Somebody sat down at McGraw Hill in the mid-1960s and wrote up, for a Catholic reference work, the list of extraordinary things that happen to people who pray seriously for long enough. It runs across two pages of volume ten, and it reads less like theology than like an index to a very strange field manual.
Visions. Reading another person's thoughts. Incendium amoris, the fire of love. Stigmata. Bilocation. Levitation. Compenetration of bodies. Bodily incombustibility. Inedia, which means going without food. Bodily incorruptibility, meaning a corpse that doesn't rot. Locutions, meaning heard voices.1
That list is what this page is about. It gets reprinted here with a claim attached: "So here we have a typical Western spiritual tradition, yet its listing of possible cultivation gong-fu acknowledges the very same phenomena experienced by practitioners of Eastern spiritual schools. Why? Because progress on the spiritual path is nondenominational."1
Gong-fu here doesn't mean martial arts. It means the physical and experiential results that show up in somebody who has done a great deal of practice — the changes you could in principle see from outside. [POPULAR SOURCE]
Underneath the rhetoric there's a plain position, and here it is at its strongest. What happens to a person doing hard contemplative practice is said to be physical. It follows from the practice rather than from the beliefs wrapped around the practice. So it should turn up in any tradition whose members work hard enough, no matter what they think they're doing or who they think is doing it to them. The phrase given for this is that cultivation is "human being science," and the reasoning is one sentence long: "Since we are all human beings, how could they be different?"2
That's a prediction, and a bold one. Traditions with no contact between them should report overlapping experiences, and the overlap should track how hard people practise rather than what they believe. If Catholic contemplatives and Tibetan yogis and Hindu practitioners reported completely different things, the thesis would be dead on the spot.
Then comes the sentence that shuts the door the last one opened. "If the phenomena don't appear, it's not that they don't exist. Rather, it's because your cultivation is wrong or just isn't good enough, or hasn't reached that stage of transformation."2
So a negative result can't count. Somebody who practises for thirty years and gets nothing hasn't refuted anything — they've been reclassified as practising badly. Both sentences sit on the same page, one after the other, and the second one costs the first everything it was worth.
The strongest evidence on the page isn't the list. It's one Catholic saint, described in detail by people who were in the room, and the detail is what makes it worth having.
(I)t sometimes extended over his whole body, and for all his age, thinness and spare diet, in the coldest days of winter it was necessary, even in the midst of the night, to open the windows, to cool the bed, to fan him while in bed, and in various ways to moderate the great heat. Sometimes it burned his throat, and in all his medicines something cooling was generally mixed to relieve him. Cardinal Crescenzi said that sometimes when he touched his hand, it burned as if the saint was suffering from a raging fever. … Even in winter he almost always had his clothes open from the girdle upwards… One day, at Rome, when a great quantity of snow had fallen, he was walking in the streets with his cassock unbuttoned; and when some of his penitents who were with him were hardly able to endure the cold, he laughed at them and said it was a shame for young men to feel cold when old men did not.3
Go through what's actually in that. Windows opened in the middle of the night in deep winter, by other people, because of him. Somebody fanning an old man in his bed. His medicines routinely adjusted — a standing accommodation rather than a one-off. A cardinal reporting that the man's hand was hot to the touch, and reaching for fever as the comparison. And an old man walking through snow in Rome with his cassock hanging open, laughing at the young men shivering beside him.
None of that is a report of an inner state. Every item is something a bystander noticed, complained about, or had to work around. That's what makes this different from almost everything else in this literature, where the evidence is somebody telling you what they felt.
The heat also had a shape. It came and went — "sometimes" extended over his whole body, sometimes burned his throat — rather than sitting at a constant. So it behaved like an event rather than like a temperament, which is the kind of detail nobody adds to make a story better.
That heat is the sharpest case for the whole thesis. Three unconnected traditions have a name for it, and the names all point at the same thing. Yoga calls it kundalini. Taoism calls it clumsy fire. Tibetan Buddhism calls it tumo heat.2 Three vocabularies, three cosmologies, one reported sensation.
And there's a mechanism attached, which matters because it takes the phenomenon out of the miraculous and puts it into something with a cause. The heat is described as frictional — it comes from the chi channels being forced open, the way anything heats up when something is dragged through it that doesn't fit yet. "Everyone experiences some degree of this purifying (frictional) heat when their chi channels undergo a particular stage in the purifying process."2
Two things follow from calling it friction rather than blessing. It should be general — everybody who reaches that stage gets some of it, not a chosen few. And it should be graded, since friction comes in amounts. Philip Neri is at one end of a scale, not in a category of his own.
Heat isn't the only thing, and the surrounding pages carry a much longer list of what people report while the channels are opening. It's worth having because it turns a vague warning into something you could actually recognise.5
Movements of energy all over the body, or slight tremors. Aches. Temperature going up, or down. Some people become lethargic and can't face work. Buzzing sounds — conches, birdsong, ringing bells. Questions coming into the mind and answering themselves during meditation.
Then a set that's oddly specific about the mouth and jaw. The tongue sticking to the palate, or being drawn back toward the throat, or pushing out of the mouth. A dry, parched throat. Jaws clenching and then, after a time, reopening on their own. Yawning as soon as you sit down.
And a set about the head and the seeing. A feeling of the head coming away from the body — the text's word is headlessness. Being able to see things around you with your eyes shut. Intuitive knowledge starting up. Seeing your own image. Seeing your own body lying dead.
Three practitioners are named as having gone through it. Muktananda reported heaviness of the head, heat or pain at the base of the spine, involuntary movement, odd breathing, inner lights and sounds. Gopi Krishna had it arrive spontaneously, with no preparation and no teacher. And Ramakrishna, working under a teacher called Brahmani, got through the promised results of each ritual in three days, and described the movement afterwards as fishlike, birdlike and monkeylike.5
The last line of that passage is the one to hold onto: the energy "produces whatever experiences are necessary for the aspirant's spiritual progress, according to habit-pattern formed by past action."5 So the list isn't a checklist to work through. It's a menu, and which items arrive depends on what you brought with you.
The practical programme comes at the end, and it's the most useful thing here. It's the only part that says what to actually do about any of this.
The task today is not to turn a Christian into a Buddhist or a Jew into a Hindu, for that will never happen. The task is to help the members of each religious group rediscover the true path, principles and practices of spiritual cultivation… that are already inherent within their own religious borders.4
Set that against the eleven-item list and it stops being a sentiment. The list is Catholic. It was compiled by Catholics, for Catholics, in a Catholic reference work, and nobody had to import anything to produce it. Whatever those eleven things are, a Christian doesn't have to go anywhere to find them written down.
And there's an instruction for the case where a tradition genuinely doesn't have the material. "It's up to compassionate, wisdom filled leaders in those traditions to use skillful means to create new vehicles to embody these principles."4 Build something new inside the tradition rather than sending people out of it.
Which is a different proposition from the usual comparative argument, and much less objectionable. Nobody is being asked to change what they believe. They're being asked to go back through their own attic.
Two things close the passage and they pull in opposite directions. The first is the flat one. These results "aren't dished out from above as a sort of grace, but are the predictable, nondenominational results of determined spiritual effort."4 Not given, not awarded, not a sign of favour. Produced. And the argument leans on a Christian premise to make the point — the claim that spiritual progress is available to anybody is asked to square with the tradition's own line that "we're all God's creatures."4
The second claim undercuts the first, and it arrives in the last sentence of the passage. "These possible results, and yet more, are entirely due to your own cultivation efforts, but you have to be introduced to the proper road of cultivation practices if they're ever going to occur."4
So effort is the cause, and you cannot start without somebody handing you the method. Which puts the transmission back in the middle of the picture the paragraph just took it out of. If you need to be shown the road, then being shown is a precondition — and a precondition you can't supply for yourself looks a great deal like the thing that was being denied a paragraph earlier.
Grace has been renamed rather than removed. What used to be a gift from above is now access to a method, and the number of people who have that access is not obviously larger.
You've read a list like this one and you want to know what to do with it. The answer isn't to go looking for stigmata. Start with the item that actually generalises, which is the heat. On this account it isn't rare and it isn't a mark of anything — it's friction, it comes in degrees, and everybody who gets to that stage gets some of it. So the question to ask about your own practice isn't have I had the heat but have I had any of it, and when. A warm patch low in the back on a cold morning counts as data. Philip Neri walking through snow with his coat open is the same thing at the other end of the dial.
Then use the long list of signs as a recogniser rather than a target. Tremors, aches, a temperature that moves, buzzing or ringing, a tongue that sticks or pulls back, a jaw that clenches and then lets go, sudden yawning the moment you sit, the odd sense that your head isn't attached. None of those is an achievement and none of them means you're doing well. They mean something is moving, and the useful thing is to be able to name it when it happens instead of being frightened by it.
Go back through your own tradition before you go shopping in anybody else's. That's the actual instruction here, and the Catholic list is the demonstration of why it works — an entire catalogue of this material, sitting in a mainstream reference work, written by people who had no interest whatsoever in Chinese energy theory. Whatever tradition you came from probably has its own version, filed under language you stopped reading.
And keep the two halves of the closing claim apart, because they ask different things of you. If the results come from effort, that's on you and nobody else, and no amount of asking will produce them. If you also have to be shown the road, then finding somebody who knows it is part of the work rather than a shortcut around it. Both are stated, and a practitioner who takes only the first will spend years being sincere in the wrong direction.
[POPULAR SOURCE] throughout. Chain: the encyclopedia list is Bodri citing the New Catholic Encyclopedia Vol. 10 (McGraw Hill, 1967), pp 173–174;1 the Philip Neri account is Bodri citing Redfield, Murphy and Timbers, God and the Evolving Universe;3 the signs list is Bodri citing the Grof volume.5 Cite it that way in each case.
The Neri material is the strongest thing here, and unusually so for this book. Every item in it is something a bystander observed or had to work around, rather than something the subject reported feeling.3
⚠ The comparative reading is printed inside the source's own sentence. Four of the eleven entries carry bracketed Chinese glosses — incendium amoris [kundalini heat], bilocation [yang shen emanations], inedia [the body becomes full of chi], bodily incorruptibility [the mai have been transformed] — inserted into the quotation on the page where the conclusion is drawn.1 The same habit appears at least five times elsewhere in the book. It matters more here than anywhere else, because the whole value of the evidence is that it comes from outside, and a reader can no longer watch the agreement arrive unassisted. And the four chosen are the four that translate easily. The seven left alone are stigmata, compenetration of bodies, incombustibility, locutions, visions, thought-reading and levitation — and stigmata in particular is tied to one specific narrative about one specific set of wounds, and doesn't translate at all.
⚠ A Catholic encyclopedia is taken as standing for Christianity because most Christian sects trace their roots to Rome.2 Descent tells you where a tradition came from, not what it currently holds, and half the Reformation was an argument about exactly these phenomena.
⚠ And the sentence right after it removes any way of testing it. Absence of the phenomena gets reclassified as insufficient practice, so no result can ever count against it.2
Open question. The heat claim is general — everybody gets some at that stage. Is there anywhere in this literature a report of somebody reaching that stage and getting none of it, and how was it handled?
Two things get said about where these results come from, and a practitioner has to decide which one they're living in. One says the results are earned. They aren't handed down, they're the predictable outcome of effort, they don't care what you believe, and they're available to anybody — including people outside every sanctioned tradition. Follow that and there's nobody to ask and nothing to wait for.
The other says you have to be introduced to the road. Without somebody showing you the method, none of it happens, however hard you work. Follow that and the first thing to do isn't practice at all — it's finding a person.
Both are printed in the same closing paragraph, and nothing joins them. Set against Verification and Its Broken Chain, the second half is the more awkward, because the person you have to find is one you have no way of assessing.
And read with True Kundalini Is Warm, Not Fierce, the Neri account sits oddly. The heat described there is the gentle kind, and this one had people opening windows at night and mixing coolants into his medicine.
What a comparison has to satisfy before it proves anything — Comparative Method in Historical Science. That page sets out the conditions for drawing a causal conclusion in a field where you can't run an experiment. Your cases have to vary in the thing you think is causing the effect. They have to not vary in the obvious alternatives. And they have to be genuinely independent of one another, which is a fact about their history rather than about the page they're printed on.
Test the Neri case against those three and it does better than almost anything else in this book. Sixteenth-century Rome and Tibetan tumo practice are about as independent as two human institutions get. The reported effect is specific — sustained body heat, in a named man, with named witnesses and dated accommodations. And nobody involved on the Catholic side had any interest in a Chinese theory of energy channels, so there was no motive to shape the account toward one.
Which is why the bracketed glosses cost so much. Everything rests on the witnesses being independent, and the annotation lands at exactly the point where their independence is what matters. The comparative-method page would call that contamination of the case by the analyst — not fraud, and not even error, but a procedure that destroys the one property the evidence had.
Run it the other way and the historical page gets something useful too. It usually treats independence as a background condition to be checked once. Here you can watch independence being spent — a genuinely separate source, annotated into agreement, in the space of a single quotation. It's a failure mode for any comparative field: the evidence doesn't get disproved, it gets used up, and the person using it up is trying to help.
(One handshake. The other candidate — that a tradition should search its own attic before borrowing — is the page's own argument rather than a finding from another field.)
Sharpest implication. The best evidence in this book for its central claim is one old man in Rome with his coat open in the snow, and the reason it's the best is that he never says a word about it. Every item is somebody else's inconvenience — windows opened at night, a bed cooled, a cardinal's hand burned, coolants mixed into medicine as a standing arrangement, young men shivering while he laughs at them. Reported experience is the weakest kind of evidence this literature has, and accommodations other people made are the strongest, and almost none of the book is built out of the second kind.
The second edge is what the annotation does. Four of eleven items were handed their Chinese equivalents inside the quotation, and the four chosen are the four that translate cleanly. Nobody is hiding anything — the brackets are visible and the reader can see exactly which words aren't the encyclopedia's. But the value of the evidence was only ever that it came from outside, and outside is precisely what the brackets remove. It's a case of a writer being helpful in the one place where being helpful destroys the thing.
Which points at something general and uncomfortable about this whole comparative project. Every act of translation makes the agreement clearer to the reader and weaker as evidence, and the two effects are impossible to separate, because they are the same act.
Generative questions.