Psychic Phenomena and Nonduality
Take advantage of slips of the veil
Siddhis are “powers” such as psychic hits, healing abilities, prophetic dreams. They exist, are real, and while they are more likely to be found in people who engage in spiritual practices, are often to be found among the mass of average joes as well. They are just facts of existence, but you’d have to be paying attention.
Many spiritual traditions warn against siddhis. Practitioners are told to ignore them, to keep eyes firmly on liberation, enlightenment, dissolution of self, nondual awakening etc. Distractions at best, ego traps at worst.
Not all spiritual traditions though. I spent the better part of a decade going to the Amazon yearly, training in Shamanism. Siddhis: healing, divination, spirit communication – are the path in shamanistic traditions.
Why be Wary
There are good reasons for traditional admonitions against siddhis. It’s easy to be hypnotized by them. The ego, the persistent sense of separation says: “Look what I can do.” And the wheel of samsara keeps spinning.
Even healing, which can feel noble, can be corrupting. The ability to affect others, to possess knowledge unavailable to regular people, can subtly or not so subtly reinforce the sense of self that gets deconstructed in nondual awakening.
The whole path of nonduality is the complete unraveling of conditioning around self, emotion, time, and space.
Yet
And yet, something not talked about much in traditional sources, is the ways in which these powers might help that unraveling.
Consider what happens during a genuine psychic hit, or what happens when you realize that the dream you had the night before spookily reflected what happened on that day. In these moments, the veil of consensus reality shifts, solid boundaries reveal themselves as permeable, provisional, constructed.
Each time the veil moves, conditioning gets released. The more you experience these slips in ordinary reality, the harder it becomes to maintain the conditioned illusions about how time, space, and perception work.
Nonduality and Psychic Phenomena
Those on the nondual path aim to see reality as it is, stripped of conception overlays. This means deconstructing conditioning on every level: the subject-object split, the separate self, the solidity and selfing of emotions, and assumptions about time and space.
Learning to spot psychic phenomena and the like can accelerate this deconstruction. They can serve as controlled explosions that crack the edifice of consensus reality, over and over again. Each of these experiences makes it harder to maintain the story that consciousness is confined to your skull, that the past is dead and the future is unmade, and that you’re fundamentally separate from the universe.
In that spirit, I have a new offering, an Intuition Foundations course, that will help you pay attention to life more, spot these cracks both in waking and dreaming life, and possibly help encourage a revolution in what you take to be reality. Learn more here: https://offer.sunship.space/90-day-intuition
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