Evidence of Yogis stopping their heartbeat

[MM1988]

Leo talked about this in a video, was there ever any evidence recorded of this happening? All I could find was that various yogis who claimed to be able to do have not been able to reproduce this in a lab setting.

I would love to be not as skeptic as I am but on one hand these Yogis want to convince people to practice Yoga and yet these claimed supernatural abilities or siddhies have never been proven. What would be a better way to convince people of doing their school of yoga by having one of these abilities approved by a scientist? That would make their particular school of yoga much more credible overnight. Now you might be saying I want bold evidence for subtle phenomena, but stopping once heartbeat or levitating into the air is also a bold claim. I just cant get over this contradiction in the spiritual world but I would be open and happy to be convinced otherwise.

[Clown]

Siddhies are usually considered to be a hindrance on the spiritual path and they're not the goal of doing yoga. If someone were to advertise their yoga school by claiming that you get all these abilities it would attract the wrong mindset.

[MM1988]

There might be some validity to the moral implications of such powers but I cant help it, this sounds like such a cop out to me. 

[Leo Gura]

@MM1988 The problem is that you are expecting yoga to be commensurable with your materialist ways of quantifying the world. And it just isn't.

You cannot grasp the subtle with the gross.

There are aspects of reality which cannot be mapped, symbolized, or quantified.

The scientist needs to have enough self-awareness to realize, "Oh, yeah... I shouldn't expect yoga to fit my terms, but instead I should fit myself to yoga's terms."

Instead of testing yoga in a lab, you should ditch the lab and sit down and do yoga yourself. That IS the test.

[MM1988]

4 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@MM1988 The problem is that you are expecting yoga to be commensurable with your materialist ways of quantifying the world. And it just isn't.

You cannot grasp the subtle with the gross.

There are aspects of reality which cannot be mapped, symbolized, or quantified.

The scientist needs to have enough self-awareness to realize, "Oh, yeah... I shouldn't expect yoga to fit my terms, but instead I should fit myself to yoga's terms."

Instead of testing yoga in a lab, you should ditch the lab and sit down and do yoga yourself. That IS the test.

But it were the Yogis that made these bold claims in the first place! thats the whole problem here. Why make a gross materialist claim like stopping a heartbeat or levitating that could easily be measured with really primitive tools. Why dont they stick to their "energies" and non-verifyable stuff.

 

I also see this completely seperated from the materialism/idealism debate, I'm open that these siddhis exist in both paradigms.

[Wouter]

Not exactly stopping the hartbeat but still impressive and related:

 

[Leo Gura]

@MM1988 Well, when they hooked Sadhguru up to an EEG machine, it registered him as clinically brain dead.

Science has done a poor job of researching yogis. If a serious scientist measures a yogi with no heart beat, what do you think will happen? Do you think he will say, "Oh! Look! All of our understanding of human physiology is wrong!" or will he say, "Oh! What a fluke! This is just some strange anomaly. I can't explain it, but this obviously can't be real so let's get back to studying normal people."

Any scientist who starts to validate mysticism will be outcast by his peers and called a mystic himself. It's a political game you cannot win. So most scientists have learned not to even approach this domain of investigation.

All scientific evidence of the paranormal (and there is much of it) is automatically dismissed as impossible. Because it doesn't fit the materialist paradigm. And the paradigm is what's king. You can only "see" evidence which your paradigm is open to. You're thinking about this whole thing backwards. It's not evidence which supports the paradigm, it's the paradigm which creates or denies the evidence.

[MM1988]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

@MM1988 If a serious scientist measures a yogi with no heart beat, what do you think will happen? Do you think he will say, "Oh! Look! All of our understanding of human physiology is wrong!" 

Well, what IS he gonna say? Lets be real here. What you say might all apply to subtle phenomena but how is a scientist gonna handwave away a missing heartbeat?

A scientist would have no choice to say, well I guess thats possible so some of our understanding must be wrong. It wouldnt necessarily violate his materialist paradigm though. It would be enought for the scientist to say "This works in a materialist world but we dont know why yet". Scientists do the same regarding black matter.

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, MM1988 said:

but how is a scientist gonna handwave away a missing heartbeat?

A scientist would have no choice to say, well I guess thats possible so some of our understanding must be wrong.

Hahahaha...

You give scientists WAY too much credit.

Do you realize that scientists are masters as explaining away and ignoring anomalies? That's what they do for a living.

The scientist's first choice is always to reject any data which doesn't fit his metaphysical paradigm. Because obviously the paradigm is right, and the data must be erroneous.

And in the rare case where one scientist is successfully convinced that the whole paradigm is wrong, what do you think will happen?? What do you think his colleagues will say when he runs over to them and say, "Look guys! I found a man with no heartbeat! All our theories about human physiology were wrong!"?

Will say hug him and say, "Wow! Great work! Let's admit to the public we were fools all this time. Let's re-write all the textbooks and tell all the doctors we taught them lies for 100 years. Yay! Hooray! All our reputations are going down the toilet! Yay!"

They will just ban him from the university for talking woo-woo pseudoscience. They will say he's been hanging out with religious kooks and has turned to a New Age believer. His reputation will be destroyed, no serious scientist will ever want to work with him, and all of his grant money will be pulled.

You don't get it yet. Science is a political game. For a thing to be accepted as true, it must win a long political battle. It's not about truth, it's about self-preservation.

"Black matter" isn't a problem for them because it fits the paradigm. It's "matter". Try to get them to fit "God" or siddhis into their paradigm and see what happens.

They still don't accept the full ramifications of quantum mechanics.

The greatest professors at CalTech still do not know the difference between a math equation and a cheeseburger! What wisdom can you expect from such a dense person?

It's like explaining a joke to a donkey. There is no substitute for having a sense of humor. And there is no substitute for consciousness or radical openmindedness.

[Prabhaker]

12 hours ago, MM1988 said:

All I could find was that various yogis who claimed to be able to do have not been able to reproduce this in a lab setting.

Doctors Baffled by Prahlad Jani, Man Who Doesn't Eat or Drink

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/International/man-eat-drink/story?id=10787036

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Fasting fakir flummoxes physicians

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3236118.stm

[Vipassana]

 

 Absolute Infi fucking nity people, ofcourse these monks can die at their will, they have beaten the materialist with a hammer for their whole life. I cannot even comprehend these radical states of consciousness

[MM1988]

@Leo Gura But the very definition of pseudoscience is scientific theories that have no empirical evidence behind them. That doesnt mean its wrong per se but just that its unverifiable so scientists tend to stay awax from it. A man with no heartbeat on the other hand would be undeniable empirical evidence.

It might be that scientists would tend to stay away from verifying these claims. But If such a man exists then word of mouth  (aka anecdotal evidence) would spread so fast he WILL end up in a lab sooner or later. In fact I found a source that claims this has happened, apparently 4 yogis agreed and attempted it over multiple days but there heart was still found to beat normally. Thats exactly how stuff becomes pseudoscience, not the other way around.

 

@Prabhaker @Vipassana Thanks, thats some good stuff. I knew about self immolating monks and its very impressive. This is the stuff that keeps a western skeptic like me meditating every day.

Edited March 13, 2018 by MM1988

[Leo Gura]

12 minutes ago, MM1988 said:

@Leo Gura But the very definition of pseudoscience is scientific theories that have no empirical evidence behind them.

 The distinction between science and pseudoscience is nonsense. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. 100 years ago x-rays were pseudo-science. Today, it would be pseudo-science to deny their existence. 400 years ago, telescopes were pseudo-science. Today, you would be called insane if you say, "Telescopes are a tool of the devil meant to deceive mankind." Yet that is exactly what the good scientists of the day told Galileo.

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A man with no heartbeat on the other hand would be undeniable empirical evidence.

No! Empirical evidence does not matter at all when you're dealing with a dogmatic person. That's the whole point! The evaluate evidence properly requires total openmindedness. Stop assuming that scientists have it. Not even close.

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But If such a man exists then word of mouth  (aka anecdotal evidence) would spread so fast

Yes, it will. And it has. And we have it. But so what? It will not become a part of mainstream cultural knowledge or mainstream science because they are the gatekeepers and will throw it away. It will just become religious myth.

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he WILL end up in a lab sooner or later.

No, he won't. He will be ridiculed as a fraud or delusional religious kook.

And in the rare case where you do succeed in getting a lab to study him, that lab will get discredited and their results thrown out for "improper procedural methods." Obviously the methods must have been improper, because everyone knows that stopping the heart is physically impossible.

You're still not grasping the depth of this problem.

[Prabhaker]

@MM1988