MEDITATION - Do I get psychic powers?

I sometimes get irritated when people ask me whether I have attained any psychic powers since I write books on Yoga and Meditation ;-) In my view, that is the most stupid question to ask.

But I can understand why most people are crazy about psychic powers. The Yoga that is being propagated today, namely Hata yoga, makes achievement of psychic powers as one of its prominent goals.

Many modern Yoga Gurus claim to have psychic powers and some even promise to pass such powers to you just by a simple touch (the so called Shaktipäta). Other well known Yogis have written autobiographies, which almost read like encyclopedia of psychic powers!

Once Buddha was asked why he does not teach how to achieve psychic powers, so that he can attract more disciples.  Buddha outright rejected the suggestion. He said his aim is to teach people to come out of miseries and not to play with powers.

But Buddha said that it is possible that one attains several psychic powers as a result of prolonged meditation. But Buddha did make it a point to stress that it is not necessary that everyone should achieve them, nor is it a measure of one’s progress or otherwise.

The Yoga sutra of Patanjali in its present form has a complete chapter (Chapter 3 – Vibhooti Päda) on ‘how to achieve psychic powers’.  The reasons given on why one attains these powers lack the clarity one finds in the first two chapters. So I have always held that only the first two chapters of the Yoga Sutra were original and the later two chapters were added by someone else (not Patanjali), much later.

Except for Hata yoga and Tantra , attaining psychic powers was never the goal of spiritual practices and almost all ancient scriptures discouraged sincere practitioners from going after them. Even Patanjali says the same.

Though many modern Gurus claim otherwise, psychic powers are never proven under controlled conditions. Even the two decades of multi Billion dollar US government sponsored research into psychic powers, yielded almost nothing.

Apart from these reasons, the one main reason why a sincere meditator should desist from going after psychic powers is that these powers pull one back to the limited body identity which one would actually like to be free from. They defeat the very purpose of meditation.

Can meditation be harmful?  This is one question that comes to some people. I will discuss that  in the next post.

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