For centuries, science and spirituality have been battling it out on these issues of perennial importance for humanity. Although spiritual teachers have always maintained that enlightenment is a ‘real’ phenomenon, and a perfectly realizable goal for all of us, the scientific community has naturally been unwilling to accept this without solid proof. It is only in the recent past that science has made a sustained effort to demystify supernormal and paranormal phenomena and accumulate sound medical evidence that explains why the spiritually super-evolved are blessed with ‘powers’ that the rest of us can only dream about.
Offering his own body-mind system for observation, Nithyananda has been working with doctors and scientists across the world to record and analyze mystic phenomena using modern technology. The results continue to intrigue the world of medical science, but we now have growing proof that a range of extraordinary abilities do lie latent in us, just outside the sphere of our current experience. Not to be awakened by effort alone, these abilities (known in Sanskrit as siddhis) also ask of us a life of intense moral integrity, deep devotion to Truth and an unquestioning surrender to the flow of Existence – the Divine, the Tao, God or whatever else we may choose to call that most intimate mystery of our lives.
Poised delicately on the border of the scientific and the mystical, these phenomena serve to remind us, as Einstein was to famously observe, that science without religion is lame, while religion without science is blind. It also leaves us with the unsettling realization that we may be much more than we can ever imagine, divine beings merely enjoying a human experience, slumbering spiritual giants only awaiting the touch of awakening.