The Siddhis
The Teaching
From perfect discipline of the transformations of consciousness comes knowledge of past and future. From awareness of the process of change comes knowledge of the sounds made by all living beings. From direct perception of one's own mental impressions comes knowledge of previous births. From one-pointed focus on the thoughts of another comes knowledge of another's mind.
These powers are obstacles to samadhi, though they seem like magical attainments to the ordinary mind. One who is established in discrimination does not value them. When the cause of bondage has been weakened, the practitioner may enter into the body of another.
By mastery over the elements, the body acquires beauty of form, grace, strength, and the hardness of a thunderbolt. — Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, Book III
Commentary
The third book of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is devoted to what he calls vibhuti — powers or manifestations. He describes an extensive catalog of extraordinary capacities that arise as natural byproducts of sustained samadhi: knowledge of other minds, knowledge of past and future, invisibility, the ability to enter another's body, levitation, and more. He lists them matter-of-factly, the way a medical text lists side effects — not to prove their existence but to instruct the practitioner in how to relate to them.
His instruction is precise and consistent: do not pursue them. They arise spontaneously from particular states of meditative depth, and the practitioner who becomes attached to them or pursues them has taken a wrong turning. They are, he says, obstacles to the highest samadhi — not because they are bad, but because grasping at them keeps the practitioner oriented toward effects rather than toward the ground from which the effects arise.
This is the perennial tradition's clearest statement about what looks miraculous from the outside. Patanjali is not arguing for the supernatural. He is describing the natural consequences of operating at a particular frequency of the vibrational spectrum that most people never access. The practitioner who has dissolved enough of the ego-self, who has aligned above and below sufficiently, finds that reality responds differently to them — not because the laws of reality have changed but because they are now relating to those laws from a different level. What looks miraculous from the ordinary frequency is simply ordinary from the frequency of deep samadhi.