Yogi Levitation, What physics need bent?

Factual Questions
41

I’m still thinking about this helium theory. Another possibility is the yogi could learn to compress and retain the helium in his lungs as he breathes in more and more of it, thus allowing him to get a whole lot more helium into his lungs.

Of course, in the correct physical world, compressing more helium into the same volume would just make it less buoyant, totally defeating the intended purpose. But this gives us a promising direction to our inquiry: Now we understand exactly what physical principal needs to be bent to make it work. We need to be able to compress more helium into a fixed volume without losing its buoyancy. That’s all there is to it.

42

I thought that Eastern teachings were that once one could see past the “illusion” of physical reality, one could levitate. IOW, =miracle/not scientifically explainable.

I kinda asked this question in another thread I started: Yogi Levitation, What physics need bent? - Factual Questions - Straight Dope Message Board

43

A warning though:
There once was a faith healer of Deal,
Who said “Although pain isn’t real,
If I sit on a pin
and it punctures my skin,
I dislike what I fancy I feel!”
Don’t let this happen to your compressed-helium-filled yogi.

44

That poem and the thread reminded me of a very old tale/joke/legend from China or India:

 *"Three monks decided to practise meditation together. They sat by the side of a lake and closed their eyes in concentration. Then suddenly, the first one stood up and said, “I forgot my mat.” He steeped miraculously onto the water in front of him and walked across the lake to their hut on the other side.

When he returned, the second monk stood up and said, “I forgot to put my other underwear to dry.” He too walked calmly across the water and returned the same way. 

The third monk watched the first two carefully in what he decided must be the test of his own abilities. “Is your learning so superior to mine? I too can match any feat you two can perform,” he declared loudly and rushed to the water’s edge to walk across it. 

He promptly fell into the deep water. 

Undeterred, the yogi climbed out of the water and tried again, only to sink into the water. Yet again he climbed out and yet again he tried, each time sinking into the water. This went on for some time as the other two monks watched. 

After a while, the second monk turned to the first and said, “Do you think we should tell him where the stones are?”"*

While it is a funny joke, the lesson that should not be missed is that there are amazing feats out there that have mundane explanations, and sometimes the mundane explanation is that some things like walking on water or levitation never took place and are examples of tales that got better with the passing of time.

45

Some Eastern teachings endorse the idea that the world is sort of an illusion without suggesting that one could levitate. Same school of thought says you can do better than yoga if you’re into this kind of stuff. So, what you said there isn’t cause-effect in either science or (all anyway) “Eastern teachings”. It has to work some other way.

46

There’s also the story of the man who spent ten years learning how to walk across the river. Only for the local Holy Man to point him toward the perfectly good bridge just a few yards downstream.

47

It’s perfectly simple - Yogis levitate precisely the way brinks don’t. The first Yogis just learned to teleport up subatomic distances, but that was very difficult and caused many to overheat and spontaneously burst into flames. The more enlightened ones realized the basic nature of the uncertainty principle. D

48

It’s perfectly simple - Yogis levitate precisely the way bricks don’t. The first Yogis just learned to teleport up subatomic distances, but that was very difficult and caused many to overheat and spontaneously burst into flames. The more enlightened ones realized the basic nature of the uncertainty principle - DxDp³[DEL]h[/DEL]/2 - meditation reduces momentum so there is greater uncertainty in the distance vector. The more they look down upon you, they higher they go.

49

In a strict sense - we are all levitating all the time since particles of our body cannot touch the particles of the floor due to electromagnetic repulsion. Our sense of touch is really a strain gauge of our skin.
As to Yogis - they come in all shapes and sizes - many are fake and are only there for the drugs - others are lost and trying to figure things out - a lot are mentally challenged. A very few and rare ones are enlightened and mostly seek seclusion. Conversations with one of these kind is very thought provoking. General rule of thumb - If the Yogi asks you to pay, he/she is fake.

50

See I dont see the reason or the fuss over levitating.

Yeah sure, a few have some sort of magical or demonic power but the most they levitate is a few inches anyways so what’s the big deal. Plus it only lasts a short time, is not always certain to happen, and requires special meditation. So they cant just say levitate and fly off to somewhere.

51

Two words: quantum tunnelling. The yogi has all the subatomic particles of their body displace upwards. Synchronised. Repeatedly. No scientific laws broken. The yogi is just an advanced quantum mechanic.

Alternative: the many-worlds hypothesis is true and yogis can slide into another universe completely identical other than their relative vertical displacement

52

The word for this process is “touching”. I’m not sure how one can meaningfully say “They’re not touching the floor; all they’re doing is touching the floor”.

53

Chronos - you are right - I was trying to portray the visual that there was always a gap between our bodies and the floor we stand on. Maybe contact is a better choice of word.

54

Three approaches to ‘explanations’

I was in Japan when members of the Aum Shinriko (neo-buddhist/christian synthesis) cult gassed the Tokyo subway. After that, there was a lot of “Who are these quacks?” investigations featured on the news – even in English. Several of the features I watched included mention that Shoko Asahara (the leader) claimed to be able to levitate while meditating and also claimed his followers could learn to do the same. There were documentary videos of groups of disciples sitting cross-legged (most notably NOT lotus position) on the floor in deep calm non-concentration. Some of the people at the front (higher-level disciples, I presume) would start rising up (even lifting their pelvis a few inches off the floor) and open their eyes in a proud “Wow! I’m doing it!” expression – only to fall back to the floor at that moment.

The official explanation was that those disciples were starting to get it; only their failure to maintain the trance, their involuntary return to reality, their subconscious unwillingness to fully break with the material world kept them from completely rising off the floor.

After the leader was caught and indicted, high-level insiders admitted the levitation trick was simply a matter of strengthening the gluteus maximus muscles and pressing the outside edges of the feet against the floor. The glutes would start the ‘rise’ and the legs would continue the action. If done skillfully enough, the practitioner could look like the pelvis was rising and the feet were merely trailing behind as the legs dangled.

Back in the 1970’s when all three of the broadcast networks were televising variety shows just about every night of the week (Sonny & Cher, Donny & Marie, Captain & Tenile, Laugh-In, Hee Haw, etc.) there was a husband & wife team of mimes named Shields & Yarnell who got their own show.

One of the skits on the show was two guys sitting in a park, reading newspapers and chatting about mundane stuff. The guest of the week was doing it with both feet on the ground; Shields was going it with one leg crossed over the other. There was nothing holding them up other than their leg muscles. After a couple minutes, someone came buy an said, “Hey, guys: They moved the invisible bench to the other side of the park.” at which point Shields and the special guest looked at each other and fell on their butts.

My point being that, with enough muscular training (and mimes are apparently well-trained with dance, yoga, and other muscular arts) one could appear to defy gravity for a limited time.

I was allowed to join the final camp-out in the Sierra Club’s Wilderness Basics course, the snow camping trip. Snow was falling on the night we took three busses full of campers up to the Big Bear area, slept in a school gym with two other Sierra Clubs, and then split up to get to various starting points (depending on our skill levels). It was clear and sunny as we hiked a half day to our camping destination. Then we set up a tent area, then carved blocks of snow out of the fallen base to set up a snow-privy a few dozen yards away. We set up another area for communal cooking, dining, and socializing by carving more snow blocks out of the base-layer and building a wall, ending up with an eight-foot by eight-foot square with a trench around it and three-foot high walls on three sides. It was all pretty neat. We’d sit on the snow layer with our legs dangling into the trench and rest our backs against the little walls. We’d put our camp stoves and on the giant square and cook and eat off the ‘table’ in the middle.

We had dinner around dusk and chatted for about an hour after it got dark, but people were getting cold and voted to go to bed. I got a couple hours of sleep but, since I’m usually a late-night person, I woke up around 10PM feeling restless. Since there was nobody else to talk with, I decided to go out and do some Tai Chi in the middle of camp.

A key component of Tai Chi is weight distribution. One will be 60-70% on one foot, 100% on one foot, and very rarely 50/50 evenly weighted. More importantly, a critical part of the movement is in reaching out with one foot while the other foot is bearing all the weight, then transferring weight from one leg to the other AFTER making sure it’s safe. So I was practicing very at a very slow even pace, working very hard to reach out with each foot and make sure the next surface was both firm and non-slippery before transferring my weight. In fact, there were a few times when I would reach out and place my foot, start transferring, and then readjust my footing because the snow was either slippery or soft. Still, I managed to get through the Yang Style Short Form twice without sinking.

In fact, after I moved to the middle of the ‘table’ and was doing the form a second time, one of the other campers must have heard me crunching the snow underfoot and he poked his head out to watch. As I finished up, he crawled out of his tent and stood up, asking, “Wow! You’re a kung fu student?”

“No, that was Tai Chi.” I corrected him, “I teach down in North Park.”

“Really?” He asked while walking toward me, “I just moved to North County and–” suddenly he had one leg up to his knee in snow and his other leg was bent at the knee with his shin on top of the ice. He was bent forward, supporting his upper body with his hands and arms.

I moved quickly toward him and set my feet wide apart while reaching out to grab his arms. As I pulled him up I noted, “Actually, North Park is south of the eight, close to Balboa park. North County is the stuff north of Miramar.”

We chatted briefly and determined that he lived too far away to reasonably get to my classes in time, and a few people shushed us so we went back to our separate tents.

Two days later, during the bus ride back, my tent-mate asked, “What’s this I hear about you floating over the snow last night?”

“Oh yeah,” I joked because I had no idea exactly what she had heard, “I was doing the Crouching Tiger, Floating Dragon* thing.”

Since I had been moving about on the surface and the other guy had sunk knee-deep into the “same” snow I guess rumors had built upon rumors…

–G!
Yeah, I know that’s not the right name for the movie. Some guy in the row behind us corrected me and we detoured to a different conversation after that.

55

Either that or you’re part elf. :smiley:

56

I saw the Teachers do any number of strange things when I lived in a Buddhist school, but never knew anybody who ever thought about levitating, it would have been a pissing away of the OM. Whatever happens in life or meditation, once it is perceived it is lost in Maya, illusion. So levitation can exist but not in the world of perceived reality. I don’t think Physics will be torn down and rewritten (the way it was by Einstein) in my lifetime, but it certainly will in the time of my grandchildren. Who knows what knowledge is going to look like?
There was a great scene in the TV show Kung Fu where Kwai Chang levitates in a jail cell. Very strange image, the way Carradine’s life played out.

57

I am a Biblical Literalist. And while Jesus walked on water because, as God, Incarnate, He was able to suspend any law of the System He created, Peter did so only because Jesus enable him, temporarily, and to teach him something he needed to know.

But Eastern religions, as noted, don’t require, nor mostly, to my knowledge, allow for, much of the belief structure or laws of Abrahamic religions.

58

Eastern religions (Hinduism specifically) perfectly allows for much of the belief structure or laws of Abrahamic religions. The only part it is not comfortable is the “one interpretation for all” or accepting one truth makes all others false. It is left to the individual to define the truth for herself but it also tells that the same individual should allow others to come to different conclusion.

So from a logic perspective say A> There is one God and B> There are multiple Gods.

So Abrahamic thought structure will tend to prove that either A or B is the truth. And proving B is false makes A true automatically.

So Abrahamic thought : Either A or B is true

Eastern thought :
Either A or B is true
Neither A nor B is true
Both A and B are true
The answer is unknowable

All - the above are okay interpretation for individuals.