Latent Occult Powers Are Being Recognized and Acknowledged

Our attitude to the development of what many call “psychic powers” is ambivalent, at best. Our popular culture is awash with movies, books, television programs and any number of healers, psychics, and occult practitioners plying their trade in our society. At the same time, while these themes and services are extremely popular, we tend to try to dismiss them as being something less than real because of the impalpable nature of some of these powers, as well as due to the amount of deception and outright fraud that has been committed under the sign of some of these powers by those who want to take advantage of the gullible who cannot distinguish the true from the false in a field that is just emerging in our lives in a serious way.

Those who have real experiences sometimes are afraid to speak about them through fear that they will be ridiculed or even ostracised. The actress Shirley Maclaine broke ground by describing some of her experiences and in particular, an ‘astral projection’ experience she lived through, in her book (and the film made from the book) Out on a Limb.

It is clear that a large number of people have, at some time in their lives, extraordinary experiences that they cannot explain away with the normal justifications and which they understand, intuitively, relate to a deeper reality and purpose than they recognise in their outer consciousness. There are documented cases of people experiencing a sense of a beloved relative at the moment of death on a battlefield on the other side of the world. There are numerous instances of ‘remote viewing’ and elite military units in Russia and the USA have in fact worked on developing powers of this type as military ‘weapons’. Energetic healing modalities have gained enormous popularity due to their effectiveness, both in their own right and as an adjunctive therapy to allopathic treatments to help mitigate side effects and pain, and speed healing. Hypnotism has been used in lieu of anaesthetic in some cases quite successfully. The connection between mind and body has been validated and the ability of the mind to aid in the healing process is no longer seriously contested, another sign that ‘occult’ powers can influence things in the external world.

Dr. Dalal notes: “When people think of latent powers, especially in the East, they often think of occult powers mentioned a little earlier. There are different attitudes both in the West and the East towards such powers. In the West, where such powers are generally called ‘psychic abilities’, the majority of people look upon them with scepticism, attributing belief in them to credulity and gullibility. However, a growing number of Westerners do believe in the veracity of abilities claimed by the ‘psychics’, such as the ability to obtain information through extrasensory perception, to affect objects and persons from a distance, to heal by invisible means and the like. Despite their erratic nature, such abilities have been sporadically employed in numerous fields, including medicine and dentistry, psychotherapy and counseling, police work, agriculture, archaeology and many others.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Introduction, pp. x-xi