| | RE: Dipa Ma Answer 9/17/09 4:35 AM as a reply to Mike Monson. Hi Mike,
The powers should be taken "at face value", as a just another skill or ability, like singing or running marathons or whatever. Impressive in their own right, but not indicative of any kind of progress insight-wise (except that they sometimes arise during practice, for example in A&P territory).
They are not in themselves useful criteria for judging the spiritual attainment of a person. Seen this way, wielding the powers belongs to the training in morality - what matters (and is useful for judging spiritual maturity) is the motivation/intention, and whether the results are skillful.
Maybe Dipa ma found the powers useful to get people's attention. In some Chinese traditions, for example, mastery of a martial art is used to get people's attention. In the West, certain psychotherapeutic qualities of meditation are used to draw people to meditation and wisdom. There are problems with these strategies, of course, and thus we get unenlightened psychic charlatans exploiting the gullible, martial artists confusing their inner practice for outer strength (maybe even getting hurt in a fight), and meditators endlessly rearranging their psychological baggage and confusing that for insight.
I like to remember that the Buddha considered enlightenment and subsequently teaching the Dharma as one of the powers, the only noble one (noble in his technical sense, not in the sense that the other powers are somehow to be looked down upon).
Oh, and to dispel the slightly grubby aura surrounding the powers a bit: If you've ever had the dream of going to your actual bathroom to have a drink of water, and found it impossible to swallow, only to snap suddenly awake in your bed feeling strangely agitated: that was likely an out-of-body dream, and oob experiences can be counted among the powers ("walking through walls"...). Thus, while not really ordinary, the powers aren't that exotic either. We in the west often lump all kinds of strange experiences together under the label "dream/illusion/hallucination", which is fine as long as we remember that like any experience, these uncommon ones can be studied, differentiated, and mastered in their own right.
Cheers, Florian |