Hi. Im just starting meditating and one topic i see pretty interesting is the developing of siddhis, From what I’ve read on the forum some users claim thet siddhis are not real at all and they are hallucinations product of deep concentration. But other people reported telekinesis and other stuff affecting reality.

Reporting telekinesis is very easy to do. Look: My great-uncle Ludwig has three testicles, can spin a dime using the force of his own thoughts, and can sing the Marseillaise with farts.

Doing telekinesis in front of a camera in a lab-controlled setting prepared by a group of experts, including magicians like James Randi, is another matter entirely. My great-uncle Ludwig is totally able to do that, but since he is enlightened, he does not want to, which proves that he can.

In the end, there is no self or meaning, so who cares? 

Siddhis are just like numchuk skills.  Telekineses and $4.75 will get you a cup of coffee. 

i read about the Silicon Valley monk, although im skeptical of his claims, because he mostly experiented haluccinations and didnt even reach Jhana jet, and as far as i know real siddhis comes after the fourth

Hi Jamess,

I think as time goes on, some siddhis will turn out to have causal explanations that reveal interesting aspects about how the brain works. For example, one manifestation of siddhis both classically and today is "hearing voices" - of people who have passed on and of devas and daemons. This was, for example, somthing I wrote about in SVM that happened to me. Now, it turns out that in the ensuing time since I wrote the memoir, the cognitive science and psychotheraputic community has recognized that some people actually hear voices even though they are not mentally ill. Not only that, but these people are able to understand what is called "sine wave" speech - speech that has been processed so that it sounds like a bunch of whistles and clicks - better than nonvoice hearers. Check out this page for an example, it's pretty wild. The experiment described in the Ars article has revealed some interesting aspects of how the brain processes sensory information.

When I listen to the processed speech today without hearing the unprocessed, it just sounds like clicks and whistles to me. I have to listen to the processed speech after listening to the unprocessed to hear the words, just like a nonvoice hearer. It's possible that intensive meditation somehow rewired my brain so that I became a voice hearer, and was inclined to interpret meaning into randomness. As another example, Culadasa, in footnote 15 to the Sixth Interlude chapter in his book Mind Illuminated mentions that the feeling of energy flows that comes with advanced piti/kundalini  may actually be due to rewiring of your brain below the cortical map of your body, something I've felt was probably the case for many years since experiencing massive kundalini in the late 90's, which I described in SVM.

The problem with siddhis from a practice standpoint is that they can convince you that you are somehow "special", like Neo in the Matrix, until you've seen anatta, and know, without a shadow of a doubt, that your sense of "I" is fabricated. And like our neo says upthread, they have a funny tendency to disappear when there is another observer present (it doesn't even have to be in a laboratory). That said, I am not going to trash anybody's belief in majick or siddhis or anything like that, if they feel it somehow is helpful in their practice. The important point, as with everything in practice, is your intention.

                

Siddhis are possible but not for each person. Siddhis arise from a combination of inherent disposition & practise. Practise alone cannot bring siddhis. In the Buddhist Pali suttas, not every fully enlightened mind had siddhis and some enemies of the Buddha had siddhis. Many living Buddhist monks and even Christians are well-known to have siddhis, including by their students who do not believe in superstitions such as reincarnation and god. 

Siddhis are posible, but take it many years daily meditations. And some spiritual knowledge. There are many free ebooks on net about. I recommend for example Shiva samhita, Gheranda samhita, books by Arthur Avalon (John Woodroffe) like Sat chakra nirupana od The serpent power and Chinese Taoists spiritual Alchemy The secret of the golden flower, translantion by Richard Willhelm.

I want to chime in here and say it's a very bad idea to use Siddhis while operating heavy machinery. 

I foolishly learned my lesson while trying to multitask and activate aṇimā siddihi (reducing one's body to the size of one atom) while operating a hydraulic excavator on a building site. It honestly surprised me that it even worked. By the time I got accustomed to my new miniature size, I heard an enormous crash and quickly realized I'd done it at the least opportune moment possible.

I had inadvertantly let go of the boom lever handle while the excavator was in rotation. By the time I'd frantically, haphazardly scaled my body close to full size again, I saw that the bucket had crashed through a wall it wasn't supposed to crash through, destroying a supporting wall and causing the entire roof above to cave in as a result. 

Of course, even when your body is the size of one atom, obviously everything causal still goes on functioning at the same speed and scale. It' was also lesson in checking ones intentions are healthy and not simply for entertainment. I only use aṇimā now if absolutey necessary.

So be careful and take care, I'm still paying back monthly installments for the damage I caused. 

Very impressive, what method did you use to get those powers?  did you course the fourteen ways of mastery described in the visuddhimaga? s

So is quantum machanics nonsense? At an atomic scale you'd likely exist in a probabilistic quantum state until someone else observed you. And how would they do that since no one can see at the scale of an individual atom?

Curious...

Of course siddhis are real. Donald Trump has a secret unit of "jhana soldiers" who are constantly reading minds of captains of Russian nuclear submarines so that he always knows their position. It is a very cheap solution to the problem of dealing with Russian nuclear triad and it is no longer necessary to spend bilions of dollars of American tax payers to some foolish DARPA research of submarine tracking systems. 

wow, shit is getting interesting