Miracles for the common folks

In the old days, in both the West and the East, when miracles were the order of the day, even spiritual leaders of the highest repute were said (or rumored) to have practiced miracles. The more intellectual or intelligent or wiser ones would smile. No matter, the common folks need miracles, as everyone needs a myth to live by, they would have thought. Carl Jung and some spiritualists complained about the lack of myth for the modern man to live by, a topic I hope to deal with in some future day. The issue that concerns me in this post is however miracle rather than myth.

Some modern day spiritual seekers (the New Agers) in the West like to play with OBE, some out of curiosity, some want to get enlightenment out of the process, and some simply for the fun of it. For the fun aspect, a prominent Taoist in Japan wrote about how he liked to venture out, sometimes with Taoist friends, and travel inside physical objects, like a piece of faceted gem-stone! OBE is not miracle in modern day practice, but not so in older days. There is this reported story whereby a Taoist master went out with a Buddhist master on an OBE trip to a distant city in China. Each picked up a flower and came back. It turned out that the Taoist master got a real flower whereas the Buddhist master got nothing back. And you know who told this story!

The most notable practicing miracle in the West nowadays is miracle healing, and the most notable example is making people walk! As a chi-kung practitioner I do have successful experience training old folks who couldn't walk; and have cured people's back pain through one single training session in Zhan Zhuang. But I certainly don't know how to do miracle healing! Once I saw a TV program (may be 60 minutes+ ?) shooting the back-stage of a miracle healing platform (a physical as well as spiritual one), seeing old or weaker folks being "pushed" to stand-up from their wheelchairs with brutal, motivational or spiritual commands; and some were seemingly blaming themselves of not being faithful enough to be able to walk as expected - by the healer or his helpers! I felt sorry for them.

And in the East, the situation is less dramatic, but still miracle-healing in nature. I'm talking about distant chi-healing. Recently I read a Chinese book written by a Taoist healer, who himself claimed to be from a prominent Taoist lineage. His bag of tricks (which incidentally include certain good practices) include distant chi-healing. He wrote that he was a member of the Chinese Olympic medical team and had successfully healed many top athletes. And needless to say he used all his healing tricks including distant chi-healing in his healing practice. In his book, most photos he used were healing famous patients using distant chi-healing! And you know who the target readers of his book are! Not me, probably not you too, my dear reader.