I believe that Fred Travis' PhD thesis involved field effect studies on the TM Sidhis. That might be the research you're thinking of.
The problem is that up until now, all TM EEG research is on many-second averages of EEG coherence, and Yogic Flying and any field effects that might be associated with it, has been on 40-second averages. Microstate analysis looks at 1/10 to 1/50 of a second EEG, and sythesizes a kind of electrical field graph for the entire brain for each time-slice they analyze. Cool stuff, and has potential in all sorts of studies, like the EEG of the brain as a PC episode starts and ends, or even doing statistical analysis to see if short PC episodes increase in frequency in a nearby meditator when the hopping phase of Yogic Flying begins... http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/EEG_microstates#Event-related_microstates http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/EEG_microstates#Event-related_microstates ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote : (I think you meant "obviously not.") I mentioned it because I thought Bhairitu might find it of interest; he'd been talking about shakti being generated, for him, in connection with the TM-Sidhis.. It was just an experience; you're welcome to make of it what you will. I wasn't making any claims for it except that for me, the "tingle in the air" the flying sutra seems to generate might not be a placebo effect, because at that point (at my friend's house) I had never heard any suggestions along those lines, and I had no idea what my friend's program involved in terms of timing, i.e., at what point she would be using the flying sutra. The "tingle" was completely unexpected, I didn't know what might have been responsible, and it occurred to me what it likely was only in retrospect. (BTW, it wasn't "45 minutes." That was how long I waited after she'd gone into the room and closed the door before I started to meditate. The "tingles" toward the end of my meditation lasted only a few minutes.) I'm all for testing for "spooky stuff." You couldn't test this example using me as a subject, though, because I'm no longer "innocent." But sure, it would be interesting to test for shakti-like effects. Not sure why you'd need a Faraday cage; seems to me it would be interesting either way. Maybe shakti is electromagnetic in nature (if it exists, of course). (BTW, I believe there was at least one study of the EEG of a person meditating (or not?) at MIU while a large group was doing the TM-Sidhi program at Amherst. It reported specific EEG changes in the test subject that were coordinated with what the folks were doing in Amherst. The test subject wasn't aware of the timing. Maybe Lawson remembers more details of the study. Don't think a Faraday cage was used.) I really can't understand why you'd question my reporting a personal experience possibly involving some kind of woo-woo, or what you thought I had "given away" by doing so. You've reported a few of your own such experiences, as I recall. Have you ever questioned Barry about his reports of Fred Lenz levitating? Or Bhairitu about his reports of shakti during TM-Sidhis practice, for that matter? Did you think I had suggested it was anything but an anecdote, Salyavin? Obviously, but you implied it was a spooky event. The 45 minute experience when you didn't know what she was doing next door and then realising it was the same when you did YF, is what gave it away. Data about spooky events would be the most important scientific discovery ever, but no one wants to take it further. Things like this would be easy to test. We have a subject (you) a method by which it could be tested (comparisons between group YF and solo YF or just meditating). all you need is a Faraday cage and some positive results and you've rewritten human history. We don't take anecdotal data as evidence though, hence my remark. And I'm sure I could think of a few alternatives to rule out first.... Ah, if only the plural of anecdote was data... ---In [email protected], <authfriend@...> wrote : Thank you. How about his second question, do you have any comments on that? "I mean, in theory, just about anything could be seen as potentially a siddhi, when the action is performed by a fully enlightened person. What activities would provide better "stitches" between relative and absolute, do you think?" With regard to hopping and muscle power, I partly agree--my experience has been that I'm using my muscles, but they aren't being controlled by the usual brain pathways somehow. It's more like a sneeze or a knee-jerk reflex or a yawn. Like you, I'm no athlete, but hopping never tired me out. And it's definitely triggered by the sutra, which in my case fairly quickly became just an impulse of something like electricity, a little tingle, no discernible words. With a group that was actively hopping, that impulse seemed to be in the air from all the people who were generating it. Before I took the TM-Sidhis course, I was at the home of a friend who was a governor. We did our program before dinner; she went into another room and closed the door because she was doing the TM-Sidhis and I wasn't. I started meditating about 45 minutes later, and was surprised to suddenly feel that tingle, on and off. Had no idea what it was, it was totally unexpected. And I couldn't hear her hopping--I don't know if she actually was physically hopping, but I would have been feeling it while she was doing the flying sutra. It was only during my flying block that I realized it was the same tingle. Which question? The one about what siddhis were left out? I'm not sure the Patanjali even covered the Vamachari Siddhis which are what I learned in tantra. They are given out carefully because they can be misused. In fact the Maran siddhis are only learned to help people who have afflicted by someone misusing them (aka "black magic"). There have been tales of the sutras that were tested on the AofE courses that were left out, some with unpredictable results. BTW, I've never thought YF depended on muscular activity because I by no means am no athlete yet by no effort did I go zipping through the air. I also was not exhausted at the end of the practice. The siddhis created a blast of shakti with me however not as thick as butter as the guru mantra my tantric guru gave me.
