"It'll blow those Chemists' minds when they start researching Alchemy and they realize the incredible power of mercury and lead to rejuvenate the body and lead to an elixir of youth!"
"It'll blow those Astronomers' minds when they start researching Astrology and the powerful effect of being born under auspicious constellations!"
__________
If the ancient guru knowledge is so great, what testable predictions does it offer, where "auras" are a causal mechanism?
In other words, not: "Thou must intake the golden aura of oats and fiber by eating some, to counter the dark brown blockage of your Pu-point." The folk remedy might well solve your constipation, but it wouldn't be evidence for the mythology around it.
It feels really great to wield the scientific method and feel supercilious to all other people and ideas that do not arise from such infallible reasoning, and sure the progress of humanity hockey sticked since empiricism took hold. But let's not forget that empiricism is limited by what we can/want/think to measure.
Like it's pretty well accepted that breathing exercises have physiological and mental health benefits but it took decades of consumerist appropriation of yoga and other techniques before academia properly found the motivation to earnestly investigate that yes breathing exercises are indeed good for you.
As someone who is a deep practitioner of martial arts and athletics, if the metaphors of qi gong and yoga were purely powerful visualisation aids that already provides more than enough tangible benefit. I don't need scientists to tell me that qi is good for my body - I can feel it.
So let's keep an open mind, our ancestors were anything but idiots.
> So let's keep an open mind, our ancestors were anything but idiots.
Just not so open our brains fall out.
Our ancestors were just like us, but fewer in number and inventing things from scratch. Miasma, spontaneous generation, Newtonian gravity, these were not people being idiots, and even though they have been shown to be wrong they are still close enough to still be useful today. Phlogiston also wasn't idiotic, but lacks utility vs being correct about oxygen.
One of the shared ways we failed then and now is that what sounds true isn't the same as what is true; the modern easy example of this is how easily many of us get fooled by LLMs, and I suspect that's how a lot of ancient religions grew, with additions and copy-errors evolving them to be maximally plausible-sounding to a human mind.
If this actually works, I'm going to be convinced that some alchemist overheard an alien dude talking about this but misinterpreted it in line with contemporary knowledge.
Proper hatha yoga (not the modern hijacked nonsense) is literally a predictive method to experience deeper aspects of oneself, one part of which is a greater sensitivity to energy movements and corresponding fields.
There is already western research on kundalini, the most potent example of bioelectrical energy, and changes in energy potential experienced by meditators. Not to mention countless empirical self-reports (upon which a good scientist would keep an open mind).
But don't let facts get in the way of your prejudices.
Words have meaning, don't write random things about a topic you don't understand because of cultural pride. What you have written is nonsense and demeans hatha yoga, among other things.
> predictive method
No
> corresponding fields
What field? Corresponding to what?
> changes in energy potential experienced by meditators
I think it's worth taking the results seriously but not the proposed mechanism literally. Equating an internal feeling which is loosely referred to as a form of "energy" with physical electricity/bioelectricity would be a mistake. Of course all sensations are indirectly the result of nerve impulses and bioelectricity, but you wouldn't say that someone experiencing tingles of say ASMR has literally received "energy".
It may turn out that you can consciously influence bioelectricity on certain levels (I mean you can certainly control motor functions, maybe you can modulate the current of injury [1] by thinking about a body part?). But you need to be clear about the level of abstraction: when you feel a pit in your stomach are you going to literally attribute this to "clogged energy in your lower dantian", at the chemical level of increased norepinephrine and reduced blood flow to your stomach, or simply as a result of your emotions and anxieties at the moment?
A less fanciful way to say "experience deeper aspects of oneself, one part of which is a greater sensitivity to energy movements and corresponding fields" might simply be "greater sensitivity to emotion and bodily awareness". People do the same thing with therapy, discovering emotional/mental baggage they'd been carrying for a long time, and parts of the body they had been unconsciously tensing.
When everything in our body is meditated by impulses and electricity, saying that you're "becoming more attuned to energy" can be technically true but a functionally useless abstraction. You can equally say "more attuned to chemical fluctuations in your brain/body" or "more attuned to homeostasis disruptions". Maybe in the past they didn't have the vocabulary to distinguish these levels of abstraction, but today we do. (And Michael Levin's work is showing that we've actually been underpaying attention to the bioelectric). This is the same way that the "theory of humors" sort of makes sense on a metaphorical level but it falls apart in a literal sense.
> I think it's worth taking the results seriously but not the proposed mechanism literally
Yes, agreed. There has been plenty of einstein-smart humans making observations for the ~30000 years of human prehistory, with and without the scientific method. Even with a low hit ratio, there is bound to be plenty of correct intuitions. A large number of post-renaissance scientific discoveries are about expressing these in the right testable framework and language.
Unfortunately, people do not bother to make the effort to study these (first hand sources, historical documents like travelogues, even scripture) and rely on either making up or repeating random shit.
> is literally a predictive method to experience deeper aspects of oneself, one part of which is a greater sensitivity to energy movements and corresponding fields.
What does it actually predict? What measureable predictions can be tested?
"It'll blow those Astronomers' minds when they start researching Astrology and the powerful effect of being born under auspicious constellations!"
__________
If the ancient guru knowledge is so great, what testable predictions does it offer, where "auras" are a causal mechanism?
In other words, not: "Thou must intake the golden aura of oats and fiber by eating some, to counter the dark brown blockage of your Pu-point." The folk remedy might well solve your constipation, but it wouldn't be evidence for the mythology around it.