levitation excitation

Birthday, 1915, Marc Chagall - © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Levitation. Did I ever disbelieve it? Probably. But now I wonder. I am open.

Last year, I listened to an entire book on levitation, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, by Carlos Eire. Eire, a scholar of religion at Yale, focuses on reports of levitation and bilocation in Catholic history, but I was already familiar with these from the Buddhist tradition.

With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to the modes of supranormal powers. He wields manifold supranormal powers. Having been one he becomes many; having been many he becomes one. He appears. He vanishes. He goes unimpeded through walls, ramparts, and mountains as if through space. He dives in and out of the earth as if it were water. He walks on water without sinking as if it were dry land. Sitting cross-legged he flies through the air like a winged bird. With his hand he touches and strokes even the sun and moon, so mighty and powerful. He exercises influence with his body even as far as the Brahma worlds.

This is from the Samaññaphala Sutta: The Fruits of the Contemplative Life, part of the oldest Buddhist textual sources. Always there is an emphasis on purification of the mind and virtuous conduct in association with supranormal powers. Reports of levitation in Christianity also are usually among the devout and among saints-to-be.

But levitation isn't confined to religion. I've recently noticed two other instances of levitation: UFOs/UAPs and trance mediums.

I noticed that reports of the movements of UFOs/UAPs, so-called physical manifestations of The Phenomenon, indicate that they defy gravity. They move up and down and sideways at speeds and with changes in direction that any gravity-bound object would find impossible, especially without any evident source of power.

And then there is the levitation that takes place in the presence of mediums, in seances. Items in the seance room rise, dart around the room, graze people's heads, change direction rapidly. The medium's chair ascends to the ceiling, with him in it. The table around which everyone is gathered leaves the floor and hovers in space.

Oh, and did I say? No one knows what gravity is. We can see and experience the effects of gravity, but what is it? If we don't even know that, why are we so unable to accept that some things and some people "defy the laws of gravity"?

But, what I am most interested in is this triangulation: levitating monks, nuns, and saints; UFOs/UAPs; and items in a seance room. What to make of this?