Can Enlightenment Lead To "Superpowers"?

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I've been looking into spirituality a lot recently, and a lot of the coaches I've seen, specifically on YouTube, claim that, by reaching enlightenment, you can develop "superpowers" such as telepathy and influence over your future and reality. Is this true? Personally, I'm very skeptical, as I feel like this revelation would be far more mainstream.

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: There is no valid empirical evidence to support the claim that spiritual enlightenment grants superpowers or telepathy. You already have influence over your future reality by virtue of being alive and having free will. You would be better off to study for a STEM degree.

Enlightenment could lead you to developing super self-control.

In a consumerism economy, people will think you're a freak.

That's the burden of a super-power.

Ordinary folks can't resist ...


Ordinary folks can't resist ...

You find truth and enlightenment in the strangest places
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StrbppmsZJw

Ask ten people and you'll get twelve answers.

The best bet, and one thing you absolutely can rely on, is that working with esoteric practices is a good lead-in to what one could call 'self-authoring', ie. a state of personal development where rather than simply having your inner nature written by reward or punishment around you (ie. if you steal a car you go to jail), or socialization where your empathy extends to 'what negative/positive effects does this action have on others?', you actually go further to properly establish your own identity as best you can within the confines of your own limitations. Self-authoring can take you into a sort of meta-morality as well as a place where you plan and write your own road map from a position of considerable self-awareness as well as situational / external awareness which can both aid you in having a much more rewarding life and also aid you in avoiding the pitfalls and blind alleys that simple socialization can lead you toward. Having some big system of mnemonics, symbols, and myths associated with them gives you a form of story telling that your subconscious mind can emotionally grock and to a degree you can actually put the ski polls down and control your own life better.

As far as the controversies go over things like a) is scrying real? b) can you achieve magical outcomes through ritual? c) can meditation lead to enlightenment? d) is there a God inside of me? - those are much more difficult. You can take it to the bank that most of the time what you'll see in your own mind or even interact with is your own imagination and really symbolic representations of unconscious aspects of yourself (internal landscape). Past that, you can and will have situations come up where the signals your getting challenge that belief. You may also have times, and I've had this happen, where you perform a ritual or take some spiritual action and the damndest thing happens - you start waking up in the middle of the night and looking at the clock when it's a straight row of the same numbers, and the correlation would be a lot stronger than selective attention adequately explains. I actually don't see a good reason to believe that we can't have encounters and even mentor/mentee relationships with non-physical forms of consciousness, it's just that heading off in that direction takes you off the map of what's typically considered objective reality and similarly any experiments you might perform with your visions to test their veracity aren't externally verifiable, repeatable, and it's still a mind-frag as to what consciousness actually is let alone how on earth, in such a seemingly constrained physical reality, such fluid interactions of consciousness could occur in the subjective.

One thing I see with meditation that is tricky - you can be the type of person who is doing it to 'get in contact' and do it in certain ways to open yourself to visions, or you can do it in the way that Sam Harris or Yuval Noah Harrari do it, meditate a lot, and take a very different direction with different outcomes.

So my best advice maybe - follow the needs that would take you toward this type of spiritual development path, gather as much information as you can about the various eastern and western mystery paths, figure out what fits you best or what seems most potentially 'real', get into it, analyze it, if a path you're on seems incomplete or lacking figure out why.

Ultimately these are tools for survival, not just physical survival but being able to live gainfully and enjoy life regardless of your life circumstance. A good analogy would be - if outward life is a map of integers and you find out that you're only allowed the range from 0 to 1 and 0 to -1 on the x and y axes where other people can go out to two or three, you can discover the infinite number of non-integer values between 0 and 1, 0 and -1, and craft something of an incredible amount of depth and richness in that space. Though that effort you may indeed find your way out of that rut and expand to 0 to 2 or 0 to 3, what's almost guaranteed is that there will be situations of hardship in your life where having these extra tools and this extra flexibility will help you get through much better, or even at all, as opposed to where you would have been without them.

So maybe start with the psychology and internal-resource expansion aspects and when you're in full throttle with that maybe better insight into the paranormal aspects, or whether they really matter to you, will come into better focus.

Do any of the coaches in question claim to have achieved enlightenment?

Personally I don't understand how some people can claim that magic is fake and yet they still believe everything written in the bible word-for-word.

"Hmm this book claims that centuries ago a man walked on water and came back from the dead? Makes sense to me! No need for any of us to question that!"

But psychics and magic and all that other s**t must be fake.

Don't the Bible agree that magic is a thing? If not what was that magic duel with Aaron vs.the Pharaohs sorcerers all about? And what do witches do, that we mustn't suffer them to live?

I think nowadays most Christians believe it's all just a bunch of lies. They'll accept stories about Moses parting the red sea or Jesus coming back from the dead without question but claim that every psychic or wiccan is a fake. Of course they probably still believe they're going to hell for it.

But it's funny to me how Christians never acknowledge the fact that nobobody ever killed in the witch trials was ever an actual witch and that they basically killed a bunch of innocent people, but they will sit there and try to convince you that magic is all fake. So in a way they do admit that the people they killed were innocent, they just don't accept any real responsibility or feel any guilt over it.

Sort of reminds me how many friends I had who'd brag about their womanizing count, how many notches they have in their belt (or how many they got at the same time!). Ended up having a drunken campfire conversation after a day of target shooting where I told one of them about a foible they just made 'Hey don't worry, you were predestined to do that since the Big Bang' and his reply was 'You know you're going to hell right?'. I think being told I was 'going to hell' would only have been cooler if I heard it from Ozzy Osbourne himself.

What it seems to come down to much of the time with these guys: social conformity good, social conformity God, non-conformity: uncool, uncool = sinful. I think you actually nailed something though - ie. that 'they're going to hell' because 'it's stupid' or because 'it's not real', and maybe that's why they're going to hell - because they're lame and believe in things that 'aren't true'. OTOH Jesus died for their sins and for their right to be popular and bang lots of women.

If I were going to do deity bartending I'd mix up a God named Jupiter-Carlito. He'd be half Zeus in the lightning-bolt throwing judge on a cloud sense and half Carlito like the NWO/WWE wrestler who 'spits (apple) in the face of the uncool' and in this case sends them to eternal perdition. In this case hell would smell a lot like apple cider.

I actually did try making a fused .jpg/.gif of Zeus and Carlito but it didn't work quite as well as I wanted, I'd need a better picture of both and a better apple icon to superimpose on Zeus's white robe.

I mean...if your goal is to stick your dick into anything that moves (and probably some things that don't), Zeus is pretty much the god for you.

Conformity sucks! I'm a non-conformist and proud of it!

Agreed, he was a metaphysical Bill Cosby. Pan's about the only one who could top him.

I don't understand why anyone would read the Bible and believe that everything in it is a literal account of past events. But you do bring up a point that relates back to the topic.

"Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father." -- Jesus, as quoted in John 14:12 (NIV)

Here, He is NOT saying that someday everyone will perform miracles as He did, but only that if a person believes in Him, then they will perform miracles -- not just the same miracles, but even greater miracles than He.

To the best of my knowledge, no one alive today is like that ... so I guess no one really believes in Jesus, or if they do, then they don't believe enough or in the right way.

C'mon, all you right-wing Christian fundamentalist evangelicals, show us your super-powers!!

Their only true power is the power of money.