Kundalini and Creativity

When I was twelve, I read a poem about aboriginal rock carvings by the Australian poet, Douglas Stewart. It was a mystical poem, and knocked me out. I decided on the spot to be a great artist. A financially secure career meant nothing to me. Neither did helping people or serving humanity. What could serve humanity better than my latest ode or beating five bells out of Beethoven on the old upright?

I won a scholarship to study Shakespeare at Cambridge, redefining his sonnets in the light of my own, and got kicked out at the end of the first year.

Art is important. It's a way of communicating without losing our essential, and precious, solitude. The lives and states of consciousness of the people who carved the whales and kangaroos in rock cave walls are barely imaginable, and yet, by some sort of magic, they are there in the grooved sandstone and in Douglas Stewart's celebration of their art. Poetry, painting, music, film can communicate the "ideograms harvested in another dimension" that JJ Semple speaks of as part of a Kundalini activation.

Kundalini is an evolutionary force. How might a widespread awakening of Kundalini affect the evolution of art?

After a decade or so in the wilderness — "Fuck off, I'm an artist!" — I realized that art involves other people. Creativity is a means of communication, a social act. I went to the opposite extreme. I became obsessed with finding an audience, researching the market, and locating my genre.

I published a comic novel lampooning my visionary self and won a fellowship from the Australia Literature Board. I found myself, briefly, in the world of agents, publishing houses and pundits. It was a wasteland. Everywhere I looked, creativity was hijacked by suits. Fat cats pushed their way between musician and listener, between writer and reader. The fiery visions of Dada and Absurdism had ended up in the drab absurdity of art-as-investment. The fact that fine creators (Orchestre Baobab, Elmore Leonard, Banksie) survive in this climate is a testament to human resilience, not to the cultural wasteland we're forced to share.


I'm sure the widespread awakening of Kundalini will bring about as profound an advance in the creative arts as it does in mental and bodily health. So what form will this advance take?

I try to imagine the first Australians as they carved the rock. There'd have been no celebrities, no tortured geniuses. Physical conditions would have been hard, but the hardship would have paled away to nothing in the presence of the spirits the carvers were chiseling. The act of creation would have involved the whole community, been a shared act, transporting all the participants into a transcendental state.

A widespread awakening of Kundalini could produce a comparable creativity in a modern context. When Kundalini comes up the spine, tortured genius pales into insignificance in comparison to what is happening to the body and the brain. If Kundalini prompts a person to write or paint or sing, the book, picture or song they produce will speak to the Kundalini in readers, viewers and listeners. It will find them, usually close at hand. There'll be a psychic connection between the creator and his/her audience. Audiences will become smaller and more local as the number of artists grows, till everyone becomes a creator with their own audience.

I think this is already beginning to happen. Peggy Payne, in a recent interview with JJ Semple, spoke of the "trance of art" as being one of the effects of Kundalini awakening, and I think that this "trance" is becoming more widespread and accessible, at the same time as it becomes more local and intimate.

I don't beat up Beethoven on the piano so much these days. I play keyboards in the pub with my mate Joe's band, a hundred or so people packed in, half of them family, foot stomping, dancing, joining in the choruses of unrecorded songs Cold Play would eat their hearts out to have written.

I still write. Novels are my personal art form. The latest, Natalie, A Kundalini Love Story, about, and inspired by, Kundalini now out with Life Force Books.

Kundalini And The Ten Thousand Things

It's true: "The Great Tao remains still, in the midst of circumstances." There is a state of non-action that is the deepest action of all; a state of stillness that initiates the dynamic world around us. The human body, however, is a thing of unstillness. My body may have originally emerged from the Primal Stillness, but as it stands, here, now, today, it's a bundle of activities, from its twitches and tics, to its endless stream of consciousness, to the hyperactive neurons busy reflecting that stream of consciousness. This restlessness, this state of constant movement and imbalance, is the same restlessness and motion that creates the "ten thousand things," the circumstances that surround all living consciousness. The ten thousand things are a part of me. Circumstances create me. Some of the ten thousand things are enjoyable — love, family, music, the novels of Elmore Leonard; many are painful — financial insecurity, personal failure, anxiety about the environment, mixing concrete on a bad price on a winter's morning in trendy London.

When we awaken Kundalini, the paradox of stillness/unstillness reaches a critical point. I believe that Kundalini is triggered by the presence of utter stillness, the possibility of becoming completely still. It's the presence, or possibility, of stillness — somewhere in, or behind, the brain — that makes Kundalini rise towards the brain chakra, in search of union with that primordial Stillness. This is why, when we begin to practice meditation, it's important to put the "ten thousand things" out of our minds. This is why it's essential to make consciousness become as still as is humanly possible in a physical body, and to set "circumstances" — enjoyable, or painful — to one side.

However, Kundalini Herself is the Life Force. Kundalini is the force behind the "ten thousand things," as much as She is the force behind the meditating body. Kundalini creates "circumstances." That's why, in the Tantras, Kundalini is given such colorful names: "World-Bewilderer," "Washer Woman" (alluding to Her elemental sexuality), "Widow" (alluding to Her sleeping state of separation from her husband, Siva, the Primal Stillness) and "Serpent" (alluding to her coiling and spiraling movement along the spine.) This means that, at some stage in the process, the "ten thousand things" must become part of the awakening. It means that "circumstances" — personal happiness or personal failure — can no longer be shut out, or excluded from meditation.

When Kundalini awakens in my body, and begins to shape it, She also awakens in the world around me — in my relationship to other people, in my social and financial situation, in my work. Understood at a fundamental level, this is a daunting prospect. It means that I must experience Kundalini in the knocks and failures of my life, as much as in the moments of pleasure and fulfillment. Because Kundalini magnifies and intensifies everything She touches, it includes magnifying and intensifying some painful things.