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Why are people so eager to learn all the "techniques" before they bother to find out whether it is even possible?
Technique serves at least two functions. First, it creates the role of teacher. There is some truth to the saying "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."
There is no prize for finding the teachers-who-cannot hereabouts.
Second, technique provides a built-in excuse for failure. You did the ritual wrong.
I mean, you just have to laugh, no offence meant
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Abilities you can get through a meditation, but correct meditation.
Meditation is the evocation of the relaxation response, a physiological consequence of sitting down, shutting up, and staying that way for a few minutes. Yes, you have practice a few times to get the hang of it. How unusual, so different from other skills, like riding a bicycle.
But you would be hard put thereafter to do it incorrectly. Yet signs and wonders do not ensue.
Obviously, there are two possibilities. There are no signs and wonders, or you're doing it wrong. Guess which one is going to be "taught"?
With elaborate ritual, it will simply never happen that an unbroken record of failure will ever have to be examined. Besides, it won't be an unbroken, there will be endless "it almost worked," and the occasional success, where the greatest pattern-recognition device in the biosphere, the brain, manages to anticipate some real-world event.
You can see the same little drama played out for things that uncontroversially do exist, like lucid dreaming. That's
really safe to teach: there is no way anybody else could possibly know whether the teacher can do it or not.
At least with fake psychic gurus, sooner or later somebody will notice that teacher always has an excuse for not demonstrating his or her skills. What really happens in dreams will never get out.
You wouldn't believe some of the stuff that is proposed as "techniques" for "inducing lucid dreams." "XYZ-ILD" (acronym names for techniques such as MILD, WILD, ...) is an in-joke in that community, like "XYZ-kinesis" is a joke around here.