George, what do you mean, move any part of your body by thought alone? Dont we move our bodies with no effort all the tome, like I move a pen when I am writing?

Are you doing something that we dont ordinariy expect to be able to do?  But you are able to do it?

Please describe futher, what you are doing, that scientists say you cant do.

There's a very famous book on Zen Buddhist thought called 'Zen mind, Beginner's Mind'  which points to this issue. By Shunryu Suzuki.

Unfortunately George your experience may be typical. The more we think we know the more inclined we are to perceive selectively to exclude what doesn't fit - we become closed. Not to mention that typical Western thought is reductionist which means we try to make sense of things by slicing them into smaller and smaller pieces until eventually as a wise man said 'we know everything about nothing'. (we lose sight of the big picture, and in doing so become even more prone to selective perception)

The other issue is that intellectual intensity blocks the 'still small voice' - our connection with our intuition or 'knowing' - especially our ability to love, to be creative, to know what's wise and good and what isn't.

Add egotistical arrogance and hubris or pride (and an academic system that sets this sort of thought up as in some way superior) as also sets in with supposed intellectual excellence and it gets a lot worse.

It's no wonder we've ended up with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, 'just' wars, technology driven by the profit motive rather than what's good for people and so on.

It's so hard to stay open. Meaning that one of the most important requirements for spiritual progress is the ability to live with enormous levels of uncertainty - to stop seeking definite answers, and especially to drop our need to rely on these to create a bubble world (a personal reality) we feel comfortable in. in the knowledge that the big picture is far too complex for us to more than scratch at the edges of it.

It's no accident that especially Zen Buddhist teachers seek as one part of the path to realisation to create a crisis of uncertainty in their student's minds. One means is the use of koans or riddles to meditate on which cannot be solved using normal sequential logic. Other traditions try to square the circle - to teach but at the same time not to create this closed mindedness - but all are wary of too much book learning.

So maybe it's not so much that God doesn't reveal to the learned, it's just that they aren't listening. Certainly not in the way a more naive, unlearned and intuitive personality does, although this route has its pitfalls too.....

Hi George-  I get my willow bark in a bottle labeled Aspirin. Bets likes it as tea? Works fine for me.

Vajra has more or less hit the problem on the nose - We have an institution that claims superiority, the Golden Cow of Science to be worshipped in place of spirituality. The problem is that in its place, the scientific method is about as good as we can get, methodologically. However, there are hints slowly leaking through the cracks that other methods of knowing may also be important.

This is rather like asking what "knowing" actually is. Aside from "knowing how" and "knowing what", and related side trips, it seems that we have adopted a materialistic definition that accords with science. The flaw in this can be seen in the rise, and subsequent decline, of naive behavioral psychology. According to B F Skinner, and his followers, everything is merely a "behavior", and all behaviors can be trained through conditioning. Aside from behavior, we are dealing with the Unknown, so the nature of people who are doing the behaving is unimportant, reducing the mind to a mysterious Black Box" with unfathomable contents. While this is not untrue, there seems to be a great deal of "personhood" left out of Skinner's equation. So it is with the Scientific Method.

Virtually everyone on this forum seems to tinker with meditative states in some manner. Bruce's introduction leads us into the world of spirits where we discover people stuck in the kinks and twists of their beliefs and karmic reactions. We all have these and related experiences, each in a different way, yet all the same.  I work on the opposite side of the life-death interface, yet have the same experiences. Lack of objectivity disqualifies these experiences from science, while adherance to objective science disqualifies people from seeing into their own spiritual nature.

This is not because of a lack of data, but a lack of insight into how to deal with it. The path of avatars, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Ramana Maharshi and the other teachers of note, is still advisory, rather than explicatory. The Ten Commandments tells us nothing about the ultimate nature of our own spirit, but merely tells us how to stay out of trouble. Carried to extremes we simply have an Inquisition.

My personal feeling is that we will eventually start to develop methodologies to deal with subjective states, personal experiences and the like. We still have well developed ideas about "intrapsychic psychology", meaning the states inside the mind that we feel, as opposed to the states that are measured with prods and probes. And having passed unchanged through the digestive tract of behaviorists, many of these ideas have turned out to be remarkably durable.

As a simple example, in meditation we access areas of experience that are non-objective, yet which are consistent with other meditators, and which are mutable, in the sense that we can mold them into forms compatible with others' thoughts. There seems to be more going on inside the Black Box than outside it.

My personal research has been to study these "hidden data" lurking in the fringes of experience, all the way back to its beginnings. It is possible to do this in a rigorous and methodical manner, using very clearly defined symbolic techniques. And although my poor contributions to the world consist mostly of training materials for regression therapists, I, and those like me, are symptoms of a growing tendency toward looking in the dark recesses of the soul for reality. For that matter, Bruce, and all the rest of us here, signify a tendency toward awakening to a new perspective.

Perhaps that's why Siddhartha made no claims of a supernatural kind, but simply said that he had awakened (bodhi).

d

That's an interesting capability George. Controlling normally automatic body functions at will is sometimes talked of in connection with highly trained eastern yogis and the like.

It's maybe worth saying that there's nothing wrong of itself with learning. The problems arise  when ego gets involved and we start mis-using or become obsessed with learning for selfish reasons - to build a selective tale on reality we feel comfortable with around ourselves, or to make ourselves out to be better than others, or to use our intellect to dominate and take advantage of others and so on....

I don;t really understand your point George - you say you can will your body parts to move in such a way as they move without you being conscious of making the deliberate effort - I think I see your meaning as I have done it on occasion - for example willing my arm to move up and it jerks up without me doing it in the usual conscious way - is that what you mean> I am however very skeptical that such a method would help someone paralysed becasue of damaged nerves etc. I think it's just caused by sending amessage to the subconsious in some way, but if the physical pathways aren;t there to make the action I don;t think  they would. I don;t think it's literally a case of mind-over-matter as it would be, eg, if I willed a table to rise up and it did. If you can do that I would be impressed. It also seems a bit of a generalisation to say that all scientsist don;t believe in God. However modern science has got where it is by spending money on experiments etc . People in ancient times believed in God but it didn;t stop them dying of all sorts of things we can cure and innoculate against today. I find the idea that if you have spiritual beliefs and practices you should therefore disparage science, to be unhlepful. They both have their uses. Also it can be argued that science is more open-minded than many religions - it is open to change and being proven wrong, whereas some religious people aren't interested in discussion and new ideas and think they have all the answers already in theri books and traditions. If science acted like that we would still be trying to cure people by blood letting, leeches and consulting horoscopes and the phases of the moon etc, or perhaps just by praying, which is not usually very dependable.

Also, science does make use of traditional remedies when they are proven to work - like dave mentioned about the aspirin in willow bark

Yep! Tibetan Buddhism is very clear as to the validity and effectiveness of the Yogic or solely practice based path. They equally are a bit wary sometimes of the Gelugpa school (actually the Dalai Lama's lot who it's said have reasoned themselves into dodgy territory a few times)  which emphasises inellectual learning a lot more than that the others...