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As persons become more and more spiritual, many of them notice that lights in their vicinity seem to turn off. They do not will them to turn off. The lights turn off with out any volition on their part.
I guess that one could develop the ability to will them off since that is happening anyway. And I suppose that someone could presume to make a pact with the devil and believe that the power is coming from there. But I think these people are being tricked by the devil into thinking that he or she has given the person supernatural powers, when actually it is a rather common phenomenon.
I once met a guy, a physicist who worked with dolphins in the former USSR, in order to train them to be spies or substitute frogmen or whatever. He claimed that he could talk to dolphins. Not a big deal. Any one can do that. But he also claimed that he could understand what they said back. Well that's kinda interesting but beside the point.
So to evaluate his progress in the spiritual realm, I asked him if he noticed that lights seem to turn off when he was around. Now obviously he could not notice if he was not around. Anyway he got quite excited, perhaps even proud of his power in that regard. He told me that once in Florida he turned off a traffic light and the engineers could not figure out what was wrong with it.
Yogas are known for abilities that go beyond the normal. Some of them capitalize, in the materialistic or monetary sense, on those abilities. But taking advantage or even paying attention to such powers that one may attain is a trap. If you will, a trick or trap set by the devil to prevent additional spiritual evolvement. It builds bad karma.
The devil is not all that bad. He or she is responsible for evolution as well as the dog eat dog world that we live in. Competition is pretty much how materialistic progress is made. If you believe in evolution, and the devil as well, it would be accurate for you to say that the devil made human beings. No wonder creationists find the idea of evolution so offensive. For example, humans rise up to meet calamities. We are constantly being stressed out as a means to our development.
So the devil, or what I think of as a natural and supernatural force, is an aspect of god responsible for nature and evolution. But we, having developed consciousness, have the understanding to rise above competition with love for all. That was the great message of Jesus. It is time to evolve to the next level of spirituality, which is outside of nature. The greatest commandment of Jesus, perhaps the only one not previously mentioned by Moses, was to love your enemy. [The closest Moses came to that was to say to love your neighbor, which is found twice in the old testament.] That includes the devil or whatever abstract force that is responsible for progress and competition and evolution.
In some sense almost everything is your enemy. When you give a talk to a large audience, they are your enemy as they provoke stress and even fear. The way to overcome them, or really yourself, is to project love to the audience. Just feel like you love them and the stress and fear dissolve. Works at cocktail parties too. Works all the time. And after a while, you will actually develop love out of the initial pretense. Like the Buddha said, use the law of expediency. |
