“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” ~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
You may see being highly empathic as a curse, especially when it seems to push people away from you rather than pull them towards you. Holding on to other people’s energy, particularly their darkness, can mean those around you ironically confuse you for an energy vampire or certainly someone to be avoided.
This, when you have emotional wounds from childhood and are unable to open up to people easily anyway can be maddening, especially when all you want to do is to share joy with others and protect them from harm.
But it may be that we have got it all wrong. Especially when it comes to the empath and what they’re really here for.
Empaths are actually highly advanced souls who are here for a distinct and luminary purpose. If anything, we should focus on the innate power, startling resourcefulness and ability to recover after a particularly crippling karmic wave that the empath can endure.
Empathy is a gift, and needs to begin to be recognized as such. Rather than sheltering behind judgments born out of seeing through others’ projections on you, for example, remember that your innate powers will only be triggered and grounded with one overriding force: compassion. You came here to do this, and now is the time to accept and elevate your path.
Here are 5 powers associated with heightened empathy which will help those who have been complaining to rapidly turn about and start counting their blessings:
You not only see other’s deceptions, but their potential
People don’t like being around you much when you only mirror their faults. But they long to be around you when you chose to mirror their potential and actively help them bring it into the now. A trap empaths can fall into is to lower their own status in order to empower others. But, knowing that healthy boundaries are an ongoing task, we can practice with every interaction.
Practice heightening your frequency in the presence of others and you will attract them to their own true potential. Be as authentic as you can, staying in alignment and people will be wowed by your intense energy and begin to be drawn to you. But then that’s what you’re really afraid of, right?
You become a beacon of light and fun
When an empath decides to no longer absorb as a way to help others, they gain control over their energetic field and begin channeling higher states of consciousness. The key is being fiercely in the moment.
Forget introversion and extroversion, once you flip the mirror on people’s projections by protecting your energy field, you immediately raise the bar and become your own source of energy. Yes, that’s right, you actually transcend the whole exchange of energy entirely and become a conduit for direct source-to-human channeling. You have to experience it to feel the high.
You will have stepped out of the matrix, and then every time someone tries to hook you with a downer or trick you into lowering your frequency (unfortunately, people do this constantly to empaths because the empath, knowingly or unknowingly, is drawing out their dense areas and saying, hey!
Look at this you might want to pay attention to it! And that’s why people appear to dislike us.) What they don’t realize is that they are subconsciously desiring you to do this. So the people who want to show you how much ego you have, and those who want to attack your own credibility are actually those who need the most love and attention.
See yourself as a blank canvas who is strong enough for this energetic uplifting to occur. No need to take it personally, it was YOU who chose to embody this path remember? You’re more than capable, and what you’re doing is a great honor.
You can communicate with the whole of the human race through telepathy
Through your inner knowing you can tell people about their inner riches or of the higher truths through telepathy. Trust me you are that sharp.
This may be why you seem sludgy and strange to those who are used to the same old repetitive conversations; when they meet someone who lives in truth yet is processing so much in one go (the timelines a person is admitting to themselves and not simultaneously) you can see why communication for an empath can be a strain.
So instead of trying to wow anyone with complex theories of the universe, stick to simply being. Be with them and find the correct energetic space with which to help them – basically raise your frequency – and let them do all the talking. Then, when you ‘see’ or hear a deception just mirror and stay in the receptive mode.
You can also communicate telepathically with them – you already are on one level whether you’re aware of it or not – and implant good thoughts by consciously thinking about things you admire about them either during the conversation or after it in a sort of remote healing. They will work the rest out on their own.
Implanting love through eye contact
The downside of a narcissistic relationship, the one that so many empaths fall prey to in their beginning stages, is that it dents the empath’s confidence to spread the love they’re capable of spreading.
Simply by raising your frequency as you walk down the street you can catch the eye of people you pass and ‘implant’ all of them (or even one makes a good days work) with that frequency. Sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie doesn’t it? But as a person who is highly sensitive to energy you will know how this works.
Transcending self and bridging the gap between non-physical and physical existence
If the ego is baited by these various exchanges of energy, then the authentic self of the empath is actually rooted in nothingness. By deflecting every dig or hook others try to bait you with, you are aligning with the archetype or path of a prophet, or compassion consciousness.
Compassion consciousness is the light in your heart and the space you discover when you come into alignment with yourself. There, you discover there is no self, only a familiar humor and high-flying optimism like that of a wise old child.
It’s hard, I know. Especially when the empath also needs love. But you can be rest assured that your spirit guides and support network beyond the veil will be there for you whenever you need them.
Part of the path of being a lightworker is being lonely, and you will get tired. But the lesson this life wants you to learn is how to refill your own energetic cup by aligning directly with the Whole, directly with Source.
You are the eternal parent and can be humbled by not receiving that nurturing back from others in your direct experience. Yet that doesn’t mean you’re not being nurtured by someone. Do your days work and then curl up and recharge, there goes another day on the front row seat of the planetary awakening. You’re so excited you got the ticket, and deep down you know you’re doing great.
Did you know that in your self-less acts you are actually bridging the gap between the non-physical planes and the physical ones? Like a medium you are bringing humanity closer to the higher knowledge gained when people continue on into death. In this way you are also bringing us closer to transcending death because in our awakening to those higher abilities we are better able to understand our role in the voluntary death process.
You are acting as an empowerment role model and, although it may not always seem like it, you are making a huge difference.
So there we have it, your five superpowers… and I’m sure there are many more just waiting there to be discovered and harnessed. Sounds much better than the usual empathy curse, don’t you think?
Here are some Super Powers of Highly Empathic People
“None attains to Ultimate Truth until a thousand honest people have called him a heretic.” ~ Junaid
Crazy wisdom, practiced by the crazy adepts of Tibetan Buddhism, the Avadhutas of Hinduism, and the sacred clowns of tribal cultures, has been called radical, inexplicable, and non-ordinary.
As far as a tool for spiritual guidance, it is one of the most unusual types. It is designed to shock the conventional mind and twist the conservative mind. It’s not for the faint of heart. Neither is it for the overly-logical or the overly-reasonable.
It is the personification of the Middle Way, a tool used for dancing on the razor’s edge between atypical and extra cognition, between extraordinary and meta-ordinary disposition.
It’s a meta-tool, for that matter, one that can crack open the entrenched, rigid, hardened head of ordinary, fixed thinking. Crazy wisdom is focused clowning, indirect teaching, covert extroversion-introversion, direct contrarianism, and overt ninjaneering gained through oblique action.
Rare is the person who can achieve such a state and maintain it through the inverted discipline that’s needed to fuel it. For much opprobrium must be endured and overcome, and one’s resilience tested in a thousand psychosocial ways.
Those capable of the uncanny abilities of crazy wisdom are polarity shifters, spinners, and twisters, laughing through anger, raging through laughter, tearing down the roof of typical thought through backwards logic and reasoning that opens secret doors, uncovers rabbit holes, and unveils wormholes.
But all of that comes after the basics, after the foundational fortitude necessary to uphold it has been forged through humorous fire. That being said, here are four simple ways crazy wisdom can be used to open your mind.
1) Purposefully go against societal norms
“There is a limit beyond which it is unhealthy for mankind to conceal truth in order not to offend those whose minds are closed.” ~ Sufi Haidar Gul
Call it non-conformity, call it counter-cultural, call it being contrarian, call it what you will – going against societal norms is a mind opener, it forces the idle mind out of its diurnal stupor.
It shocks the immediate tribe’s ordinary sensibilities while challenging widely held beliefs. When used as a daily tool for leveraging open-mindedness, it can do wonders for your creativity and imagination.
Practicing going against societal norms can be as simple as practicing misfortune, as the stoic Seneca did, or as complex as strategically breaking outdated laws through eccentric action in order to reveal how petty the justice system is in the grand scheme of things.
It could be as simple as opposing orthodox, secular, and religious authorities through basic disobedience, or as complex as positioning yourself inside a bolted down fiberglass pyramid in the center of an Occupy Wallstreet protest, meditating with a sign hanging around your neck that reads, “When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.”
2) Alternate between opposites
“A spiritual teacher must be a person who can be totally balanced, but not one who cannot help but be balanced.” ~ Tokusan
In order to challenge fixed ideas and assumptions, sometimes you have to dance between opposites, alternating between harmony and opposition, piety and impiety, mortification and indulgence. Sometimes you have to make opposites shift polarities in order to keep yours and your immediate tribe’s mind open.
Whether through contradiction, negation, or paradoxical statements and actions, moving deftly between opposites is a powerful way to test your own discipline and open your eyes to spiritual truths that could not have been seen through typical modes of perception.
Alternating between opposites, whether through words or actions, is designed to bypass the rational mind in order to engage with mindfulness and ultimately, no-mind.
The Ultimate Truth itself is primary; consequences and perceptions are secondary as such, the ramifications of switching, twisting, or off-setting opposites may be perceived by others as crazy, wild, or even amoral, but that matters little when compared to the fact that the dug-up truth revealed the absurdity, shallowness, or superficiality of the situation.
3) Attack the derivative and secondary through indirect teaching
“A tactful teacher is no teacher at all.” ~ Zen Saying
Sometimes in order to break through fixed biases, you must use the deceptive tactics that attack the derivative of a situation in order to reveal deeper truths.
Rather than care what others think of you, focus on the primary objective of truth while attacking the secondary subjective bias, using indirect methods of teaching, such as incurring blame or using consciously controlled anger for dynamic purposes in order to upset the apple cart of fixed assumptions.
Feigning a bad temper can be quite effective in indirectly attacking the secondary in order to reveal the primary of a given situation. It’s deceptive, sure, but it’s deception with higher purpose which most people won’t see at first (and may never see) but which has the potential to grow inside someone like a seed, into truthful fruition.
Whether feigning anger, incurring blame, or behaving like an eccentric, a wielder of crazy wisdom uses these as tools of indirect teaching in order to obtain a truthful revelation that could not have been attained in another way. Most important of all is to have fun in the process of revealing truth.
You may appear to be at variance with society because of your paradoxical actions, but it is in order to reveal that perception is always the paradox. As Mulla Nasrudin said, “Enjoy yourself, or try to learn that you will annoy someone. If you do not – you will annoy someone.”
4) Use humor to turn obstacles upside down
“Humor cannot be prevented from spreading; it is a way of slipping through the patterns of thought which are imposed upon mankind by habit and design.” ~ Mulla Nasrudin
This one is also an exercise in stoicism. Turning obstacles upside down flips the dynamic – bad becomes good, unhealthy is transformed into healthy, the obstacle becomes the path. In order to effectively do this, you need a good sense of humor.
Luckily that’s the cornerstone of crazy wisdom. There is neither good nor bad to those practicing crazy wisdom, but perception makes it so. As long as you are in control of perception and can focus on extrapolating the positive from the negative, then everything appears simply as an opportunity.
As Marcus Aurelius said, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
At the end of the day, violating accepted norms, tipping cultural apple carts, shocking superficiality into greater mystery, is all smoothed out through the sacred humor employed by the crazy wisdom teacher. Sacred humor is the lifeblood of crazy wisdom. It’s the polestar and the lodestone of eccentrism. Without it, your craziness isn’t wise, it’s just plain crazy.
With it, however, your craziness can launch you past the paradox of perception and into a heightened state of awareness where you are able to glimpse the true character of a situation, and although your crazy humor may be at odds with societal norms, your higher understanding of the overall Infinite Game of life absolves you of your variance within the petty Finite Games comprised of fixed thinking, ignorant biases, and rigid beliefs.
Crazy wisdom points the only way toward enlightenment – having a good sense of humor, which is usually masked by a thousand layers of cultural conditioning. Crazy wisdom has a way of reconditioning these conditions.
As Chogyam Trungpa said, “The only thing to do is to quite painfully, unmask.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.” ~ Plato
Believe it or not, compassion is a consciousness. A floor level on which we must raise our elevators to. Compassion can become a practice, and a vibration with which we tune ourselves in to.
Much like a radio dial, everything in this universe has a certain frequency and once we tune ourselves in the first few times, we can easily recognise the sensations we experience from residing in that particular station.
But compassion is a powerful thing. It’s no coincidence that masters of life the world over teach that compassion is the highest goal we can achieve. Compassion cuts through density and shadow like nothing else, and for those who have had a hard time of it, it can literally save your life.
If you take just one step to pull yourself out of the sludge (or over-complexity of life) and into bliss, then make it this. Make it your task to see the world through a compassionate lens.
Once we practice seeing through the lens, we may discover that the lens was actually our true and unaltered selves in the first place. This ‘consciousness’ is inside every one of us literally waiting to be unlocked.
Here are three good places you can begin your transformation and search for that inherent compassion consciousness waiting for you within:
Have compassion for yourself and the rest will follow
Our inner voice can be transformed from a critic into a loving, nurturing parent once we practice compassion for ourselves. Seeing yourself as a third person or taking it upon yourself to ‘enter’ memories of hurt as your new compassionate adult self to stand up for the child who was wounded, can be fun ways to practice compassion.
If compassion begins as the radio station we tune to during meditative practice, then after a while it becomes second nature. And that is when we realize that compassion is our true nature.
In fact, observing the breath or focusing on a sound like the hum of the air conditioning is another fantastic way to switch off the mind precisely because it allows the true self and pure consciousness to flood back in. In halting the flow of thoughts we allow compassion consciousness to say ‘hello there, I thought (excuse the pun) you’d forgotten about me’.
The true nature of mind IS compassion consciousness, and when we practice operating from a place where time dissolves and our fight or flight is silenced, then we automatically tune to the radio dial of compassion. A radio station that actually IS our innate and ever-present selves.
“Sex is the seed, love is the flower, compassion is the fragrance.” ~ Osho
Remember the human behind each face you look in to
Although it may seem like doing this removes the complexity and colour surrounding each soul, we can unlock compassion consciousness through shedding the layers of judgment that attach themselves to material appearance.
A practice is to suspend all attachments entirely; to the rudeness of the person in front of you, to their anger, to their dismissal of you, to their dislike of the world around them. Part of the path to compassion is in becoming so unimaginably sensitive to this web of intricate non-verbal signals that we slurp them up like a sponge and become unable to see where we end and the other begins.
BUT, this is a gift because in experiencing the extreme we are more likely to then arrive at the core of every being we interact with.
Many people across the globe play the victim or the wounded ego and become awful people… just awful terrible people who are unkind, selfish, unfriendly and what those who haven’t put down their duality lens yet might even describe as evil.
Is this ‘evil’ a portrait of their personality; a fixed archetypal-like montage of their past lives to date?
Or could it be a collection of traces from the experiences they have attracted in their current life, ones which are doggedly following them about no matter how hard they try to shake free of them?
Are they carrying these traces because they ARE evil or have they just not found a way to put down that burden yet? Is there even such a thing as personality, or is there simply alignment or non-alignment with the Whole and pure consciousness?
In making the choice to see the raw human in everyone we look into, we chose not only compassion for those with leprosy or those who are obviously persecuted in an attempt to make ourselves look good to the external or the crowd.
We also chose to reflect back to them their authentic self, which is perfect and loved and in alignment with the universe. Without preaching or becoming didactic, we chose the simplicity of compassion and love even those people we perceive as having the densest and most difficult energy.
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.” ~ Buddha
Smile and the world will smile with you
Humour is often the sparkliest treasure to be found in the chest of compassion consciousness. If existence can be discovered to reside on the knife edge between survival and everything being a joke, then laughter helps us come back down to earth.
What IS, is the perfect balance between the ridiculous and the solemn, and without both simultaneously juggling on the rope of direct experience, we fall off.
Not taking yourself too seriously extends to even smiling in the face of our own death. And we invariably do, because that is one of the few times we get so close to pure compassion consciousness.
When the veil is thinnest. Imagine crossing back over into non-physical experience only to kick yourself that you let yourself become too serious and forgot the flippancy of the whole thing. When time gets too important for you then that’s a sure fire sign that you need to meditate on death a little to get your perspective back in place.
Laughter dissolves time and allows you to swim in the beauty of pure presence. Being like a child allows you to align with (or remind yourself of) compassion consciousness; you tread that fine line between reverence and irreverence at the world around you as it comes spinning towards your face. This is why it can help to view the universe as holographic or an illusion… or as a simulation of your choosing.
Take your eye off it for a second and the whole thing will get too big for its boots and creates only more worlds of suffering. The simulation knows that the brighter you chose to shine, the better you thin the veil between physical and non-physical.
Compassion consciousness is something we pass on, because the moment you start living it, is the moment it spreads through those non-verbals. Everyone is like a sponge, whether they’re aware of it or not, and energy vampirism is just a way of explaining the opposite of what we really want to happen.
What we really want to do as a species is share and expand and unlock the consciousness that we know is waiting there to be discovered.
Like a ripple of light we are all egging each other on to GO THERE. Ironically, it’s only a matter of time.
“In the light of the near-death experience, death is nothing more than the illusion of separateness and finality, and those who can believe in this vision of death, like near-death experiencers themselves, lose all fear of it, for how can you fear that which does not exist?” ~ Dr. Kenneth Ring
Most of us purposefully forget the experiences of the afterlife so that we can better submerge ourselves in the complexities of life in order to achieve great heights and cherish life as much as we can.
Perhaps we are encouraged to swallow the pill of amnesia in order to avoid topping ourselves, for if we remembered how wonderful non-physical was in comparison to the hellish-like states of mind chatter most human adults put themselves through, then we’d surely all race to return to it.
However, what we do all have memory of when we put some effort in, is that life is a gift and our physical reality is one of pure joy; that is if we allow ourselves to experience it as such.
What accounts of the afterlife do, if anything, is to treat us to a little reminder that we must make the most of it, and try to approach life as a child; with loving innocence and an attitude of exploration.
Here are 4 common accounts that people experiencing near-death have brought back with them, accounts that remind us to breathe as if it were our last:
The visitation of deceased loved ones, Spirit Guides or ascended masters
‘There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.’
An atheist Neurosurgeon fell into a coma when the e. coli bacteria flooded his brain and he lay in a vegetative state for several days.
When he awoke he reported that he had travelled to another dimension in the clouds where angel-like beings told him simple but loving messages. These messages included things like ‘You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever,’ and ‘You have nothing to fear.’
Many have reported that, on their way to death, they were spoken to by loved ones who had passed beyond the veil and gone non-physical decades before this experience. These loved ones or benevolent angels always had messages of hope and kindness, but also urged those experiencing this to make the most of life and for the person to return to their body and make a shift in attitude or to turn over a new leaf.
These people then returned to their bodies, knowing that it was not their time, and began the work they had really came here to do.
Many people have reported a life review that supposedly happens at the moment of death. It is meant to happen in a human heartbeat, but stretches in time so that the person experiences every single interaction and individual they have encountered in that lifetime simultaneously.
There are also reports that people re-experience both their emotional reaction at the time as well as the emotional reaction of the person they were interacting with.
Seeing the body below them
‘The further out of my body I got, the more clear the tone became. I had the impression it was like a road, a frequency that you go on … I remember seeing several things in the operating room when I was looking down. It was the most aware that I think that I have ever been in my entire life …’
Pam Reynolds became brain dead whilst undergoing surgery and experienced watching her body being operated on and going towards a bright light. One of the most interesting things that she describes is how coming back into her body was like being submerged into ice.
Other accounts of taking that distinct step from physical to non-physical include the sensation of being released from brambles or being lost in some dark woods and then, of the relief of suddenly finding yourself home again.
The account of Steve Gardipee of his near-death experience whilst fighting in the Vietnam war is interesting, not only because of the emotion he expresses when relaying the experience but also because of his succinct descriptions.
He describes how he experiences an intense and beautiful light and how he experiences the duality of being both a creator being and part of the whole yet simultaneously acknowledging that he is a tiny fragment of something mind blowingly big; something that the human mind or singular consciousness cannot understand on its own.
Despite the obviously Christian interpretation of an experience of a male God (perhaps we see what we believe), it’s particularly touching as he expresses how there isn’t a speck of darkness in heaven and that all there is for everyone is love.
He also points out that this is not in line with the God he was taught about and that the presence he experienced showed him his own ability to control his own life and the true essence of free will.
So, whether you believe in near-death experience and these accounts of the afterlife or not, you have to admit they’re pretty prevalent… and strangely familiar. They could be fabrications or flights of fancy. Perhaps they’re projections of the mind; dream states which occur when the body is shutting down for the last time.
My rational mind always pipes up when I read about such things, trying to deny them or wrap them in a healthy dose of cynicism, but then I remember the death I experienced (not first hand) but witnessed as a child and recall the sensations or love and reassurance and know (that there just might be), some truth to them.
“The more your words come true, the more you will feel yourself to be full of some Divine power, some siddhi—the power to do miracles.” ~ Osho
A couple of years ago, I traveled to Rishikesh in the Northern part of India to undertake my initial yoga teacher training course. There were several classes every day, including practicing Hatha and Ashtanga yoga, as well as mantras and meditation.
Around midday, right after lunch, we would gather in the yogashala with notebooks and pens for the most cerebral of our classes: yogic philosophy. It was during one of these afternoons that I heard a phrase that was forever burned into my mind: the invisible flying yoga army.
I had to laugh at the time because the thought seemed preposterous. As I’ve learned more about the science of Yoga as a whole, however, I have found information in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that points to this kind of phenomenon.
What are the Siddhis?
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are 196 sutras, or aphorisms, compiled at some point before 400 CE. In them, Patanjali describes the eight limbs of Yoga, and includes a section on the siddhis, which appear to be plainspoken directions on obtaining supernormal abilities, including invisibility and levitation.
According to Patanjali, the siddhis are not magical powers that belong in a fantasy novel, but real abilities anyone can develop through concentrated meditation and asana practice.
“Meditation will bring back the powers and awareness from the past; more importantly, it will expand your consciousness today.” ~ Frederick Lenz
According to the Yoga Sutras, there are three general levels of siddhis: inferior, secondary, and primary. Anyone who has studied the largely untapped potential of the human brain has likely brushed up against some modern interpretations of the siddhis.
Psychic abilities such as mind-to-mind communication, the ability to see into the past or the future, an imperviousness to the elements, and an unconquerable nature are all examples of the ‘inferior’ siddhis. Many people already possess one or more of these abilities to some degree.
Samyama and the art of development
As you progress along a spiritual path, the practice of samyama will emerge. Literally translated, samyama means binding, and refers to the combination of dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (unio
n with the Divine).
Patanjali says that the secondary siddhis will naturally begin to blossom with the sustained practice of samyama. Here, things start to get pretty extraordinary.
“When samyama is done on the form of one’s own physical body, the illumination or visual characteristic of the body is suspended, and is thus invisible to other people.” ~ Yoga Sutras 3.21
And so we have the invisible part of my philosophy teacher’s invisible flying army. How is this possible? I think it helps here to reflect on one of the more basic principles of yoga.
While there are many ways to interpret the salutation namaste, one of the most common is this: the Divine in me recognizes and alludes the Divine in you, and when you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, there is only one of Us.
This implies, then, that when inhabiting that place, we are in communion not just with each other’s Divinity, but with Divinity as a whole. Our truest, most essential nature is that of Spirit. Everything other than that is a layer, from our gross form (our body) all the way up to the idiosyncrasies of our egos.
So, one interpretation of this sutra is that when we are able to come into true union, the necessity of visibility in our gross form becomes just another layer that we drop.
The Siddhis as more than physical superpowers
John McAfee, author of Beyond the Siddhis, has another interpretation of this sutra. McAfee urges his readers to look at this and other siddhis in a less literal sense. “Before we spend years practicing the formula for attainment that Patanjali provides,” he writes, “we might first ask ourselves how visible we are now.” Of course, in a purely temporal sense we are all clearly visible. One glance at your hand on the mousepad is evidence of that.
When we look at ourselves in the spiritual sense, however, the answer to that question gets more complicated. The face that we reveal to the world is—to some degree or another—made up of our past experiences, our expectations of ourselves and others, and various roles that we have agreed to adopt (consciously or otherwise). This conglomeration of stories is what we make most visible to those around us.
“Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.” ~ Ken Wilber
Here, again, we can see how dropping the layers that surround our Divinity can lead to invisibility in the spiritual sense, if not in the gross sense.
When we recognize and join in union with our own sense of Divinity — and in turn that of every other being’s — our identity, our story, becomes invisible. In that place, I am no longer a 31 year old female divorcee who drinks too much coffee and writes about yoga. I simply Am. That’s all. I Am. The same as you. Or the Dalai Lama. Or Donald Trump.
What could this mean for the other siddhis?
When viewed from this kind of perspective, the other siddhis take on a new dimension. For example, in Yoga Sutra 3.25, Patanjali writes, “By samyama on the strength of elephants comes a similar strength.” By putting the gross interpretation of this aside, this sutra can indicate an extreme strength of spirit.
Yoga Sutra 3.23 promises that you can attain foreknowledge of your death. When we look at the true nature of life, however, it becomes clear that every moment contains its own set of deaths. “Media vita in morte sumus,” or “In the midst of life we are in death,” is the first line of a medical antiphon. Every second, our cells die—and are reborn. When we are aware of this fact, we are constantly in touch with death.
So, that invisible flying army of yogis? Men and women who reside in their Divinity without the pretense of ego, or heaviness of heart. If you ask me, that’s one heck of a superpower.
“There is a limit beyond which it is unhealthy for mankind to conceal truth in order not to offend those whose minds are closed.” ~ Sufi Haidar Gul
Sometimes in order to break through fixed biases, you must use the deceptive tactics that attack the derivative of a situation in order to reveal deeper truths.
Luckily that’s the cornerstone of crazy wisdom. There is neither good nor bad to those practicing crazy wisdom, but perception makes it so. As long as you are in control of perception and can focus on extrapolating the positive from the negative, then everything appears simply as an opportunity.
and levitation.
