Kundalini strikes again....This Time an Eminent Neurosurgeon

A couple of weeks ago I submitted a draft paper for my MSc in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology to my personal tutor for his comments before submitting the final paper in early December. In his feedback, he wrote that it might be useful to look up the work of Eckhart Tolle, Katie Byron, and Dr. Eben Alexander. Eckhart's work I am familiar with, having read The Power of Now and A New Earth many times. Byron I am less familiar with, but know the system she has developed called, The Work, is based on questioning our thoughts and asking, "Is this thought true?" I haven't read any of her books or attended any of her trainings. However, I have heard both her and Eckhart speak when I was a volunteer at a mind, body, spirit center in London some years ago.

Proof of Heaven by Dr. Eben Alexander

Dr. Eben Alexander, however, I knew nothing about. I hadn't even heard his name until my tutor put it in his comments. All my tutor gave me was his name so my first stop was Wikipedia which I realize isn't the best academic source, but I wanted to get a general flavor of what he is claiming and what he is claiming shocked me. He is claiming nothing less than Proof of Heaven, which is the title of his book about his near death experience (NDE). Historically, I have been ambivalent about reports of NDEs. I feel intuitively that they stem from brain activity — particularly right brain temporal lobe activity triggered by spontaneous Kundalini. However, the fact that this account was written by a well-respected neurosurgeon (Dr. Alexander), who knew a great deal about neuroscience, got me to thinking. If my tutor recommended this research and expected to see some reference to it in my final paper, I had better knuckle down and find out more about it.

On my way to work I stopped off at a bookshop and asked if they had Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife in stock. I was in luck; the shop assistant picked the last copy from the shelf. Glancing briefly at the cover I saw that it had a butterfly on it which holds personal significance for me. So feeling intuitively that there was something in this book which was going to be important, I thanked the shop assistant and left.

When I returned home from work that evening I opened the book and began to read. Dr. Alexander claims that e-coli bacterial meningitis shut off the neocortex of his brain which resulted in his coma and subsequent NDE. I am no neuroscientist/neurosurgeon so I can't comment on this.  However, the description of the pain he endured and the associated physical symptoms screamed to me, "Kundalini."

On page 13 of the book, he writes, "I shifted slightly in bed and a wave of pain shot down my spine." In the next paragraph, "Instantly the pain ratcheted up another notch — a dull, punishing throb penetrating deeply at the base of my spine." On page 16, he says: "Pushing open our bedroom door, she (Eben's wife) saw me lying in bed just as before. But looking closer she saw that my body wasn't as relaxed as it had been, but rigid as a board. She turned on the light and saw that I was jerking violently. My lower jaw was jutting forward unnaturally, and my eyes were open and rolling back in my head."

On pages 17-18 he continues: "When the EMTs wheeled me into the Major Bay 1 of the ER, I was still convulsing violently while intermittently groaning and flailing my arms and legs. They went to work on me, I was squirming like a six-foot fish pulled out of the water. I spouted bursts of garbled, nonsensical sounds and animal-like cries."

I hold the Buddhist view that there is nothing in the inner world to be afraid of and while I haven't had the rich intense vivid visual experiences Dr. Alexander had, the convulsions are something I identify with. For many weeks and months after raising Kundalini, my body would convulse just before sleeping. It still happens occasionally, but I have learned to trust and surrender to the energy and when the episode ends I am left feeling calm and relaxed.

After reading his account, I googled Dr. Eben Alexander and kundalini to see if anyone had connected his experience to Kundalini, but the combination only resulted in a few articles. Had I expanded my search to include near death experience and kundalini I would have found many links. I am very aware that the connection between the two, although rather commonplace, has not been extensively explored. Nevertheless, those of us who are more experienced with this energy need to read Dr. Alexander's account, as well as the many other NDE accounts. If the consensus is that NDEs are driven by the spontaneous eruption of Kundalini energy, it solidifies the hypothesis for research around the connection between Kundalini and NDEs.

However, as interesting as his book is, I'm not sure his experience constitutes proof of heaven. He needs more time to assimilate his experience, more time to research it, more time to think about it in scientific terms before conferring religious status on the states he passed through.

It would be useful to hear the accounts of those who treated him in the ER and to know more about the drugs they administered. Will he dig deeper into the physical causes and the anatomical processes that induced the experience?

Has Dr. Alexander ever heard of Kundalini? And if so, will he pursue the connection to NDE, specifically to his experience? Does he understand that both Kundalini and NDEs take time to integrate? It took Gopi Krishna 20 years before he was able to write about his Kundalini experience. JJ Semple needed almost thirty years to be able to write about his experience. Will Eben Alexander continue to write about his? Or is his first book a "one and done?"

At the Kundalini conference which I organized and facilitated in April 2013, one of the speakers, a Kundalini Yoga Master, was asked the question, "Is Kundalini dangerous?" His reply was, "I think it is dangerous to ignore Kundalini."

Intuitively, I feel that Kundalini is the vehicle that is shifting certain people's consciousness. Why these people and not others I don't know? Nevertheless, we should be aware of the relationship between Kundalini and the NDE. That the two phenomena share enough commonalities for us to conclude that they are related.

Perhaps, Dr. Alexander's account is most notable because of his standing in the medical community as a respected neurosurgeon. Is he now considered a renegade because he ventured beyond the accepted confines of science? What do his colleagues think? He and his book have received a torrent of backlash from atheist neuroscientist, Sam Harris, who sees Dr. Alexander's book damaging the argument that consciousness is a by-product of the brain. Will Dr. Alexander recant?

As of this writing, it appears he no longer agrees with the neo-atheist position. It appears he now believes consciousness to be independent of the brain. What will he believe 20 years from now? What do you believe?

Kundalini and God

Back in the 50s when I was young, bars and taverns featured philosophical discussions in which showing off your vocabulary and your syntactical prowess played a large part. Mastery of debating and spoken language was important. Perhaps we had fewer distractions — no iPads, no Internet, no Netflix, no Kindle Fire, no TV remotes. You had to get up, walk across the room to change the channel. Pretty much a linear world. Books opened on page one and proceeded to the last page, cumbersome LP records loaded, then played from track one to the end. No hopping around, no random channel zapping.

Did this paradigm affect our train of thought, our self-expression? Probably. I remember formal discussions, often centered on theology — God vs. no God, free will vs. predetermination, life and afterlife, — often quoting Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, and other sources, many of whom had been dead for hundreds of years. We were closer to classical literature then, closer to formal expression and grammar. We took pains to use "few" correctly, instead of lumping paucity under the all-inclusive "less." Not only did we discuss in bars, impromptu forums were everywhere: around campfires, on trains, in schoolyards and campuses, even in Army barracks.

During one discussion I remember fading into a kind of beer-soaked reverie, a moment of clairvoyance in which I was a separate entity outside myself, watching the words come out of my mouth, people’s arms waving, beer being swigged. It was as if I was a ventriloquist’s dummy someone else was manipulating. Yes, it was me talking, but the words weren’t really mine; I was a mouthpiece for something I’d heard or read. I felt a shudder, as if I was, and had always been, involved in a vain search for recognition, a desire to be taken seriously, in spite of the second hand nature of my words.



I wondered if anyone had answers. Or were we simply verbal shadow boxers, some more clever than others, aimlessly repeating without any empirical basis to our thoughts? Were we merely casting opinions, hoping others would somehow fall under the spell of our words?

There had to be another way of exploring these issues. Endless discussion around beer-laden tables was not it. Quoting the cognoscenti led to nothing. But what way was there? And if there was a way, was it worth pursuing?

Whatever it was, instinctively I knew I would have to find it myself, go it alone. I would have to step outside groupthink and conventional wisdom, stop repeating what someone else thought or how someone else had rationalized the existence or non-existence of God.

My search led me to Yoga and Kundalini, back to the very essence of my Being, like the following Tagore poem suggests, coming back to where I started:

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot at the first gleam of light, and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said 'Here art thou!"
The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into into tears of a thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'

Activating Kundalini in 1973 was serendipitous, but unintentional, in that, yes, I was meditating, but at the time, I had never heard of Kundalini. I stumbled into it as a result of my meditation practice. I didn't really understand what might happen should my meditation practice succeed. Back then, it wasn't like it is today; there was very little information on Kundalini and I didn't even start looking for it until my awakening happened because I didn't know what to look for.

Forty years later I now understand the futility of polemics. The only thing that matters is experience, and what you see, hear, and feel during your experience. Reading won’t get you there. Neither will science, law, education, religion, money, or good works. If they worked, we’d all be illuminated.

Kundalini takes no position on God; it merely connects you to the energy continuum. Trouble is people (very intelligent people) will see you as an advocate of religion, despite the fact that Kundalini is at once agnostic and ecumenical. To activate it you do not have to follow rituals or say prayers. No invocations, no learning of doctrine, no chanting the names of Saints.

There are no cultural, no language, no geographical barriers to activating Kundalini. No religious prerequisites either. An individual can do it if he/she is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu. Or none of the above — a person without religious affiliation. Once I realized this, I said to myself, Hey, this isn’t religion; this is science, albeit a kind of self-empiricized science that most people won’t recognize.

Unfortunately, one of the constraining factors around Kundalini is that, once an experience like this (a Kundalini activation) happens, one looks around for verification and support, and the only place one finds it is in Hindu, Taoist, and/or Buddhist texts. So the initiate throws in his/her lot with Eastern religions...for a while, at least. But if he/she starts to examine the issue as I have over the past 40 years since my Kundalini activation, he/she sees that what happened to him/her could happen to anyone. And he/she begins to see the scientific ramifications of his/her experience, begins to realize Kundalini is neurobiology.

The danger is getting so carried away with religious fervor that you miss the science. It leads to getting tainted with the kiss-of-death Spirituality label. There is a term that describes this work but it’s not spirituality, it’s Metaphysical.

What’s the difference? you ask. Spirituality has become a cliché. Ask 50 people to write down a one-sentence definition of spiritual and you get 50 different, contradictory answers. The word has no meaning. Metaphysical, on the other hand, is clear: it means beyond the physical.

The Mind can be a Prison

So be careful. Just because you feel a religious fervor on awakening Kundalini, don’t say you spoke with God or saw Him if you didn’t. For instance, perhaps, you saw a white light, but don't assume that God is somehow in the light, not an anthropomorphic representation, that is. God IS there, just as God IS everywhere. The God I'm talking about, however, is as much the consciousness contained in the Energy Continuum as it is You in your self-realized state.

Try to catalog your experience scientifically. Include only the realities you see and hear. Yes, there is an Energy Continuum, but just because you now perceive and are part of it doesn’t mean that you have to embellish it. That only does a disservice to those who are trying to gain mass critical acceptance for Kundalini. Yes, the Energy Continuum is wonderful, like Disneyland to a child, but place yourself in it accurately. Don’t get labeled as a spiritualist. At the very least, step back from your experience to evaluate it. Is it a scientific experience or a religious one? It’s got to be one or the other; it can’t be spiritual, because the word has no meaning. If religious best describes it, realize you get nowhere. People will call it spiritual and lump you in with fundamentalists and fanatics. If metaphysical best describes it, then it’s scientific, because metaphysics is the science of that which lies beyond the physical. Never forget Kundalini is a direct result of physical activity. Consciousness rising out of mechanical pieces and parts, namely our breathing apparatus and our sexuality — neurobiology at its most potent.

So, if you come out spraying a lot of new age mumbo-jumbo, everyone you talk to will be thinking it’s all in his/her mind. Don’t give them the satisfaction of lumping you in with religions based only on faith or spiritual cults based on accepting someone else’s arbitrary opinions. Try relating it to the real world. You’ll find there’s no separation. They flow into one another — the physical into the metaphysical.

Just because you can’t furnish an empirical proof that science accepts today, doesn’t mean your experience isn’t real. In time it will be empirically proven, once we have the tools and/or the means to do so.

Today, we have the nouveau atheists, Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, who carry on about God and no God. More words, cleverly put together. It’s still only opinion. And it’s beside the point. They are talkers, not doers. And metaphysical knowledge cannot be gained by talking.

Do they have a case? Absolutely, their arguments about the limits of religion are correct; everyone should read their books. Accepting anything on faith is wrong minded. But they add no empirical evidence to the matter, just more rationalization.

Ask yourself: Why do neurobiologists ignore Kundalini? If they're really investigating the neurological effects of biology, shouldn't they be investigating the most powerful means of enhancing the brain? Should they really be saying the only way to study the brain is from the outside-in, not the inside-out?

Whether it’s from the side of religion or the side of science, it’s only so much talk. No one knows without doing. The problem with doing is there’s a tendency is to overdo. To get carried away with religious fervor when it’s really a scientific experiment you’ve just lived through, one that took place in the laboratory of your body.