Sunday, August 10, 2014

Long Distance Love

When I was twenty one, I left Australia to study at Cambridge. I'm an only child. My mother was very upset. She didn't want me to go. She made me promise faithfully that I'd come home as soon as my studies were finished.

I made the promise, and immediately broke it. I stayed away for fifteen years.

Taxed by my father with disloyalty, I pleaded that I loved my mother and thought about her a lot.

"Codswallop!" Dad replied. "That's an avoidance. That's just thinking. Without actions, thinking means nothing. Thought, on its own, is a cop-out."

When Kundalini awakens, something happens to "just thinking." Consciousness takes on an increased energy, while the physical brain's power over us abates. Thoughts become packets of energy arising from an energy field. They're no longer a series of compulsive nervous tics in the head. It's possible to see a thought coming, as it were, on its way — like an eruption from the surface of the sun that hasn't yet reached the earth — and to know what the thought is, without having to directly think it. It's this that makes mindfulness possible, and rewarding.

The true energy of thought begins in the heart, and is only registered in the brain as a secondary image. When the mind's center of gravity is changed in this way, passionate contemplation of a loved one becomes a movement towards them in the energy continuum, a movement that is as real as seeing them with our eyes, or holding them in our arms. In this way, Kundalini alters the possibility of what "just thinking" might mean to people who are physically separated.

It's no coincidence that there's been an upsurge in Kundalini awakenings at a moment in history when more and more people are parted from their loved ones: the Thai farmer selling hot dogs at Abu Dhabi airport, who's missed seeing his children grow up; the Filipino seamstress cleaning hotel rooms in London, who can't be with her dying father. People displaced by war and natural disaster. The drifter who can't explain why he doesn't go home to see his mother.

Mindfulness — knowing thought without thinking it — empowers consciousness and takes some of the physical edge off necessity. Painful though it may be, physical separation becomes the pale, outer shadow of an inner closeness. Indeed, when Kundalini opens the throat chakra, the source of space/time, closeness becomes oneness, no matter how far apart you are.

I finally made it home to see my mother, and she forgave me my broken promise and long absence before she died. Close to death, high on morphine, I think she understood the power of "just thinking," though my Dad still reckons it's Codswallop!

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