Force Powers

Fyxe wrote: fictional accounts are based on real life much of the time. look at the Jedi Knights! They have super powers and are based on real life people that have similar abilities.

Uh... thats literally and factually not true, man.
The Jedi were imagined and created drawing heavily on the iconic imagery of (heavily romanticized) old west characters and samurai films...

This is common knowledge to even the most casual fan of Star Wars, Fyxe, you can't not know this...

You can apply whatever mysticism you like, that's your interpretation of Jediism and The Force, but what you just said? That is legitimately a fantasy or an outright lie, there is no sugar coating that.

I have nothing against your interpretations, but you shouldn't have to lie to support them, and I won't ignore it simply to be polite.

People are often inspired by fiction, but fiction is not always inspired by reality, and rarely is it true to the inspiration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnLj8DMqaC8

Ok, so imagine watching this footage. Dramatic short cut shots, ominous music, clichée expressions on all characters. So far so good, gotta sell a show, I suppose. Then the setup happens. The monk sits down, crosses his legs, you can see his right shoe looking out to the left from underneath his robes. Long robes at that, too, but that's traditional attire, so fair enough. They too are convenient, but let's not be too cynical yet.
Anyway, the man starts chanting. Dramatic shots, tension rises. This continues for a few cuts, and then before the shot where the monk lifts off the ground he is suddenly closer to the curtains behind him and further away from the candles by a few inches, roughly as much as one of those tiles the floor is made of, maybe a bit less. His robes now cover the shoe. Well, maybe his concentration was broken by natural urges and he needed a quick pee break. Of course the chanting footage before was already captured, so I guess one might as well keep it, not waste any film on recording the restarted procedure from the beginning.
Then the monk at last lifts off the ground. What a breathtaking moment. Camera is shaking, quick cuts between the host and the monk, zooms in and out, even a shot of the camera man by another auxiliary camera man. "Come, get this!" All very dramatic.
A few seconds later after the host and his teammate have established that they see no mechanism holding the monk up in the air from below, the old man starts descending again, the curtains behind him slightly moving once the motion begins.
And then the film ends.

What is the purpose of those curtains? Do they aid the monk's energy channeling, or is it possible to perform the same feat without them? Why do they move? There is slight air motion as we can see from the candle flames, but is that quite enough wind to disturb the curtains so much? And if yes, why aren't they gently swaying in the wind occasionally during any of the rest of the time?
Why did the crew stay strictly in front of the monk and did not film behind him during the levitating phase when they could so easily capture the patch of ground behind him before the break? Even when they film slightly from the side during levitation, the viewing angle carefully avoids capturing any of the space behind the monk. You'd think this would be an obvious part of the film to include in the final cut, even if only to convince the sceptics watching.
What medium was this footage shot on that it would have been so prohibitively expensive or un-rewriteable that they couldn't afford re-filming the meditation after the pee break? They could have filmed him approaching the spot again, sitting down again, the whole ordeal anew from the start. Instead they chose to conceal the break in a cut. If an innocent break is all it was, this raises many many questions the producers could have easily avoided but chose not to.
If however the break was to position the monk on something like a shovel that would later lift him up, the cut is perfectly easy to explain: They could not have re-shot the approach and sitdown as the shovel would be blatantly obvious, but they couldn't not reposition the monk once he sat because otherwise they couldn't produce the illusion. The better proximity to the curtain makes more sense, as does the curtain's slight but sudden movement once the monk changes from hovering to descending.
In a word, everything falls into place and makes perfect sense if this is a trick and the film crew was in on it. If this is genuine, though, many things seem rather odd filming and setup choices.

Pay attention to the details, think about what you are seeing and what you are being shown and how you are being shown those things. The "Look, it's magic!" conclusion may be precious to you, but if honesty with yourself is of any value to you, you must recognize that bias, set aside your passion, and patiently work at combatting the ignorance before you proclaim that you know what you just saw. Gather as much information as you can harvest before passing the judgement, and if your favoured one succumbs to the scrutiny of your own intellect, then so be it. Better to have been fallible and correct errors once made, than think oneself infallible and stay wrong no matter what.
The Jedi-y thing to do is not to just accept and believe all claims at fictional Jedi-like powers. The Jedi-y thing to do is have the humility to recognize and admit one's own fallibility, let go of one's ego, one's urge to jump to the conclusion without the argument, one's emotional attachment to one conclusion over all others, and instead seek out knowledge where it is lacking, and make the best call after how ever much time you can afford investing into the search. Being a thinker and a doubter is not a mark of cynicism or of darkness, or of bitterness or anger. Carefulness and humility - aside from being virtues in their own right, in my opinion - can be fully justified by the Code, too.

Thank you Gisteron for at least not calling me a liar... ONCE AGAIN! I dont really know how anyone would expect me to respond to that. beyond that I think you are trying very hard to come up with reasons why this was not real. Its like extraordinary claims to prove that evidence right in front of your eyes, is not real. I dont see where he moved anywhere and curtains are curtains, they move sometimes with gusts of wind, just like the candles. maybe it was just a bit stronger then. why would these people lie? what do they get out of that on tv?

Really?

REALLY??

an easily staged/faked trick popular with STAGE MAGICIANS is your argument, now?? Against my specifically calling out your assertion that "Jedi were inspired by real people with similar powers"? A statement that any one of us can look up and disprove in under 5 minutes?

I don't care about your interpretations, but what you have said about THAT topic is verifiably not true, and it is wrong for you to misrepresent information to fit your views and potentially mislead others (that last part is purely speculative and hypothetical at this point in time and I in no way accuse you of deliberate deception or misconduct, nor do I accuse you of devious or otherwise underhanded motivations)

Fyxe wrote: ... I think you are trying very hard to come up with reasons why this was not real. Its like extraordinary claims to prove that evidence right in front of your eyes, is not real.

No, not at all. I don't need reasons to dismiss it. My profile picture is a CGI rendering of a Jedi Holocron like object hovering above a fuzzy mirror. I have experience with graphical effects and I understand enough physics to say that genuine hovering the way the monk alleges to is pretty much impossible. I don't need "reasons why this was not real", I have very strong expectations that it likely wasn't and I could have faked a film like that myself, though I would have done it in graphical processing rather than with the far more convincing practical effects employed by this team.

I also do not need to try hard, nor to make any extraordinary claims. All I need is pay attention to the film and notice the continuity break. This is not wishful thinking, the man's shoe was not covered by the robes in the shots before the final liftoff and it was covered in the shots where levitation commenced. You can see it, I can see it, there is no disagreement between us about that continuity break being part of the film. Interesting is what comes of it next: You ignore it because you want to believe no matter if it's fake or not. I do not ignore it because I want to know what I'm looking at, no matter if it's fake or not. That's the difference between you and I in this case. I'm being honest with myself, you are being deceptive with yourself.

why would these people lie? what do they get out of that on tv?

Ratings. Hence money. They produce sensationalist entertainment for those who enjoy it and they get to continue their show and thereby their jobs by making good watchable content.
Don't get me wrong, the production here is quite alright. The hand-held camera makes it feel spontaneous and authentic, there is definitely worse acting to be found on TV, the lighting is smooth, the costumes look good. The editing I find somewhat overdone, but the editor knew what they were doing, and the sound scape is creepy and tense and sets the mood effectively. It looks like a very decently made show, but a show is all it is, and the motivation behind it is a showman's motivation behind any show they film.

so if I understand you gist, you are saying that:

First off this is just impossible because your a genius physics guy and you just know.

Your an expert film maker with CGI who could have faked this better and because of that you have strong expectations that this must be faked.

There is editing breaks in it so they must be decieving us.

The man covered his shoe with his robe before he levatated and so this PROVES he faked it! I mean obviously you cant levitate if your shoe is covered!

Oh and money and conspiracy are obvious in this show even though there is ABSOLUTELY no proof of this, you just get to assert thais because... why again?

I think the idea, Fyxe, is that what is more realistically likely to be true has more ways and reasons to be true than what is less likely. Because of this, it is wiser to more sincerely consider that which supports the more likely scenario, otherwise, we risk falling to gullibility.

Fyxe wrote: so if I understand you gist, you are saying that:

First off this is just impossible because your a genius physics guy and you just know.

No. I didn't say it was "just impossible", I said it was "pretty much impossible". Learn to read.

Your an expert film maker with CGI who could have faked this better and because of that you have strong expectations that this must be faked.

Wrong again. I never said I was any sort of film maker, let alone an expert one. I never said I could have faked it a better way, only a different way. Learn to read. My expectation that this is fake stems from the fact that it is pretty much physically impossible. I am not saying the film footage itself was tampered with through CGI techniques, but had it looked convincing in the first place, there would still be reasonable doubt due to the existence and quality of even TV grade CGI at the time of the show's airing.

There is editing breaks in it so they must be decieving us.

Cuts in editing are normal. Very rarely do we find film makers publishing all of their recorded footage unedited. There is however a continuity error which is almost completely inexplicable under the model whereby the levitation was real and almost completely trivial to explain under the model whereby it was fake. Combine it with the fact that levitating like this is pretty much physically impossible whilst doing a parlor trick is easy and inexpensive, and already a strong case is on our hands. This is an inference to the simplest explanation, not a proof.
Maybe you have a model that is even simpler than that the man stood up and sat down on a shovel in the middle of the procedure and was lifted by a handle reaching behind the curtain, by all means, I'm all ears. If your model can account for the inconsistencies and oddities and for why the producer didn't choose to re-shoot or re-edit the footage such as to fully conceal it - like the part where the monk covered his shoe with the robe as you assert in a second. It must have happened on the other camera and the editor decided to show us instead the host's face during that moment, presumably so you and I can debate it or so, let's hear it.

My model accounts for all of the oddities and is compatible with physics as we know it: It proposes the shovel to explain the robe displacement, and the shovelstick to explain the robe's motion. Notice, that while the crew were filming all around the monk back when we could see the shoe, once the levitation phase started, there is not a single shot showing us any of the space directly behind him. My model explains this by saying that the crew wouldn't want to risk breaking the illusion even more than it already has by outright showing the mechanism of levitation.
Your model, meanwhile, has to propose highly contentious magical powers and is yet to account for all of the sloppiness on the film makers' part. So far it already accounts for things like curtain motion by introducing a sudden gust of wind that didn't blow out any candles we get to see and came from a direction we have no footage of. And it accounts for the robe displacement by proposing the monk's interrupting his deep otherwise almost fully unmoving meditation at some point when we don't get to see him do it, only to cover a shoe for reasons unstated.

The man covered his shoe with his robe before he levatated and so this PROVES he faked it! I mean obviously you cant levitate if your shoe is covered!

No. Learn to read.

Oh and money and conspiracy are obvious in this show even though there is ABSOLUTELY no proof of this, you just get to assert thais because... why again?

I didn't assert conspiracy, I asserted money. Because that is what shows are made for, believe it or don't. There was no way the crew wouldn't have been in on it if it was a deception, but if it wasn't, their goal is still to get you to tune in next time. It's not about informing you about the wonders of the universe, that's what literature, philosophy, and science educators are tasked to do. These people are entertainers first, that's why they filmed it, and that is why they aired it, whether it was real or not.

Fyxe wrote: so if I understand you gist, you are saying that:

First off this is just impossible because your a genius physics guy and you just know.

Your an expert film maker with CGI who could have faked this better and because of that you have strong expectations that this must be faked.

There is editing breaks in it so they must be decieving us.

The man covered his shoe with his robe before he levatated and so this PROVES he faked it! I mean obviously you cant levitate if your shoe is covered!

Oh and money and conspiracy are obvious in this show even though there is ABSOLUTELY no proof of this, you just get to assert thais because... why again?

What he's saying is that this is an ancient trick used to fleece people out of money. It's been done for centuries, nearly unchanged.

A recommendation regarding the kind of thing shown on that video:

If we are researching the reality or non-reality of events like that, doing a bit of study into stage magic helps. My first recommendation would be the book "Houdini on Magic", which after many decades appears to be still in print and also available used.

Harry Houdini (real name Eric Weiss), as some may know, was a consummate magician and showman in his day who, in the latter part of his career, focused his efforts on exposing fraudulent spiritual mediums. He'd consulted mediums himself when he was grieving the loss of his beloved mother, and became furious when his insight into trickery revealed to him how those he visited defrauded the public.

Much of "Houdini on Magic" is for other performers, describing how to perform various tricks or how to make a good impression upon an audience. But there is one chapter (a somewhat long one, I recall) that goes into significant detail about Houdini's battle with a medium named Margery. Margery, prior to meeting Houdini, had quite a following, and even convinced scientists who imposed the best controls upon her they could design that she was the real deal. Houdini proved that everything Margery did - causing objects to float, making voices come forth from the empty air, and so on - was just a bundle of magician's tricks. He did the same thing with countless other mediums, but Margery I believe was his most famous, and well-documented, case.

I'm not trying to say that paranormal events don't happen; I actually happen to think they do. I wouldn't make the absolute claim no one can levitate, though I am skeptical. But in this case, that monk's move from being out in the open to near the curtain was an immediate tell. Why did he do that? If he needed to be a distance from his interviewer, why did he pick right next to the curtain, and right in the center of it where there is likely an opening from which a support could be extended? Any charlatan could do the same, and since the field of claimants to paranormal power is, regrettably, heavily populated with charlatans, we have to consider the likelihood that - due to using similar methods - this fellow is one of them.

I'd think someone who was really a master of levitation would be somewhat similar to a master of the guitar in one respect. A real guitarist can play on a sidewalk, in a coffee shop, or in the middle of a mall; a phony might stand in front of a closed curtain, behind which plays a CD of Segovia as s/he silently plucks dampened strings.

It's a moral crime, imo. In this case, it discredits Buddhism. Should there be people out there with genuine psychic powers, a performance like this robs them of credibility as well. It inspires all of us to trust one another at least a bit less.

In a field of study like this, we are required to consider stringent criteria for verifying experiences. We are looking for diamonds in a field of coal, where each coal-lump says "Hey, look at me, I'm a diamond!"

Omhu Cuspor wrote: It's a moral crime, imo. In this case, it discredits Buddhism. Should there be people out there with genuine psychic powers, a performance like this robs them of credibility as well. It inspires all of us to trust one another at least a bit less.

This is a very good point, too! Granted, I'm not particularly concerned with the credibility of genuine psychics. While the abundance of illusionists makes us scrutinize them all the more, it's not necessarily unfair. Ideally we should be sceptical of any claim no matter how many times we have been lied about it. We are forgiving to people who haven't or about claims we have not heard before out of generosity, not because it's the intellectually honest or a consistent thing to do.
Besides, genuine psychics should be able to live up to the fairer, stricter standards anyway, so not much of a loss to them this is.

But what the charlatans are doing is make a mockery of not just the "real psychics" if those exist, but of just regular, genuine believers. The tricksters exploit the believers' willingness to accept things uncritically and make them believe lies. It also makes a frankly disgusting and disrespectful mockery of the spiritual traditions themselves. There are real benefits to meditation. It helps people keep a healthier heart and a cooler head and for many it is a spiritual practice through which they find emotional peace. This is a perfectly respectable and realistic promise that gets called into question in the public mind, because cynical woosters and frauds hope to make a quick buck by callously lumping it in together with promises of magical powers.

I think this answers the question of the magic Monk, both in relation to his long robes and also the curtains behind him.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6EfpMxqSxY

@Fyxe

I"m no expert, but from what I have read, is that "psychic powers", or whatever you call them or however you define them, are RESULTS from your training; Zen and Tantrik literature abound with references to hallucinations, levitations, OOBE's, telepathy, and things of this nature.

In Zen, they are called "makkyo", They are basically things that distract you from the original aim of your path, which as a Buddhist, is "enlightenment", or satori.. Check more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makyo

I don't affirm the existence of these things, but my perspective does not preclude their existence.

My questions to you are:

What are you training for?

And what are you willing to give up to attain your goal?

JK Im training to become one with the force. I see the Jedi path as one possible area that I might further this pursuit and I am willing to give up nothing, instead I expect to gain everything!

So you are willing to make no sacrifices, and yet expect to obtain "everything"? Does this "everything" you expect to gain include any kind of understanding of anything, be it spiritual tradition or how people operate or how nature does? Or is it "everything" except learning?

At any rate, that is a very unique set of goals. Give naught, get all... Best of luck to you.

Why would I have to give up anything?

Fyxe wrote: Why would I have to give up anything?

Hi Fyxe. I think the inference of Gisteron and J.K. Barker here rests in a perception that attainment of almost anything is a trade-off; we must let go of one thing to attain another.

We can see this in all sorts of human ambitions. Billionaire J. Paul Getty once opined that his aspiration to be a powerful, wealthy businessman of necessity made him an inadequate husband; he was unable to devote the necessary time and energy to both roles simultaneously to be successful at each of them. The child who aims to do well in his/her school studies has to sacrifice time playing baseball or reading comic books. Someone devoted to indulgence in an addiction gives up both healthy relationships and a healthy body. The one who seeks enlightenment may have to give up much - some mix of wealth, social interaction, status, physical pleasure, and possibly a portion of the level of sanity required to navigate Earthly life; I recall an early teacher of mine once commenting, "There are a lot of saints in mental hospitals."

Buddha sacrificed his kingship. Jesus sacrificed his life. Gandhi sacrificed physical pleasure to a very significant degree. Yogananda sacrificed his ability to support himself (being forced to turn to his father for financial support for much of his life). In less esoteric pursuits, Jimmy Carter decided to trade a relaxed retirement for a continued life of service. Countless LGBTQ individuals have sacrificed family, occupation, and friendships to attain self-acceptance and self-expression. Three newsworthy Western individuals have had their freedoms seriously restricted in recent years for choosing to make the public aware of nefarious deeds perpetrated by national leaders.

Everything in this realm of existence costs something else; we are always choosing between mutually exclusive alternatives. To slightly paraphrase the Dread Pirate Roberts from the The Princess Bride: "Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying sell you something."

So, imo the question remains relevant. What are we willing to give up to get what we want?

Allow me to add my 2 cents.

I think Force powers should really be viewed in the same way that the bible used miracles, like walking on water.

It was because Jesus was being promoted as a hero that tales of his exploits were exaggerated. The idea of miracles was very old and was long used as a sign that God was with a particular person. However, it should be of noteworthy significance that Moses, being trained in Egypt, did miracles but so did the priests of Egypt by the writer's standards. So either God was with them both or neither were doing actual miracles but rather things that most people didn't know how to do. Science. When science is mythologized you get miracles.

Miracles exist in Star Wars because it serves as the proof that the Force "is with" a certain individual. So Force powers where never about literal magic that the Force can do but rather SYMBOLIC of the mysterious connection between a person and the Force that is meant to illustrate the supernatural quality of the Force.

And it isn't that the Force is magical in the sense of some kind of Warlock or Witch, but rather magical in the sense of a Wiccan whose close connection with the earth is part of their experience with natural herbs and whatever else they might use. The Force is magical in the same sense that the sun, clouds, trees, are all magical. But do you see it? Do you appreciate the awesome quality of it all? Or do you devalue you these things because our species constantly puts prices on them and turns them into paper and other things that eventually becomes trash?

Everything in Star Wars, just like everything in the bible, wasn't and isn't to be taken literally.

Taking things literally is how people often negate spirituality and turn religion into vanity.

Don't get me wrong, there are good ways to compare the two, but this ain't it. You have a lot of odd beliefs about the Bible which keep cropping up, but I'll bracket that discussion aside

Star Wars was never supposed to be taken literally. The Bible claims it is. One is well-defined fiction and the other is an ancient text which has different expectations, but wasn't written as a fun story.

Talk all you want about literary criticism of them both, but that's a lousy comparison.