Shouldn't full enlightenment include the ability to perform miracles?

reply to post by aaaiii

Text You sound like you want to be God. Isn't that a little presumptuous?
[/quote
Assumptions on your part. My soul years to experience more of God, to taste union, enlightenment, and divine things. But to want to be God is most def some of the best foolishness heard in a while

reply to post by aaaiii

Text You sound like you want to be God. Isn't that a little presumptuous?

Assumptions on your part. My soul yearns to experience more of God, to taste union, enlightenment, and divine things. But to want to be God is most def some of the best foolishness heard in a while

It is the light energy that emanates from the holy divine being,
that can reline and kick start the healing process in another being.

when someone is this state of divinity ..just being in that persons presence is all that is needed if you are open to receiving such grace.

a healer does not do the healing ...they simply become the vessel so the healing energy can move through them and out into reality.

enlightenment is "now"

and you do not know when you are in that timeless state..... you only know when you are not

reply to post by dominicus


The fully enlightened certainly can perform miracles. Reality is practically at their finger tips; they can open the program so to speak, and manipulate its coding in any way they please.

But an enlightened soul is not driven by ego and false pride any longer. They have no need to prove themselves to others for fame or fortune.

That doesnt mean they will not help you if you ask, though. Many enlightened souls throughout the ages have healed people of various afflictions that have asked to be healed. The same happens today. You just dont hear about because it refuses to be pigeonholed by science into an easily definable and reproducible action; thus, to science, and the West, it does not exist.

some thoughts to ponder......

performing miracles was nearly commonplace during the time of Jesus. Caesar was also said to have healed people. it was expected of great people as part of the mythology of the day.

buddhism: "walking on water isn't worth the $1.50 it would cost to take the ferry". one interpretation: miracles are the manipulation of phenomena which are all illusory anyway. buddhists say to stay away from magicians and tricksters.

i agree with the poster about the enlightened having "nothing to prove". with the understanding that comes with enlightenment, im guessing the individual has better things to do with and better ways to focus their mental efforts. id imagine the phenomenal world would become something to let go of and not a thing at all, really.....

do you think that Jesus walked on water? it bothers me about christianity that this issues even matters when what came out of his mouth was infinitely more important than where he walked. see- another reason not to perform miracles.....they're just too powerful for people to handle, and i know this from having witnessed at least two.

I think you have brought up an interesting question but the question behind your question is: "what is real?" to answer it one way there are 2 Truths- that everything exists and that nothing exists. just find the razor's edge between them and you'll be fine. (some help huh....? lol)

reply to post by LifeIsEnergy

if someone follows the Buddha's path to a T, he will not find what the Buddha found? Again, hmmm... a lot of monks are wasting their time then huh

Nope, the journey, the experience is what is important, not the destination. Nothing is a waste of time, except for intentional time wasters like television. But, how many more Buddhas have there been? How many more Jesuses? I think a whole lot of people toss the "enlightened" term around without having any idea what it really means. And, I agree with the OP, I think a truly enlightened person has become god-like, and that person could perform miraculous feats that seem to defy what we know of physics and universal laws. The reason they could defy those, is because our knowledge is limited to human perception, but a god-like entity would know all the secrets of the universe, and they could perform beyond our human understanding, and the perception from our viewpoint would seem miraculous or beyond the known physical realms.

reply to post by BlueMule

I am enlightened. Everything makes sense to me. But that doesn't mean I know what everyone had for dinner last night. It means I have a higher order of knowledge.

We are all enlightened. I learn something new every day, and it makes me more enlightened, but I have not reached enlightenment, and neither have you. I don't care what you think you understand, but I am 100% certain that you are not enlightened, and I am also 100% certain that no amount of "studying" can make a person enlightened. You have to experience the world to become enlightened, not just study the ancients. In fact, if you and a homeless guy were to race to enlightenment, I think he would have a head start on you. No offense intended, but the experience is much more valuable than the knowledge.

Originally posted by getreadyalready
reply to post by LifeIsEnergy

 

if someone follows the Buddha's path to a T, he will not find what the Buddha found? Again, hmmm... a lot of monks are wasting their time then huh

Nope, the journey, the experience is what is important, not the destination. Nothing is a waste of time, except for intentional time wasters like television. But, how many more Buddhas have there been? How many more Jesuses?

Jesus and the Buddha were mystics. Every mystic who reaches a certain stage of development is equivalent to them. And psychic abilities ("miracles") come with the territory. Every mystical tradition has noted that.

Interesting thought. Separate the wheat from the chaff kind of thing. Is there such thing as full enlightenment? I learned a long time ago that once one level is attained, there is yet another level above that. I would say that if you think you are enlightened then you probably aren't. It is something one just knows and, as others have said, when one is on the path to enlightenment, there is no need for ego.

But, consider Siddhis

Siddhi (Devanagari सिद्धि; IAST: siddhi; Tibetan: དངོས་གྲུབ, Wylie: dngos grub[1]) is a Sanskrit noun that can be translated as "perfection", "accomplishment", "attainment", or "success".[2] The term is first attested in the Mahabharata. In the Pancatantra, a siddhi may be any unusual skill or faculty or capability.

The 8 primary Siddhis

Aṇimā: reducing one's body even to the size of an atom
Mahima: expanding one's body to an infinitely large size
Garima: becoming infinitely heavy
Laghima: becoming almost weightless
Prāpti: having unrestricted access to all places
Prākāmya: realizing whatever one desires
Iṣṭva: possessing absolute lordship
Vaśtva: the power to subjugate all

en.wikipedia.org...

While the wiki version isn't exactly as I learned them, it comes close. Much like enlightenment, siddhis are not to be sought after but rather, unfold as one travels their path. Pertinent to the OP is the translation noted above-"perfection", "attainment." This seems to suggest that the OP is correct in the supposition, however I think the key word is full. As I said earlier, their is no full as there are always more levels, just a matter of degrees with people of a higher degree being able to do neat tricks.

Most of what Is being said is pie-in-the-sky idealistic nonsense. One doesn't gain god like powers to manipulate the physical world in the way it is being suggested. Metaphorically, perhaps.

Originally posted by getreadyalready

We are all enlightened.

No, we're not.

I learn something new every day, and it makes me more enlightened, but I have not reached enlightenment, and neither have you.

Yes, I have.

I don't care what you think you understand, but I am 100% certain that you are not enlightened, and I am also 100% certain that no amount of "studying" can make a person enlightened.

I never said it could.

You have to experience the world to become enlightened, not just study the ancients. In fact, if you and a homeless guy were to race to enlightenment, I think he would have a head start on you. No offense intended, but the experience is much more valuable than the knowledge.

You are assuming stuff. Just because I have studied a great deal doesn't mean I'm not a mystic. I am a mystic and I've united with God and God became me. I've pierced the veil of Maya. I've taken the red pill and escaped the illusion of the Matrix, so to speak. I have been a vehicle for 'miracles' to enter the world. I'm a Buddha, a brother of Jesus, a son of God, a star child. I've united with Atman, and through Atman...Brahman.

reply to post by BlueMule


Fine. I'll take you at your word, and if your word is true then I would love the opportunity to learn from you, experience your presence and see how I can grow from having known you. You've become one with God, and that is what I wish to attain also. You surely have much free time as your earthly bounds are voluntary at this point, and your purpose here is only to instruct and share, so please let me know when, where, and how we can get together. If I sound facetious it is not intentional, this is an honest plea for help. There are many things in my life I do not have control over, but I want to, and there are many areas I have influence and need, and I feel I can change the world for the better, and I would appreciate your coaching and mentoring to help me have the impact I am destined to have.

PM me if you are interested.

Not sure. Becoming like Buddha and Christ seems that for some they would be able to heal, and walk on water, that miracles in space/time could occur. But the answer just given inside is different. Even Christ and Buddha died, after all, though ascension is a part of our instructions.

What just opened inside me was the knowledge that we are in a matrix school and there are boundaries to the outlines and events, a kind of rules (not just dark side ones), that govern this reality, a structure. And I don't believe it is the goal of everyone to pursue the meltdown of the structure of the school itself.

In fact it reminded me of discussions with a friend online the other day. He was very close in his meditation to achieving a state, his goal is unlocking. He actually had a similiar goal to my own when attempting to pursue the lucid dreaming and astral, and that is to time slip. To be capable of enhancing learning, say 6 months in 2 hours, or more. And there are some who speak of this, so its not an impossible goal. But the underlying goal is full awakening.

I'm not at all convinced that is why your soul is here. The reason is this, Souls already have those abilities. Why would they chain rays of themselves in lead body suits to wake up to their abilities.

Instead, an infinite diamond soul, with facets/faces, some very clear and shining Light, and some imperfect still with cloudiness, so, souls are learning to perfect themselves, grow, shine.

Given a choice between spending hours attempting activation, and becoming superman in the system, OR stuggling to overcome an area that seems blocked within, making a life change or creating a different job to enable one to outflow abundance to others, or help those in need, make the world a happier place, attempt to outreach to a broken heart, or even saving a life if possible. Thinking in terms of which would you rather spend time on? Why did you soul send forth the ray?

These questions are well worth bringing to your Soul in meditation and asking about them.

It's worth remembering that when Jesus healed, the faith of the person in question was a factor. He didn't heal the faithless. The state-of-mind of the people around him was part of the inner alchemy of miracles. We are one.

This is a dynamic that parapsychologists call the sheep-goat effect. When skeptics participate in ESP tests, they have a scoring pattern. They score below chance, in accord with their expectations...in accord with their lack of faith. They are 'goats'.

When 'sheep', or believers, participate in ESP tests, they have a scoring pattern too. They score above chance expectations. Faith is psi-conducive. Doubt is psi-inhibitive. Miracles are manifestations of psi.

Both goats and sheep are using psi. They are literally performing miracles. WE ALL CAN. But their difference in mental attitude is part of the inner alchemy, and it determines which archetype of the collective unconscious and which aspect of the archetype will shape the miracle. The trickster or the healer?

'What the thinker thinks, the prover proves' -RAW

Pioneering Parapsychologist Gertrude Schmeidler Has Died
Dr. Charles T. Tart on May 5th, 2009

I just found out that a parapsychologist colleague of mine, Gertrude Schmeidler, died last month (1912-2009). I say colleague rather than friend, for while we were friendly there was a great age range difference so we never got to know each other well.

Gertrude made one of the most important discoveries ever in parapsychology, one with strong spiritual implications and one which I think none of the spiritual traditions knows about, for while it's something that can happen in everyday life, it's pretty much unobservable except under laboratory conditions. She gave many classes of students ESP tests, guessing at concealed cards, but, before giving or scoring the tests, she had students fill out questionnaires that asked, among other things, whether they believed in ESP.

When she analyzed the results separately for the believers – the "sheep" – and the non-believers – the "goats" – she found a small, but significant difference. The sheep got more right than you would expect by chance guessing, they were occasionally using ESP. The goats, on the other hand, got significantly fewer right than you would expect by chance.

Think of it this way. If you were asked to guess red or black with ordinary playing cards, no feedback until you'd done the whole deck, you would average about 50% correct by chance. If you got 100% correct, you don't need statistics to know that would be astounding. But if you got 0%? Just as astounding!

The sheep thought they could do it, they got "good" scores, they were happy. The goats knew there was no ESP, nothing to get, they got poor scores, they were happy, that "proved" their belief. These were not people who were sophisticated enough about statistics to know that scoring below chance could be significant….

Many other experimenters replicated this effect over the years.

The only way I've ever been able to understand it is to think that the goats occasionally used ESP, but on an unconscious level, to know what the next card was and then their unconscious, acting in the service of their conscious belief system, influenced them to call anything but the correct one. The goats used a "miracle" to support their belief that there were no such things as miracles….

Talk about living in samsara, in a state of illusion!

"I believe and I become." -Bruce Lee

This might provide some of you with food for thought.

"It is true that certain psychic faculties capable of a worldly application, such as the Dibba-cakkhu (clairvoyance), Dibba-sota (clairaudience), Mano-Maya-Kaya (projection of the ‘astral body’) and other paranormal powers are developed in the course of Buddhist meditation. . . .The Buddha and the Arhats possessed such powers and when need arose they exercised them for the sake of the ignorant who demanded ‘signs and wonders.’ But in general the Buddha deplored their use, preferring to spread the Dhamma by the ‘miracle of teaching’ and the self-propagating power of truth. To those not yet fully emancipated from worldly delusion they can become attachment-forming faculties, and as such have to be guarded against and overcome in the struggle for Nibbanna. In the Buddhist view, one who embarks on concentration exercises to obtain supernormal powers (Iddhi) is doing so with the wrong intention and at great danger to himself. If all power corrupts, supernormal power can corrupt superlatively." (Mahathera, 1975, p.iv)

Source: Tibetan Psychic Traditions

There are many different kinds of psychic -spiritual "gifts" that enlightened people develop. Maybe when you become enlightened you will get one or more...probably not all...and maybe none. It doesn't matter. Only fools think that only enlightened people have psychic abilities and that every enlightened person would or should be able to demontrate them on demand for skeptics anywhere, anytime. It's not nearly that simple. Nothing ever is.

Pop-culture and exoteric religion have resulted in our culture having some pretty warped expectations of enlightened people. Not to mention stereotypes.

For the record, I still agree with the OP. I still have yet to meet a person that has truly reached enlightenment, and as par for the course, those that think they know the most are usually the ones farthest from the ultimate goal, because assumptions and knowledge only get in the way of true understanding. I don't fault them for their arrogance, they are just indoctrinated with education, which leads to close-mindedness. Experience leads to a more organic understanding and a profound realization of how much we don't know.

Socrates would have a field day with today's educated crowd.

For the record a little bit of synchronicity, a co-worker just sent me this quote, and it was for an entirely different reason, but pertinent to this thread.

"It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence" The Ethics of Belief (1879)
William Kingdom Clifford

Originally posted by getreadyalready
For the record, I still agree with the OP. I still have yet to meet a person that has truly reached enlightenment

Maybe you have but your expectations and sterotypes and so forth blind you.

I don't fault them for their arrogance, they are just indoctrinated with education, which leads to close-mindedness.

That's funny, I say the same sort of thing all the time to refer to unenlightened people who presume to know what enlightenment is all about, and then try to tell me all about what they think they know when I tell them I am enlightened.

Originally posted by dominicus
I'm posting this as an opinion and as an open discussion. In regards to many of the recent debates of what is/isn't Enlightenment, I have recently been thinking long and hard and it came to light that many Beings who people historically claimed where Enlightened, Jesus and Buddha for example, were able to perform miracles.

I'm talking healings, walking on water, levitation, power over physical death, and much much more based on historical claims of many other individuals.

Well, my opinion is that if you are Enlightened, you can show mastery over the laws of Nature and perform miracle like feats. I think thats the Ultimate objective proof.

If you dont believe miracles are possible, that your problem. I believe the things Jesus did and Buddha did where actual events and have myself experienced directly and factually many of their teachings into the nature of the mind and the inner worlds, so to me they were genuine.

So what's your take on miracles as proof?

There's no legitimate evidence that anyone has ever performed any of these miracles that you've pointed to. Period. The most esteemed biblical scholars agree that the entire Jesus narrative must be taken on faith alone, and no historian (that isn't being funded by an Evangelical "think tank") actually believes that there is any historical evidence that supports the gospel claims in any manner whatsoever.

Then again, as far as enlightenment is concerned, I don't even think that 5 people on this board can agree on exactly how to describe what it is (well, beyond the boilerplate crap that has been kicking around YouTube for the last several years that doesn't seem to be translatable into normal English language phraseology), so you have that issue to deal with before you start demanding fictitious acts of transcendence from anyone.

They say that the Age of Aquarius will do away with all that mystical esoteric foolishness, and if so, I wish it would hurry up and dawn already.

"Buddhism teaches that after a practitioner achieves a certain degree of realization, spiritual power develops. A person at the level of an Arhat is said to possess six supernatural powers. Even so, it is understood that it is through Enlightenment that supernatural powers are manifested, rather than that supernatural powers enhance Enlightenment. Furthermore, it is acknowledged as well that supernatural powers are not attainable exclusively JUST by Buddhists and Buddhists only. It is possible for anyone who has deep religious and spiritual cultivation to develop some kind of 'super-normal powers.'"

the-wanderling.com...

There are mystical experiences that rip you out of reality as we know it and strip away your identity. Then 'you' realize that 'there is no spoon', and that the ego-self is an illusion.

It's sort of like what happens to Neo after he takes the red pill. Prior to that, "Thomas Anderson" might have believed that reality is an illusion. But that belief didn't make him enlightened. Metaphorcally, taking the red pill did. Transcending his ego-self ("Thomas Anderson") and becoming something more, "Neo", did.

And even then, he wasn't through learning. He didn't see everything there was to see and learn everything there was to learn before he decided to go back in the Matrix, to become Thomas Anderson again, in his old neighborhood. The mystical experience wears off and you are back in your tiny body, in your tiny ego-self, in your old "reality". Kundalini energy floods your body and slowly you get grounded again, you grow accustomed to being human again. You get used to being in a body as the energy slowly drains.

So there was "Thomas Anderson", back in his old neighborhood, looking around with new eyes, learning to walk again. Learning to see the illusion as illusion in light of the larger reality he had been initiated into. If some skeptic on the street had ran up to him and demanded to see "miracles" that skeptic would probably have been disappointed. And yet, even so, Neo had a higher order of knowledge than that skeptic can imagine.

Enlightenment doesn't mean miracles on demand, and unenlightenment doesn't mean the trickster archetype can't act through you.

why, wouldn't an unenlightented person not be able to preform miracles?