Spiritual Show Offs

Why It's Unwise To Trust Anyone Bragging About Spiritual Superpowers, Especially If They Want To Charge You Money

*The following is an unpublished bit of cut material from the original manuscript of my now published book about my ten year journey working with healers around the world- Sacred Medicine: A Doctor’s Quest To Unravel The Mysteries Of Healing.

During a decade of studying with Indigenous healers, shamans, energy healers, faith healers, gurus, yogi masters, and trauma therapists around the globe, I met a gobsmacking number of spiritual show offs. Because I did not have famed magician and skeptic James Randi following in my footsteps reality-testing everything I was witnessing or proving how he could replicate the same so called metaphysical shenanigans with a magic trick, it became very difficult to determine what was real and what was sleight of hand magic- or a con. Over time, I realized that the distinction between a real metaphysical phenomenon and a strategically staged magic show intended to fascinate and lure people in wasn’t the most important question. What mattered was the heart- and ethics- of the healer.

It took me years to learn what I finally read in the yogi memoir The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. In the beginning of the book, young Yogananda has ambitions to be a monk, and he’s searching for his spiritual master. He encounters many Indian spiritual teachers with spiritual superpowers, known as “siddhis” in the yogic texts. For example, the eight classical siddhis (Ashta Siddhi) or eight great perfections are:

• Aṇimā: the ability to reduce one's body to the size of an atom

• Mahimā: the ability to expand one's body to an infinitely large size

• Laghimā: the ability to become weightless or lighter than air

• “Garimā”: the ability to become heavy or dense

• Prāpti: the ability to access any place in the world.

• Prākāmya: the ability to realize whatever one desires

• Īśiṭva: the ability to force influence upon anyone

• Vaśiṭva: the ability to control all material elements or natural forces

Yogic texts claim that spiritual discipline can open up these siddhis, but seekers are warned that they can be a spiritual cul de sac leading to grandiosity and inflation, something to notice but ignore, walking on by rather than getting fascinated or arrogant because of such powers.

In the New Age world, spiritual teachers and seekers aren’t so humble. Online influencers make big bucks promising such spiritual superpowers, claiming they can make you “superhuman” if you attend enough $3000 meditation retreats or practice your magickal manifestation with enough spiritual devotion (which requires one on one manifestation coaching, for $250 per session, of course.) Power is sold to the highest bidder, whether the power you seek is attracting great “abundance,” calling in the love of your life, learning how to cure cancer without going to medical school, astral travel, psychic powers, or the ability to overcome gravity or move things with the power of your mind alone.

The gurus Yogananda was interviewing to find the one that felt like his own had their own spiritual show off tendencies. One Swami allegedly showed off his power by taming tigers. Another could levitate. Another could cure lethal illnesses. Another could materialize perfume and make it exude any scent out of the skin of his devotees.

When the Perfume Saint invited Yogananda to become a student and spend twelve years learning to materialize perfume astrally as a way to demonstrate the power of God, Yogananda said, “Sir, is it necessary to prove God? Isn’t He performing miracles in everything, everywhere?”

The Perfume Saint said, “Yes, but we too should manifest some of His infinite creative variety.”

Yogananda said, “It seems, my honored saint, you have been wasting a dozen years for fragrances which you can obtain with a few rupees from a florist’s shop.”

Yogananda goes on to discuss his understanding of how the perfume manifestation happens and explains that he too would eventually learn, through his spiritual disciplines, the “how” of materializing matter, using breath work and a kind of hypnotic power. But he sees it as an arrogant abuse of power to show off that kind of spiritual superpower. He writes, “Wonder-workings such as those shown by the ‘Perfume Saint’ are spectacular but spiritually useless. Having little purpose beyond entertainment, they are digressions from a serious search for God. Ostentatious display of unusual powers is decried by masters.”

Like Yogananda, I watched a lot of impressive theatrics by so called spiritual masters and I never did sort out what I believed about what was real and what was a sham. For example, what really happened when my research landed me in the home of a Qigong master famous for manifesting Chinese herbs out of the palms of her hands, which allegedly could cure incurable diseases? Was she really manifesting Chinese herbs out of the palms of her hands like the Perfume Saint claimed to manifest flowery smells? If so, why not go to the natural herb store and just buy herbs? Why the herbal theatrics, if not to lure people in with their fascination.

I first heard about the Qigong master from another healer who swore this Qigong master could manifest stinky Chinese herbs in the palms of her hands and had cured stage 4 pancreatic cancer in a famous shaman with the “heavenly medicines.” If someone was creating matter out of thin air and curing incurable cancer, I wanted to see it for myself. I had heard about such magical manifestations of matter by gurus like Sai Baba before, but if you look closely enough, most of those claims fell apart under careful scrutiny and turned out to be the fraudulent tricks of a sexual predator.

Still, I had committed to a journalistic investigation of various forms of healers. Hooked by a blend of curiosity and fascination, I showed up with my $300 cash in hand to witness her magical manifestation first hand. I didn’t take long to figure out that the Qigong master was a severely traumatized woman blended with a grandiose, inflated narcissistic part with a Messiah complex.  Had I examined her with my heart and my intuition instead of my fascinated parts, my intellectually curious parts, and my power hungry parts, I would have discerned from the get go that this woman was not some spiritual being of pure love whose depth of spirituality gave her special powers. To this day I can’t say for sure whether any of her alleged superpowers were real or whether they were all an elaborate show. But I can say that her show was conning a lot of vulnerable people out of a lot of money.

Whether or not this healer actually had any real healing power or not, I cannot say. But I can say that she was definitely a con artist. Her schtick was that she would use her healing powers to cure wealthy celebrities in New York, but once they were cured and pledging their eternal gratitude, she would hook them into giving her all their money, allegedly so she could build her own temple and expand her spiritual teachings and healing practice. Threatening them by telling them that their illnesses would come back unless they gave away all their wealth as an offering to the Medicine Buddha, she was raking in the dough.

The Qigong master always pulled the same con, manipulating the client into giving her huge sums of money. The Qigong master would somehow fairly accurately intuitively “read” some bad deed they had actually committed in their past, disarming the client and causing them to become defenseless from shame and humiliation. She would then explain that their illness was the resulting karma from their bad deed and that if they wanted to be cured, they would have to fork over millions of dollars and donate it as a good deed to the healer’s mission, as a way to pay off the karmic debt. The healer would then pocket the money.

When her assistant realized how rich the Qigong master was getting off of terminally ill clients, she just couldn’t stomach it anymore.  She insisted that the healings and the manifestations of herbs and holy water from the palms of her hands were real, that she wasn’t just a sleight of hand magician or a total charlatan. But she cried when she told me that she stayed too long and felt shame that she had participated in the crime. She had supported the Qigong master for fifteen years without ever getting paid a dime because she felt such a debt of gratitude from the cure she received from her own “incurable” disease.

“But you can’t trust her,” she cried. “She was pure once, and she got corrupted, like most of them do.”

It became clear to me that this Qigong master was a traumatized woman whose heart was closed. Even if her powers were real, she had lost the capacity for empathy or love. Whether or not her powers were real, a healer who can’t love ultimately can’t really be a healing presence, no matter how many magical powers she claimed to have.

Just look at the so called “John of God.” In his book Cured, Jeffrey Rediger, MD documented medical evidence that a handful of people who were treated at the healing center in Brazil really did seem to experience cures from incurable illnesses. Whether or not the “healer” was responsible for those cures is impossible to sort out. But he was also a serial rapist and mob boss and will be serving out the rest of his life in prison.

In all my years of research, I never did figure out with any scientific clarity whether some people really do cure cancer with their hands or remote intentions or prayers or holy water. But I did figure out that many of them can’t be trusted, even if they do have some sort of spiritual superpowers. Like the Perfume Saint, maybe the discernment piece we can take away is that those who really might have healing hands and pure hearts probably aren’t bragging about it on the internet or raking in the cash when they do so, and they certainly aren’t leading cults or sexually assaulting those who come to them on their knees. They aren’t charging you the big bucks to learn how to cure disease like they can. They’re not spiritual show offs trying to hook your fascination or entertain you with the illusion of magic.

Maybe they’re just humble folks you don’t hear much about, like nurses laying on hands in hospital recovery rooms and chaplains praying over people in pre-op holding and Hospice angels helping people transition gently to the other side. Maybe they don’t have a line out the door or sell expensive plastic trinkets at their gift stores. Maybe they’re not peddling holy water that comes from a spigot and calling it a water blessing for $150 or selling books promising to teach you how to manifest Ferraris or yellow butterflies. Maybe they’re simply the friends and loved ones holding the hands of people getting chemotherapy and recovering from surgery, ministering to the sick quietly and without showing off.

What are your experiences? Have you experienced spiritual show offs? Was it your opinion that what you were seeing was real or some sort of magic show? I’d love to hear your own ideas about what’s real and what’s bravado out there.