Elevation

Read The Way of the White Clouds, a book, originally written in 1964, by Lama Anagarika Govinda, the honorific of a German who studied and taught Buddhism for many years in the Indian subcontinent. The book comprises a pretty travelogue of the author's several trips in the 1930s and 1940s to Tibetian monasteries and ruins to learn about Tibet's distinctive brand of Buddhism, and it vividly conveys the grand desolation of the high, dry plateau. A recurrent theme is that the supernatural is pervasive in Tibetian religion, whether it is the reincarnation of the author's guru, a generally revered master, as a child a couple valleys over, or having visions that people will show up just before they do, or the uncanny accuracy of the god-possessed oracles at certain temples, and the argument is that this side of reality is unjustifiably denied by scientifically minded skeptics.

Most religions have miracle stories and many, me not included, have witnessed events that seem supernatural - are these only examples of believers and some ill-informed outsiders deluding themselves, or do some of these reports point to gaps in the scientific/rational worldview? Postulating a power of people to communicate via thought (telepathy, to use the Greek coined by "parapsychologists" who sought to study such things scientifically) and/or to move things through thought (telekinesis) would explain many of the stories, but hasn't been shown to happen in a predictable or reproducible way. However, these are not exactly hot areas for scientific research, and the effect would surely depend on state of mind, which isn't easily induced or measured. Though even skeptics will admit that we understand little of how mind works, the Dalai Lama's call for research will not, I fear, be quickly answered. For now, I'm going to keep an open mind.