The perception of consciousness

According to the website of the Evolutionary Collective, awakened consciousness is characterized by heightened perception, fearless receptivity and penetrating insight. Many of us have experienced or intuited a flip into what they would call awakened consciousness. I prefer to simply call it being "aware". 

I suppose everybody has heard the claims made about the general health benefits of yoga and meditation, and in contrast to the not so distant past, the scientific community now has irrefutable evidence to show that regular yoga practice improves high blood pressure, decreases stress levels, boost our immune function, and lifts our spirit in addition to a growing list of benefits to the health and welfare of it's practitioners.
What hasn't been researched to the same extent is the reputed existence of extraordinary abilities that can be attained through the diligent practice of yoga, but they are well established and documented in the literature of yoga, where they are called siddhis.

The fourth century BC sage Patanjali enumerated the following siddhis in his Yoga Sutras (as listed by Targ and Katra):

Knowledge of past and future; understanding of the sounds made by all creatures; knowledge of past lives; knowing what others are thinking; prior knowledge of one’s death; the attainment of various kinds of strength; perception of the small, the concealed, and the distant; knowledge of other inhabited regions; knowing about the stars and their motions; knowledge of the interior of the body; control of hunger and thirst; steadiness; seeing the adepts in one’s own interior light; intuition; understanding of the mind; entering the bodies of others; lightness and levitation; brightness; control of material elements; control of the senses; perfection of the body; quickness of the body.

While science is slowly getting round to the idea of the individual health benefit of yoga, the Transcendental Meditation (TM) Organization has conducted several demonstration projects to show the effects on the surrounding community of a large number of people meditating in a group. This project occurred in Washington, D.C. between June 7 and July 30, 1993 and involved up to 4000 people meditating in a group. The surprising results were verified by an independent group of scientists who approved the research protocol and performed the statistical analysis  of the data.

Their report showed that homicides, rapes, and assaults decreased by 23% (significance p < 2="" ×="" 109) in D.C. during the period, and reverted back to normal levels afterwards, mimiking the results of a previous trial held in Iowa during 1982-1985 that monitored motor vehicle fatalities, suicide and homicide as main variables to change during a similar but smaller group of focused meditation.

If we consider the ever increasing body of evidence being collected, the inescapable conclusion we glean from these abilities, hard as it may be to believe, is that the mind not only functions through the senses, but also through extrasensory processes. This means that large regions of space, likely all of space; and large eras of time, most probably all of time, present, past and future may be open to it.

If you were wondering how you could unlock some of the extrasensory mental abilities we share you can begin by reading Are you suffering from empty thoughts.