What book promised magical powers? How have you practiced recently?
I came into it after taking a class on Buddhism then went to a local Zen temple.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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I don't recall the title. Mind... somethingorother. It's been a long time.
But here's a big famous one that talks about it. The Yoga Philosophy of Patanjali ( https://a.co/d/76RM5jE ). It's towards the back. A chapter entitled supernormal powers.
Concentration (aka Samatha, Anapanasati, Samprajnata Dhyana) taken deep will deliver powers. But it also has downsides.
Nonconcentration (Shikantaza, Vipassana, Asamprajnata Dhyana) is better. But you kinda need to get good at concentration first and get a handle on what's involved.
(Used together is very powerful.)
I do Shikantaza these days.
(The Fluffy Cloud school has a nice succinct guide with pictures : http://fleen.org/fluffy_cloud )
Similar, actually.
Back around twelve, I rejected the ideas of Christianity, not out of a crisis of faith, but out of all the contradictions and hypocrisy I was seeing.
I ran into most of the usual religions over the next year or so, but also some less common ones, including wicca and neopaganism. Since I hadn't yet rejected the idea of the supernatural aspects of religion, they seemed pretty damn cool. Some of the books I found talked about meditation and how to go about it.
While I left the religious aspects behind as I explored the various faiths and systems of the world, meditation stuck.
Even when I eventually settled into the more non religious aspects of Buddhism, the meditation wasn't tied into it really, it was a separate thing that just makes happened to also work there. And, when I eventually decided that no religion was really useful to me, I kept the meditation, even though some aspects of it still carry methodology and imagery from the various religions.
But, yeah, the idea of magic was cool as hell, and meditation was part of that. The magic was malarkey, but meditation worked :)