A friend sent along this YouTube debunking of the yogic capacity to levitate:
The intellectually well-heeled may snicker at so flimsy a trick and at the credulity it can inspire but the problem the scene posits is hardly a cheap date.
Walking on water, turning water into wine, levitating ...
About levitating, my mother once read over an advertisement for classes in which students, for a fee, might learn to levitate. Whether it was true or whether it was false didn't interest her much. Her question was, "if you could do it, well, then what?"
How many things are akin to this -- activities or wonders in which believers beg piteously between the lines, "Please, please, please don't pop my bubble!" Disbelievers, of course, can exhibit a smug delight in debunking well-blown bubbles.
Take away the smug insistence of a disbeliever and I think the purpose of spiritual life is to pop bubbles. Religion may blow the bubbles, but practice invariably pops them one by one ... when it's any good.
What a rug-burn of a paradox ... following a persuasion (intellectual, emotional, spiritual) that posits one bubble after another, one belief after another, one meaning after another, one explanation after another, only to find, when some seriousness is brought to bear, that the question remains adamantly unanswered:
"Then what?"
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