Kundalini And Time

We all feel, inwardly, at some deep level, that time is an illusion. Daily life, with its pleasures and problems, makes this illusion — that one moment follows another — irresistibly strong. But there’s still an inkling that what the physicists say is true: space and time are one and the same thing, and this space/time continuum is static. Every event that has ever been, and that ever will be, in the physical universe, is here, now, with us. Even if we only feel it as a hunch, the desire remains, at a fundamental level, to make the time illusion more than an abstract concept, in fact, to live it, and so free ourselves from it.

When the mind, body and subtle body are cleansed and grow still, Kundalini awakes a precious understanding: that the brain itself is an event. The brain isn’t just a lump of cells and tissue stuck inside the skull. Neural matter is an event, an action, emerging from the energy field at a frequency so high it can’t be registered, and therefore seems solid. The brain is in constant movement, and this is what creates the illusion of time — time is the surges of energy moving from left to right, and from right to left, from hemisphere to hemisphere of the thing inside our skulls.

 

Time is an illusion, but the illusion has a rhythm, and there are moments within that rhythm when Kundalini grows more intense, and it’s possible to experience the time illusion bodily. In daily life, one side of the brain dominates the other side, and there is a switching between hemispheres which is essential for our biological survival. Constant left hemisphere dominance would destroy the brain with too much outwardness, and constant right hemisphere dominance would destroy the brain with too much inwardness. In meditation, the switch from hemisphere to hemisphere takes place about every ninety minutes, and there’s a moment when the two hemispheres are in sync. This occurs naturally. It can’t be controlled. But it is an opportunity, because it’s then that Kundalini is concentrated in the susumna nadi, the central channel, beyond time. 

 

That Kundalini is as much out in the cosmos as it is inside the body can be proved by personal observation: There are two moments in the day when Kundalini is at Her most powerful: at dawn and at dusk, the “cracks in the world” of traditional wisdom. At dawn and at dusk, the physical universe becomes both expectant and poignant. Expectant, because profound change is possible. Poignant because change takes time.

 

The other morning, as the sun was coming up, a crow glided down from somewhere and landed on the fence in our garden. My eyes saw feathers and claws grasp splintery wood. My body registered weight, vibration, a bird-shaped form shaking a loose paling. My brain knew it was simply watching a crow landing on a fence. But what overwhelmed me — what Kundalini saw — were feathers, claws, a fence that were made of time. The crow’s — and the fence’s — substance was nothing but time. I was lucky enough to be at one of those instants when the two hemispheres were in sync and Kundalini took over the central channel, because my body changed, it too was made of time. It had no substance outside an event that included both me and the crow and the fence, and, suddenly, everything.

Kundalini and Consciousness

Consciousness is a strange and powerful thing.

Consciousness is so weird, it's not quite right to speak about having consciousness, or even of being conscious.

My friends are intelligent and sympathetic people, but when I tell them that Kundalini is a biological eruption in every cell of the body, of a consciousness that lies beyond the body — they laugh themselves silly.

Materialism is the unquestioned faith of our day. When they've stopped laughing, my friends assure me that consciousness is just a chemical reaction in the brain. They point out that different mental and physical functions can be located in different parts of the cerebral cortex, and that when a particular part of the brain is damaged a corresponding bodily or mental function is lost.

This is the twenty-first century equivalent of pious Victorian churchgoers pointing to the forms and structures of nature and leaping to the conclusion that a Deity must have designed them.

Consciousness comes before all this. Consciousness takes precedence. You need the presence of consciousness before you can even begin to study the brain and map it with electrodes. Consciousness remains, in deep sleep and coma, even when the various neural functions are lost or damaged. The brain is a response to this presence of consciousness.

A damaging result of materialist religiosity is that in our day-to-day lives we assume that consciousness is a weak, negligible thing, a helpless passenger carried along by the drives and addictions of our bodies, when, in fact, the very reverse is true. When Kundalini is awake, the body is in the grip of consciousness. A fathomless intelligence takes charge of every ganglion and synapse.

One of the most powerful effects of Kundalini awakening is what it does to love, and to the act of love. Our partner is no longer a distant object towards whom we struggle with our senses and mind in the hope of finding a little closeness. Neither are they just a separate personality that might, if we are lucky, happen to dovetail with whatever separate personality we happen to be stuck with. When Kundalini is active, our loved-one's face and body, their mind and their personality, come spinning out of a vortex of consciousness that is as beyond them as it is beyond us. We feel the same vortex of consciousness absorb us, our senses and our minds, from the base of the spine upwards as union becomes real, and love more than a dove-tailed closeness.

The Tantras describe the susumna nadi, the central, spinal channel, as having two thin, tube-like nadis inside it — the brahma nadi and the citrini nadi — where the Kundalini energy gets closer and closer to sheer consciousness. The citrini nadi is "as fine as the thousandth part of a hair, and pierces all the lotuses, and is pure intelligence" as Kundalini, "She who is outside the universe, and goes upwards," awakes.