When I was young, I often read the Biblical stories of the prophets, including the prophet Elijah. Elijah appears in the Christian Bible, Old Testament Hebrew Bible, Talmud, Mishnah and even the Koran. Why? Because he was a samadhi master and performed many demonstrations of samadhi powers which the uninformed (ignorant) call miracles or works of God. Elijah is famous for raising the dead, bringing fire down from the sky and ascending into heaven in a chariot of fire.

None of these events are unique in the history of spiritual cultivation. In fact, many have been repeated elsewhere, so if you accept them HERE you have to open the door to accepting them THERE. That's the first mistake most people make. These deeds are not the province of just Elijah, or the Jews or the Biblical line of masters, or Christians or however limited you want to make your claims. That's another mistake people make who just don't know enough about spiritual cultivation and its stages.

Elijah's miracles were the result of cultivation, nothing more and nothing less, and you can read all sorts of accounts from all sorts of spiritual streams describing not only the same sort of events, but telling you how to cultivate them. In this case we don't know which methods Elijah used, and that's another reason why the Jewish line of samadhi masters (Prophets) has died out. The Rabbis need to start cultivating samadhi if they want to re-establish it.

If you cultivate, then you can perform these feats as well. The India yoga schools and tantric schools have catalogs of such powers you can cultivate even if you DON'T achieve full samadhi — it just takes practice, which is why I won't speak of certain feats you can perform since a smart person  upon hearing of them can recognize how to cultivate them and will do harm to himself and others. That's why my own teacher has showed me or mentioned to me various methods on how to kill ghosts, open up this or that chakra, or advanced deadly martial arts that he never discusses publicly. Very few people can understand these things, but a smart person can in one second at least understand the theory, and from that go on to cultivate various forms of gong-fu WITHOUT  samadhi…though the result might take years of efforts.

Anyway, Elijah's miracles are the results of samadhi powers, and have nothing to do with "God" (though that's what you proclaim to your audience who can't understand because they lack any attainment,s or when you want to deflect questions or change the trajectory of events or for whatever reason) but with personal efforts at self-cultivation. They are not the province of any one religion, nor is any religion SUPREME because they have this sort of demonstration in their history. Where there are samadhi masters there are superpowers, so you'll find this sort of thing everywhere there are saints, sages, gurus, masters, adepts, initiates,  etc. 

In fact, when spiritual streams  battled with one another in the past, usually these powers were publicly demonstrated by cultivation adepts on both sides in a type of contest to see whose stages of cultivation were higher than the other. You can read countless stories of this — Christianity's Saint Patrick vs. the Pagans, Tibetan Buddhists vs. Bon magicians, Judaism's Elijah vs. the priests of Baal, Moses vs. the Egyptian priests, Chinese Buddhist Adepts vs. Taoist priests, various Hindu masters vs. Muslim masters, Sufi masters vs. orthodox Muslim scholars, and so forth.

It would be a great book to collect all these stories just to show you how both sides cultivated such powers, and how the battles   first involved a contest of logic and rhetoric to see whose teachings or dogma was supreme, and then a battle to see whose realization and gong-fu was   higher. That was a debate. So today if you challenge someone from another religion to some sort of debate, if your own knowledge isn't far reaching and you don't even have any gong-fu or wisdom attainments, you aren't even qualified. It's not a matter of intellect, but accomplishment….and yet that accomplishment must also illustrate an understanding of the spiritual path.

In just one random instance of a gong-fu battle (most you can find in India) held in China, two Buddhist monks (Kashyapa Matanga and Gobharana) publicly ascended into empty space and manifested the eighteen transformations of an Arhat during a dharma battle with some Taoists. The upper part of their bodies emitted water, the lower part of their bodies emitted fire; the upper part of their bodies emitted fire, the lower part of their bodies emitted water; they walked about in empty space; they lay down and went to sleep in empty space, and so forth. 

That's what I wanted to bring your attention to - this control over the five elements in dharma battles because Elijah exhibited the same thing.

Many people have written that Elijah's departure in a  chariot of fire (the Biblical description of his passign away) was a primitive people's account of a UFO. Nope….it was actually just an uneducated people's attempt to describe one of these "eighteen transformations of an Arhat," well known in countless Indian, Tibetan, Buddhist and Chinese stories, and just described.

That's the purpose of this blog post — to teach you about the eighteen transformations of an Arhat:

Therefore, the arhats, who have achieved the highest attainment of the Hinayana, know beforehand when their earthly life is over. When ready to pass away they manifest wonders, "reduce their bodies to ashes and extinguish their knowledge," saying of themselves, "My life is over, my pure conduct is established, my task is done, and I will not experience any further becoming."
 … the state of dhyana, as Shakyamuni also said, are a kind of common phenomenon; that is, they are not the monopoly of Buddhism. As long as they deeply understand the principles and diligently cultivate realization, ordinary worldly people and those of other religions can all attain similar states of concentration, but none of them are the ultimate complete teaching. [The Story of Chinese Zen, pp. 44-47]

For instance Ananda, the attendant of Buddha, had finally reached the stage of Arhatship upon the teaching of Master Mahakasyapa, the successor of Shakyamuni Buddha. He was crossing the river Ganga when King Ajatashatru of one country arrived  and begged him to come to his side, while the people of the city of Vaishali  started gathering on the other banks of the River Ganga to welcome him across and begged Ananda to come to their side.

In order to avoid disappointment to both parties and possible conflict, and knowing that his time to depart this world had come, Ananda displayed his superpowers by rising  into the air and disappearing into a ball of fire. His ashes fell on both the banks of the river where the relics were enshrined. He basically demonstrated upon his death, as an Arhat typically does, his siddhi power over the fire element just like Elijah. It was exactly the same thing — many Arhats choose to leave the world in this very same method and it is recoutned countless times in Tibetan, Chinese and Indian sources.

That is exactly what Elijah did. He had samadhi capabilities, for sure. The evidence in unmistakable. But by no means was it unique or supreme. He definitely was not enlightened either, but did reach the samadhi realms in his cultivation and upon his death, rose into the air, performed the fire transformation, and departed.

No, it wasn't a UFO… it was just an Arhat saying Farewell.  

Those poor UFO folks unfortunately know too little about cultivation to have even made the connection. They might want to read a book like the stories of the 84 Siddhas in Masters of Mahamudra, by Dowman.

Too bad that too few know anything at all about spiritual cultivation and meditation techniques. Of course UFO books sell, cultivation and meditation books don't.