Siddhis - gift of God's grace or consequence of own efforts?
>
> For more than a decade Shri Lalita Devi has revealed that She is
> the Supreme Goddess in the Sahasrara, and that Shri Mataji Nirmala
> Devi is Her incarnation on Earth. The siddhis that enable my three
> children to visit Her in the Sahasrara were initiated by Her. None
> of my children desired anything. How can mere children mediate on
> Shri Mataji and are met by Her in their Sahasraras? How did
> three-year-old Lalita or five-year-old Arwinder acquire such
> powers? Whatever they told me about the Shakti in the Sahasrara is
> the basis of www.adishakti.org. Without these siddhis there is
> absolutely no way to provide evidence that Shri Mataji Nirmala
> Devi is the incarnation of the Great Goddess.
>
Next they hold that as a corollary from the first tenet, God abides inside the heart of every man as the sun abides in all its myriad rays. He is not merely a physical body alone, as materialists believe, nor a body plus a ghost-like soul which emanates from it after death, as religionists believe, but he is here and now divine in the very flesh. The heavenly kingdom must be found whilst we are yet still alive, or not at all. It is not a prize which is bestowed on us in the nebulous courts of death.
The practical consequence of this doctrine is embodied in the third tenet of the mystics, which asserts that it is perfectly possible for any man, who will submit to the prerequisite ascetic discipline, to enter into direct communion by contemplation and meditation with the spirit of God without the use of any priest or prelate as an intermediary and without the formal utterance of verbal prayer. This renders it quite unnecessary to lift upturned palms in suppliant adjuration of a higher Being. Silent aspiration thus replaces mechanical recitation.
The fourth tenet is as obnoxious to official religion as the last for it declares that stories, events, incidents and sayings, which in their totality constitute a holy scripture, are merely a mixture of imagined allegories and actual happenings, a literary concoction whereby mystical truths are cleverly conveyed through the medium of symbolic myth, legendary personification and true historic fact; that the twentieth century indeed could quite justifiably write its new Bibles, its new Qurans, its new Vedas afresh if it wished, for the divine afflatus may descend again at any hour.
Mystics hold, fifthly, that their practices ultimately lead to the development of supernormal faculties and extraordinary mental powers or even strange physical ones, either as the gift of God's grace or as the consequence of their own efforts.”
Paul Brunton, The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga,
E. P. Dutton & Co., 1966, p. 77
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