Kundalini Yoga
The
word Kundalini means the “coiled-up one,” and it refers to the spiritual
energy which is regarded as coiled up on itself in most of us most of the time,
at a seat at the bottom of the body, actually, right at the anus.
The goal of this yoga is to employ breath control and meditation to
uncoil that Kundalini so that it comes up a channel in the spine known as
Sushamna. And as it does, it passes through the different
organic levels of psychological commitment: the genitals, which are the center
of sex; the navel, which is aggression; and
the heart, which is the opening of
its capacity for compassion; the throat, which is of ascetic austerity; the
mind, which is of the beholding of the
image of God. The
throat is the verbal center, and is related to the let side of the brain, just
as the image center is associated with the right side of the brain.
So
there must be something peculiar in you, a leading spark, some incentive, that
forces you on through the
water and toward the next center. And that is the Kundalini,
something absolutely unrecognizable, which can show, say, as fear, as a
neurosis, or apparently
also as vivid interest; but it must be something which is superior to your
will.
Otherwise you don't go through it. You will
turn back when you meet the
first obstacle; as soon as you see the
leviathan you will run away. But if
that living spark, that urge, that need, gets you by the neck, then you cannot
turn back; you have to face the music.
So
there must be something peculiar in you, a leading
spark, some incentive, that
forces you on through the
water and toward the next center. And that is the Kundalini,
something absolutely unrecognizable, which can show, say, as fear, as a
neurosis, or apparently
also as vivid interest; but it must be something which is superior to your
will.
Otherwise you don't go through it. You will
turn back when you meet the
first obstacle; as soon as you see the leviathan you will run away. But if
that living spark, that urge, that need, gets you by the neck, then you cannot
turn back; you have to face the music.
Now, according to tantric teaching, there is an urge to
produce a personality, something that is centered, and divided from other
beings, and that would be the klésa of discrimination.
It is what one would describe in Western philosophical terms as an urge or
instinct of individuation.
Cont’d … The instinct of
individuation is found everywhere in
life, for there is no life on earth that is not individual.
An innate urge of life is to produce an individual as
complete as possible.
So the entelechia, the urge of
realization, naturally
pushes man to be himself. Given a chance to be himself, he
would most certainly grow into his own form, if there were not obstacles and
inhibitions of many descriptions that hinder him from becoming what he is really
meant to be. So the klésa that contains the germ of
personality can be called just as well the klésa of
individuation,
because what we call personality is an aspect of
individuation.
Even if you don’t become a complete realization of yourself, you become
at least a person; you have a certain
conscious form. Of
course, it is not a totality; it is only a part, perhaps, and your true
individuality is still behind the screen – yet what is manifested on the surface
is surely a unit.
As most people, no matter how much they think of themselves,
are egos, yet at the same time they are individuals, almost as if they were
individuated. For they are in a way individuated from the
very beginning of their lives, yet they are not conscious of it.
Individuation only takes place when you are
conscious of it, but
individuality is always there from the beginning of your existence.
Hatred is the thing that divides, the force which
discriminates. It is so when two people fall in love; they
are at first almost identical. There is a great deal of
participation mystique, so they need hatred in order to separate themselves.
After a while the whole thing turns into a wild hatred; they get
resistances against one another in order to force each other off – otherwise
they remain in a common unconsciousness which they simply cannot stand.
(fear) Phobos separates more than hatred, because fear causes one to run away, to remove oneself from the place of danger.
There has been, and is still, more
participation mystique
in
Our idea of heredity would be similar to the idea of
samskara, as well as our hypothesis of the
collective unconscious.
For the mind in a child is by no means tabula rasa.
The unconscious mind is full of a rich world of
archetypal images.
The archetypes are conditions, laws or categories of creative fantasy,
and therefore the psychological equivalent of samskara.
But mind you, in the Eastern mind the doctrine of samskara is so
different from that definition that perhaps a Hindu would object to my attempt
at comparison. But the archetypal images are really the
nearest thing we can see.
(symbols) For these
symbols have a terribly clinging tendency. They catch the unconscious
somehow and cling to us. But they are a foreign body in our system –
corpus alienum
– and they inhibit the natural growth and development of our own
psychology.
It is almost like a secondary growth or a poison. Therefore one has to
make almost heroic attempts to master these things, to do something against
those symbols in order to deprive them of their influence.
Now, here we have to speak of Kundalini and what she is, or
how she can be awakened. You remember that Professor
Hauer said that some instigation from above arouses Kundalini, and he also said
one must have a purified buddhi.(def – TpoKY20) or a purified spirit, in
order to arouse her. So the progress into the second cakra is
possible only if you have aroused the serpent, and the serpent can only be
aroused by the right attitude. Expressed in psychological
terms, that would mean that you can approach the
unconscious in only one way,
namely, by a purified mind, by a right attitude, and by the grace of heaven,
which is the Kundalini. Something in you, an urge in you,
must lead you to it.
If that does not exist, then it is only artificial.
So there must be something peculiar in you, a leading
spark, some
incentive, that forces you on through the water and toward the next center.
And that is the Kundalini, something absolutely unrecognizable, which can
show, say, as fear, as a neurosis, or apparently also as vivid interest; but it
must be something which is superior to your
will. Otherwise
you don’t go through it. You will turn back when you meet the
first obstacle; as soon as you see the leviathan you will run away.
But if that living
spark, that urge, that need, gets you by the neck,
then you cannot turn back; you have to face the music.
You see, the Kundalini in psychological terms is that which
makes you go on the greatest adventures. I say, “Oh, damn,
why did I ever try such a thing? But if I turn back, then the
whole adventure goes out of my life, and my life is nothing any longer; it has
lost its flavor. It is this quest that makes life livable,
and this is Kundalini; this is the divine urge. For instance,
when a knight in the Middle Ages did marvelous works, like the great labors of
Hercules, when he fought dragons and liberated virgins, it was all for his Lady
– she was Kundalini.
And when
Leo and Holly go to
Mrs Crowley: The anima?
Dr. Jung: Yes, the anima is the Kundalini. That is the very reason why I hold that this second center, despite the Hindu interpretation of the crescent being male, is intensely female, for the water is the womb of rebirth, the baptismal fount. The moon is of course a female symbol; and, moreover, I have a Tibetan picture at home in which Siva is depicted in the female form, dancing on the corpses in the burial ground.
For when you are just one with a thing you are completely
identical – you cannot compare it, you cannot discriminate, you cannot recognize
it. You must always have a point outside if you want to
understand. So people who have problematic natures with many
conflicts are the people who can produce the greatest understanding, because
from their own problematical natures they are enabled to see other sides and to
judge by comparison. We could not possibly judge this world
if we had not also a standpoint outside, and that is given by the symbolism of
religious experiences.
Now, if the yogin or the Western person succeeds in awakening
Kundalini, what starts is not in any way a personal development …
What starts
are the impersonal happenings with which you should not identify.
If you do, you will soon feel obnoxious consequences – you will get an
inflation, you will get all wrong. That is one of the great
difficulties in experiencing the
unconscious – that one identifies with it and
becomes a fool. You must not identify with the
unconscious;
you must keep outside, detached, and observe objectively what happens.
But you then see that all the events that happen in the impersonal,
nonhuman order of things have the very disagreeable quality that they cling to
us, or we cling to them. It is as if the Kundalini in its
movement upward were pulling us up with it, as if we were part of that movement,
particularly in the beginning.
It is true that we are a part, because we are then
that which contains the gods; they are germs in us, germs in the
muladhara, and
when they begin to move they have the effect of an earthquake which naturally
shakes us, and even shakes our houses down. When that
upheaval comes, we are carried with it, and naturally we might think we were
moving upward. But it makes, of course, a tremendous
difference whether one flies, or whether it is a wave or a great wind that lifts
one. For to fly is one’s own activity, and one can safely
come down again, but when one is carried upward, it is not under one’s control,
and one will be put down after a while in a most disagreeable way – then it
means a catastrophe. So, you see, it is wise not to identify
with these experiences but to handle them as if they were outside the human
realm. That is the safest thing to do – and really absolutely
necessary. Otherwise you get an
inflation, and
inflation is
just a minor form of lunacy, a mitigated term for it. And if
you get so absolutely inflated that you burst, it is
schizophrenia.
The real secrets are secrets because nobody understands them.
One cannot even talk about them, and of such a kind are the experiences
of the Kundalini yoga. That tendency to keep things secret is
merely a natural consequence when the experience is of such a peculiar kind that
you had better not talk about it, for you expose yourself to the greatest
misunderstanding and misinterpretation.
(born again) The
Hindus have an extremely interesting theory about that. I am
not strong on
metaphysics, but I must admit that in
metaphysics there is a great
deal of psychology. You see, it is utterly important that one
should be in this world, that one really fulfills one’s entelechia, the
germ of life which one is. Otherwise you can never start
Kundalini; you can never detach. You simply are thrown back,
and nothing has happened; it is an absolutely valueless experience.
You must believe in this world, make roots, do the best you can, even if
you have to believe in the most absurd things – to believe, for instance, that
this world is very definite, that it matters absolutely whether such-and-such a
treaty is made or not. It may be completely futile, but you
have to believe in it, have to make it almost a religious conviction, merely for
the purpose of putting your signature under the treaty, so that trace is left of
you. For you should leave some trace in this world which
notifies that you have been here, that something has happened.
If nothing happens of this kind you have not realized yourself; the germ
of life has fallen, say, into a thick layer of air that kept it suspended.
It never touched the ground, and so never could produce the plant.
But if you touch the reality in which you live, and stay for several
decades if you leave your trace, then the impersonal process can begin.
You see, the shoot must come out of the ground, nothing will come out of
it; no linga or Kundalini will be there, because you are still staying in
the infinity that was before.
Now if, as I say, you succeed in completing your
entelechia, that shoot will come up from the ground; namely, that
possibility of a detachment from this world – from the world of
Maya, as the
Hindu would say – which is a sort of depersonalization. For
in Muladhara we are just identical. We are entangled in the
roots, and we ourselves are the roots. We make roots, we
cause roots to be, we are rooted in the soil, and there is no getting away for
us, because we must be there as long as we live. That idea,
that we can sublimate ourselves and become entirely spiritual and no hair left
is an inflation.
You know, in
The
cakra symbolism has the same meaning that is expressed in our metaphors of the
night
sea-journey, or climbing a sacred mountain, or initiation.
It is really a continuous development . It is not
leaping up and down, for what you have arrived at is never lost.
Say you have been in
muladhara and then you reach the water center, and afterward you return
apparently. But you do not return; it is an illusion that you
return – you have left something of yourself in the
unconscious.
Nobody touches the
unconscious without leaving something of himself there.
You may forget or
repress
it, but then you are no longer
whole.
When
you have learned that two times two makes four, it will be so in all eternity –
it will never be five. Only those people return who thought
they touched it but were only full of illusions about it. If
you have really experienced it, you cannot lose this experience.
It is as if so much of your substance had remained, so much of your blood
and weight. You can return to the previous condition,
forgetting that you have lost a leg, but your leg has been bitten off by the
leviathan. Many people who got into the water say, “Never
shall I go there again!” But they left something, something
has stayed there. And if you get through the water and into
the fire of passion, you never can really turn back, because you cannot lose the
connection with your passion that you have gained in
manipura.
As
I told you in (the West’s) actual historical psychological development we have
about reached anahata and
from there we can experience
muladhara, and all the
subsequent centers of the past, by knowledge of records, and tradition, and also
through our unconscious.
Suppose
somebody reached the ajna
center, the state of complete
consciousness,
not only self-consciousness. That would be an exceedingly
extended consciousness which includes everything –
energy itself – a consciousness which knows not only “That is Thou” but more
than that –
every tree, every stone, every breath of air, every rat’s tail – all
that is yourself; there is nothing that is not yourself. In
such an extended consciousness all the cakras would be simultaneously
experienced, because it is the highest state of consciousness, and it would not
be the highest if it did not include all the former experiences.
(sidebar) We are confronted with a paradox: for us consciousness is located high up, in the ajna cakra, so to speak, and yet muladhara, our reality, lies in the lowest cakra. TPoKY 60
(?) So, too, the cakras are symbols.
They symbolize highly complex psychic facts which at the present moment
we could not possibly express except in images. The cakras
are therefore of great value to us because they represent a real effort to give
a symbolic theory of the psyche.
Con’td … The
psyche is something so highly complicated, so
vast in extent, and so rich in elements unknown to us, and its aspects overlap
and interweave with one another in such an amazing degree, that we always turn
to symbols in order to try to represent what we know about it.
Any theory about it would be premature because it would become entangled
in particularities and would lose sight of the
totality we set out to envisage.
The goal of this yoga is to make the mind stand still. Why
should you want to do that? We’re coming to a basic idea in
this perennial philosophy – namely, that everything is experienced through the
mind. This is maya. The mind is in an
active state. The image is given of a pond rippled by a wind.
The rippling pond with its waves reflects images that are broken.
They come and go, come and go, come and go. In the
Book of Genesis, the wind, the breath, the spirit of God blew over the waters.
That’s the creation of the world. You start this
excitement going. Now comes the point.
What we do is identify ourselves with one of those broken images, one of
those broken reflections on the surface of the pond. Here I
come: There I go. That links us to the temporal flow, time
and space – maya. Make the pond stand still, one image.
What was broken and reflected is now seen in its still perfection, and
that’s your true being. But that’s everybody else’s true
being also. This is the goal of yoga, to find that reality of
consciousness which is of you and of everybody else. TMTT 133
You
can’t bring kundalini up the center until you have recognized that these are
simply two aspects of the one
consciousness. The light of the
moon is the reflection of the sun.
The light of your body, the consciousness of your body, is immortal, eternal
consciousness in you.
Consciousness first, then you.
You represent the specification of the consciousness in time and place.
Through the specifications of your personal life you are to abstract the
immortal. To experience your eternity through the
vicissitudes of your mortality, that’s the total goal. TMTT
142
The goal of the yoga is to wake that coiled-up energy and bring it up the spine.
It’s pictured as a serpent, a little female serpent, because, again, the
energy is female. It’s a little female serpent called the
kundalini, an coiled-up female serpent, pictured about as thick as the hair of a
boar, white, and coiled three and a half times around a symbolic lingam,
a symbolic male organ which is there as the base of the body also.
This is all “subtle” substance. You won’t find it on
the operating table. TMTT 134
As that serpent power enters the field of those sequential centers, the whole
psychology of the individual is transformed. TMTT 134
(ACCOMPANYING PICTURE TMTT 143)
From 2000 B.C. we have an Indian stamp seal showing a figure in yoga posture.
There are two
ida and pingala serpents.
So we have four thousand years of interior exploration in
(KUNDALINI – PICTURE ON TMTT 227!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Navaho
Pollen Path