Kundalini And Evolution

The authors of the Tantras speak of history as a decline, a falling away from an original perfection. As the ones who revealed the techniques for awakening Kundalini, these authors ought to be listened to. What we call evolution, they call a darkening. What we call progress, they call a lapse and a forgetting. They depict human history as a stage-by-stage descent into chaos. These descending stages are the four "ages" of Hesiod's "Works And Days," the Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron.

In the remarkably parallel Hindu picture, our present era (Hesiod's Age Of Iron, and the Age Of The Wolf of Norse legends) is called the Kali Yuga, the "time when Kali is wide awake," Kali being the female deity symbolizing the elemental, primordial forces, which become destructive when not balanced by a transcendent stillness. The Kali Yuga is a time of alienation from that which transcends the world, a severing of the links with the Primal Spirit, leading to the predominance of all that is merely material and physical. As The Visnu Purana puts it: "...property alone will confer rank; wealth will be the only source of devotion; need will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation..." Surely this describes much, if not all, of the outer social and economic world in our era. Far from evolving, we are descending. It's for this reason that there's been such a widespread current awakening of Kundalini, because it's on the physical body that Kundalini works, opening a sort of Last-Chance-Saloon path to transcendence, when the more ancient and more spiritual paths have been largely lost, and we're stuck in our own heads and nervous systems, floundering in the surrounding materialism.

That Kundalini heals and re-balances the body and brain is beyond doubt. I am undergoing this physical reshaping myself. However, as it goes on, I can feel it being resisted by forces from outside me, by energy fields in my environment. As my center grows more still, the powers trying to throw it off balance become more and more external, and more powerfully external. When Kundalini awakens, sensitivity to the surrounding energy field becomes so heightened as to be sometimes frightening. The Kali Yuga is right there in your face. An opaque being is standing an inch in front of your eyes. Personal weaknesses and problems become charged with a force they never had before, as if they too come from outside you, and are no longer merely the quirks, loveable or less so, of the guy or lady you used to be.

Spiritual Pursuits...Then and Now

In olden days, spiritual pursuit was more of an endurance trial-by-fire that required proving yourself before being admitted to the ultimate truths, as per the following example:

Knowing that his revenge was wrong, Milarepa (Then known by his boyhood name 'Fortuitous') set out to find a lama and was led to Marpa the Translator. Marpa proved a hard taskmaster. Before Marpa would teach Milarepa (c. 1052 – c. 1135 CE) he had him build and then demolish three towers in turn. Milarepa was asked to build one final multi-story tower by Marpa at Lhodrag: this 11th century tower still stands. When Marpa still refused to teach Milarepa, he went to Marpa's wife, who took pity on him. She forged a letter of introduction to another teacher, Lama Ngogdun Chudor, under whose tutelage he practiced meditation. However, as he was making no progress, he confessed the forgery and Ngogdun Chudor said that it was vain to hope for spiritual growth without the guru Marpa's approval. 

Milarepa returned to Marpa, and was finally shown the spiritual teachings. Milarepa then left on his own, and after protracted diligence for 12 years he attained the state of Vajradhara (complete enlightenment). He then became known as Milarepa. 'Mila' is Tibetan for; 'great man', and 'repa' means; 'cotton clad one.' At the age of 45, he started to practice at Drakar Taso (White Rock Horse Tooth) cave — "Milarepa's Cave," as well as becoming a wandering teacher. Here, he subsisted on nettle tea, leading his skin to turn green with a waxy covering, hence the greenish color he is often depicted as having, in paintings and sculpture.

~ The Magic Life of Milarepa

Contemporary seekers of enlightenment, truth, self-realization (or whatever term the current the spiritual authorities bestow on such seekers) would giggle at the prospect of building and tearing down towers and would quickly move on to the nearest strip mall offering kundalini yoga, a tee shirt, a yoga mat, and a 10% discount. Not so in yesteryear:

Marpa said to Milarepa, "I was very hard on you, but do not be distressed. Be patient. Teaching is very slow work. You have the energy to work, so build a tower of Sutra. When you have done that, I will instruct you and I will supply your food and clothing."

Western civilization is not cut out for "slow work." We want answers, shortcuts, formulae, handholding and all manner of emotional sustenance. After all, compared to the life of an eleventh century Tibetan, we're all fairly high maintenance.

Cherry Blossoms

Back then, the student stayed with the teacher/guide/guru 24-7, living in his house or boarding with a group of like-minded students. However long it took. Today, it's fitting in an hour of Tai Chi here and there, then back to the rat race.

California Street Garden Plant

So what kind of effect does the difference between the two paradigms have on the teaching?

1) Whether it's a weekend workshop or a Thursday night yoga class, there's an immediate dissipation once the practitioner is back on the street, in the subway or on a bus. A dissolution of energy. The student begins to question the process: as in "After all, what's the point?" "I won't be able to go next week because my daughter has a recital."

2) Motivation is eroded. It's normal. There's a lot of demands in modern life, and so little information on how to manage it. We might look around, pick a role model and follow it, but this is often hit or miss. So we end up wondering: I sit; I meditate, but nothing happens. How did I ever get involved with this stuff? Where does it all lead? How can it solve my problems?

"Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away.

Now it looks as though they're here to stay."

 ~ Yesterday -The Beatles

Hydrangeas

No one to turn to for advice; no towers to build and tear down. And yet the towers are all there, in other forms, of course: bills to pay, dishes to wash, jobs to go to, meals to cook, beds to make, dogs to walk, intimate conversations to have. These are our towers. All we have to do is recognize them, changing the way we think about the various intrusions in our personal space and daily lives.

Girl With Flowers

Once we're able to change perspective, the task is no longer drudgery, but an exercise in mindfulness. And once mindful, our deep breathing kicks in to lower stress, make us even more mindful, and we whisk through menial tasks joyfully.

Four textures

Mindful, we no longer waste time questioning things that must be done and we see our daily life as an extension of the weekend workshop or the Thursday yoga class. The paradigm is turned around; the restlessness vanishes. It begins to make sense: That it's not so much about teaching as it is about learning to remember ourselves.

Kundalini And Anger

What happens when we are angry while Kundalini is active in the body and consciousness? Anger is natural and inevitable. The Tantric texts associate anger with the belly chakra, and the deeper form of anger — violence, the ‘fight’ element of the ‘fight or flight’ reflex — with the muladhara chakra at the base of the spine.

This is understandable: anger is a fiery state, a facet of the fire element of the belly chakra, whilst violence is in our very bones, a facet of the life force at its most elemental. It’s perfectly right and normal that Kundalini may awaken whilst these deeper forms of anger and violence are still inside us, not just mentally, but as part of our DNA. There are plenty of things in the outside world that are a just cause for anger: idiot politicians enshrining gun laws, fanatics prepared to kill for their meager beliefs. Such anger, however, is merely ideological, and nowhere near as raw or intense as the anger we save for our nearest and dearest when they upset us. When Kundalini is activated, this raw, personal anger can become magnified out of all proportion.

An example
The other morning I woke in the dark with a couple of hours still before the time I needed to get up, but with Kundalini very intense, an upward movement in my spine of a light that I was conscious had been there all through the night. By keeping still and lying flat on my back I could let it become both more intense and more supra-conscious. However, at a certain point, I needed to meditate. The simple repositioning of my body from prostrate to upright, and a more conscious control of my breathing, enabling me to stay with the energy as it grew more powerful. I got up, washed, and was just about to begin meditating when my mother-in-law came running in, wanting me to look at something. It was a long, deep, expensive-looking dent in the side of my father-in-law’s car. He’d been shopping in Chiang Rai, and someone had backed into his car while it was parked and he was in the shop. I’d given him some money to insure the car. Where were the insurance papers? I asked, eager to start meditating. Well, the money had gone to a big party celebrating Loi Kratong, the Thai River Goddess Festival.

What had my father-in-law been doing in Chiang Rai? Buying a uniform. He’s never had a job in his life — has lived for decades off his beautiful, marriageable daughter — but he owns six uniforms — western-style municipal and military-type uniforms that Thai men particularly fancy themselves in. He goes to fairs and temple parties dressed like a brigadier general and directs traffic and car-parking, an honorary occupation remunerated only in whiskey. His car needed fixing. What was I going to do about it? I was angrier than I’ve ever been at a politician or fanatic.
 

The Scream

The tipping point of my fury wasn’t so much the money as the fact that now I wouldn’t be able to meditate. Stillness, breath relaxation and mind control were now out of the question.

I sat down anyway, which made me even angrier — and a strange thing happened: All the energy of my rage was still there, racking my body, up and down, but the reasons for my anger, all the things and people I was angry at, suddenly faded away without my even trying to stop thinking about them. My father-in-law and his car were still there, but only as harmless husks, vague memories faintly troubling the surface of this deep energy. In some ways, I was meditating more powerfully than usual, because I understood that the slightest inner turning towards any of my usual thought processes would cast me down into a maelstrom. I knew that trying to struggle against my anger, or reason myself out of it, would be disastrous. Kundalini would lurch over into the right channel, the pingala nadi, alone, in a sort of physical explosion. After an hour, the energy was calm and luminous.

Blake has interesting things to say about anger. He speaks of anger, jealousy, sorrow etc as "states," as "states of being," comparable to the "elements" of Tantric cosmology: earth, water, fire, air, akasha (ether) and manas (mind). These states, like the Tantric elements, are simply configurations of energy, and, as such, are neither good nor bad. They can be passed through without ill effect, as long as we center ourselves on the energy itself, the Kundalini shakti. It’s in this sense that Blake speaks of anger and violence being transmuted into spiritual war, the struggle for liberation: "I will not cease from Mental Fight..." It’s the truth behind his saying: "The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

My Thoughts And The Lies They Tell Me

A Jihadi extremist walks into a crowded restaurant with explosives strapped under his coat. His thoughts tell him that the people around him are his enemy; his God will reward him for destroying them and furthering his cause. He pushes the remote that sets off the explosives that tears apart his own flesh as well as those who are close by.

Although this is a very extreme example, are we not all victims of our thoughts. When I was twelve, I thought my parents didn’t love me. This made me feel very sad and was responsible for some silly, bad behavior. It wasn’t until sometime later that I began to see how much my parents loved me, and the sacrifices they made, not only for me, but also for my brothers and sisters. This changed everything about our relationship and my behavior.

Our thoughts are often full of judgements, fears, doubts, worries. Our minds are filled with negative voices and pictures of what could go wrong. Experiencing life through our busy thoughts is often unpleasant. Even if our thoughts are positive, if they do not reflect reality, they can and will lead to disappointment because they only portray fantasy.

There’s a funny quote that I found when I turned sixty:

"When you're 20, you care what everyone thinks; when you're 40, you stop caring what everyone thinks; when you're 60, you realize that no one was thinking about you in the first place." ~ Unknown

Built into our thoughts is this very strong sense that they are true. We don’t question our thoughts because we assume they are who we are. But are they true? Are they really who we are? And when we believe them to be true — a part of who we are — how do they affect us? Do they lead to inappropriate and destructive behavior?

Richard Rohr, in his on-line course on the Twelve Step program called Breathing Under Water, says: "We all take our own patterns of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when they do not fully compute. That is the self-destructive nature of all addiction and of the mind, in particular. We think we are our thinking, and we even take that thinking as utterly 'true,' which removes us at least two steps from reality itself."



As a young person growing up on a farm in Eastern Canada during the fifties, I saw and experienced a lot of poverty. I recall a time when I asked my parents for a bike. I was told that they couldn’t afford it. Words I heard often and they were true at the time. Now that I’m sixty plus, not rich but financially secure, I still hear that voice when buying something I don’t necessarily need: I can’t afford it.

But it’s a lie; I can afford it. When the stock market goes down, (as it has a lot over the last decade) my thoughts are: My God, I’m going broke. But it’s a lie. The money I have invested in the market is money I don’t really need. But still, when the market go down, I feel depressed as if some impending disaster is just around the corner.

Meditation and Kundalini are teaching me to stop listening to my thoughts, and the lies they tell me. Kundalini has revamped things inside so that I am learning to listen to the more subtle voice that exists at a much deeply level than the chattering mind. This inner witness and its connection with the mystery that lies beyond it are able to observe the ramblings of the mind, to pick and choose what to accept and what to reject. They enable me to see how truly good life is, how supportive and trustworthy it is when I don’t allow meaningless thoughts, and the lies they tell, to lead me in directions I never wanted to go in the first place.



Thoughts, images, voices, constructs, conditioning, beliefs are transit visitors that protrude into our lives. They arise and they fall. They are not permanent. They are not you. When we learn to observe them, and not become attached to them, we can follow them or let them go. We can build the life that we want for ourselves.

Hello, My name is ______. I'm an alcoholic...

This post is inspired by a moving documentary I watched recently. Eight men and women spoke about their journey towards alcohol dependence/addiction. What struck me was how each spoke about feeling a sense of anxiety/unease that alcohol "was able to take the edge off."

I began thinking about the nature of "the unease" which the alcohol numbed in relation to my own life. And when I looked back at my childhood/adolescence, I recognized this feeling of anxiety and unease. It was a feeling of not belonging. What I used to dull the pain was food and in my book Female Kundalini I speak about this.

 I now recognize that the emptiness I felt then and continued to feel until I found my spiritual teacher was a spiritual emptiness which all of us, by virtue of being human feel, but frequently block out either by denial or by employing a crutch. The particular crutch we select to make us "feel better" tends to stick to us for the rest of our lives.

I recently heard a famous writer being interviewed and he spoke about how in his early childhood he developed a stutter and turned to writing as a relief from talking, he channeled the anxiety he felt into writing which has made him the extremely successful writer that he is today. Many other writers speak about "being driven to write" that the writing "relieves something."

This is all good and productive when the crutch one uses is socially acceptable and lucrative, but my compassion goes out to those whose crutch is alcohol and/or drugs, both of which quickly become a slippery slope. It is said of alcohol that first it becomes a guest, then a host, and then a master. In the stories which the eight people in this documentary told, that was the inevitable pattern.

What makes one person use alcohol and another the pen to relieve anxiety? I don't know, is it karma? We all do it — more or less. If, however, each of us was to make an honest self-appraisal, we could probably identify the crutch we use to make us "feel better." As our dependency advances, shame and denial kick in. This is the despairing cycle that I went through for years with food. And that's why I'm concerned with the nature of this unease we all feel and are constantly trying to get relief from.

It was only when I read the teachings of my guru and His explanation — that unease is the result of "self-contraction," a separating of ourselves from Reality — that I was finally able to understand the nature of this discomfort.

For the first time, I felt beyond the tension of the self-contraction to the indivisible Reality that lies beyond. Now I feel so incredibly lucky and blessed to have finally found my Guru. I know that the word Guru holds negative connotations for many people, and for me to be a devotee involved a major loss of face because I am on record as previously saying that no one needs a Guru.

But because each of us creates the self-contraction it is not possible to free ourselves from it alone. Was it Einstein who said that a problem cannot be solved at the same level as the mind that created it, that solving it requires something else? Guru means going from dark to light and it is the hardest thing to accept that as human egos we are in the dark and in order to be free we have to surrender to the light of a guru or realized adept; there is no other way. The Guru removes the obstacles to realizing our true nature, not by working on ourselves, but by turning our attention to the Guru and surrendering to the process.

The ego "I" rejects this and I am sure that the previous paragraph is controversial, but I have only ever spoken or written about my own experience and that hasn't changed because I am now committed to the path of devotion. This activity of self-contraction that we all do at a deep subconscious level leaves an anxiety and unease that we don't want to feel so we look for ways not to feel it. Any search, whether material or spiritual, is aimed at relieving the underlying anxiety caused by the decision to break away from Reality and identify itself with the body/mind. This is how the search works and it is the ego "I" that searches. The irony, however, is that separate-ness is an illusion.

Freedom or Self-Realization comes not from searching for ways to relieve this anxiety but by having the courage to feel into and examine the sense of anxiety and unease and trace it back to its source. I am aware that this is much easier to write about than to practice. At the height of my self-destructive food binges, if you had asked me what it was I was trying not to experience or feel, I wouldn't have been able to tell you. All I would have been able to say was that there was a tension in me that binge eating eased temporarily, which is why addictions are so strong.

At the end of the documentary, all of those interviewed said that the way they cope without alcohol today is due to learning how to handle and manage feelings of unease and anxiety; they don't go away (of course they won't because they are inherent in the design of the human being). So instead of seeing these feelings and unease as a sign of weakness, we need to see them as human feelings that we all have. The only way to be free of them is not to search for ways to be free, but to recognize that we are and always have been free, but we just don't realize it. To understand this is to end the search forever.

A Dream Of Loss

About every six months I have the same dream, always close to morning after making love with my wife with particular tenderness during the night. It’s a dream that aches through my whole body, yet it isn’t a nightmare. Nightmares and dreams in general lessen when Kundalini is awakened. Kundalini stays on throughout the night, with a greater or lesser intensity, and burns away the subconscious stuff that gives rise to dreams and nightmares. Except for this one exceptional dream of loss. It occurred again last night.

My wife and I had passed through one of those love-makings where there is a shift from a pair of bodies copulating to a pair of subtle bodies, fused at the base of the spine. When this happens, the issue of ejaculation-or-non-ejaculation is simply bypassed, forgotten, by both of us. Ejaculation doesn’t happen because it’s no longer important. The Kundalini energy is felt very powerfully. When we finally fall asleep, Kundalini stays on during the night as a physical light that keeps us keenly aware of each other even in deep dreamless sleep. And then, near morning, this same weird dream:

Her phone rings. A man wants her. She’s gone. That’s it. There’s some peripheral wandering around by me, looking for her, which isn’t important. What’s important is the fact that someone I love and am aware of so utterly could suddenly become so absent, so unlocate-able, so unfind-able. The sense of loss is too deep to be a nightmare, and seems on the point of tipping over into joy.

I’m sure everyone has these dreams, and I feel certain that far from being sad, they are glimpses of the transcendent state. The simple fact is that each of us is a god/goddess hidden behind our individual psychology, senses, and DNA. These dreams of loss are a glimpse of the fact, unbearable to our psychology, senses, and DNA, that we are gods/goddesses, and it’s such a stunning fact it can only be brought into focus in the dream state, particularly after making love. This person I feel so deeply aware of, close to, and at one with is unlocate-able, out in the night somewhere, totally beyond me, because she is the Shakti in her primal state. The unknown guy who phones her, and takes her, isn’t my rival, he’s my real self.

Beliefs and Kundalini

"In meditation, we practice observing our thoughts, seeing them come, seeing them change, seeing them go. They are a phenomenon of the mind, empty of any permanence. We discover that we are not our thoughts. Our inner witness or observer gives testimony to this. In the same manner, we must practice observing our beliefs. They come, they change, they go. They also are a phenomenon of the mind, empty of permanence. In this manner, our inner witness can become an instrument of compassion, not of judgement, with those who do not share our particular beliefs."

 Mehru Danda ~ "Being Overly Identified With Our Beliefs"

Beliefs are like being slowly poisoned. You don't know it's happening until you're half dead, in this case brain dead.

Not all beliefs are harmful: believing that your dog has a spiritual connection with you harms no one. But believing that your religion is the one and only truth is largely the result of cultural indoctrination and social conditioning accompanied by harmful — sometimes even militant — overtones. But I'm not out to generalize; I'd rather look at my own case as honestly as possible — a survey of my beliefs over the decades, what I've done with them, how they influenced me, or not.

First, let's remove facts from the discussion; facts are not beliefs.

Beliefs are like hypotheses with emotional baggage. Instead of trying to validate a belief, like we would a hypothesis, we accept them for a variety of reasons, usually because of social or cultural pressures. When young, everyone is exposed to a variety of beliefs. If they take hold, they're hard to get rid of, even subsequently, when doubts surface. And when people construct political systems around beliefs they become doubly dangerous.

Beliefs are relative, not absolute. Relative, that is, to surrounding environmental factors. They are not an inherited byproduct. In other words, beliefs are not the result of heredity or some sort of ontological programming passed on through DNA. They are derivative.

Luckily, I was moved around so much as a child that I was mostly confused, rather than zealous or devout. Prejudice never took hold. As for religion, I admired some of the liturgy and literature of the Episcopal church, but the doctrines left me thinking: there must be something else — something that didn't involve an anthropomorphic being somewhere in the sky. Something more tangible. I didn't stop to think what it might be; that was way beyond my ken. How could there be something that bridged the seemingly unbridgeable gap between myself and some sort of God? As an entity, I felt limited. It didn't occur to me that religion had probably sprung up as a result of man's feeling just that way — small and insignificant.

Well, after many hardships I found the bridge. I won't go into the details; my books do that. They're all about my discovery and practice of kundalini meditation, which is not a belief system but a physical-to-metaphysical transformation process, one that involves the body as much as it does the spirit.

I should like, however, to point out that kundalini reinforced my inherent skepticism. It reengineered my mental essence so I would question everything I saw, heard, or felt. Does it do this to every person it touches? From what I've observed, the answer is no. Some people are so dependent on set beliefs that they keep replacing outmoded or debunked beliefs with new ones in spite of the fact that they have already discarded many sets. Is this harmful? Unless what they believe in concerns violent political or religious opinions, I can't say for sure. I just wonder why kundalini was able to wipe my psyche clean while other kundalini adepts still adhere to beliefs that are, at best, unproven hypotheses.

If kundalini can't consistently expunge unverifiable beliefs, what can? Once again, science comes to the rescue.

New research involving a psychologist from the University of York has revealed for the first time that both belief in God and prejudice towards immigrants can be reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain.

Dr. Keise Izuma collaborated with a team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to carry out an innovative experiment using transcranial magnetic stimulation, a safe way of temporarily shutting down specific regions of the brain.

The researchers targeted the posterior medial frontal cortex, a part of the brain located near the surface and roughly a few inches up from the forehead that is associated with detecting problems and triggering responses that address them. In the study, half of the participants received a low-level "sham" procedure that did not affect their brains, and half received enough energy to lower activity in the target brain area. Next, all of the participants were first asked to think about death, and then were asked questions about their religious beliefs and their feelings about immigrants.

~ Belief in God and prejudice reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain 

What these experiments mean to me, a layman, is that there are regions of the brain that store beliefs and certain types of energy directed at those regions may affect the severity or degree of one's attachment to said beliefs.

Of course, some people are already saying this kind of experiment is dangerous because scientists might also be able to replace one belief system with another. Nevertheless, it appears to be one more indication that beliefs are relative, not absolute.

The Fear Of Death

Why is the fear of death so powerful? We have constant experience of endings — tasks, holidays, feelings, days, all end — so that it should be easy to transfer that experience to understanding of our own death. But it isn’t easy. Death isn’t as simple as falling asleep and never waking up. The idea of falling asleep and never waking up isn’t strong enough or profound enough to encompass the actuality of death.

We experience those instances of falling asleep at night when there is a sudden jerking back into consciousness, a bodily spasm similar to falling that instantaneously wakes us. These moments happen instantly because the fear that underlies them, the bodily fear of death is too profound to bear for any more than a split second. But even these times — times of physical danger when there’s an adrenalin rush of physical recoil — aren’t enough to approximate the real fear of death. The fear of death is so powerful because death ends the universe, not just an individual being. At the moment I die, everything dies, not just me. The mountains, the stars, the people and places I love, all die too. This reality, only approachable in the turiya state of samahdi, is an opportunity.

The Grim Reaper

In the Ajna Chakra three states of being are symbolized: the Itrara Lingam, the inverted triangle symbolizing the shakti, and the aham-khara, the strange reality called, in the Tantras, the "I-maker." It’s the force that in Blake’s prophetic books is called the "Spectre." Its source is outside the body, yet it creates the separateness of the "I" literally in every cell of the body. It’s such a powerful force that it has to be constantly hidden from consciousness under the various sense functions. These sense functions are seen to be more and more illusory, the closer they get to the "aham-khara."

The "ahama-khara" is only experienced directly, face on, at the moment of death. But, the wonderful thing is that the moment of death is here, right now, constantly with us, because the space/time continuum is in fact nothing but the present instant. When this is seen, a strange thing happens. We realize that being a separate "I" is just a state, a mere stage of being, through which everyone and everything passes. This is the real sense in which we are all identical, as we pass through, or open, the aham-khara by means of kundalini.

This is the "one body" spoken of by Blake, Boehme, and Paracelsus, and not any identity in our minds or feelings or bodies. In fact the bigger the differences in our minds and feelings and bodies, the greater the variety, the better. It’s also in the aham-khara that a person — say a person we love, or even one we hate — becomes so much "One Person" that their stature as God or Goddess is seen, or in Tibetan terms, "Prajna," wisdom entering us from above.

Noise

I’ve always been sensitive to noise. It can make life difficult in a crowded, noisy city, and can be challenging when kundalini has woken the deeper energies of the nervous system.

Edvard Munch (Norwegian,1863-1944) "The Scream”

The guy next door to me hopes to be a DJ. He practices his scratching very loudly and repetitively. At the moment he works on a building site, and can only rehearse of an evening, or on those mornings when he can’t face climbing into his overalls. He’s a nice man, but he doesn’t speak much English and I don’t speak much Romanian. When I talk to him about meditation, there’s a lot of hand-shaking, back-slapping and invitations to drink wine, but the noise issue doesn’t get resolved. I was faced with the problem of simultaneously handling Kundalini and dealing with his wall-rattling dub base without going insane, giving way to rage or moving house. It brought the issue of ‘First you do it; then it does you’ into sharp focus.

The mind that goes insane and gives way to rage is, strangely enough, passive. I go insane or give way to rage because my consciousness is the victim of the outside world, my brain is the outside world’s passive object. That’s why noise is so intrusive. My inner passivity is the reason that noise gets inside me, and can bug me, in a way that visual impressions don’t. I can live happily looking at an un-beautiful bedroom wall. Tired magnolia woodchip doesn’t do my head in, but when the wall starts to vibrate to Romanian drum and bass there’s a deep clenching of my nervous system that shuts me off from the world around me. This is the bodily reflex of the animal ‘fight or flight’ mechanism (‘fight’—break his door down with a sledgehammer; ‘flight’—move house.) This reflex, even the ‘fight’ part of it is, again, the result of an inner passivity. I want to sleep, relax, switch off, and I can’t. I flee from the possibility that there might be some inner state of permanent activity powerful enough to dispel or transcend noise intrusion (let alone other more violent intrusions). Yet there is such a state of permanent inner activity, and it’s name is Kundalini, Kundalini that isn’t resisted or which I don’t attempt to channel via the pingala nadi (which is when Kundalini burns and short circuits the nervous system).

When Kundalini overcomes the fight or flight mechanism and becomes a permanent conscious force (even at moments of intrusion) a strange state is arrived at. There is no otherness. The guy next door and his music are part of me. I willed them in the pre-natal state just as I willed my whole life and body, its strengths and weaknesses. Stated as a bare concept this sounds both bland and bizarre. But in fact, Kundalini can overcome otherness, and is powerful enough to overcome otherness, in a quite literal way. I arrived at a state in which I still felt the walls shaking, and the pounding of the music—nothing was shut out—but Kundalini changed the pounding and the shaking into manifestations of a silence that was welling up out of me. I heard the silence that the noise came out of and anchored myself in it. I felt no resentment of my neighbour, in fact, I could somehow feel him through his seemingly mechanical and, to me, inhuman, music.

There is a paradox in this—‘Kundalini does you’, but the ‘does you’ is in fact the awakening of a permanent inner activity.

The Shuragama Sutra speaks about ‘sense organs returning to their source.’ Each sense function (smell, taste, sight, touch, hearing and thought) has its place of origin in the subtle body. In the Tantras, this place of origin is called the tanmatra of a particular sense function. When Kundalini rises through the chakras, the physical sense functions return to their origins, and the tanmatras awake. Sound, as physical hearing, has its origin in the tanmatra of the throat chakra, where the source of space and time are also revealed (space and time bearing a distinct relationship to sound.) This is why sound can be particularly intrusive, because it disrupts one of our higher manifestations—our being in space and time (trapped in a room at one a.m with the walls shaking.) The Sutra says that ‘when one sense organ returns to its source, all six are liberated.’ Also: ‘If one wants to attain Samadhi, hearing is the best way to enter... How excellent is the contemplation of the world’s sound, a pure sound, like the ocean’s roar.’

One other, minor, issue is the effect of Kundalini outside of the body, on ‘the world’ and other people. I think it’s wise not to dwell on this side of things too much as there’s scope for both fantasy and paranoia. However, as regards my neighbour, I clearly needed to act outwardly as well as inwardly. One night, a little after midnight, I knocked on his door. I had to knock loudly because the music coming from inside was deafening, however I didn’t knock with my sledgehammer. My neighbour was performing his DJing to a roomful of his friends, and didn’t like me interrupting him. I felt both angry and scared (they were drunk). I said my piece, and a weird thing happened. I felt kundalini coming out of my words, and out of my whole body, and filling the room. My words were forceful, but not furious! I felt a wonderful relaxation and strength in the simple justice of what I was saying. And I could tell that they heard it too. In fact, they were aware that Kundalini was in the room. What ought to have been a shouting match turned into a dignified and friendly conversation. And they switched the music down!

Death Is Not Physical

In 1999, I was on a Buddhist Vippassana Meditation retreat when I experienced the rising of energy which I now know to be Kundalini. At that time I had neither experience nor knowledge that this energy existed in the body. The form that the energy took was a rising and falling that seemed to start from the base of my spine and rise up through my body to the top of my head and down again. As it rose I found myself being raised high and rocked from side to side. My feet were wrapped around my meditation stool so I knew I wasn’t being physically raised and rocked; the experience was purely energetic.

Turning my attention inwards and merging with the energy I allowed myself to go with what it wanted to do. I cooperated fully with it. There were no thoughts, no fears, just complete absorption in what was happening. I experienced this rising and falling of energy during a number of sitting sessions. It must have been around the sixth session that the energy changed its intensity and I began being lifted higher and rocked more violently. This made me think that maybe there was something that I was expected to "do." All was intuitive on my part because, after trying to speak with one of the teachers about what was going on in the meditation sessions and seeing her confused reaction, I knew that I was on my own. I was determined to see the process through to the end, whatever it might be.

I remember one vibration that made me feel as if I was being lifted very high, making me think, "If that’s what happens, okay." But I didn’t fall. When the next vibration came I suddenly remembered the Buddhist concept of surrender. Did surrender have something to do with this experience? I didn’t know, but I decided to give it a go. At the height of the next vibration I said "I surrender" and immediately the vibration died down. I was relieved and thought that was the end of it all. To my amazement, the energy rose again, now I felt this acute fear. I didn’t know what else to do. I had exhausted every technique I was familiar with and it wasn’t enough; the rising and falling of the energy wasn’t ended by "surrendering."

Since 1999, I have reflected on the fear I experienced during those moments when I realised that surrendering wasn’t enough to end the movement of energy up and down my body. The fear wasn’t all encompassing in that I could have opened my eyes and brought the experience to an end. It was something that I had to feel and experience and, having come as far as I could, I was determined to see it through. Looking back, it seemed vital to feel the fear and stay with the experience. I was fortunate because I didn’t have to "be" with the fear for very long. But for those moments of fear were paralyzing.

It was in that same sitting during the next vibration that I knew exactly what it was I had to do. I don't know where the realization came from. (Did submitting to the fear create the space for eventual clarity?) I don't know. All I knew was that I had to take my feet away from the stool when I surrendered so that I was totally vulnerable. This is why the rising and falling did not end: I was still holding on and what was surrendering was my ego. Again without any fear or thought about what I was doing or the possible consequences, on the next vibration when I was raised to the highest peak with the energy, I took my feet from the stool and said, "I surrender, but only to the Light." Why I said this I have no idea. I don’t remember seeing any light, or having any perceptions. I only wanted to be clear about what I was surrendering into. I didn’t want there to be any ambiguity about the surrender. Immediately, all of the movement of energy ended and for the remainder of the sitting sessions of that retreat, my meditations were once again what I was used to.

I have also pondered on the surrender and what it meant. There is no doubt that there was a sense of "going over" in that surrender, but over where and to what? Something died in me for sure and now many years later I think I understand what happened. I have never had a teacher or guru to ask about this, but in the last couple of years have been Graced to have been introduced to my Guru, who I intuitively recognize to be a great Realizer and Adept.

From reading His spiritual experiences and teachings I now recognise and accept that what happened that day wasn’t a physical death but the psychological death of the ego. This process happens gradually, and now so many years later, I see how the process unfolded and continues to unfold.

It began by my saying yes, by my staying with the process. This is why courage is so important if one is serious about Enlightenment. The process is an ordeal, it always was and it always will be, and it demands absolutely everything. Ultimately, it demands the sacrifice of the ego "I" or the egoic self. This is why when authentic realizers undertake the process with groups of devotees, you can count the number of devotees who are able to realize the process for themselves on the fingers of one hand.

Undergoing the psychological death of the ego is not easy, but once surrender is offered voluntarily, it then becomes inevitable. In my case, after the initial surrender, it was a case of painstakingly unconcealing how the ego had been put together to see that it is something that is constructed in language. Once realized, the ego can be voluntarily transcended. It is important (for mental stability) that it is transcended by seeing it for the made-up construct it is.

When certain things happened to me in life, I constructed Margaret as an ego "I" and I decided who I was and what my life would be in relation to that I. I don't doubt that without having first surrendered in that meditation session that this insight with its overwhelming resonance would not have happened. The ego would never have allowed it to penetrate, but being mortally wounded by surrendering many years ago, the experience was an "ah-yes-I-see-that" moment without any associated drama.

This is why a Kundalini experience in and of itself is not enough. In fact, it’s just the start. The energy must be brought to a certain point if it’s to play a role in the psychological death of the ego "I" — without which Enlightenment is not possible. Ego and Love cannot occupy the same space. Kundalini is a purificatory energy. What it purifies is everything that would might interfere with the death of the ego. In effect, what Kundalini is doing is preparing consciousness for the sacrifice of ego "I" so that a state of Love can emerge.

This is my last post for 2015. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who read my posts during the year and wish you all a pleasant festive holiday season.

Being Overly identified With Our Beliefs

The commonly held definition of “belief” as found in the dictionary is: A firm opinion or conviction; an acceptance of a thing, fact or statement; a person’s religion or religious conviction. Some would argue that their belief is the “absolute truth.”  The question that comes to my mind when a statement like this is professed: If your belief is an absolute truth, then why does it sometimes change? Why does a transformation process like kundalini rising break down, modify, and even eradicate beliefs previously held? 

Over the years, my own beliefs have radically changed and continue to do so. I grew up in a family where religion was neither emphasized nor a concern, however, the culture of the Eastern Canadian farm community did leave an impression on me that continues to this day. My early identity was shaped by the families and neighbors who worked independently but at the same time depended on each other for many tasks that couldn’t be handled alone.

 

During my early working years in the city, through the positive influence of people who were important to me, I began a journey into the Catholic Christian faith tradition, which impacted and changed my life in a substantial way. By my mid-thirties, I was engaged in part-time ministry, as well as full time employment and family life. My identity was being shaped by many formation programs and retreats, as well as a ministry that moved me in a radically different direction from my days on the farm.  Christian meditation and meditation retreats became my means of maintaining a focus on what I thought was important. They were a way to affirm my beliefs in the Catholic faith. It’s not that I never questioned certain beliefs of the Church that made no sense; I often did. These apparent differences were dismissed on the basis that wiser teachers knew far more than I did; some things just had to be accepted by faith

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In my mid to late fifties, Kundalini rising was the next dramatic turn that blew a hole into my many deeply ingrained thought patterns and beliefs. Kundalini leaves few stones unturned. Its energies modified and dismantled many of the images and constructs that had served to define my identity and that gave me a sense of who I was in relation to the world and those around me.  My identity had been substantially modified. Many of the beliefs that motivated me to act in a certain way disappeared. I was left confused and bewildered, but also with a great sense of spaciousness, wonder and freedom. The world as I previous saw it had changed, and I knew there was no way I could ever go back to the way it was before. And I didn't want it to.

                 

In her book “Returning To Essence,” Gina Lake describes beliefs as deeply held patterns of thought that structure our experience. She says that because we believe something, we behave accordingly. Most activities we engage in are based on our beliefs. Those who have different beliefs and values spend their time doing different things. Beliefs form the basis of our identity. They give witness to who we are. But when our beliefs change, our identity changes with them. She writes:

"Our beliefs actually create the situation they describe. That's why it is said that we create our own realty: Our beliefs determine our reactions to life and our choices and therefore our experience, and our experience reinforces our beliefs. Once you realize that, you can choose whether to listen to this version of you and of your life, or not."

All of this, if you think about it carefully, is tied to ego. Our ego is defined by the identities and roles that we assume, how we see ourselves in the exterior world. So our beliefs, when acted out in the stage of life, maintain this ego definition.

When I examine the patterns of change in beliefs in my own life, I must conclude that beliefs in themselves, like thoughts, are not the problem. The problem comes when we become too attached to them. When we become too attached to our beliefs, they may crystallize to form something that is rigid and inflexible. When we become too attached, there is a danger that they become our “absolute truth.”  This “absolute truth” then begins to prepare its defense to justify itself. There is a danger of becoming like the Scribe or the Pharisee we read about in the Gospels, a person who allows ego beliefs to become God; and then look, with judgement, at anyone who does not share that same belief. Are we not seeing this play out in the world today?

Our beliefs need to be examined often and treated more lightly. Those that no longer serve a useful purpose, that no longer lead to a further evolution of consciousness, must be let go, and replaced with something else. Where possible, kundalini would be glad to do this for us.

In meditation, we practice observing our thoughts, seeing them come, seeing them change, seeing them go. They are a phenomenon of the mind, empty of any permanence. We discover that we are not our thoughts. Our inner witness or observer gives testimony to this.
  

In the same manner, we must practice observing our beliefs. They come, they change, they go. They also are a phenomenon of the mind, empty of permanence. In this manner, our inner witness can become an instrument of compassion, not of judgement, with those who do not share our particular beliefs.