fascinating interview

Fakir Musofar, body piercer, samadhi, out-of-body, God etc
http://levity.com/mavericks/musa.htm
I especially liked the bit about God greeting him:)

Great interview. Very cool.
Thanks!
Mac

“Fire is fire, no matter where it burns.”
Mac

Hi Mac,
I actually did a fairly extensive search on this guy and it turns out he is using the body’s pain to seperate his soul from it. The soul doesn’t want to stay in the body because it is so painful.
That got me thinking, maybe this guy is a bit insane.
However, there IS some good stuff in this article.
It occurred to me though that he doesn’t really know what samadhi is. The reason i found this website is because i was searching for fakir burials. He came up and i thought it was interesting at first, but now i see that my initial thoughts on this interview were different to the ones i hold now.
It’s strange how you can watch or read the same thing twice, and on both occasions see a totally different thing.

I am not in to anything like body piercings or body modifications but he was right on about the loss of the mystical and magical in Western society. I especially like what he had to say about rights of passage and tribal customs and rituals (with meaning attached). I’d like to read the book that it came from.
Mac

Nope, this technique ordeal path is very powerful and can be found in authentic shamanism.
Think of it: pain is an illusion of ego so you have systems using such path. In some cases, you can even Shaktipat this way !
Albert

This unfortunate man being interviewed is an example of the disorder known as masochism, a mental illness which is defined as “a sexual perversion characterized by pleasure in being subjected to pain and physical suffering and abuse.” Not a “fascinating interview” nor “cool” at all, but rather a sad commentary on the suffering of mentally illness.

John, to be fair, he started off by saying that he used to go into trances and found that he could pierce his body without feeling pain. Then he said that he had out of body experiences and death experiences through it. I fail to see how this is a mental illness.
I do, however, concur that people who abuse their own body in certain ways, and especially sexually related ways, seem to derive pleasure from pain. In which case, this man does seem to have some type of psychological disorder.
But bear in mind that i found this interview after searching for FAKIRS on Google.
I find it rather fascinating that people can pierce their skin in these fashions and not bleed, feel no pain, and sustain no scars. That in itself is a good reason to check out Fakirs. I have been researching Houdini, and the SAdhu Haridas Burial.

The BDSM world is full of people, both sane and insane, spiritual and non-spiritual… Some of them knows pretty well what they’re doing, like this guy in the interview, some of them don’t. It’s a very blurry zone where very little is “normal” and very much is exploration of all kinds - sexual, relational, mental, physical and for some: spiritual. Some can get harmed there, some don’t. Some are there due to mental illness (almost always in turn due to physical or sexual abuse in childhood) repeating their traumas, some are there to spice up their boring sexlife, some are there due to compulsive traits, fetishist traits or other conditioned patterns given by karma or whatever we want to believe they come from, some are there to see others and are not really interested themselves, some are there to suck up low frequent energies like vampyres, some enjoy pain for sado-masochistic reasons, others are more into pain to reach ecstacy as described above. ‘Subspace’ is a common term among practitioners. ‘Dissociation’ would be the psychiatric term.
In the “new age” society in Stockholm it’s not difficult to find people who have one foot in the chrystal world and one foot in the Leather Club world… The worlds are getting together, and I believe an interview like this one may decrease many prejudice against BDSM practitioners.

John, I take it that you don’t enjoy piercing yourself with shiny, sharp objects in your doctor’s bag?
Mac

Moderator note: Topic moved for better placement

Great interview

in christian tradition, there are only 2 possibilities to be canonized : to do miracles, or to be a martyr. So, suffering is definitely considered as a path, and Jesus taught it himself. (I have to add that a 3rd path is currently being consired, the “path of virtues”, since some people want to canonize children who didn’t die as martyrs, like Anne de Guigne for example).
Anyway if you read the life of Saint Peter of Alcantara (whom St Therese of Avila has seen in glory after his death), you would call this guy a true masochist. He wore a cilice his entire life, ate every 3 days, slept 1h30 per night, had only 1 cloth, no shoes… and he was not alone. There are many Saints like him, especially in the catholic tradition. For example St Gerard of Majella asked his brothers to whip him, and you can’t call him a fool, he did the greatest miracles.