Is Kundalini Intelligent?

How Intelligent is Kundalini? It’s smarter than I am. I used to think I was the smart one. That’s because I didn’t understand the concept of the Primal Spirit as a component part of human ontology, even after reading The Secret of the Golden Flower (SGF) that makes the distinction between it (the Primal Spirit) and its polar opposite (the Conscious Spirit). According to the SGF, the Primal Spirit is the formative energy responsible for our embodiment. When the Conscious Spirit activates at birth, it starts recording and processing the endless flow of information taken in by the senses. And from this information it constructs our ego.

Bombarding the Senses

As babies we perceive the world around us and begin to formulate judgments and hypotheses about what we see, hear, and feel. This entity offering me her breast is warm and smells good and the milk it provides tastes good. Later on as we refine our ability to process information, we learn to abstract events and situations: this entity (which I now identify as my mother) loves me, or, heaven forbid, if the experience is unpleasant, if my mother doesn’t provide the comfort and protection I need, we attach negative labels: My mother doesn’t love me. My mother hates me. And the beat goes on, until we are fully conditioned by the world around us, and we have forgotten the energy that created us — the Primal Spirit. The ego wants it that way, wants us to suppress this knowledge, all part of a defense mechanism for survival in "so-called" real world.

At the age of 35, I raised Kundalini. Energy I didn’t know existed started flowing through a neural subsystem in my body. I could feel and observe it. Almost immediately, I realized that this subsystem was the Primal Spirit, the term I’d come across many times during my yearlong study of the SGF — without really understanding what it meant. To me it was devoid of any substantive meaning. But when it booted up inside me, not only did it energize my body, it healed and restored it. And I put two plus two together to make four, then five, then six, then infinity. Yes, the Primal Spirit deals in oneness and infinity.

Two are One in the Infinite

Not only did this energy subsystem heal me, it did so intelligently. Which made me realize it had access to DNA and other evolutionary information about my being.

Of course, the ego doesn’t like this. And given its exposure to years and years of conditioning, it wants you to believe that “smart” starts and ends with It. No other entity is as smart as It is.

After a few months of living with Kundalini, I realized the Primal Spirit knew more about my actual Being than my ego (the Conscious Spirit) ever would. It didn’t take conditioning into consideration; it went about its business with the same determination it used to create my body — fixing its broken parts, reengineering its subsystems. After all the Primal Spirit built my body. It is master contractor, all other systems are subservient. Now, finally recalled to duty after a 35-year dormant period, it picked up where it left off at birth. Back then, the ego didn’t exist. And now that it does, it is incapable of admitting that it is a product of acculturation, conditioning, approval and longing. The ego is a master of denial.

How do I know any of this to be true? Think back to that primordial time in the womb. What is the brain doing during gestation? Is the left brain functioning? Is the right brain intelligent? Does the word intelligence have any meaning during the time in the womb? I surmise that the situation is pretty much like Jill Bolte Taylor’s account of left-right brain interactivity during her stroke:

"On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain, that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me and then it released me. Then it just gripped me and then released me. And it was very unusual for me to experience any kind of pain, so I thought OK, I’ll just start my normal routine. So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body exercise machine. And I’m jamming away on this thing, and I’m realizing that my hands looked like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. I thought “that’s very peculiar” and I looked down at my body and I thought, “whoa, I’m a weird-looking thing.” And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I’m the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I’m witnessing myself having this experience.

"And it was all every peculiar and my headache was just getting worse, so I get off the machine, and I’m walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There’s no fluidity to my pace, and there’s this constriction in my area of perceptions so I’m just focused on internal systems. And I’m standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower and I could actually hear the dialog inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, “OK, you muscles, you gotta contract, you muscles you relax.”

"And I lost my balance and I’m propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy. Energy. And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me, what is going on?” And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button and — total silence.

"And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there."

The above extract, already cited in Margaret Dempsey’s The Master and his Emissary post, highlights the operational differences between right and left brain functioning, reveals what happens when the left brain (the Conscious Spirit) shuts down and the right Brain (the Primal Spirit) is left alone to cope. Trouble is with the left brain shutting down, there’s not much it can do except to stand ready to merge the individual spirit with the infinite. In the womb, it's different; the left brain is barely operative while the right brain uses the evolutionary energy to create a new being.

Parallel Lines Meet at Infinity

So how does Kundalini manifest intelligence? It doesn’t know addition, it doesn’t memorize phone numbers, or do crossword puzzles. It does, however, know the human body. It does know evolutionary energy. It does know DNA, which it "invented" without having to read a textbook. In fact, text books are only now scratching the surface of what the Primal Spirit "knows."

In my case, it sent out feelers to inventory my body; it received the results, analyzed and interpreted them, then sent back the requisite healing energy to repair the disorder. In my book, that’s intelligence.

Meditation or Medication...When Kundalini Rises

The title of this page fascinates me. Having experienced both — meditation and medication — I feel inspired to examine each within a spiritual context.

I first came across meditation when I discovered Buddhism in 1988. Meditation is an integral part of Buddhism, the vehicle for developing self-awareness. One accomplises this by noticing the internal thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, thought processes while meditating. Whenever I meditated, my thought processes quickly overloaded, almost as if my brain had launched a computer virus. I had no idea where the millions of varied, meaningless, but powerful thoughts came from.

It might seem like a contradiction to say that meaningless thoughts can be powerful in their ability to distract during meditation, but they can, and are. The mind is threatened by meditation and so it throws up thoughts that distract from meditation. The Secret of the Golden Flower calls this the battle between the Primal and the Conscious Spirit. The Conscious Spirit wants to maintain its hegemony over our true nature — the Primal Spirit.

Separation of the Spirit Body for Independent Existence

Once, I remember sitting down to meditate and immediately thinking, 'I want a cup of tea.' I had gone the previous three hours without wanting or needing a cup of tea and suddenly because I sat down to meditate, I wanted a cup of tea. Why was this impulse suddenly strong enough to propel me to the kitchen to get that cup of tea?

I have always found meditation challenging and for most of my spiritual life have preferred the practice of mindfulness although I didn't know what it was called back then — before it had the name it has today. Gurdjieff called it self-remembering. The practice of being constantly aware and alert to everything that is going on all the time. I found that easier to do than sitting down to observe the thoughts in my mind.

When Kundalini rose the second time it awakened hitherto inactive areas of my brain — in terms of triggering insights and intuitions I had never before experienced.

As a consequence, I went through many shifts of consciousness, one of which bordered on a mania that took the form of speaking endlessly of a conspiracy that kept Kundalini hidden from people and feeling sure that it was a conspiracy by secret societies like the Freemasons!

Such high bursts of energy are inevitably followed by a crash and I did crash for a number of reasons  I won't go into now. This dip led me to a doctor who prescribed a very low dose of an anti-depressant. The drug succeeded in lifting my consciousness out of the black place it fallen into.

The mania accompanied by depression might have indicated I was experiencing a bi-polar episode, but it didn't feel like that, given what I have read about bi-polar. Nevertheless, the mania did awaken areas of my brain which had never been active, producing new varieties of thoughts and concepts.

No doubt meditation prepares the body for spiritual awakening and causes consciousness to expand in direct proportion to the degree of one's self-awareness. The rising Kundalini causes an awakening and then, depending on the intensity of the awakening, the renewed meditation may take on a different quality. The awakening may be so overwhelming that medication may be necessary. The outcome depends solely on the individual and the symptoms manifested.