The Supernatural And Metaphysical Unite!

Sad is watching someone thump his chest because he believes he's won an argument that's unwinnable. That's what the polemic concerning God vs. No God is, an unwinnable argument, a polemic.

In polemics the winner is the one most skilled in argumentation. Evidence, empirical or anecdotal, is not to be found, while shouting and obfuscation are ubiquitous and omnipresent. Invective, rant, tirade, broadside, diatribe, attack, harangue, condemnation, criticism, stricture, admonition, rebuke are its hallmarks. Ted Cruz is a master of polemics.

I didn’t have to read Cold-Case Christianity (CCC) written by LA cold-case homicide detective, J. Warner Wallace to realize that it was based on customer profiling and psychographic targeting with a liberal dose of the agent's and the author's crafting a clever non-fiction book proposal, i.e., that a veteran homicide detective could apply the principles and techniques used in solving cold cases to prove the veracity of the Bible. Trouble is, the author doesn't start from scratch; he has a foregone conclusion he is determined to fit his so-called researched facts to. I downloaded the sample pages, read them, saw where he was headed, and decided to pass on the rest. Nevertheless, the book is a big seller, which says more about the general lack of analytical skills than it does about the book's content. It tells us that people need constant reinforcements of their beliefs, and they are ready to accept them blindly, in whatever form they are offered — film, article, webpage, book.

Bart Ehrman's book Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible offers a more coherent appraisal of the Bible's content than CCC does, but whether you accept Ehrman's or Wallace's version of the facts is not the real issue. Both are best sellers. And both put forth arguments that are mere stand ins or straw men for the real issue: the God vs. No God argument. One side argues that, if they can verify evidentially the accuracy of the Bible, it then follows that God must exist; the other side argues that if they can disprove the assorted "facts" in the Bible, it proves that God does not exist. This is the straw man fallacy, which Wikipedia summarizes thusly, "The so-called typical 'attacking a straw man' argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition by covertly replacing it with a different proposition." Whether the information in the Bible is accurate or not does not prove or refute the existence of God.

This straw man approach is a new wrinkle to the old "There is a God" argument, the one which urged you to accept the existence of God on faith. But like that approach, it's beside the point. Whether you argue "Bible facts" or "faith," there's no proof that God does or doesn't exist. I'm not saying He doesn't; I'm saying I don't know. No one knows, and no one can prove otherwise.

The “faith" approach is more of a movement than a proof, a political groundswell with no rational basis. The "Bible facts" argument is moot because — even though it's a diversionary straw man tactic meant to bolster the less reasoned "faith" argument — it boils down to using the intellect in trying to prove, or disprove, the existence of God. I call this the outside-in approach. It is not possible to apprehend the supernatural — I prefer the term metaphysical — with the rational mind, from the outside-in. Not possible to use intellectual pyrotechnics or polemics to authenticate the supernatural or metaphysical. Authentication must be lived and experienced first hand.

There is an alternate: the inside-out approach, which uses Eastern energy cultivation techniques such as meditation, yoga, etc, to actually awaken the hidden subsystems of the human body, allowing the individual to experience metaphysical reality directly, i.e., to pass from the physical to metaphysical planes, and thereby bear witness to what I call the energy continuum — an expanded reality beyond the material world that contains that world and the worlds beyond all cosmological worlds. How far an individual goes with this type of practice depends on his volition and dedication. Let me add here one insight it has given me: the ultimate aim of meditation is to become more and more conscious. Enlightenment, therefore, is becoming fully conscious.

How did I arrive at this? Through a kundalini meditation that projected me into a vibratory state of such profound consciousness that I realized, not because someone asked me to take it on faith, but because I experienced it, that a hidden metaphysical reality does exist, that death is only an intermediate state. How unconscious I had been all of my life!

What sort of mechanism did this meditation trigger in order to accomplish this? It used the body's most powerful source — sexual energy. Quite simply, the energy source which creates life was rerouted and drawn up the spinal column into the brain. Since kundalini is a biological phenomenon, it needs to draw energy from a biological source in order to accomplish its purpose. That source happens to be sexual, the same energy source involved in procreation. How could it be otherwise? The energy used to create life is the same energy used in spiritual re-birth. What other source in the human body has the requisite energy to accomplish such a task?

Luckily, I was in my early thirties when this happened. Plenty of time to learn from this process and to restore my body to its optimal condition. At first, the effects were physical; my brain and its casing were reshaped (strange how the physical awakens the metaphysical which in turn kick off a reconditioning of the physical). Gradually, as these metaphysical experiences deepened, I became more conscious, until I realized I was using only a portion of my potential, that full consciousness might somehow remove me from the physical world. As I said, becoming conscious is gradual and I haven't felt ready to make such an existential leap.

But whether it boils down to what Christians refer to as a supernatural experience or to the term I prefer, a metaphysical experience, my aroused kundalini showed me that while we can't prove the existence, or non-existence, of God, we have at our disposal a vast range of experiential phenomena, such as OBE, NDE, kundalini awakenings, etc., all of which are triggered by a voluntary or an unexpected summoning of biological energy.

With this type of experience, there's no need to thump the chest; winning the argument is not the goal here. Scientific evaluation is. These cases don't depend on polemics; they occur irrespective of cultural, language, religious, educational, or geographical differences — and they share many of the same symptoms and effects. For the individual, it's a take-it-as-it-comes succession of phenomena in the laboratory of his or her own body, which, over time, also quiets the ego as it renews the being. For society, it's a piecemeal compilation of metaphysical accounts, which, as each anecdote is added, becomes an avalanche begging for a suitable means of scientific authentication.

The inside-out approach jettisons the whole baggage of conventional wisdom, polemics, and traditional religion. Christianity, which was turned into a political party by Augustine of Hippo and whose proponents/apologists and critics/detractors have argued God vs. No God back-and-forth for over two thousand years without making any progress, is an especially sad case.

Individuals, influential early Christians like Arius and Origen, who encouraged the direct experience of the inside-out approach — much in the mode of Buddha, Gurdjieff, Krishnamurti, Milarepa, and Lao Tse — were systematically rooted out and persecuted by pro-Augustine spin doctors, a case well-documented in the Elizabeth Clare Prophet book on Reincarnation and Christianity. Yes, there are unproven hypotheses in her book, but the idea that Jesus was on a Buddha-like trip during his lost years, supports the notion that the major historical spiritual figures used the inside-out approach to arrive at the insights and fundamental practices that the religions named after them are based on. The outside-in approach didn't appear until much later when the various spin doctors began arguing the endless stream of dogma/doctrine, much to the chagrin of the real authorities on religious experience.

In fact, the supernatural yearnings Christians feel are a positive element; they need to join with metaphysicians to practice and pursue the inside-out approach that values energy cultivation and direct experience over polemics and the dictates of intermediaries, i.e., priests, spin doctors, theologians, and ecclesiastics.

Those who take the inside-out approach have made, and will continue to make, measurable progress in the practice and discovery of energy cultivation techniques which lead to direct metaphysical experience, the multiplicity of which is just beginning to be catalogued and authenticated, à la Michael Murphy’s The Future of the Body, a survey of consciousness and meta-normal experience.

The Secret of the Golden Flower - Revisited, Part II

For over 40 years, I’ve practiced Golden Flower Meditation (GFM), the method in The Secret of the Golden Flower (SGF) that many adepts recognize as derived from the Buddha’s own meditation system. When I first started, I had no idea it was a manual for activating kundalini...

Perhaps it was because the Wilhelm translation of the SGF has a poetic quality that obscures unambiguous execution of the meditation teachings embedded in the text. Metaphor rather than easy-to-follow, step-by-step explanation is the norm. A modernized How-To it is not. Terminology often sidesteps the underlying process, hints at it, leaving you to wonder if you are doing it correctly. Some terms overlap in meaning; some techniques are referred to by more than one term. Only by obstinate practice do the techniques become clear.

Nevertheless, I kept at it. I’m not sure why. Part intuition, I suppose. Part distrust of mass movements: I was turned off by Scientology and similar movements that herded initiates toward obedience as dictated by a single leader. Buddha and Milarepa had done it on their own. Why couldn’t I?

Life in 1970 — when I started meditating — was quite different from today. No Internet, not many books on yoga or meditation. It took me over a year to understand the method and practice it in a systematic manner. The one thing that kept me motivated was that, once I caught onto the breathing techniques, I began to detect sensations of energy stirring and flowing throughout my body.

I became a skilled observer, applying techniques in a manner best suited to my particular morphology and soma. I created a step-by-step order for my practice, which turned out to be important because it’s not possible to jump over or skip a step; each one has to be mastered before moving on to the next one.

I stress the point about becoming a skilled observer as much as I stress learning to meditate on your own. Groupthink never gets it done; you can only learn so much from others. The real work is done in the laboratory of your own body. You must become your own best “spiritual” detective.

It Takes Courage to Go It Alone

GFM has entirely reengineered my nervous system, body, and brain. The method is composed of three techniques, each of which must be mastered in turn before beginning the next:

1. Diaphragmatic Deep Breathing (DDB)
2. Control of Heart Rate
3. The Backward-Flowing Method (BFM)

The Backward-Flowing Method

It’s a system that Gopi Krishna, the 20th century’s great elucidator of Kundalini, described as “containing unmistakable hints about the sublimation process.”

He’s referring, of course, to sexual sublimation, a process that uses distilled sexual energy to wake up the nervous system and revitalize the brain and the body, ultimately triggering Kundalini. Although sublimation sounds mystical, it is really a biological process, entailing the diversion of  sexual energy to the brain. Instead of flowing out, as it does during normal sexual intercourse, the seminal fluid, or cervical fluid in a woman, is diverted to the brain in a distilled form known as prana, which is the key to enhanced neuroplastic activity in the brain.
 

Sexual sublimation is the basis of activating Kundalini in whatever form it takes. I say this because the Kundalini experience takes many forms, probably because the sublimation process takes so many forms. Hidden channels can open in dissimilar ways, triggering a flow of distilled sexual energy to the brain that varies according to individual metabolism and soma:

“For a week I observe my breath circulate in the opposite direction without noticing any effect. The mind goes on autopilot and I go back to my uninspired routine: walking, cooking, meditating. Then, two weeks later, about the length of time it takes the backward-flowing process to become permanent, there’s something new. On the day in question, I feel a sensation at the base of my spine like the cracking of a small egg and the spilling out of its contents. For the next month, I observe the fluid-like contents of the egg trickle out of its reservoir and slowly begin to climb my spine. What is this fluid? I can’t describe it exactly. It seems to emanate from the base of the spine and press upward. Each time I sit to meditate, it has risen a half an inch higher.”
~ Excerpted from, Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time

Meditating is easy for some, but not for others. It took me a long time to get comfortable with the process, to learn the posture and to concentrate. I was alternately bored and restless, fidgety and impatient, sleepy and indolent. Sitting in the lotus position, my mind used the time to review the events, impulses, and relationships in my life. I was powerless to stop this inner dialogue, to clear my mind of chatter. I knew it could be done; others had written about it. To succeed in meditation, it had to be done; all the teachings said so.

"Nor must a man be led astray by the ten thousand ensnarements. This happens if, after the quiet state has begun, one after another all sorts of ties suddenly appear. One wants to break through them and cannot; one follows them, and feels as if relieved by this. This means the master has become the servant. If a man tarries in this stage long he enters world of illusory desires."
~ The Secret of the Golden Flower

I dropped everything and concentrated on meditation in the hope it would improve my breathing, allowing me to become a better musician. However, sitting in the lotus position, I couldn’t get the breathing right. One day while walking, I decided to sync my breathing to each step, counting my breath over a series of strides. Exhale four counts, hold four counts, inhale four counts, hold four counts. Start over. I practiced a lot, walking great distances until my breathing became regular. The process of counting obscured the chatter, and it gradually disappeared. Eventually, I stopped counting; my mind had emptied. And I returned to sitting meditation, which then kicked into high gear. It had taken me over a year to get my mind under control, but once I was able to, the meditation advanced quickly.

As a result, my Kundalini activated at the age of 35. Energy I didn’t know existed started flowing through the neural channels of my body. I could feel and observe it. Almost immediately, I realized that this pranic, super-conscious energy was the Primal Spirit, a term I’d come across many times in The Secret of the Golden Flower without really understanding what it meant.

It took about three months for this process to complete. I never felt sexual arousal, rather a benign hydraulic sensation, as if a liquid was slowly being “pumped up” my back. Should you succeed in activating "the circulation of the light," as explained in Part I of this post, the outcome will probably differ from mine, or from the next person's. Don't worry about it. You'll find your way.

"When one begins to carry out one’s decision, care must be taken so that everything can proceed in a comfortable, relaxed manner. Too much must not be demanded of the heart. One must be careful that, quite automatically, heart and energy are coordinated. Only then can a state of quietness be attained. During this quiet state the right conditions and the right space must be provided. One must not sit down [to meditate] in the midst of frivolous affairs. That is to say, the mind must be free of vain preoccupations. All entanglements must be put aside; one must be detached and independent. Nor must the thoughts be concentrated upon the right procedure. This danger arises if too much trouble is taken. I do not mean that no trouble is to be taken, but the correct way lies in keeping equal distance between being and not being. If one can attain purposelessness through purpose, then the thing has been grasped. Now one can let oneself go, detached and without confusion, in an independent way."
~The Secret of the Golden Flower

Don't Lose Sight of the Body's Role in This Work

After awakening Kundalini, I was able to visualize my body as a real time, transparent, 3-D model, much like a life-size version of a child’s human anatomy toy model. I could see the defective parts; they lit up and vibrated at a different frequency. I could see how certain parts my body had torqued as a result of their being denied vital life force growth energy. How do I know this to be true? I know it firsthand; it happened to me. I felt and observed the energy rising along my spine, felt and observed it entering my brain. But don’t take my word alone. Test it in the laboratory of your body.
 

Read The Secret of the Golden Flower - Revisited, Part I

Integral Yoga – Every Moment is Prayer

The word Yoga simply means union. The moment of oneness with the absolute. In common parlance currently in vogue, the term has come to represent physical practices, asanas or poses and nothing more. The poses assumed by Yogis to gain control of the body are simply one small aspect of the vast number of spiritual practices called Yoga. The poses are from the branch of Yoga called Hatha Yoga.

Throughout history, humanity has experienced leaps in consciousness through revelation. Whether it is the prophet Moses, Jesus, Buddha or the founders of various other religions, awakening of the kundalini and subsequent ascension of the individual to a state of illumination is accompanied by revelations that then gather a following, become part of religious practices.

Depending on the era of birth, the geography of the individual, his level of education and creative abilities, there are wide variations in the resulting revelations. They all point to the same reality but they are all expressed differently. As mentioned in my previous post, these methods are ours to use as we see fit and the path taken towards self-realization which works for one most likely will not work the same way for anyone else. This needs to be understood before accepting a rigid set of techniques and before proselytizing others.

Tied at Mooring – Tranquil Summer Days

A better approach is to figure out what path best allows you to find inner peace and drop the external mask, the persona that obscures your inner reality for the sake of fitting in with the outside world. Sri Aurobindo, the Indian mystic and Ken Wilber, the modern day mystic whose ideas are the inspiration for the ''Matrix" movies are two proponents of an integral yoga. A collection of practices that address every aspect of the human state and approach the quest for self-realization as an incessant stream to be lived each moment rather than a set of rituals performed at a certain hour.

Classical yoga divides spiritual practices into four kinds of yoga. This classification is exhaustive. Nearly all practices and states of being, and methods of worship fall into one of the four categories, regardless of the religion of the practitioner.

The four paths of Yoga: There are four traditional schools of Yoga, and these are: Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Karma Yoga, and Raja Yoga. While a Yogi or Yogini may focus exclusively on one of these approaches to Yoga, that is quite uncommon. For the vast majority of Yoga practitioners, a blending of the four traditional types of Yoga is most appropriate. One follows his or her own predisposition in balancing these different forms of Yoga:

Jnana Yoga: Jnana Yoga is the path of knowledge, wisdom, introspection and contemplation. It involves deep exploration of the nature of our being by systematically exploring and setting aside false identities.

Bhakti Yoga: Bhakti Yoga is the path of devotion, emotion, love, compassion, and service to God and others. All actions are done in the context of remembering the Divine.

Karma Yoga: Karma Yoga is the path of action, service to others, mindfulness, and remembering the levels of our being while fulfilling our actions or karma in the world.

Raja Yoga: Raja Yoga is a comprehensive method that emphasizes meditation, while encompassing the whole of Yoga. It directly deals with the encountering and transcending thoughts of the mind.

The most common is the path of devotion, known as bhakti yoga. Praying twice a day, attending mass on Sunday, reciting the Lord's Prayer are all forms of bhakti yoga. This path, of faith, of absolute surrender to the divine is the most common form of worship. This may suffice for the average individual that worships out of a sense of social obligation, but not for the seeker on the path. Praying or meditating for an hour still leaves about 15 waking hours in the day that are not devoted to the quest. It is not just impractical to meditate or pray for hours on end while ignoring worldly duties, it is also unnecessary.

The Rising and the Falling

We need to remember the underlying goal of all this effort. The final stage, commonly called enlightenment, is beyond understanding. One can't aim for it and set course like a ship sails to a port. However, we know that the way to this destination goes through a constant process of awakening the true self and staying awake. Constant mindful awareness to each action, constantly breaking thought patterns that take us away from the here and now. By becoming aware of the mental agitation, by becoming cognizant of the constant unrest within us, we learn to witness it. To separate, for the first time ever, the mental apparatus that thinks, from the true self that is the witness. It is not I that does the thinking. I witness the mind as it creates the thoughts. Each time I step back and witness the mental machinery, it is also a process of detaching oneself from that mental chatter.

Essentially, it is a process of removing conditioned responses and ingrained patterns that have long kept us enslaved. For the first time, we taste true freedom. A freedom from the human robot bound by those repetitive patterns and conditioned responses. A freedom to be spontaneous and "in the moment," seeing, for the first time, the world as it is, without the baggage of preconceived ideas, labels and notions of how the world should be. 

Integral Yoga understands the need to incorporate the different forms of yoga and devote each waking hour to the contemplation, service and realization of oneness with the absolute. Expressed differently, to know that one is a creation of that almighty intelligence, and can never be separate from it, one needs to provide methods that constantly awaken the consciousness from the slumber induced by our mundane "reality."

Motor Highway Fest

A kundalini awakening is simply an automated mechanism that takes over the psyche and goes about cleansing the soul of past conditionings and shows the individual how to proceed on the journey of realizing one's true self and union with the absolute. Some aspects of this process, such as revelation, are governed by the energy and require no assitance from the individual. Others require the ego to co-operate and surrender itself to the greater work being performed, knowing it will be completely dissolved at the end of the process. 

Knowing this, the various forms of yoga and techniques associated with them can be seen as methods of helping the individual see beyond the ego, to align the ego with the path of spiritual progress until it realizes its role as an interface with the outside world and not as the true self. At their most basic, methods of worship inculcate positive patterns into the psyche. A lifetime spent reciting a mantra and activating a state of surrender to the divine molds the brain, creating neuronal pathways that eventually allow the self to see itself clearly.

The best way to remove an ingrained pattern that leads us towards robotic behavior and prolongs the state of ignorance is to replace it with one that causes an upward spiral towards freedom. A pattern of repetitive behavior that eventually removes all patterns and conditioning. This is the true purpose of any method of worship. If a chosen method does not serve that purpose, it should be replaced by another, more effective one or augmented with other methods that achieve this goal.

It may seem like a contradiction in terms to advocate the use of ritual, repetition and conditioning if our final goal is to remove all such shackles, but it is not. It depends on the patterns we choose, how we practice, and why we practice a ritual.

It is important to have control over who programs your mind and what it is being programmed with. If I am doing it myself, aware of the effect of that course of action, I have a better chance of reaching my true self. If I allow friends, social groups, or worse, television commercials and the approval-disapproval control mechanism, high-school popularity contest that is the Facebook "Like" button, I remain stuck in the realm of ego, bound by the senses and the ego's craving for comfort and its tendency to create a false reality favoring a selective image of itself.

In future posts, I intend to write in detail about each path and how almost every action or thought can be a method towards the realization of the absolute.

No pain, no gain.. don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

I recently read a quote by a popular guru in a question and answer session. One of his disciples asked the guru about kundalini. Now, this guru is a famous personality in India, one that influences millions of people. Currently, you cannot talk about the spirituality/New Age scene in India without mentioning this person. The conversation went something like this:

Q: Guruji, what is Kundalini and how to awaken the Kundalini?

The Guru: Kunda means body, and Kundalini means the conscious energy in this body.

Whatever happens in meditations in the Advance Course is Kundalini itself. There is no other way to interpret Kundalini. If meditation happened, it would not be possible without the awakening of the Kundalini. If you went into meditation, it means the Kundalini has been awakened in you.

I was amazed, not only by the lack of knowledge of this well-known guru, but his touting of his 'Advanced Course' and reducing the definition of kundalini down to 'when you meditate, that is a kundalini awakening'. Here I sit, 6 years into a sometimes scary journey with profound insights, a writhing snake slithering up and down my spine, immense improvement in latent skills, becoming a better singer, photographer, a change in my outlook towards the world, a totally new person unfolding each day. I have undergone shock and trauma that rivals PTSD experienced by soldiers that have served in the worst war conditions, questioned my sanity, lived in existential terror for years.

Along comes his exalted holiness and gives this simplistic and downright misleading definition of the phenomenon. A lot has been said on this blog about what a K awakening brings, but I think there is a need to mention how to spot a fake and what a kundalini experience is not.

Anyone that quotes scripture and describes the kundalini process based on what's in the sacred texts, but has no explanation or personal stories about their own experiences should been viewed with suspicion. Likewise, people that remain exactly the same person without a fundamental shift towards spirituality, and more importantly, people that do not go through a phase of trauma, disorientation and a cathartic cleansing of the body and mind have not experienced a Kundalini awakening.

Our images of the divine are invariably the beatific, calm, sublime and angelic notions of a benevolent God. You just have to look at the pictorial depictions of Jesus or the Buddha to confirm this notion. In rare instances, depictions of wild, scary goddesses like Kali or a bellicose Shiva might stray from this image, but the pseudo-gurus usually play to the beatific, peace-loving guru image that they are expected to play. It makes them tougher to spot. They have memorized the scriptures and have a witty line memorized for every question. If you have undergone an awakening, however, these gurus are laughable and stand out like three-dollar bills.

Kundalini can be a scary, mean, energy that does not give a hoot about you, your ego and its notions about reality.

"I am an atheist who likes Richard Dawkins" may sound cool at cocktail parties, but gets thrown out the window when the energy takes over and starts to overhaul the entire being, starting with the fake rationalizations, the false ideas of self that we hold dear, the explanations we give ourselves to hide our skullduggery. There is nothing politically correct or gentle about it.  It is a benign energy, but when it does its work on us, our ego sees it as a horrible experience because the ego resists death. It dearly wants to hold on to its ideas.

As seen from the perspective of the dying ego, the energy is demonic. A surgeon operating on you to remove a gangrene makes you bleed, there is a lot of pain, but the eventual result is the healing of the body, leaving the person healthier. What the kundalini energy does is very similar. It removes the harmful gangrene attached to our souls, our ego. The things we keep hidden in depths of our mind, even from ourselves, (especially from ourselves) are laid bare. The first few months (or years, depending on how long you resist) are the worst. If you have spent a lot of time building up an ego, pretending to be someone you are not, your ordeal will be pure purgatory.

In fact, this is the real purgatory. The term refers to the bridge, the throat chakra, that separates the earthly realm (the body) from the higher chakras (the head). The concept of purgatory, in the metaphysical sense, are the visions seen by those undergoing a Kundalini awakening who are stuck in the in-between stage. The cleansing of past trauma, sins, wrongdoings stuck in the psyche as blocks are cleansed by the energy as it passes up and down the body, giving way to brief glimpses of the absolute (heaven) as the energy passes unimpeded to the third eye or higher, activating the pituitary and pineal glands, releasing anandamide, giving rise to mystic experiences as the left and right hemispheres underwent neuroplastic reconstruction.

In the state of mystical hyper-awareness, the trauma and past 'sins' are churned up and as the energy burns through them (literally, a burning sensation as the energy passes through the spine) each is seen vividly. This is the experience of hell. The journey from earth to hell to heaven is the span of the vertebral column. The number 33 has a significance in metaphysical literature of disparate traditions. Jesus 'died' at 33. 33 is not only a numerical representation of "the Star of David”, but also the numerical equivalent of AMEN: 1+13+5+14 = 33. In Kashmir Shaivism, the universe is explained in 36 tattvas or principles. The first 33 are in the realm of divinity in an expanded form, the last 3, shiva+shakti = paramshiva, when the yin (right brain) and yang (left brain) unite to become the absolute (crown chakra). In Hinduism, there are 33 levels or koti of Gods. Each level has its own deities. (The word koti also means the number 100 million in Sanskrit and Hindi and it is mistakenly said that there are 330 million Gods in the Hindu pantheon).

Why the emphasis on the numbers 33 and 36? Simple. There are 33 bones in the vertebral column. The energy takes the human being through the expansion of the absolute, a reverse evolution or involution back to unity. The 'death' of Jesus at 33 is the death of the human and the subsequent unity with the absolute. 33 steps on the way to heaven, then a purging of the impure or demonic in purgatory (ego loss) and entry into heaven. There are countless tales of wars between Gods and demons, one of the most famous being the Hindu tale of Samudra Manthan, where Gods and Demons churned the ocean (consciousness) using a snake tied to a mountain, Meru (Meru-danda is a term used for the spinal column). It yielded several gifts, gems, powers and the poison halahal, which Lord Shiva held in his throat, turning it blue. A reference to the throat chakra and the poison or toxic blockages and trauma that have been cleansed by the energy. The detailed account can be found here.

Now, all this magical, mystical stuff, wondrous phenomena, revelation that solves ancient riddles and explains allegorical tales from mythology, summed up as “when you meditate, you awaken kundalini” by this charlatan. Sad state of affairs. Kundalini fundamentally changes you as a person. The old you does not exist any more. The new you is a higher ascended being (if the process is allowed to unfold properly). Politically correct ideas do not come into play. Lofty ideas about 'helping society' take a back seat to just keeping your back from breaking into two and keeping your sanity intact.

I have run into all kinds of people during my awakening. The worst kind are those that have made a commodity out of spirituality, to be bought and sold in hour-long sessions of chakra therapy, energy work, past life regression and assorted mumbo-jumbo. Some of the worst advice I have received is from these hucksters. Kundalini is a rare phenomenon and there are very few people that can offer genuine advice and help out a person suffering in the depths of 'hell'.

On the other hand, there is 'modern' medicine, that has relegated this incredible experience to 'kundalini syndrome' in the pages of DSM IV, the reference manual for mental health professionals, to be treated as a pathological condition, to be 'cured' with powerful anti-psychotic drugs, doing immense damage to the poor person struggling to cope with an extraordinary occurrence.

There is no gentle way of easing into this experience. People who prepare all their lives to receive this blessing, through a regimented set of practices, breathing exercises, yoga, a diet of fruits and vegetables, cleansing rituals may never receive the blessing, and people that are totally unprepared and clueless about it stumble into it as I did, through a spontaneous awakening as a byproduct of drug use, meditation, tantric sex, while delivering a baby — only to wander through life looking for answers. The rare individual that prepares for this through yogic practices and receives it under the auspices of a true guru maybe one of the few that can ease into the subsequent process with minimal trauma, but most aren't that lucky. The disoriented, terror-filled stage which makes the person look and sound 'crazy' is almost a given.

Any guru that does not warn you about this is doing you a huge disservice. It is better to read true accounts of people that have undergone a real awakening, people in the modern era, not ancient sages. It will save a lot of time and may even provide simple, common sense answers like my previous description of terms like hell, heaven and purgatory as seen from a 21^st century perspective, but with the aid of mystical experience. Stay away from the hucksters. I thank JJ for starting this and other blogs and forums so people with a genuine experience can inform and educate others.