How Sexual Sublimation Works

I’ve not posted to this blog or uploaded to my podcast for several months because I’ve been writing a novel for the past year and a half. Writing a novel is more absorbing and time consuming than writing nonfiction. It requires complete concentration. Now that I’m almost finished, because the novel addresses a number of sexual issues, among them sexual sublimation, I’d like to clarify how sexual sublimation worked for me. I’m no sexologist; I’m just offering my personal experience.

Spoiler Alert: Just because this process functioned as it did for me does not mean it will work that way for you. Every kundalini experience is different. That said, let’s begin:

Every person is endowed with unique sexual characteristics that express themselves through the various physical, emotional, and psychological mechanisms that make up their beings. They can be summed up in one word — libido.

Suffice it to say that some people are very sexual in nature; some are not — and everywhere in between. Through my own experience and through conversations with other kundalini adepts, I believe that libido affects a person’s capacity to trigger the sexual sublimation process, which has to have enough sexual energy to do its transformational work.

“Libido is sexual appetite or drive. A person's libido is motivated by brain function, hormones, and learned behavior, regardless of their sex, and tends to fluctuate according to mental state, hormonal shifts, and stress. Some medications can affect sexual appetite as well.

“When a person's libido is high, they're more likely to desire sexual intimacy and to seek it out with a partner or through masturbation. This is healthy and normal, but an overly high libido that interferes with quality of life can be a sign of a hormonal imbalance or neurological disorder. When libido dips, interest in sex does as well and may be completely absent, which can put a strain on intimate relationships.

“The neural pathways involved in sexual desire are similar in males and females and include cerebral, spinal, and peripheral components. Libido directly correlates to physical responses: when sexual desire is high, blood flow to the penis resulting in an erection signifies sexual desire, as does lubrication and enlargement of the labia.”

~ What is Libido?, by S. Nicole Lane - https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-is-libido-5084040

Moreover, age, physical endowment, emotional stability, eating and drinking and other harmful habits, as well as (believe it or not) pollution can affect sperm and hormone counts.

Here’s how sexual sublimation worked for me. First, the raw material, i.e., my libido and other biological characteristics at the time I started meditating had to be taken into consideration. Would my Being be able to furnish enough sexual energy to complete the process?

“It's not just about the climate, our food supply and energy resources – pollution could be affecting men's penis sizes, fertility and libido too.

“That's according to environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Dr. Shanna H. Swan's new book Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race, which explores the correlation between smaller penises, lower sperm counts and the use of industrial chemicals in everyday products.”

~ Pollution is Shrinking Penises, Scientists Warn - https://www.menshealth.com/uk/sex/a35911756/small-penis-pollution-fertility-sperm-count/

I was 31 years old, a good age for this work; young enough and not too old. (I know a number of older persons who’ve had trouble sublimating.) Health: good. Habits: I stopped drinking and drugs about that same time; smoking when I was 22 (I wasn’t a heavy smoker). I came up at a time when this country’s air and water supplies were in a lot better shape; polluted resources were not an issue. I’ve had my share of ejaculations, no way of knowing the absolute numbers, only that I started at 13 years old.

The purpose of the meditation I practiced was to distill reproductive fluids into an elixir and then draw this elixir up the spine into the brain. This process began with my practicing the breathing exercises described on the Golden Flower Meditation website. After a while, I started to feel a buildup of what I perceived to be energy in the loins (lower belly region). Again, because I’ve written extensively on this topic, I refer you to the Common Sense Kundalini website for more detail.

As the meditation progressed, I began to feel weaker and weaker after ejaculating. Eventually, I had to stop altogether; the kundalini process was asserting itself. If I wasted “my precious bodily fluids,” I suffered the physical consequences. Gopi Krishna wrote about a similar struggle he'd had.

Sexual energy is the most powerful source of energy in the human body. Normally, this energy is used for reproductive purposes. When prevented from flowing out (during intercourse and masturbation) and redirected to the brain, the seminal fluids in a man and the cervical fluids in a woman are distilled into an elixir and used for evolutionary repurposing. This is the sexual sublimation process. I didn’t know this at the time I began meditating; I just followed the process as it unfolded. There comes a time when kundalini takes over. At his point, you may be in for some surprises. If you long for your former way of life, you might be disappointed.

If I had to come up with reasons why some people succeed in this work and other don’t, I’d maintain that it helps to have a healthy, energetic libido; excellent breathing and lung capacity; the persistence of a detective; excellent lateral thinking and survival skills; and the ability to follow through without becoming discouraged.

As for sex after awakening kundalini, both Gopi Krishna and I discovered that the body needs to be nourished by high quality foods, clean air and water, this being especially critical after intercourse.

Now it’s back to my novel. Keep an eye out for it.

Morality and Kundalini

Because we exist in an energetic universe, there is nothing to prevent an immoral or dangerous person (by society's standards) from activating kundalini. We can only hope that, once active, the impact and the immensity of kundalini experience will, at a minimum, steer the person towards a respect for the Golden Rule.

Don't believe we live in an energetic universe as opposed to a moral one? Think about the origin of each: the source of the first is Consciousness; the origin of the second is man-made religion, an activity devised by man for the purposes of social cohesion.

Consciousness does not take sides; it's the driving force behind evolution. It judges mutations: beneficial, harmful, or neutral, without getting involved with particularities. It doesn't function as the Judge Judy of evolution, ruling on whether a given human interaction is fair or not.

Religion depends on social cohesion and civility. If these moral forces implode, as they have over my lifetime, what will replace them? We've already seen the rise of authoritarian tendencies.

The Merry-Go-Round of Life (courtesy of RP Bradley)

More empirical proof can be witnessed by the way we treat one another. We've mostly thrown the Golden Rule to the dogs — this basic religious teaching is no longer observed or practiced, even lip service to it is rare.

You see evidence of it everyday. In drive-by shootings, in random attacks, Internet bullying, fake news, violence against women, economic inequality, racial hatred, whack-a-mole wars.

Can kundalini jump in and quick start human evolution or do we have to wait eons of evolutionary space/time before the brain's most grievous characteristics are eliminated — its mammalian characteristics?

If you consider that we evolved from one-celled animals to what we are today, it is logical to assume that, given a similar amount of time, we will, once again, change forms many times over. Short-sighted animals that we are, many among us, believe that we have reached a state of perfection, that we can evolve no more. Quelle arrogance!

It is impossible to project exactly what formal changes human beings might undergo. Nevertheless, if I were to guess what that form we might take, I'd first ask myself which mutations cause the most problems as far as human life is concerned?

I'd have to answer: the body itself, the source of all our problems: war, materialism, money, overwrought emotions (jealousy, hate, pride, rage - ten commandment stuff). If we were to ultimately evolve into "bodiless beings," these issues become moot. This may sound crazy, but it is consistent with evolutionary purpose and process — in that evolution eliminates harmful mutations.

Am I hypothesizing that the human body, which some of us worship, which every one of us would like to worship, is an evolutionary mistake? Kundalini tells me that there is more to me — to everyone of us — than a body.

There's a lot of mystery and confusion around kundalini, what Gopi Krishna aptly termed "the evolutionary energy." It's become a hashtag, a meme. If you activate it, you half expect it to solve your problems and change your character. Not so. If you're a bad person, you alone can change your attitudes and personality. Kundalini can provide the objectivity to see things as they really are, but it can't change your behavior. You alone can do that.

Religion, on the other hand, is so much opinion and polemics. The challenge is to bring back that part of it common to all religions, the one moral activity under each individual's control — the Golden Rule.

A Reminder: Kundalini Is Science, Not Religion

Since the dawn of civilization, religion has been part of human life. To a certain extent so has science, for example, the discovery and use of fire and tools. Prehistoric humans accomplished amazing feats under difficult conditions.

Northern Communities feel climate change impact

The big difference between science and religion was that, in Europe, at least, from prehistoric times to the 17th century, inexplicable phenomena were passed on to religious entities — the Church, etc. Up to that time, religion was science and science was religion:

By the end of the 17th century, Europeans were aware of logarithms, electricity, the telescope and microscope, calculus, universal gravitation, Newton's Laws of Motion, air pressure and calculating machines due to the work of the first scientists of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Pierre Fermat, Blaise Pascal, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It was also a period of development of culture in general (especially theater, music, visual arts and philosophy).
~ Wikipedia 

Anything that smacked of magic was suspect, and there were many natural phenomena that could not be explained until science found respectability. Even then, many scientists were condemned as heretics until much later on.

Science was never concurrently recognized in all corners of the Earth. A scientific tradition was underway, but it took centuries for everyone to get on the same page. Even now, as illustrated by the struggle to establish universal acceptance of climate change, some refuse to acknowledge the science behind it — much to our general detriment.

CDC - Climate Change and Public Health

What does this have to do with kundalini? Simply that, until Gopi Krishna, no one described this phenomenon as "the evolutionary energy in man." Not even Darwin recognized this essential part of human biology.

Kundalini is older than the hills. It's been part of our beings forever, driving our evolution forward, the engine behind what Gopi Krishna called "the evolutionary impulse." Without it we'd still be one-celled entities.

Way back when, it was only normal that kundalini events were handed over to religion. That when monks and other religious pathfinders began to experiment with meditation and other practices, metanormal results followed — kundalini, prescience, ecstatic states, shamanic powers, stigmata.

These phenomenon were not ascribed to biology; biology didn't exist. Religion took them over, ascribing them to God. The problem that still haunts kundalini is critical mass. Even though kundalini events occur all over the world, irrespective of language, culture, religious preferences, geography, the fact that these events differ as to triggers and effects, makes it difficult for biologists and other scientists to investigate. Kundalini just doesn't awaken in the same way in each individual every time it occurs. No two kundalini events are the same, giving scientists little "critical mass" on which to base meaningful hypotheses.



If you've experienced, or are aiming to investigate kundalini, you cannot rely on the various claims, either those that insist kundalini doesn't exist or the anecdotal accounts that insist it does. Continued research will undoubtedly shed more light on this important phenomenon. For the time being you must rely on your ability to distinguish real from unreal, actual from imagined.

An important irony to consider, however, is the fact that to reach the metaphysical, you depend on the biological (the physical) resources of the body. Notice I use the term metaphysical, not spiritual or religious. That's an important distinction in that metaphysical simply means "beyond the physical." What spiritual actually means no one knows.

The biological, physical (kundalini) opens the door to the metaphysical, and that other great mystery scientists have yet to fully and ably explore — consciousness. Whether you develop your physical resources through practices like yoga or meditation or your resources develop naturally, the physical YOU plays an important role in shaping the metaphysical YOU. In other words, illumination and increased consciousness depend on your biological configuration.

As Gopi Krishna stated:

"Can we deny the fact that whether a fortuitous gift, divine grace, or the fruit of Karma, in every case there is a close link between the talent or beauty exhibited and the oragnic structure of the individual."
~ The Awakening of Kundalini

The Thing That Really Triggers Kundalini

If there’s ever to be a scientific study of Kundalini, so that Kundalini awakenings can become widespread and verifiable, then the single thing that triggers Kundalini needs to be isolated. Kundalini awakens in a multitude of situations, with a plethora of apparent triggers: drugs, meditation, emotional catastrophe, shaktipat, even the bizarre practice of erotic asphyxiation, but these are merely circumstances, that surround the moment of awakening, they are not the trigger itself. We must look deeper to find the first cause. I think an indication of what the trigger is can be found in two small statuettes, both bronzes, from the Kashmiri and Tibetan traditions. These bronze statues combine two figures, but were made for individual meditation. One is the Tibetan yab-yum image of Vajrasattva, the Diamond Thunderbolt Sceptre seated in upright sexual congress with Vajradhatvisvari, the Diamond Thunderbolt Wisdom. The other is the image of a rampant Kali, again in the upright position, straddling the erect penis of the dead Shiva.

Vajrasattva has huge eyes. They stare out across Vajradhatvisvari’s shoulder on the brink of terror. He’s staring into the void, one foot lifted in a stamping movement as her body climbs his in a zigzag motion like a bolt of lightning. In the other statue, Shiva’s eyes are closed, while Kali’s eyes stare straight ahead into the same terrifying ecstasy. This is the moment when the physical eyes see the complete reality of space/time, of which our visual world forms only a small part.
 

Kali’s Eyes Stare Straight Ahead

Relativity and quantum mechanics both teach that space/time is static. This reality need not be confined to mathematical formulae, or remain a mere scientific concept. It can be experienced bodily, as the statuettes show. If all of time and space is present here and now, it follows logically, and in the most down-to-earth way, that the moment of my death is present here and now. I can look at it, experience it. This is what Vajrasattva and Kali are staring into — the fact of ending. This is what the corpse Shiva has already achieved. So what, then, does his phallus indicate? Surely a dead body is an inert, flaccid thing. On the level of reality where this trigger of Kundalini is found, ending is an action. It’s frightening, but it is something that is done. Ending is not something that’s inflicted on me, even though my body might be in a state of prostrate inertia.

This is not sexual fantasy either. It’s the moment when experience accords most with reality. Our bodies, including our brains, are made up of subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics shows that subatomic particles are not "things," they’re "events." My body is an "event" moving through days and nights that are a matrix of "events." Kali riding Shiva is an "event." Vajradhatvisvari climbing the Thunderbolt Sceptre’s body is an "event." And, as Feynman showed in his space/time maps, every subatomic event is marked by the annihilation of the initial particles and the creation of new ones. Vajrasattva’s eyes and Kali’s eyes are wide and stare-y, on the brink of terror, because consciousness can go down to this depth. The inner eyes can keep open even at this moment of becoming void. This is do-able. It’s more than a verbal concept. Consciousness, at the most fundamental level, is a quantum process. It’s been shown experimentally that the human eye, when it becomes adapted to the dark, can detect a single photon, with its zero mass, and its status as both wave and particle.

A quantum process of consciousness triggers Kundalini, but the question remains, why, then, does Kundalini have such a radical effect on the external, physical body and on the human brain? If the trigger is so subtle, how can what it triggers — Kundalini — be so outwardly powerful?

The universe is held together by four forces: the strong force, the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the gravitational force. The strong force binds atomic nuclei together. The electromagnetic force is the force that holds in balance the process of attraction and repulsion between charged particles, and allows particles to form new combinations. The weak and gravitational forces work on more long-range interactions. Kundalini is experienced as power because Kundalini begins as a flash, a "lightning flash," of the strong force (Vajra also means "Diamond Thunderbolt") at the nucleus of the atom, and then works outwards, or rises, through the more material manifestations of the electromagnetic and weak forces (the body in space and time). This is why the circumstances that surround a Kundalini awakening can seem so confusingly varied. The sexual symbolism of the statues is appropriate, because this lightning flash that triggers Kundalini, is very similar to what can happen at the moment of orgasm, if consciousness strips itself down to nothing, so that orgasm is suspended and something else comes into being.

Being Certain in an Uncertain World

The most important factor in my life was not the result of a conscious decision — although aspects of the decision making process were present. Most important was my recognition — at an early age — that there was something out there beyond the physical, something of a more ethereal nature.

Once your psyche perceives this, you are hooked because you take on the challenge of proving it to yourself, a challenge you never relinquish. It may take a lifetime, but this recognition provides the basis for building a life founded on searching for certainty in an uncertain world.

This is not something derived from traditional religion; it comes from within. It happens in spite of the influence of the elemental world around you. In fact, it is counter to everything the world teaches you, counter to all its conditioning and indoctrination. For me, the final step in my process of self-knowledge was listening to my body after mindlessly damaging it:

"The mind and the body really aren’t friends. The mind is a tool of the culture, an expert propagandist for fitting in. Yet, as the mind drowns out the truth, the body continues to tell it. Which is your real friend? The body, you say. Do you listen to it? I didn’t. And yet, at some level, I must have. I never would have made it back otherwise. Spiraling out control, there has to be some measure of omniscience, or else recovery is impossible. The mind is just too strong. It campaigns incessantly for all the things you think you ought to be doing, all the things you think you are missing. How can you possibly stand up to the supplications of the mind? Nevertheless, as my abilities decline, I keep a sense of awareness in spite of the things my new persona tells me about myself. Without it, I would never have found a way to restore myself."

~ Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time – JJ Semple

At an early age, a jolt of higher consciousness invaded my psyche and set me deliberating on the possibility that something greater surrounded me, that I was attached to a field of existential wisdom or consciousness, which, in daily life, manifested itself through a knowledge not acknowledged by the orthodoxies of worldly life. Gopi Krishna explains it thusly:

"The first reality we come across is consciousness. The world comes later. We know first ourselves and then the world. So the wiser course is first to understand the knower. What modern thinkers have done is to ignore or bypass the knower, forgetting that it is the knower that is doing it."
~ The Awakening of Kundalini—Gopi Krishna

These early murmurs of the psyche were almost immediately buried beneath the so-called "adjustment process" that fitting into worldly life requires us to follow. Buried, but not dead. Inert, but not extinct. All it took was an occasional murmur of the heart to awaken it.

Gee, maybe there is something out there. Maybe, I should explore it. But where to start? Could I be missing something in the sermon? At church? I feel it but have no idea of how to reach for it. Don't wait so long to think about it again. Maybe I'll understand it better the next time.

And there is always a next time. Whether it's a stirring in the body, or an instance of thrall. A chord struck while reading a novel. A sunset. A passionate kiss. An itch waiting to be scratched.

Eventually, I did something about the itch. I started to explore self-hypnosis, yoga, all methods of meditation, and I started to do a whole lot of reading; I was about 27 years old at the time.

At first, I didn't associate my dabbling in spiritual practices with the presentiment that there was something out there, albeit running in parallel on two separate tracks:

1. The occasional presentiment that there was something behind the material world.
2. My practice of yoga and meditation.

I hadn't practiced enough to realize the two would eventually meet up. Although I began to see the elemental, material world for what it was — a kind of illusory distraction — I wasn't able to connect my childhood presentiments to the yoga and meditation I was practicing. In other words, I had no coherent ontological model. That would come later...after much more practice.

What does this ontology consist of? Adi Da Samraj describes it thusly:

"Precisely what is wrong with the universal scientism of modern society — and the forms of politics that derive from that scientism — is that the modern scientific 'world'-view and modern politics do not permit the human being his or her psyche.

"Scientism constantly forces the human being to stand face to face with nothing but elemental 'experience.' It denies all reality to the higher dimensions — which, since ancient times, have been recognized by human beings as their fundamental resource.

"Scientism denies the connection to the energies and 'creative' sources of the 'world.' Human beings are denied right 'religion' and true Spirituality by scientism.

"Scientism is simply an activity of the verbal mind. It is oriented toward the investigation of elemental phenomena without any psychic participation in the 'world.'

"Even when scientists investigate phenomena that are not merely elemental, but that belong to the realm of energies and the psyche, they do not study these things through the psyche. They study them 'objectively,' as if these invisibles were butterflies under a pin.

"However, in order to investigate such phenomena, one must enter into 'consideration' of them through the medium of the psyche — through feeling, through intuition, through all the aspects of the mind and heart that precede verbal consciousness.

"In this 'late-time' (or 'dark' epoch), people are not permitted to recognize and acknowledge the invisible dimensions of existence. Nor are they permitted any psychic connection to those dimensions, or to anything else for that matter.

"People are encouraged to watch TV and go to work and wait for science to save everyone. But science can never save anyone. Science is not a 'method' of salvation."

~ The Gnosticon - Adi Da Samraj

Science is supposedly value neutral, but is it? Even back then, when I started exploring, I came to realize that science was not the answer. It was always one step forward-one step back. The Salk vaccine-the atom bomb...scientists ready to dedicate themselves to research, no matter how benevolent, how heinous. As in the Dr. Strangelove-esque, I'm only a scientist; I was ordered to do it. They told me it was for the good of mankind.

Abandoned Nuclear Energy Plant

And what about Kundalini? How does it fit into the above ontology?

For me, Kundalini is the ultimate confirmation that existence is something more than the "scientismistic" definition we limit it to. For me, it signaled the meeting up of the two tracks that had been running in parallel. Not only did Kundalini make sense of the cosmology that reaffirmed my Being's relationship to "higher dimensions," it also made sense of science. If the Kundalini sub-system exists in our bodies, it must be there for a reason, and that reason boils down to the realization that human evolution is a work in progress.

Kundalini is the instrument that links human biology to higher consciousness. It is responsible for our bodily substantiation, and for our past, present, and future evolution. Our form, our brain, our consciousness! All are related to the Kundalini in us and all are still evolving. And that is what science should be studying — the biological aspects of Kundalini and its connection to consciousness.

Suppose you do have an itch to explore beyond the elemental. Young or old, it makes no difference. In your heart you know there's something out there. Metaphysical, astral, causal, etheric. Whatever you want to call it. No matter. Nurturing the recognition, never letting go of it leads to a series of innate revelations that no amount of propaganda can dispel. To be certain of one thing in life is an immense accomplishment.

And unlike most of the underlying assumptions of elemental life, based on sensory programming and hand-me-down opinions, you don't have to take someone else's word for what you discover along the Way. By finding out for yourself, you have emptied the memory banks of preconceived notions, zeroed the atomic clock back to its primordial beginning, stripped the psyche bare, and started over.

Finding certainty in an uncertain world takes courage. So does unbelieving all acquired beliefs. Yet compared to what you've been told about the world and how it functions, being certain of even one little thing, when those around you are certain of nothing, is not only a whole different paradigm, it's a manifest advantage in exploring the infinite reaches of consciousness. Finding certainty in an uncertain world helps you understand the cosmology of life and discover a "peace that passeth all understanding."

JJ Semple Interviews Peggy Payne, author of Cobalt Blue

    I read Cobalt Blue after author Peggy Payne and I reached out to each other in an attempt to define the similarities and differences between Kundalini fiction and non-fiction. Today, non-fiction outweighs and outsells the fiction category, but that may change as more and more authors investigate Kundalini, either by experiencing it or by reading about it. 

   Before Christmas, Peggy and I agreed that I would send her questions about how she was able to work the Kundalini theme into Cobalt Blue. Here is the Q&A:

   JJS: There’s kundalini and kundalini. The strip mall kind and the Gopi Krishna kind. Are you’re at all familiar with the differences? To what degree? 

   PP: I feel strongly about making no judgment on anyone’s spiritual experience.

Certainly I’ve read the literature: Gopi Krishna, Lee Sannella, Irina Tweedie, Stanislav and Christina Grof, Muktananda, your own work, JJ Semple, and many others. Also, early Christian mystics who described similar experiences.

As for “strip mall kundalini,” I once attended a workshop where I was informed that we had all had our kundalini raised (I didn’t believe that for a second.) So I know what you mean if you’re talking about glib bandying of the term.

However, much more important to me than making any such distinction is to respect each person as the expert on his or her own experience.

JJS: In which category do you place Andie?

PP: Andie’s experience rocks her to the bottom of her soul. At the time of her first experience, she has never heard the word kundalini. She doesn’t know until near the end of the story what has happened to her. For most of the story, she is in the midst of an enormously disruptive ordeal that unmoors her from everything she thought she knew about herself. And to make things much worse, she is fighting it.

JJS: Unless I’ve misunderstood your background, it seems that you don’t have direct experience with energy cultivation techniques like kundalini meditation. How did you become interested in kundalini as a subject for Cobalt Blue?

PP: I’ve studied reiki, done some kundalini yoga as well as other kinds in India and the U.S., attended various workshops on energy, and been a meditator for many years.

But when I finished my early drafts of Cobalt Blue, I, like Andie, didn’t even know the word kundalini. I had overheard it used once at a party in a two sentence exchange behind me. Noted it, but didn’t know what it meant and didn’t look it up.

Then years later, I thought I’d finished my novel and was sitting out on my porch by myself one night listening to the rain. A thought popped into my head: “It’s kundalini.” The next day I did a little research, and I found that this force fit the story that I’d already written, that it was roughly comparable to experience others have had. This gave me a new understanding of what this woman — and, vicariously, I — had been dealing with. (It was a ferocious hard novel for me to write.)

I don’t claim anything as dramatic as a kundalini awakening for myself. Only twinges. I found this in a journal I kept years earlier in India doing research for my previous novel, Sister India:

“Throughout the morning I keep noticing a sensation I have felt here before, a small physical thrill that I cannot explain. It comes from simply looking around me. It's like an electric pulse, made of molten color, the brilliance of all the silk saris at once; and it pushes past my fatigue and travels along the wire that hooks together body and soul. Jet-lagged and short of sleep though I am, that jolt keeps pushing through. I welcome it. It’s somehow part of what I’ve come here for."

JJS: I found Cobalt Blue an easy and fun read. You write very well. I especially liked the way you developed Andie’s place in her artist community and her relations with others. Talk about your approach.

PP: Thanks, JJ. Her place in her artist community came naturally to me. I’ve been in the same weekly writers group for 32 years. And I share office space with a dear friend; other writers and artists also rent in the building from time to time. I’m part of a close-knit group of supportive fellow artists. It’s a great thing. I’d hate to try to do this work without it. 

JJS: Kundalini entails a repurposing of sexual energy by preventing it from flowing out through masturbation or intercourse, and instead, diverting it up the spine to the brain. If this is an accurate analysis of how sexual sublimation works — and documented experiences from ancient Indian and Chinese to modern practitioners says it is — what made you think that Andie might go on a sexual rampage when conservation of sexual energy is the only way to avoid deleterious effects associated with the loss of sexual energy (prana)? Or, to put it another way: after awakening, heretofore unused functions in the brain become active and warn male and female kundalini adepts (by sending biological signals) about the harmful effects ejaculation has on the body. Do you think someone could go against the biological changes in brain function that kundalini induces and actually waste large quantities of prana?

PP: Andie is no adept. Her awakening happens in jolts and ragged pieces at a time when she is depressed and her life is already in disarray. Its genesis is the meditative practice of painting, even doing work she considers routine. She thinks she’s ill and her biological signals are utterly swamped by confusion, emotional uproar, and the powerful sexual sensations that so many people experience in kundalini awakening. But without a teacher or any kind of guidance or knowledge, she finds herself compulsively acting on the mad sexual impulses. That’s very upsetting and frightening to her.

Yes, the sexual energy should be transmuted. But for a long time, Andie is in the throes  of a “wrong rising” and an effort to suppress what is happening.

Finally, however, a valuable spiritual development comes about through the sex as she begins to regain some control.  It gives her a body-and-soul recognition of the passion to merge with others, to know herself as one with other people, to give up, if briefly, her separateness.

JJS: Nevertheless, even if my take on the triggers and effects of kundalini don’t jibe with Andie’s actions, I found your hypothesis very interesting to the degree that I cannot positively say that the effects she manifests (her sexual behavior) could never happen as a result of a kundalini awakening. Have you thought about that? About the subconscious urgings that caused you to take her in that direction?

PP: I didn’t feel I had any more control of her than she did of herself. As so often happens with novels, the story and the character had their own life to live.

I do feel strongly that sex and spirituality are vitally intertwined. Sex and spirituality are central to my other novels as well and I write a blog on the subject.

And subconscious urgings? Well, having been a teenager in the years of the frustrating sexual Double Standard, I was perhaps due to erupt in some way. (I’m 65 now, BTW)

JJS: What’s more, if a person did go on a sexual rampage like Andie’s, she would probably act in much the same way. Who’s to say?

PP: Exactly. I think our imaginations know things that our minds and bodies are still catching onto.

Evolution and Kundalini

Evolution is a much scrutinized subject. I once saw an X-Men movie. Walking through walls, telekinesis, telepathy, magnetic powers, etc. were included.

The context was mutants. Of course, there would be no homo sapiens without evolution, or without mutations; it's the operating currency of DNA and genetics. Modern humanity is considered to be about 50,000 years old.

Human evolution reminds me of auto sales. New cars may have features, new devices like an MP3 player or lights on side mirrors, that soon morph into "minimum requirements." And those new "features" become old hat, and newer features are needed. Such is evolution.

Kundalini as evolutionary energy is really a wild idea! Inside us is a mechanism driving evolution? Gopi Krishna reckoned that this "evolutionary energy" was pushing us toward a predetermined future human being. Nietzche wrote about Man and Superman, which Hitler misunderstood to be his "Master Race." "In his posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard de Chardin wrote of the unfolding of the material cosmos, from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is 'pulling' all creation towards it." Ouspensky wrote a book called The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution. Of course, it is a genderless idea.

My own version of this is contained in a poem called "Beneath The Surface of this World."

Beneath the surface of this world,

Invisible to the naked eye,

Exists an energetic framework,

The basis of both you and I.

A Brownian motion generator,

A quantum dynamic mold,

A thermodynamic continuum,

A multi-frequency spectrum of old.

It has a purpose, this sublime world,

A tendency to go from hot to cold,

A subtle yet definite cooling off,

A conductive, convective, radiative road.

A path, if you will, that all energy takes,

But Life defies this blasé manner,

Building structures and storing energy

With all the power of Thor's hammer.

Life's purpose is to grow, my friend,

Individual, species, and ecospheric biomass,

To convert the nonliving to the living,

The soil and water to trees and grass.

The whole direction of living energy,

Both universal and close at hand,

Is to increase its nature and its volume

While striving for the Super land.

Therefore the direction of human evolution

Must be to achieve the higher state

Of conscious living energy

That comes when spirit and matter mate.

A higher state of energy,

More concentrated and powerful,

This is the purview of the gods,

Of shamans, witch doctors, and monks of old.

A higher state of consciousness

Is simply life's purpose to fulfill,

To convert sunlight into gold,

The alchemy of the spiritual.

So freeing up one's energy,

Clearing the path for prana, chi,

Spirit, life's essence that circulates

Throughout the body is the key.

From Chinese medicine to Indian yoga,

From Egyptian meditation to Toltec Naguals,

From Nordic runes to Lakota totems

Life's purpose to fulfill is the ultimate goal.

The universal pursuit of higher states of being,

Religions of the masses and philosophies all

Are part of life's process of self-preservation,

A means to an end, a guide to the far.

So think not that there is an evil in life,

Evil is the absence of life, the self-destructive mode

That occurs when living energy falls short of the need

To bridge nature's gap, and continue the road.

We all do our best to live out our purpose,

To grow and to prosper as organic beings.

Some fail it's true, but no one is perfect,

Death's part of the cycle that gives life its meaning.

Continue to pursue the path of improvement,

Of self progression, of achievement of excellence;

The curve spirals inward toward an infinite center,

Unreachable it's true, but always intended.

As for the condition of society, ecology, and such,

It is all part of our living romance,

To fight the good fight when fighting is called for,

These are just steps in the cosmic dance.

Have faith in this bedrock of spiritual design,

This underlying world of energy,

For suffering is longing, the desire to grow,

There is nothing wrong with wanting, desire is holy.

Spotlight on Consciousness Research

You’ve visited imaginary worlds and other dimensions in science fiction movies, in comics and in novels. Are they just the writer/director's hallucinogenic fantasies? Or are these dimensions actually KNOWABLE? If so, how can we prepare ourselves for this type of altered perception?

Jacob’s Ladder. The Matrix. Memento. Altered States. Fictional worlds in which material reality suddenly melts away and the protagonist is left to fend for himself in harrowing, seemingly unreal situations. We’ve witnessed these worlds and believed them to be figments of the writer’s imagination. But are they?

Undersea World of the Mind

These so-called imaginary worlds are as real the people, streets, houses, and stores we encounter in our normal daily rounds. Although we cannot see these apparitions in our current state, scientists and other investigators are finding they are real. Moreover, they are not the threatening specters moviemakers would have us believe — but simply exist beyond the reach our limited consciousness.

At a key moment in Jacob’s Ladder, Jacob's friend, chiropractor and guardian angel Louis (Danny Aiello), cites the 14th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart — “Eckhart saw Hell too; he said: ‘the only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won't let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they're not punishing you,’ he said. ‘They're freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and... you’re holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.’”

Materialism - From High Water to Hell

This is straight out of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In fact, this film is a fictional interpretation of a Near Death Experience (NDE). At the end we see “Jacob never made it out of Vietnam.” His body is shown in an army triage tent just as he expires. Apparently, the entire series of events turns out to have been a dying hallucination. Jacob's experiences appear to have been a form of purgation in which he releases himself from his earthly attachments, finally joining his dead son Gabe to ascend a staircase (Biblically known as Jacob's Ladder) toward a bright light.”

The science of consciousness, or should we say the scientific investigation of it, inevitably delves into the unseen — that which lies behind the physical — the metaphysical. This investigation is now moving forward on two fronts (metaphysical investigation and physical science) toward the same objective, namely the full unfolding of consciousness, or as Gopi Krishna called it: "Knowing the Knower."

Much investigation is still outside the realm of traditional science, yet, as metaphysical exploration moves forward, we apply more scientific methods, which caused JJ Semple to wonder, "Who's to say that the same scientific methods we apply in the physical realm won't someday apply to the metaphysical realm? The NDE provides palpable evidence of meta-physicality.” 

This exploration is being conducted by two informal, loosely-knit research tendencies, not by any sanctioned organization. Nevertheless, it moves forward with a dynamic élan, prompted, I believe, by what Gopi Krishna called "the evolutionary impulse." Metaphysical investigators explore consciousness from the inside-out while physical scientists explore it from the outside-in. Instead of sniping at one another, they need to cooperate:

Group 1: Metaphysical investigators

Metaphysical investigators, those who have undergone Kundalini/NDE experiences, write about them from the inside-out, just as a 16th Century explorer might have kept a journal of his adventures during a sea voyage. This inside-out group is headlined by such researchers as, Gopi Krishna, Richard Bucke, J Krishnamurti, and PD Ouspensky, who cautioned that metaphysical research in the laboratory of the body deserves a rigorous methodological approach:

"There is no question of faith in all this. Quite the opposite, this system teaches people to believe in absolutely nothing. You must verify everything you see, hear, or feel. Only in that way can you come to something."

In keeping with this approach, JJ Semple described his experience in Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time: “After activating the Kundalini-Life Force, I was able to see the blueprint of my perfect body and compare it to my actual state. Amazingly, the Life Force recognized my deformity and immediately began to correct it. I witnessed it slowly reshape my body to the exact proportions in the blueprint.

“I could see my original design and the fact that it is perfect means that an unseen sentient entity in nature created it before my substantive being came into this world.”

These observations are alluded to in the writings of other Kundalini researchers, such as Michael Bradford:

"This control and guidance is also evident in the experiments done with developing animal embryos in which the removal or substitution of tissue, if done at an early enough stage, does not result in a totally deformed final form but rather in a smaller or modified, but still complete form. If the process of development were strictly a mechanical one, this would certainly not be the result. One logical explanation for this phenomenon is the existence of a controlling field, such as the pranic spectrum, which has a pre-determined form towards which it is guiding the development of the organism via the growth processes.”

In The Backward-Flowing Method: The Secret of Life and Death, JJ Semple wrote, “Where this blueprint had been stored between the time of my conception and my 35th year, I did not know. Physical scientists, geneticists, in this instance, would probably say it resides in the brain, and that is a safe assumption, for, until we can prove it resides outside the body, we must assume it is somehow connected to it, as in lines of code stored in DNA. Nevertheless, the fact that I saw the blueprint and watched the Life Force energy use it to “reengineer” my body makes me think that some sentient agency must play a role in reproduction, and in the design and formation of the body. Why had this blueprint suddenly reappeared? Where had it been for thirty-five years? Why was the Kundalini-Life Force using it? If it had no purpose, wouldn’t it have ceased to exist? So then, it must have a purpose, for it was still there.” Does the notion of controlling field (an outside the body metaphysical entity) come into play?

In The Biology of Consciousness: Case Studies in Kundalini, JJ Semple continues this discussion:

"As applied to my situation, the 'controlling field' referred to in the above passage used a blueprint of my perfect body to manage my bodily substantiation. The changes in symmetry I experienced were due to neural blockages caused by the splinter — blockages causing a massive redistribution of growth energy throughout my body. Ergo, my transformation from a symmetrical to asymmetrical being. Not only did this newly awakened pranic energy reverse this process, it started it going in the other direction, namely from asymmetrical back to symmetrical. It healed me, and it did so intelligently, which made me realize it had access to DNA and other evolutionary information about my being. And that is what I base my hypothesis about Kundalini’s ability to modify DNA on: finding a way to restore and revitalize the affected body parts, a process that included conforming my body to the blueprint for its intended substantiation. It still amazes me that 35 years after my birth, this 'controlling field' or super-consciousness went back to my 'archives,' found the blueprint, and used it to restore my body to its original intended state and form."

Group 2: Physical scientists

Physical scientists, such as Dr. Harold Saxton Burr of Yale University, who explored field theory in the 30s. “Physicists define a field something like this: when something occurs somewhere in space because something else happened somewhere else in space, with no visible means by which the cause produced the effect, the two events are connected by a ‘field.’ If this is true, then:

"As everyone knows, when we sprinkle a card with iron filings and hold it over an ordinary magnet, the filings will arrange themselves in a pattern that represents the ‘lines of force’ of the magnet’s field. And though we can change the filings as often as we like, each set of filings will always assume the same pattern.

 “Even by the most pedantic, therefore, the ‘fields of life’ can be considered a scientifically-respectable phenomenon, eligible one day for the imprimatur of the hierarchy. When that will be will depend on how long it takes biochemists to lose their enthusiasm for present fashions (and perhaps for economic interests to open their focus to cost-effective natural vs. patented chemical solutions)."

• The fact that we do not perceive these states/fields means our current consciousness must be inhibited,  
• There is consciousness in every field/cell.

As author Sol Luckman points out:

“A salient point in the evolutionary model I am elaborating is that evolution of species ultimately is driven not by material, but by metaphysical energy, or consciousness, of a spiraling, 'meta-genetic' nature.

“If today we are to embrace a worldview in which consciousness is more important than matter, we need to base our timekeeping on the nonphysical, invisible reality (that gives rise to reality) rather than on the physical.”

If both groups combine their efforts, they will uncover actualities that make the themes explored in science fiction a reality, enabling, as Gopi Krishna so aptly phrased it, "a state of perception where the invisible world of intelligent cosmic forces will be cognizable to every human being."