The blog tends to be slightly or sometimes well behind where I am currently reading. I have several more series to do from within the Christian tradition, but am mainly reading in Vedanta and Yoga right now. As I have been reading more in the Vedanta and Yoga traditions, the concept of Siddhis (“miraculous powers” attained through meditation – see link for previous post) has been more on my mind.
Various teachers in the Yoga tradition put more or less weight on siddhis, with Patanjali himself seeming to view them as superfluous to the yogi’s true goal (see Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras 3:37). In general, I lean toward the belief that a fascination with siddhis and the like is a distraction from the contemplative quest. Nevertheless, reports of these types of things do surround the contemplative traditions as a whole.
The purpose of this post is to briefly document my own modest experience in this area:
When I first began seminary, I took a Spiritual Development class. One of my assignments was to spend multiple periods of two hours in prayer. There were no further instructions than simply to be in prayer for two hours.
During these periods I would pray for people I knew. Sometimes, I would inexplicably be presented with a powerful image while I was praying for an individual. In one case, as I was praying for a particular friend, I was presented with an image of the state of Washington. As far as I know, there was no prior link in my mind between this person and the state of Washington. The experience of the image itself could best be described as a “vivid stamp in the mind’s eye.” Hard to describe, but clear and unmistakable to me at the time.
As it happened, this friend (a former college roommate) called me soon after one of these prayer periods. He was in the military and at a point in his training when they were determining where he was going to be stationed next. He told me a few of the options: I remember New York being on the list along with several other states. He did not mention Washington as a possibility.
During our conversation, I told him “You are going to be stationed in Washington.” I then told him about the image I received while in prayer. He told me that Washington wasn’t an option, and the choice wasn’t up to him anyway, so we just left it at that.
A few months later my friend called me to tell me that, contrary to the options that had initially been presented to him, he was going to be stationed in Washington. He spent the next several years of his life there. At the time, both coming from an Evangelical perspective, we took it as a confirmation from God that this was where he was supposed to be.
I also had a similar experience around this time where an image was presented to me while praying for a friend which later seemed to be meaningful to the individual.
I don’t know what to make of these things, and of course coincidences happen and sometimes we interpret things in hindsight, drawing meaning where perhaps there was none to begin with.
But it’s also possible that we are connected in ways that we don’t understand. People, matter, time. We still really don’t know the first thing about how Reality works. And the deeper we go, the stranger and stranger things get.
So that’s my brief experience with Siddhis.