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OCCULT POWERS
India who are able to control their feeling of hunger and thirst because there is a plexus in the throat that is the cause of this sensation, and if this plexus can be controlled by concentration, the person may remain without food or drink for many days. A gradual rising of the power dormant in the navel until it reaches the plexus between the eyebrows can make us able to see many things which we are not able to see otherwise. The real spiritual powers of the soul are not levitation or aerial navigation or any such thing. Such powers may be exercised even by jugglers, and there is a Sanscrit verse in one of the Jain books addressed to one of these. The powers of celestial beings or of many human beings are not to be seen ; we see the manifestations such as aerial navigation and many other powers of the body, but it is not on account of this that we consider them to be great, but on account of the spiritual knowledge and spiritual powers. When persons delight in the mere manifestation of these powers, their power is only that of the juggler. When their life itself is on the moral and spiritual plane, he will never desire to exercise these powers, but they will come of themselves. But how can we become spiritual ? That is the most important point. Spirituality does not mean the acquirement of psychical occult powers, but the unveiling of the soul itself; and that cannot be done by any power of the body, but of the soul itself. Some such power we oftentimes see in some experiments of hypnotism, etc. The person in the hypnotic state, according to the
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