I'm a materialist and an atheist, I can unserstand how some people can manifest certain visualizations or experience other halucinations that seems hyper realistic, integrate with external reality and even controllable through diligent concentration practice. But as far as I'm concerned this stuff only happens within the mind of the practitioner and cannot influence "objective" reallity. 

So how can someone demostrate his powers in an objectively (i.e. scientific) verifiable way without requiring the challenger to have the same degree of practice?

Hmmmm... to start this conversation off on the right foot can you explain to us what "objective reality" is?

Well. This is very difficult, I assume I am not talking to a solipsist (otherwise this disscussion is moot) so there's at least the recognition that other minds exist outside your own.

A second natural assumption to make is that those other minds are not entirely disconnected from yours and somehow share access to experieces that at least corrolate with one another on some level (i.e. you see a chair, I see a chair, we can agree that our experiences have some corrolation although we cannot be sure if they are the same).

I would then define "objective" reality as this communication channel or shared information that we all have access to.

Pretty philosophical, but sounds reasonable?

If said powers do not influence objective reality, then they cannot be scientifically verified.

I am not entirely sure I understand you question, so I'm sorry if this is not what you are asking but ...

One way is for a psychic to produce verifiable information that she would have no normal way of knowing.


http://www.deanradin.com/evidence/evidence.htm
Of course all the controversies in the history of science show that the best explanation for the evidence is an opinion.

And people tend to demand ironclad proof for things that contradict their strongly held beliefs but will accept a tenuous hypothesis to allow them to maintain their beliefs in the face of conflicting evidence. Which makes changing someones mind with evidence very difficult and very unlikely. This is true for materialists, scientists, and believers in psychic phenomena and religion. So a meeing of mind is not really likely. 

aloha mat,

   Reasonable, yes, but not materialism. We might also define such a shared information communication channel as "god."

terry

There are at least some powers claims that are amenable to investigation under a materialist scientific viewpoint. Claims of insight into past lives and supranormal experience during NDEs come to mind. In those cases, researchers have focused on confirming verifiable details and attempting to verify a lack of potential contamination from sources such as something seen on television, etc.

aloha s,

   That reality is a magical construction seems self evident to me. Hawaii is a magical place. If you look at a globe and place hawaii in the center, all around is only water, all the rest of the land is on the other side of the world. Very far away. "The mainland," mundanity.

   Why don't people who have spiritual power reshape reality? There is a gross misunderstanding of reality (that is, existence) embedded in the question.

   So-called "objective reality" is a delusion caused by ego-centric thinking. Without a subject there are no objects, no objective reality. All objects are like reflections in water, not only distorted but only seen by a unique and ever-changing viewpoint. The delusion is to imagine such objects are "real." Like a rainbow, there is a real colored reflection, only visible from a pair of eyes oriented in space just so, to water droplets and sunlight. Thus what we call "objective reality" is purely subjective, and the more we realize how subjective it is, the more objective we can be.

   People see what they desire, what they want to see. Since the primary interests of the human animal are food and sex, we see objects related to those desires. Ways to make ourselves more attractive and wealthier. When these basic desires become satiated or unavailable, we seek other pleasures, and see other objects.

   Kings and statesmen seek power; it is the nature of politics, to convince others they need to do as they are told. Religion is harnessed to this end. Always. It is what distinguishes religion from spirituality, that religion is diverted to social uses by those who would arrogate the powers of god to themselves. Roman emperors (chinese emperors) honestly believed they were gods (emperors of heaven), and ruled the world by divine right. They created religions (titus created christianity) in their own images and made people worship them, while suppressing competitors (eg jews).

   In truth, it is as our self-professed atheist/materialist mat says, there is only this communication channel that itself creates existence, immaterial and theistic.

     I object (!) to the assertion that "reality is deeply personal." The "person" is a social fiction. All we really have is the dependent co-arising of phenomena. All dharmas are impermanent. All objects, all objectivity, disappears with their subjects. Everything is empty. Objects are such as they are: fluid aspects of reality entire, undivided, nondual. The upshot is that reality is the same for all beings, or they could not exist.

   Thanks for your comments.

terry





Illusion and Reality

What is seen is not the Truth
What is cannot be said
Trust comes not without seeing
Nor understanding without  words
The wise comprehends with knowledge
To the ignorant it is but a wonder
Some worship the formless God
Some worship His various forms
In what way He is beyond these attributes
Only the Knower knows
That music cannot be written
How can then be the notes
Says Kabir,  awareness alone will overcome illusion

   Ram dass used to say, "If you know who you are and I know who I am, then there is only one of us." Only this agreement, this communication channel. No persons at all; an empty conveyance. A "lone brightness here listening to the dharma" (rinzai). A clump of grass; a stand of pines. One hand claps.

t




Arriving here at this village,
peach blossoms
in full bloom.
Red petals reflect
on the river.

~ryokan

It has to do with finding access concentration. I recently posted a thread about holidays and access concentration.

I guess I opened a bag of snakes. 

A more concrete question:

In MCTB Ingram tells that Sawadaw U Pandita Jr "demonstrated powers" (https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-vi-my-spiritual-quest/70-around-the-world-and-finding-home/vimuttimagga-the-path-of-freedom/).

1. Does that mean they had a shared halucination? If that's the case, some information about the halucination must be conveyed from U Pandita to him so he could construct his own mental halucination based on it. It also means that a "normal" person would not be able to perceive the phenomena. It also means that demonstrating a power is simply triggering a certain halucination in another though words or actions.

2. Does that mean something "objective" changed? i.e a "normal" person could perceive an unusual occurance. If that's the case then it can be scientifically verified.

3. Does that simply mean that Ingram was constructing such an impression about U Pandita for himself without that actually being the case? In that case, one cannot demostrate powers to another, one is simply convinced of powers in another by some weird trick of the mind.

It means that we are all just seeing shared hallucinations, all the time, as we see an ”objective” reality.

How would that work, do you think?

Part of it is called social constructions, and part of it is the bodily predispositions shared by human beings. The Buddha called it delusion. What did you think I meant?

I was just curious about the mechanism you were proposing by saying we all have "shared illusions."

To the extent that we agree upon an objective reality of substance, we share it. To the extent we don’t, the statement doesn’t apply.

Edited to add: Even science suggests that we all live in and are part of a hologram, after all. 

Oh, okay.

IMHO, objective reality == probablistic/statistical cause and effect

The Universe is like a simulation
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0801/0801.0337.pdf

Running in the mind of God.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2Xsp4FRgas

Since all consciousness is made of the same stuff as God's consciousness,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xki03G_TO4
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/03/realizing-ultimate.html

anyone can hack the program.
https://www.thesecret.tv/law-of-attraction/


Personally, I don't do it. The last time I tried it I was in 8th grade and the results freked me out. Afterward I asked an adult why she broke rules to help me and she got this glassy eyed look and said, "I don't know."  I did it thinking I would influence myself and when I saw it influencing several adults I realized this is serious stuff and I could get in trouble messing with it. It is not right to influence people without their knowing it and it is not right to "cheat" when you benefit at the expsnse of other people. It is not for me. Maybe some people are here to use it for an approved purpose, I don't believe I am one of them.

Yeah, I should have added that qualifier from the beginning. I just took it for granted.

hisssss....

Jim, similar things happened to me at about the same age. At that time I didn’t meditate knowingly. I prayed and I thought someone or something was answering the prayers. Still, I was very selective in using it, but not selective enough. I used it to be relieved from having to make oral presentations, as that was traumatic for me. Once I almost completely lost my voice, but it also happened that the teacher was ill. I so hope that it was just a very mild cold and that he enjoyed having the day off and maybe got the chance to finish a good book or something.

well, until they levitate a pitchfork, summon spirits or demons, or walk through a wall, IN TIMES SQUARE, with hundreds of witnesses, i’ll be in the "powers are nonsense" camp.

but if someone wishes to prove otherwise...

It would be cool if one of the advanced meditators on DhO, lets say, installs a small camera during fire kasina retreats or at other events with higher likelihood for occurence of powers. That's not really a scientific evidence, but if e.g. Daniel Ingram publishes a video of levitating pitchforks, I would be totally convinced, and many other people here too.

I tend to believe that powers exist, but only because of testimonials of highly advanced meditators that I trust. However, when I listen to arguments in favor of existence of powers, I feel like a piece of the story is painfully missing.

During history, there is a virtually infinite number of examples of 100% proven frauds, scams and lies involving "powers". Whether we believe in powers or not, we must admit that countless people have been victims of con-artists who were just after their money. As you are reading these words, many desperate people around the world looking for help, are being lied to and manipulated in real time. So many investigations during history revealed thousands of different techniques for deceiving people, from spiritualist seances to modern cold-readers.

You may have heard of a notorious war criminal (now in prison), who lived for years with a different identity, pretending to be a spiritual healer. With time he became popular and even stared giving public interviews as a "healer"!

So, from people quitting jobs and relationships because their astrologer said so, to cases of people dying because they relied just on alternative medicine and medicasters, people pretending to have powers have made a cumulative damage of historical proportions.

This is a serious social issue - if I started talking about gurus and praising their teaching capacity without even mentioning all the suffering that was caused by many of them, that wouldn't be OK. It's a practical question - if we become just totally amazed by powers, without any skeptical distance whatsoever - then, we are much more prone to becoming a victim of a charismatic manipulator.

The issue goes even deeper: the emotion of amazement and numinosity that we get from witnessing fake powers and staged synchronicities is THE SAME as the emotion you would get if you witnessed the real thing. That makes things a lot messier, because our emotional reaction to the topic which colors our subjective world and is main source of the feeling of "being convinced" - is an unreliable and irrational instrument.

So, the idea that skepticism is somehow blocking you from seeing the powers may have some truth to it, but it is also potentially dangerous, because throwing skepticism out the window can make you vulnerable, naive and irrational. 

The approach I prefer is: complete skepticism *and* complete openness. Our minds should be open to the possibility of powers being involved in a certain event, but also - lets be open to the fact that it IS possible for a event to seem and feel 100% magical, surreal and synchronicity-like, while while it actually has NOTHING to do with any of those. When we see a card trick, the easiest explanation is - "it's magick", but we know that a carefully planned manipulations is hiding behind the "magic" surface.

(S., this turned into a ramble, sorry, nothing directed personally to you, it's just a reaction I have in discussions like this   )

Well put. And from what I have read about Magick from Daniel, it seems like scepticism might be a safety barrier not only from scams but also from the real thing. That’s probably good. I don’t think humanity in general is ready for magick.

Griffin, I appreciate your take on this. This area has a lot of nuance to it. Common sense combined with a morality angle is generally a great lense through which to view the powers.

You lift the X Wing out of the Dagobah swamp, thus demonstrating to all.

perhaps the only lens through which such effects could be regarded as "powers"... the conventional, conditioned, conformist view is that the individual ego possesses (or doesn't possess) "powers"... power is actually diffused and unconditioned...like a current in a river, or a wire...

If I was actually going to try and design an empirical experiment? Have the challenger flip a fair coin a designated number of times. The chalengee must control the outcome of the flip to some pre-determined level the challenger deems acceptable to convince them based on a normal distribution of fair coin flips. Let's say to be convinced I need to see an event that should only occur at random 1/100000 attempts. You can find the number heads out of x coin flips required for that. That or maybe they could just use their powers to win the lottery at even higher odds?

So ... just to pop another snake head out of the bag ... what is this objective reality anyway? 

If we take radical positivist physical and materialist view of the world, then objective reality is something like a collection of vibrating energy fields (string theory) coalescing into apparent subatomic particles (quarks) that interact in weird ways to give illusory impressions of solidity and motion and etc. In other words, when we talk about 'objective reality' we actually aren't taling about objective reality at all. What we are really are really talking about is a favoured and comforting yet subjective interpreation of sense data.

Actually 'objective reality' is far weirder and less undestandable than anything talked about on this forum.

Do tell!

When the great Marvin Minsky was asked whether the objective world is real, he replied that the question is meaningless.

Probably safer saying we know how to model sunshine and wood for a couple more decades.

Heh.  Well, I think just walking around in daily life is the greatest and most unfathomable siddhi of them all !

That's a really overlooked point. We act like the little things like siddhis are major miracles but ignore the fact that we create this whole universe, but treat it as banal and commonplace. (That's if we create it, anyway). Siddhis are kind of tiddly when viewed like that.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Small kids are good at reminding us, though. I know some grown-up people that are still able to approach the world as magickal, and make others see it as well, without involving any siddhis at all (depending on how they are defined, I guess). Some people somehow just turn everything they touch to a fairy tale.

Then we have the cynical version: The fact that Trump hasn’t pushed that red button is a miracle. The fact that mankind is still around despite all our destructive traits is a miracle.

Personally I prefer the fairy tale touch kind of magick, and the magick of sunlight glistening in the mists that billow upward from a tranquil forest lake in the morning, and the magick in how people reach out to each other in crisis and make everything worthwhile against all odds.

We have powers. We can turn on the cellphone, most of us can walk around, create soundwaves and smell the roses. That's nice. I can also hide a magnet under my t-shirt and attract metal. Pretty amazing, eh.
If evolution or technology got us some new powers they would be quickly normalized and the dreamers would wish for something new beyond that. 

Science and rational understanding are the only things that really brought us foward and give us reliable insight and ways to create and influence. The idea of "levitating" etc. is frankly ridiculous. The only interesting thing about this is a psychological one. Why does one even feel the need for this kind of "power". What are the desires and beliefs behind it?

Sure, technology and science are not that attracive in many regards. You can study chemistry for 8 years but after that you still aren't a level 15 wizard who can kick everybodys ass. Your knowledge is more or less useless in every day life and doesn't give you a real advantage as such (except a pretty high-paying job).

I don’t know why people would feel the need for powers. I can’t say that I do. Except for the fact that I appreciate being able to relieve my own inflammatory backpain by means of meditation (dissolving the pain with piti) regardless of the fact that science says that I can’t. The way this works may very well be scientifically explained tomorrow. Frankly, I don’t care, as long as it works.

I could be wrong, of course, but I highly doubt that there are that many believers in levitation specifically.

Placebo and nocebo effects are scientifically proved, right? They fit Daniel’s definition of magick, if I’m not mistaken.

"Hallucinations" of the kind you suggest have had a stronger impact on the course of human history than any other factor has or, indeed, will.  From my perspective, your definition of "objective reality" must at the very least incorporate weak-form panpsychism or you're simply not describing reality. 

Buddhists have demonstrated extraordinary, objectively verifiable abilities since the days of Kublai Khan. They've cut themselves to the bone and not bled. They've stopped their hearts at will. We can suppress or deactivate the Default Network in the brain and grow new brain matter in scientifically verifiable ways that others evidently can't. Is that not "power over the physical world?" 

"But ah!", you reply, "All this is just happening in your head!" Well, everything is happening in someone's head, even "athiesm" and "materialism", which are empty concepts within the mind of the practitioner. Heads are objectively the most powerful things in the world.

Has the primacy of Mind not been demonstrated a thousand times over via the Observer Effect in quantum mechanics? I understand that many physicists don't like it, and continually attempt to demonstrate that Observer-free models of quantum behavior, but they've been attempting to do so since the 30s and have only continued a proud tradition of failure.