--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > "Any more exactitude to the answer, especially down to a > > yes/no is too much ensconced in a materialistic worldview. > > The rarity of siddhis makes them more mysterious, it's the > > loving intimacy that matters most, devotion." > > When it comes to demonstrating sidhis, yes/no is the ONLY > criteria that matter.
I would agree. It's *exactly* the same scenario as Off bragging about how Shotokan karate guys are "the best" and could kick anyone else's ass. Empty, self-important rhetoric until they actually DO kick some ass. As Cuba Gooding might say, "Show me the money!" Show us the levitation, don't talk about it and theorize about it. > And it matters even more if a professional magician is > in the room cuz they can smell the bullshit that Buddha > only dreamed of. Again, I'd be the first to agree. It would be good to hear a professional magician try to explain away some of the levitation I saw the Rama guy do, because it often took place "on the fly," in circumstances where "apparatus" didn't seem a possibility. I mean, we've hiked out into the desert for three hours, and the guy is wearing nothing more than shorts and a T-shirt and hiking boots, carrying nothing, and he just stops in the middle of an open space with nothing around him that could even be *used* as "apparatus" (the nearest trees or cliffs from which to string wires were half a mile away). And yet the dude just steps up off the sand and walks around for a few minutes, a foot above the ground. Or in a Denny's at 3 a.m., deserted except for him and a few of his students and one waitress. Rama didn't even *choose* the Denny's in question; I did, because I was driving us back from somewhere and needed some coffee. So the waitress gives us all our coffee and then asks if we need anything more, and when we say no she ducks out the front door and goes around to the side of the building, out of sight, to smoke a cigarette. Rama grins at us and just lifts up off the genuine naugahyde of the Denny's booth and hangs there in mid-air for a few seconds, sipping his coffee. Everybody cracks up and laughs, which was probably the point of the stunt. Curtis, I'm *more* than open to suggestions from you or anyone else as to how these things could have been "staged" by a magician. I don't see that as being a relevant option when trying to "explain away" this particular guy's levitations. The idea of being somehow "hypnotized" into seeing these things might be more relevant, except that over the years, almost *none* of the instances of siddhis I and other people saw were "suggested" or "announced" ahead of time. It was as if the guy was purposefully *avoiding* anything that could later be regarded as suggestion. He'd just DO them, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, to catch everyone by surprise. So have at it, dude. I wish you'd been there in the desert at the time, and could bring your know- ledge of stage magic to the table. I have *tried* over the years -- Lord knows I've tried -- to come up with some way to rationalize these experiences away and write them off to some trick, and damnit I can't. They -- WHATEVER they were -- happened, and I'm stuck with having seen them. Believe me, that is FAR scarier and harder to live with than being able to explain them away as some kind of trick or hallucination.
