This book I’m reading at the moment – Supernormal, by Dean Radkin, PhD – brings up some fascinating stuff. The tagline for the book is:

Yoga, Science, and the evidence for extraordinary psychic abilities. 

Radkin is a highly credentialed scientist, and essentially what he says in the book is that so called “miracles,” such as clairvoyance, levitation, telepathy, telekinesis, bilocation (meaning you can be in two places at once), surviving only on air for months at a time, and other such unbelievable things, are actually very possible at the extreme pointy end of yogic practice and study.

Patanjali, who in ancient times literally wrote the book on yoga, describes a method called ashtanga, which is broken down into an “eightfold path.” This is:

1. Yama – abstaining from harmful behaviour.
2. Niyama –  developing good behaviours.
3. Asana – developing physical postures to enable one to meditate for long periods.
4. Pranayama – developing breathing techniques to focus the mind
5. Pratyhara – limiting your focus to a single object of attention (mindfulness)
6. Dharana – developing single pointed concentration.
7. Dhyana – deep meditation
8. Samadhi – unity or mystical absorption with an object of attention.

Note that Asana, which is what we in the west know as yoga, being the physical postures, is only the third stage of yogic study. We believe that the asanas are yoga, but in fact they were originally only a step towards advanced meditative practices.

According to Patanjali in his Sutras, which is the source scripture for yoga, it’s at the ultimate state of Samadhi, or enlightenment, that one can exhibit “siddhis.” These are particular psychic abilities, which Patanjali describes in a separate chapter in his classic Sutras. Interestingly, he describes them very matter-of-factly, as though they’re no big deal. If you put in the work, you too can levitate and read minds!

Anyone who has read Autobiography of a Yogi will remember accounts of such extraordinary feats such as levitation, clairvoyance, being in several places at one time, and so forth.

Radkin in his book sets out to see if any of these things can be proven, scientifically. But one of his difficulties is that those who have attained enlightenment aren’t predisposed to show off their powers, or wantonly subject themselves to scientific scrutiny. It goes against the very notion of samadhi.

I haven’t finished the book yet – his scientific experiments are still to come – however I read one passage which I thought I’d share with you.

Radkin was talking about how we have a need for empirical evidence to prove that something exists, and is “real.” But then he talked about magnetism. Magnetism was regarded as magic for centuries. No-one knew how or why it “worked.”

In the 12th century, they believed there was a North Pole star that was also magnetic, which was why magnetic compasses always pointed to the north. It was some six hundred years later that scientists figured out what magnetism actually was.

So for all that time, magnetism was regarded as something supernatural. Magical.

So what else operates within our current realm that we regard as magical, or supernatural, and yet in times to come might be completely understandable, and measurable?

Just like magnetism, could there be a time in the future when these miraculous yogi siddhis are eventually accepted as a natural part of our world?

Australia’s top film magazine for the industry, If, has just published a story about my trip to Dallas, to film The Texas Cosmic Rays Experiment.

Here’s the story –

http://if.com.au/2014/11/06/article/Intuition-is-sending-filmmaker-on-bizarre-mission-to-the-US/XCYOWKEARF.html

Jennifer’s brother Matt, who guides me towards many things interesting, sent me a YouTube link today.

It’s an interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook, where he talks about how his intuition told him to take a job at Apple when the company was almost broke, and everyone he trusted told him not to take the job.

(Steve Jobs was a strong advocate of intuition.)

I disagree with Cook on one point though – he says that you’re not born with intuition, you develop it. I don’t believe that to be the case.

Certainly some of the wise men and women I’ve interviewed in India and Italy attest that we’re all born with intuitive powers, it’s just that life – parental and societal pressures etc – forces us to distrust our intuition, and steers us towards “common sense,” or what’s deemed to be correct and logical.

Common sense would have me not go to Dallas and spend fifteen days in a cheap motel, eating crap food, without any money.  But as soon as the Bombay astrologer told me this is what my charts advised me to do, I had an immediate and very strong intuitive response to do it.

I received an email overnight from someone in the US. They’d heard about the Texas Cosmic Rays Experiment, and they wanted to put me up in a flash hotel.

I gratefully declined, saying that I had to start in a cheap motel as per the astrologer’s instructions. But I mused on it later, thinking: It’s starting…

McCurry is a master at using colour…

The cosmos is sending me to a city chock full of millionaires.

In fact, according to a recent report, Dallas has the fastest growing population of millionaires in America.

Nearly 70,000 millionaires at last count, with another 50,000 expected to join that elite club in the next five years.

Twenty-two people on Forbes’ Richest in the World list come from Dallas.

All I can say is – Whoo hoo universe!

Thank you for not sending me to West Africa.

I’m looking forward to these fifteen days from November 23rd!!

I’ve just posted on the Gone Tours website some information on the distances and elevations of the various stages on the Assisi tour, next April / May.

Here is the link –
Assisi Tour – distances & elevations.

The pilgrimage is 224 kms over 10 days of walking. There’s a day in Florence, a rest day in Gubbio (a wonderful historic town) – finishing in Assisi.

It’s going to be a glorious walk…

I got an email from my brother Bob yesterday. He's currently walking the Camino Frances with his 21 yr old son Rupert.

They've been walking nineteen days now, without one rest day, and last night they would have got to Leon.

That's hooting along!

I'm astonished, because they hardly did any training. My brother did though do squats in lieu of walking. He said he was doing 300 squats a day before he left Australia.

He said in the email they both have bad blisters, but they're “soldiering on.”

Ha! And before they set off they were wondering if they'd even make 100kms. They'll be in Santiago before they know it!

The Camino carries you upon its wings…

Heading back to Mudgee, we stopped overnight in Narrabri, in the centre of New South Wales.

I went out at first light and took some shots with my little compact Sony RX100 MkIII –

I’m in Brisbane Queensland at the moment, where I’ve been doing some work for the university where I’m an Adjunct Prof…

I grew up in Brisbane, and my family lives there – brother, sisters, and mother. Jennifer and I have been staying with my youngest sister, Angela.

We had dinner together last night, and my mum came over. She’s 87, and as it turns out the dinner was a celebration of the publication of her new book – The Killer with Three Hundred Names. 

The book details a twelve year investigation she undertook to solve one of Australia’s most notorious triple homicides, committed over a hundred years ago. The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) did a half hour profile on my mum last year, in a programme called Australian Story that features prominent Australians.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon if you’re interested –

The Killer with Three Hundred Names

This is her fifth book. In each book she’s solved a murder that dates back more than a hundred years.

My mum is remarkable.

Anyway over dinner we were talking about the intuition film I’m doing, and she told me how as a youngster – when I was two to three years old – I seemed to have some kind of communication with the spirit world.

it would happen when we were driving. I’d sit up in the back of the car, look ahead out the front windscreen and smile, and start saying: “Hewo…” (Hello)

And then up ahead a cemetery would come into view.

Evidently this happened many times, and it freaked out my mum and dad – because they could never see the cemetery. Often it was around a corner or over the crest of a hill – but I would sit up and smile and start saying hewo…

My mother said last night that at that age, I didn’t even know what a cemetery was. Much less anticipate it before anyone else saw it. Much less seemingly communicate with spirits.

She said that she and my father at the time thought it was “very strange.”

And then as I got older it stopped.

Of course I can’t remember any of this.

But in esoteric writings they say that a child up to the age of two or three often carries the wisdom and capabilities of past lives. But they disappear as you get older, and the patina of the real world begins to encrust those sensitivities.

A couple of people around the table said they had goosebumps as my mother was telling the story. This wasn’t some Halloween gag. She was simply telling me what she and my father had witnessed when I was young.

She said she couldn’t remember if I’d exhibited any other “tendencies,” but she remembered that vividly.

I came across this today as part of my research into intuition –

A quote from Pablo Picasso, from a series of conversations with the great Hungarian photographer, Brassai:

“To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing… When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

Ideas are simply starting points. I can rarely set them down as they come to my mind. As soon as I start to work, others well up in my pen.”

I find this a fascinating way of looking at the creative process. And it’s a method I’m using in making my film on intuition. I’m following my intuition.

Here is a piece I recorded in Dharamsala –

The Process –