'. Wim Hof is interesting but I've done standing chi kung training in the middle of a Great Lakes winter and managed to make steam come off me (I was wearing clothes). None of this stuff is really all that far out there although I give more props to Rama and Hoff than to Jani and Chang. You know what I think a really impressive demo of nei kung is? A guy by the name of Bruce Frantzis shattered his spine, deformed his skull and cracked his pelvis in a car wreck. He refused a spinal fusion and managed to heal himself with nei kung. That is a useful 'power'.

You are welcome. Thanks for commenting. I want to make it clear to anyone that did not understand that I do not believe that I had powers then, now. Even if some of what I said sounded magical. I didn't confess to those powers to brag, get awe, respect or anything. I wanted to illustrate just how fixated I was and how easy it can be when we believe in magical thinking, to assume magic is happening. Nor do I believe I have powers now either. When I said that I finally got a power, what I mean is, a reliable ability that comes from within (from my mind no less) that I do not have to try for. The evidence of that 'power' is that it continues to work. I mean it strictly metaphorically, just in case that is not understood by anyone.

And thank you very much to Kate, sifusufi, forestofemptiness, thelerner, singaporeguy, that guy and everyone else for reading and commenting. If there was any group of people online that I could post that and be somewhat understood it's here.

A method is just a method. An effect is an effect or it isn't. It takes a human frontal lobe to judge a method or effect 'good' or 'evil'. I really have no idea what you are talking about Ape. Do you believe that you have powers that you obtained by being 'good'? (whatever that means)

This attitude is part of the problem and not the solution. I find it detestable when people are so certain of their superiority. Your statement is common to what I've come to expect from some self professed Christians. I think that it is this attitude of contempt, the whole 'You are so intellectually pedestrian because you just refuse to 'get it' by making the virtuous leap of faith and thus wallow in your own ignorance" which is extremely close minded. Science has it's flaws yes. Your ability to post your contempt for science online is due to scientific advancement that resulted form engineering and understanding how things work. It takes an open mind to wonder about and question why and how things work. It takes chutzpah to offer explanations counter to what the current groupthink is. See Galileo. Good scientists are willing to alter their models when they find their conclusions are not supported by evidence. Not all scientists are good ones nor are scientists free from agendas and their own biases. No one ever said science was perfect. But at least science tries. It is my belief and my hope that science will someday be able to document chi meaningfully. It's only a matter of time. I rewatched some of those JC vids and I especially disapprove of the newspaper ignition. It is such obvious trickery. If he had the ability to ignite newspaper it stands to reason he could also ignite other paper products. If I were testing JC I would let him do his newspaper trick and then offer him bathroom tissue, ruled notebook paper, paper towels or dried leaves. A good test would be for him to ignite one paper or paper-like substance after another without handling them in advance or knowing what kind of substance he was going to handle. Let's see how many times he can do it. If he can only light newspaper that he has manipulated into certain shapes well then we have a problem with a staged trick rather than an actual power. If random people handed him similar objects and he could ignite them one after another without fail in roughly the same amount of time I would have been impressed. Instead I felt I was robbed several moments of my life to watch a chemistry trick masquerading as psi.

You are very welcome sifusufi. Thanks for the video MD. Good stuff.

Agreed. It is my understanding that no one is transmitting T3h R34l 8uddhism because no teachings were written down for years after Sid's death. It was oral tradition only for awhile and there were factions right away that started spinning off. We know that oral traditions never get screwed up or altered as time goes by. No one would ever dare to put their own spin on it either and add that to the teachings. Why don't you tell us all how you have actualized Madhyamaka from your own personal meditation experience? It has been my experience that a person is best served by taking a technique, practicing it a lot, noting what you've learned, then use your own words to describe what you've gained or lost spiritually. You got me. You'd be surprised. I have a tremendous respect for Buddhism and once came very close to choosing that path myself. Despite not having clearly seen the obvious superiority of Buddhism I still managed to overcome my mental and emotional suffering in this life. In the last fifteen years that I've been practicing Taoist meditation I've discovered that certain Buddhist teachings make complete sense and I've often wondered if I had chosen Buddhism and stuck with it if I'd be as happy as I am today. Try these variations of what you said on for size and see the difference at how it comes across. It could be that any memory of a previous life is actually caused by negative spirits that attach to various people, transferring memories. Even if you don't agree with this, you cannot rule it out. In my experience, I've found that memories of previous lives is actually caused by negative spirits that attach to various people, transferring memories. You may not agree but I am not sure we can rule it out. Perhaps any memory of a previous life is actually caused by negative spirits that attach to various people, transferring memories. Even if you don't agree. You don't come across as someone who has put in the time and deeply digested these things and come to your own conclusions about them. You preach as though you know but I think it's just an intellectual game for you. Your posts are not moderated for the possibility of differing opinions, experiences or even the chance that you are wrong. Perhaps you could meditate on your favorite teachings for about 5-10k hours then come back and tell us what you yourself have found out about Self, not what you think you know about it from someone else's scriptures. Also, I don't agree with you that past lives are caused by negative spirits that attach to people, transferring memories. So much for 'that truth'. If you want to go further into this you better be able to come up with something better than 'study Madhyamaka'. Besides, assuming (for the sake of argument) that your title and premise are correct, so what?