Sustained yogic practice is described, across several classical texts including Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, as producing genuine extraordinary capacities, siddhis, along the way: unusual strength, knowledge of others’ minds, extraordinary sensory range, and other powers exceeding ordinary human capacity. What is notable, and easy to miss for a modern reader primed to treat any special ability as an obvious goal, is how consistently the source texts treat these powers not as achievements to pursue but as hazards to be wary of.
Patanjali’s own text is explicit on this point, describing siddhis as arising naturally from advanced practice while simultaneously warning that they can become upasarga, obstacles, if a practitioner becomes absorbed in cultivating or displaying them rather than continuing toward the actual goal of practice, the direct realisation this series has traced throughout Series II. The concern is not that the powers are illusory or fraudulent. It is that they are genuinely real and genuinely seductive, capable of reinforcing precisely the sense of a special, accomplished individual self that the entire practice was designed to see through.
This connects directly to the earlier account in this series of ahamkara, the function responsible for stamping experience with personal ownership. A practitioner who develops a genuine siddhi and takes pride in possessing it has handed ahamkara fresh and highly compelling material to work with, precisely at a stage of practice where the aim was to loosen ahamkara’s grip rather than supply it with new, more impressive content to identify with.
The texts’ consistent advice is not to suppress or deny siddhis should they arise, but to treat them with the same detached observation applied to any other experience, neither pursuing them nor being unsettled by them, keeping attention on the deeper aim they can so easily distract from. That deeper aim concerns nothing less than a practitioner’s relationship to their own mortality, and it is to that relationship, and the specific discipline the tradition built around keeping it in clear view, that this series turns next.
Part 95 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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