Mataji/John's response:  I agree that we are searching for something more fundamental and spiritual than psychic powers. I believe what we are searching for is meaning and engagement with our life, our friends and family, our world.

The cultivation of psychic or magical powers can be a marvelous way to add meaning and to engage life. There are two major appropriate reasons we cultivate magical powers: to increase our powers of perception; and to increase the creative part we can play in the cosmic dance. They are interconnected.

When we increase our ability to perceive psychically, we increase our ability to heal our relationships and our lives. This manifests first in an ability to explore and heal our blocks and misunderstandings from a sheltered place, while we are meditating. Using our developing abilities, our accumulating everyday know-how, and feedback from our friends and from others, we learn and grow. Eventually, as our psychic skills grow, we become able to use our insight on the fly, that is, in the midst of our interactions.

I'm only aware of two ways to advance our abilities to this point. We can find someone who is a good teacher and who already has that level of ability and study with them for years, or we can engage in some course of meditation practice in which we learn to hold a magical focus (it may still take a few years, but we can set our own course).

Often, in the past, deliberate cultivation of psychic abilities was discouraged, though some spiritual texts such as Patanjali's Aphorisms do explain how to cultivate psychic abilities and thereby imply their usefulness. Today's context is new. Today our social structures are supported by enough abundance that many of us can devote less time to survival, and we can move freely and interact socially in ways that were unavailable 100 years ago. In this new social environment, relationships require new kinds of individuation that can be developed best with using social skills, augmented by psychic perception.

The wider cultivation of psychic perception makes us less likely to use it to dominate others. Today,
people are unlikely to confuse ability with virtue, and consequently less likely to blindly follow someone with powers. Even more importantly, since so many people are developing their own abilities, psychic abilities no longer isolate us in a special class. They bring us together into an emerging community, one in which we can both seek many alternate opinions and share our own abilities as a part of the conversation. The best teacher is interaction with others.

Today, people are more ready to share their concerns and criticisms about their teachers with those teachers. This helps keep us honest, growing, and moving beyond much of our self importance.

The second reason to develop magical abilities is to create more skillful manifestations in the cosmic dance. Jane Robert's Seth always used to say that humanity is learning to be become conscious co-creators with God. As long as we use our magical abilities with a light heart, and with sensitivity to the feedback we get from our friends and from other interactions, we can use our growing magical abilities to do good, and to do well (to prosper). Of course it is theoretically possible for someone to misuse their magical abilities. And it's important to recognize that all of us already use magical abilities unconsciously. Everyone I know who has brought them into conscious awareness uses them with more compassion than they did before.

We all misuse our power to some extent, but the more conscious we become, the more ability we have to use it skillfully and compassionately. Again, the key is involvement with people who will share their opinions with you. My experience is that magical powers are fun, fascinating, and a potent aid in the exploration of life, love, and compassion.

c 2001 by John Friedlander
www.PsychicDevelopment.cc