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The first paper of this panel seeks to address the idea of siddhi in relation to the order of Ramanandi sadhus. In this case the Ramanandi approach to siddhis draws on Tantric practice to break through the proscriptive laws of nature, yet does so as a means for rendering service, seva to the larger community. While siddhis are at times rejected within Indian ascetic tradition, as Patañjali aptly illustrates in his Vibhuti Pāda, precisely because they take the practitioner back to an egoic relation to world as other, the Ramanandi yogi draws on the power of siddhi for larger than individual-self aims.
The second paper in this panel draws on the work of the 20th century scholar Gopinath Kaviraj and his guru Swami Viśuddhananda to suggest that the seemingly impossible feats that Swami Viśuddhananda performed—creating fruit seemingly out of thin air, tranforming roses into jasmine flowers—in fact look to a higher order of physics. Drawing from a Tantric conceptualization of materiality, as Swami Viśuddhananda tells us, “within each category of things in the world, the full compass of all categories of matter is present,”[1] Swami Viśuddhananda used a synaesthesia of light and mantric sound to alter the structure of matter. This paper suggests the limit case of the yogi—who can directly, simply by the power of his or her mental concentration affect the material world, as Vishuddhananda did with his widely-known display of yogic powers, materializing tangerines, transforming a rose into jasmine—offers a compelling case study for parsing out the problem of mental causality. That is, what does it tell us about the relationship between the mind and the material world-- when a yogi, through the power of mind, can cause tangerines to appear inside sweets?
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