I was just talking to someone offline and she said that I should be careful using "siddhis", and that they require a very "clean mind".

I don't think of what I do as a siddhi, but I want to hear everyone's thoughts.

I use rapport building and thought transference to help people with pain. For example, someone has tennis elbow, and I might transfer the thought "The elbow is healed".

If a person is happy about his elbow pain having disappeared after seeing me, where is the problem? I don't believe my skills are very strong at all, but I use what i have to make things work out in a pleasing way. The pain doesn't always disappear by the way - it seems to depend upon how much rapport the person allows and I can't/don't force that.

Also, how is this different from interpersonal attraction, wherein two people develop (or allow) rapport, and all sorts of images and thoughts get transferred between the two of them? I think thoughts are being beamed between people continuously. I do my best to keep thoughts positive or neutral.

This person I was chatting with seemed to become angry at me and left the conversation in a hurry, before I could ask her what she was thinking. Up until that point, the conversation had been very amiable, as usual.

Hi triple C,

All righty, I'll take the bait. Perhaps my last two chat posts did not come through, but I specifically wrote that I had to go and that it had been a pleasure chatting with you. I had a lot of hearty laughs in that chat. I guess you could check around your mind to see about why you cultivated an assertion of the semblance of anger in the mind, or not. You know, so be it either way: that's your dharma, as they say. I have my own dharma to work on.

So intention is one thing --- placing a mental intention shapes the mind and in doing so prevents the mind from going down other channels.

Intention has a mild relationship to "tricky" siddhi/siddhi aspiration: meaning intention is a deliberate action of mind, where the mind is doing something in a belief that that deliberate action is the proper course of action, that that thought should be actioned. Intention is like buying a stamp, putting it on a specific letter, and deliberately sending that letter to effect some instruction or outcome.

Some intention is really useful and benign, even benevolent. Usually the benevolent utility of intention directly correlates to how much a situation has been observed and studied. Otherwise, there's the adage: the road to hell is paved with good intentions; this arises from a lack of observation and checking one's own assumptions at the door.

Even "wholesome" siddhis are notoriously cautioned against. But a wholesome siddhi could be like finding a book of stamps on the pavement outside the post office and then maybe leaving the stamps on the post office desk with a note saying, "Free". Maybe that could work out okay. There's no expectation, there's not self-reward, there's a very naturally befitting, smooth action of what was found/seen and how it was passed on.

An unwholesome siddhi is like striving to find a book of stamps, striving to get certain letters written, and posted. There's a lot of presumption of "what's right/helpful" there, beaucoup de conceit, as they say in Frengland. Then if there's the merest sense of how the action/intention/siddhi could benefit the doer (agrandissement) then there's even more problem caused/invited.

Sometimes people experience unexplainable hints or insights, particularly after concentration develops (in the realm of "high equanimity"): concentration is basically calming the mind into an alert, curious, open, unasserted state wherein situation and insight can seem to arrive out-of-the-blue. So some weird insights can come up that seem to be siddhic. If a person presumes that they can handle and pass on that information beneficially --- whoa, nelly. But when something sort of siddhic seems to arrive in the mind freely, from the open space of utter equanimity, and as unsought information, now the person just has to really keep asking themselves (when they get off the cushion) if they really should do anything with that information. What I think happens is the free-placement for that insightful information will show itself, without any assertion (again) from the practitioner who got it freely in the first place (in meditation or in mindfulness).

So with intention or deliberate siddhi-aspirations there's just a huge, huge caution about one's own practice and mind. For myself, I specifically know my mind to be much too self-interested, too "windy", too distractable, too ignorant, so I have specifically intended "no siddhis" before some sits, even though my personal exposure to these is incredibly minor, certainly not even certain.

I mean you actually know what's happening in your mind, while I do not. So I think you know best if your healing thought is being done without attachment to the results and is just benign-benevolent organization of your own mind or if you would be hoping to gain something in the single-pointed focus as well.


Good luck : )

[edit: It is from Shin Yen that I heard siddhi compared to taking a piece of flesh from the thigh to help cover a blemish on the face--- that that borrowing would cause a new trouble and that the patch would be visible anyway. There is a YouTube video with him and Jet Li discussing this]

Hi thanks for your response katy. I'm trying to take what you say and put it in my own words so that I can grasp it better.

-- So long as one has studied the situation closely, deliberate intent is ok. This includes such things as hypnotic suggestion. I wouldn't call what i do a siddhi, I'd call it non-verbal suggestion, (sometimes with a hypnotic element).

-- Are you suggesting in paragraph 5 that I should work for free?

-- regarding paragraph 6, I'm mindful not to strive as such, because I know how that ruins all manner of things. I do feel an ego boost if/when it works, but I am also aware that any ability tends to disappear if I get a big head, so it's self-limiting in that sense. Similarly, if I have an attached attitude, the healing doesn't happen, so it's also self-limiting. The process makes me let go and it makes me adopt a more humble attitude. Other people I know personally have commented that I switch between being humble and big headed, so it's probably a good thing to have reinforced.

-- I do gain something from the use of this suggestion/hypnosis process. I can't not. Self esteem results from acting with intent.

Have i understood you correctly?

Thanks

Hi C C C.


No, siree.

In general, based on some of your siddhic exploration in past posts and what seems to me your continued interest in it based on our chat last night and your experimentation of remote viewing, I have long wanted to express a caution to you. On the other hand, I don't: who am I to know what's good for you? And I like mundane things, so people's siddhic explorations are outside of my knowledge in large part.

But then I did express that caution in my above post. ***


I really cannot saying what's ok for you. From my perspective, it seems like what you are reporting is experimentation with benevolent mental focus for yourself (like your walking into a group of strangers discussed in another thread) and for others. When you speak of keeping healing intention around your work --- and presuming that that mental intention is not actually distracting you from doing a technically proper job --- it sounds useful and uplifting to you and others. Many traditions express the need to focus our minds like some of what you describe, and some of your efforts and some of the results you've reported do remind me of the Dharmapada's "Choices".

However, in some threads you have written about siddhis and the effort to create mind-to-mind communication without body language, such as a female friend in a trance under your hands. For me, this is not something to pursue and it seems like a siddhic effort---not matter how weakly or non-attained. Again, that's just not something I would or do pursue. But I don't think you should stop either: I just think about harm-reduction, cautions. ***But it sounds like you know well the hazards and obstacles created about in big-headedness and personal desire.

Good luck, "bub" I often stay out of your posts because our practices tend to focus on different things, but I do like following your practice when I can.

I have read in many traditions that people should request healing before it is given to them as what inflicts them is part of their path until they desire differently. Then I read that the chances of healing someone that truly had disease as part of their path would be temporary at best. I now tend to go with this presumption. If you're doing metta practice on someone without asking you're casting spells without permission. Of course I hope to receive it back threefold if they don't like my Brahma Viharas

Hi katy, I used to think that eyeballs rolling around and eyelids fluttering was something special, until I found out that it's a reasonably common sign of hypnotic trance. I also found out that I can't do it with everyone in the same way; this person is particularly hypnotizable I expect. Her eyes would go absolutely crazy, and on one occasion she opened here eyes and said something highly unusual and a bit spooky. I wanted to film it and post it on youtube but she wouldn't let me. The other thing that bugged me was that other "trained" people could get her eyes doing that too. That really got rid of my specialness feeling!

Here's some interesting info I found out about that experimenting phase. At all times she had her eyes closed and wouldn't know what i was doing. If I held my hands close to her head, the effect happened. If I moved them away, the effect almost completely disappeared. I wondered if that was because her hearing was slightly affected by my hands being close by, so I altered it so that my hands crossed and the palms were facing outwards away from her head, but still just as close. The effect disappeared. So I concluded that energy does actually transmit through the palms of the hands. Some people would say "duh!" but for me that was fairly concrete proof. By the way, I have tried to heal this person of various minor ailments and failed miserably, even when the trance was quite deep. All with permission of course.

I'm thinking twice about what you said and I have other techniques which are less "invasive" you might say.

I can't see any harm in sending people positive energy dream walker.