East Meets West 13
is seen to be a frivolous distraction. Some practitioners feel very strongly against the topic. I remember one particularly heated discussion on psychic powers during a yoga teacher training that I took a few years back. The instructor brought up the topic of the siddhis (the word used in yoga philosophy for psychic powers), and you could practically see the battle lines being drawn. When the traditional perspective held by most yoga practitioners in the West was given by the instructor, one woman said that she flat-out disagreed. She was very open about her own psychic abilities, and she didn’t appreciate being told that her gifts were distractions from spiritual enlightenment. To be honest, I couldn’t fault her there. A few of the students in the class were really harsh in their response to her. Though there was an attempt to return order, the teacher eventually had to shut the conversation down and dismiss the class for the day. I have also seen similar things happen in online groups when someone asks about the siddhis or psychic powers in general. This aversion comes from a long line of sages who talk about yoga, but in the West, most people learn about the yoga philosophy regarding psychic powers through Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. For Patanjali, the universe is dualistic. It is composed of both Spirit and matter. After spending some time detailing the dualistic nature of the universe, Patanjali cautions the reader against the concerted effort to develop psychic powers. For Patanjali, concentration is a mystical experience meant to unite the practitioner with Spirit. Everything outside of that ultimate goal is seen as a distraction. As in aphorism III, 38, Patanjali tells us that the psychic gifts, which have a tendency to develop naturally from yoga and the trance state, present obstacles to spiritual growth. 11
Magick & Mysticism Initially, it was very hard for me to reconcile Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and their supposed philosophy against psychic powers. My spiritual beliefs and my personal experiences seemed to counter his wisdom. My own spiritual awakening as a witch was transcendent, and I attributed a great deal of that transcendence to my intense focus on psychic
11. Mukunda Stiles, ed., Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (San Francisco: Weiser Books, 2002), 41 (III, 38).
