The Serpent Power for Dummies

Kundalini (the Serpent Power) for Dummies

Note: I got up this morning. Spent a few hours meditating and worked the kundalini in my own way from my root chakra into my crown chakra. The results were good. And so I sat down the rest of the day and wrote this thirty-three page essay in order to share my experience.

This is intended as a humorous and brief introduction to spiritual anthropology rather than a “serious” study of kunalini. (That is, I am not selling anything--there is no marketing system, expensive seminars, or certification program attached to this essay).

The Voice of Shiva

One day a woman will love me

As the sky loves the sun, moon, and the stars

Perfectly one yet perfectly free

A love that is completely giving

Without diminishing her beauty

She shall love me as the sea

Loves the waves, the winds, the tides,

And the moon that with her heart confides

Her beauty as deep, as wild, and as free

She shall love me

As the avatar of the goddess Kundalini

With divine fire in her eyes

At her touch the world will cease to be

For in her love is the fulfillment

Of every desire and dream

Kundalini Yoga (the Serpent Power) for Dummies

Introduction

Put briefly, do not try this at home. Or, not without many years of training your mind, concentration, emotional body or soul, and your physical body in a variety of ways. Some say that kundalini yoga is not suitable for Westerners. But then again neither is nuclear power, genetic engineering, wars, religion, capitalism, communism, socialism, or any number of other things which Westerners seem more than adept at abusing and misusing in endless way.

If you train properly, you are free to use any method modifying it according to your own needs.

Kundalini is just one of a set of basic practices which relate to mastering the physical body, its health, and which leads in the direction of attaining physical immortality.

Its limitation is that it only provides mastery of the life force within the body. Numerous other systems also offer similar results but with different methods and with a different emphasis. It also is not directly related to healing and in no way by itself leads to self-mastery.

It is similar to knowing how to take a part, clean, and then put together again a 1956 Ford engine. If you need to break down an engine, clean, and then reassemble such an engine, then it is good to already have first hand experience.

This ability may not help you with other makes and models of cars, trucks, trains, airplane, or spaceship engines. But it gives you a nice reference point. It informs you of whether or not you wish to pursue a career in working, for example, as a mechanical engineer who designs energy systems.

The advantages of working with kundalini in some form, however, are numerous. Ignoring the question of whether kundalini enhances psychic powers—a very dubious and questionable goal for this practice anyway—kundalini does offer a wonderful way to clear the mind, attain inner peace, and a feeling of being profoundly grounded in the body. And it serves as an enlightening reference point for those seeking to gain insight into male-female gender issues.

For some individuals who already possess great powers of concentration and imagination, working with kundalini will be essential if they are ever to attain balance in their psyche. The overdevelopment of the third eye in the forehead through excessive concentration can only be balanced by a corresponding development of the root chakra or the chakra that grounds the psyche in the physical world. More on the correlation of the various chakras later.

Also, if you can unite within your own body the perfection of feminine power as embodied in the goddess kundalini with the perfection of masculine power as embodied in the crown chakra—under the guise and symbolism and presence of the god Shiva—then you have attained through personal experience a direct perception into the essence of the masculine and feminine mysteries. Again, such mysteries are endless but this is one nice approach to gaining insight into them.

Eventually over the course of evolution everyone will learn to acquire these insights, abilities, and inner union of gender opposites since in a future civilization these things will be treated as simply child’s play, something every child will have already mastered before entering puberty.

But in our dark times with the obsession of our civilization solely on the external world and the narrow-minded and child like oriental traditions which have no global awareness and assume no responsibility for the unfolding of human history, these ABC’s of body awareness remain mostly cloaked in ignorance and piecemeal methodologies. Experiments with kundalini-gone-bad serve as warnings to the untrained to stay away from what can easily lead to disaster.

Beginning Practice

The Root Chakra

Note: the last few days I have been developing my own version of yoga. But that is another essay.

After preliminary practices (as in five, ten, twenty, or thirty years of mental, astral, and physical training), you concentrate on the perineum which is at the bottom of the torso. There develops an intense feeling of dense power at this location.

You lead that power toward the tip of the spine going into it and then continuing up the spine.

There are actually four petals associated with the first chakra, the root, or muladhara chakra. These petals as in petals of a flower blossom (since that is what the energy configuration resembles) all relate to being grounded in the physical world. The four petals relate to mastery of body and awareness as represented in

1. the martial arts: an intense awareness of one’s physical environment. Obviously the study of self-defense requires mastery of the body, movement, and physical energy in motion in one’s immediate environment.

Various traditions, therefore, prefer to pursue self-mastery through martial art practices which often imitate the nature, instincts, perceptions, and moves of animals in attack and flight situations.

2. Another petal relates to simply being grounded—being heavy or feeling solid like a rock. Thus the inability to anyone to lift even by an inch an Aikido master off the ground or to push over a Tai Chi Chuan master. These individuals are solid and grounded in a physical sense.

3. A third petal relates to evocation—this is the power of pure concentration to gather and to condense energy outside of the body. A highly gifted medium can condense a spirit so that it physically appears in one’s immediate environment. Similarly, a skilled magician can condense a higher spirit so it manifests in some form. In other words, the root chakra possesses a natural interest in condensing, that is, making spiritual or astral beings to manifest so they are solid and substantial in our world.

4. The fourth petal relates to simply being aware of the physical body from inside. There are many practices which lead to such awareness. Simple yoga or any variety of methods which focus consciousness on the physical body increase awareness of the nervous system, muscles, blood flow, organs, and vital energy in the body.

Awakening the kundalini relates in particular to point 2. Being grounded and to point 4. Being aware of the inside of the body and its functioning.

Kundalinin does not relate to being aware of the immediate environment since the individual is basically totally ignoring the external world during this practice. And it ignores point 3. There is no interest in condensing or materializing or making real anything other than the manifesting of the Shiva/Crown chakra awareness at the top of the head.

It goes without saying that most Westerners do not have any awareness of the inside of the body or to being solid and grounded like a rock in which they learn to feel dense and heavy. Consequently, even a brief, fleeting contact with kundalini can lead to a great variety of psychological symptoms and side effects.

For example, one or both partners in a relationship may feel obsessed or enchanted with the other partner when actually all that has happened is that the polar gender attraction briefly produces the immense, overpowering and insatiable hunger typical of kundalini when it is not being well-directed.

Typical for practitioners of kundalini, if you concentrate on the perineum, the awakening power takes the form of a serpent or a python. In other words, the resulting sensation is of a very dense, hypnotic/mesmeric earthlike energy. But it resembles a snake uncoiling—that is, the sensation, feeling, imagery, and awareness of it within the body feels exactly as if a huge serpent or python is now moving up your spine.

It is cold, very physical, and easily tends to consume consciousness—though the spine is small, the serpent feels like its width is the size of the entire body or even much larger than a human being or even filling the entire room. In other words, the sensations of the serpent power uncoiling can easily overwhelm consciousness so that you feel that this huge, uncoiling serpent is all that exists.

Ignore these fantastic and inflated images and sensations. It is just a very dense power that is moving upward in your body through the spine with the intent of joining with the crown chakra at the top of the head.

For some, there is also a devouring quality about the serpent uncoiling in the body. As I mentioned, it embodies an insatiable and blind hunger. This instinct is prehistoric, a monster of the Id as Freud might describe it. Ignore all these charming and quaint descriptions.

The DNA molecule itself with its desire to expand and spread throughout the universe is simply kundalini on a molecular level. Kundalini is more than molecular. It is a cosmic hunger—the entire universe desires to unite with its opposite to attain cosmic oneness, supreme bliss, and enlightenment. Evolution is not always friendly to those who are timid, shy, and who lag behind. There is a momentum built into nature that seeks to increase and expand awareness. This momentum is not just personal, collective, or global. It is cosmic.

As this kundalini energy enters different parts of the body it pierces the various chakras or psychic nervous centers which may produce a variety of wild and strange effects. Among these are the kinds of obsessions or uncontrolled psychic powers which are associated with those chakras or parts of the body.

Typical of over-stimulation of the Malahadra chakra, the place where we start, is a vast increase in vitality. But this vitality is not necessarily nurturing or granting health. It may be profoundly imbalanced. For example, you feel uneasy, full of nervous energy, pent up, overcharged and like you need to discharge the excess energy inside of yourself through some form of physical activity.

You may feel like climbing a mountain, going dancing all night, or like Swami Rama—simply playing tennis all day long wearing out student after student who plays across the court from you.

Consequently, one disadvantage of dedicating your life to yoga and mastery of body and vitality is that later in life you will be unable to transmit your shaktipat or the essence of your tradition to any students.

It may be wise, then, not to ignore all those seemingly mundane and secular responsibilities toward society, history, global peace, and all those other ethical issues relating to the well-being of the society in which you dwell.

The affairs of the outer physical world may seem like a distraction to the soon to attain master-hood-ness of the adept yogi, but the physical world is actually a great place to study for its own sake. Here you can learn to connect to others and engage in such activities as compassion and love. Love may seem like a strange and unnatural concept in many traditions and religions, yet it is very useful for communicating who you are to others. Without love and empathy, the transmission of one’s inner essence to others may result in others literally bouncing off of the walls which also was the result of one of Swami Rama’s shaktipat transmissions.

Now then, as long as the movement of the kundalini serpent power remains centered within and moving up the spine you shouldn’t have any trouble. The well trained student will already be acquainted with each chakra internally and know through direct observation and perception the range of vital, psychic, and emotional experiences the chakras contain.

[The chakras actually have little or no mental component encoded into them. That is, they are mostly etheric and astral without an element of mental vibration. In other words, you get to define, shape, and transform the energy within the body according to your own ideals, objectives, and methods. The body is as mysterious as the universe and no one tradition will ever be able to access the body’s range of mysteries and powers.]

Now then, let me pause a moment rather than simply ascending with the kundalini upward through the spine. What happens if I let the kundalini vibrate briefly in the perineum?

As I do this, I feel that I have become a coiled serpent about thirty feet high. And that I am gradually uncoiling. There is great power present.

At the same time, I feel as the serpent power I am able to enter this body of a human being as a tiny replica of myself but without a diminishing of my power. In this case, my physical body feels like it has turned into steel—it is dense, heavy, and solid. But it is not metallic. It is a biological version of metal—a serpent with power over matter itself. That is what I feel.

There are other things going on also. There is a sense of the primal or primordial instinctual hunger of every animal on earth that exists or ever has existed. And a few other things as well. But I have already processed most of that sort of thing. Being and feeling the instinctual and perception awareness of a T-Rex, a pterodactyl, a crocodile, a shark, a hawk, a snake, a lion, a wolf, a whale, a humming bird, a tree, a flower, a cloud, a sea, a mountain, a volcano, etc--that is all just basic shamanism 101. Who hasn’t worked at that sort of thing?

Anyone pursuing a spiritual path might consider exploring the animal kingdom through active imagination. Otherwise you end up with doctrines that say “Your body is the temple of God;” but then in practice they end up treating the body not as a sacred temple but as something they train in sports when they are young; and then they only exercise and take care of themselves when their doctor insists they do a little health maintenance to improve the stats in their blood analysis. Quote Forest Gump: Stupid is as stupid does.

The Second Chakra

Contentment is the greatest wealth there is.

--Swami Rama

As the kundalini rises up the spine, you enter different the areas of the body. The next area is associated with the sexual center (you can look up all these cute oriental names for yourself). Now then, should the kundalini be in some way blocked or hindered in its free movement, it may linger here. It may pour out its insatiable hunger into an area of human experience that can inherently not fully accommodate these drives and powers.

Typical of over-stimulation of kundalini in the sexual center is an obsession with sexuality and sensual, erotic sensations. This is not all negative. There is a heightened increase in awareness of the senses—of sensuality and pleasure.

For example, without taking drugs, the individual can immerse his entire consciousness in one sensation such as a touch, a kiss, a caress, a smell, a taste, a sound, etc. Perception becomes acute, intense, and reaches toward the heightened levels of perception different animals possess

The real danger here is that this emphasis on sensory perception and the desire for gratification occur without any feeling being present. Ravishing, overpowering, totally captivating, and absolutely gratifying sexuality but without affection? How far will that get you? It will make you jaded, numb, or turn you into an emotional vampire in no time.

And as with any obsession, the first experience imprints upon the nervous system that heightened pleasure, but any subsequent experience often has less intensity and significance. Consequently, the obsessed individual attempts to repeat the experience over and over longing to appease the new, uncontrolled hunger but to no avail.

A similar problem occurs when the individual becomes possessed by kundalini. This is more than obsession. The kundalini—the blind, primordial, and insatiable hunger--actually takes over the individual’s consciousness. In doing so, it gains full access to the person’s memories, mind, thinking processes, and all of his or her skills.

The person, in effect, is gone and the kundalini acts like the individual but with its immense mesmeric concentration which is now intent only on feeding itself. It exists, you recall, to attain oneness with the crown chakra—with Shiva, with transcendental enlightenment.

But it has been dumped, like a mighty queen who exists to rule a kingdom, out among thieves and paupers who have no respect for royalty. They seek to steal from her and abuse her divine vision and commission. Consequently, she turns upon all of them requiring their sacrifice so that she can regain the energy she needs to return to the spine and to continue her ascend.

Human being—meet sacred archetype. It is not defined by or limited by human morality or personal needs and identity. It exists to consummate a divine union. Fail to assist her in her sacred quest and she turns on you to devour you and whoever is around you. Like the Ark of the covenant, you never want to touch it with your bare hands. It is sacred. It will annihilate you with its mysterious powers.

Kundalini as embodied and mastered by some advanced but non-human souls on earth enables an individual to be totally self-motivated from within. There is tremendous energy available to the conscious self to pursue whatever goals one wishes to achieve. There is freedom from anxiety and any desire for social recognition or self-validation.

But feeling fully alive? Forget it. Kundalini may lead to a continuous state of bliss—that look of someone drunk-on-bliss you see in the faces of many Swamis and Sufis. But being fully alive includes being aware of the universe around you—its beauty and harmony. Being drunk on bliss and that “high” of feeling like you are always levitating will not get you there.

If you turn your self into a flower, you may get the bliss and sense of beauty and wonder that is a flower. But you do not expand your awareness much father than that. Think of kundalini as Scottie in the engine room. Captain Kirk can call down and say, “Scottie, I need more power.” Kundalini is that power in one form. But you still need a captain in the captain’s chair if you wish to witness the beauty of the universe.

Also, some famous Swamis, e.g., Swami Muktananda—see his autobiography--report how the serpent power, also called the goddess kundalini, appeared to them first a beautiful woman who wished to make love to them. But upon embracing her, she turned into a hideous serpent intent on injecting them with her venom and devouring them.

This is all typical, par for the course, kind of phenomena that occurs in normal human experience even without the presence of kundalini. The kundalini merely enhances these ordinary human experiences with sex, love, and obsession, dominance and submission, and so forth.

You do not need to do kundalini yoga or enter some mystical realm such as that of the mermaid queens or the sphere of Venus with its spirits of love in order to encounter these things. A woman who enchants you and seemingly steals your soul and will from you leaving your ego consciousness destroyed and annihilated is easily found right here on earth.

Why you can get the same negative experiences just from dating. Experience with these things in ordinary life does, however, help you better understand their effects when amplified through the divine power of kundalini hidden within human beings.

Thus, if you are after enchantment, rapture, bliss, ecstasy, delirious pleasure, or even exquisite pain leading to catharsis, transformation, and transcendence, etc. try picking someone up in a bar (or perhaps an on-line dating service)—the results are so much easier to attain and you can escape the side effects of destroying your nervous system for the rest of this incarnation; simply leave the woman or man behind when you walk out the door in the morning.

There are a number of other powers or experiences that are associated with the second chakra. One is pure happiness—a continuous welling up from within of the feeling and vitality of being happy. Your body feels saturated with contentment and pleasure and these feelings overflow from you to others.

The mermaid type women personalities I describe are often great masters of this form of energy in the second chakra. But they have to hide their existence from human beings lest others try to dominate, possess, or become emotional vampires around them.

Also relaxation is associated with the second chakra, in particular, through fantasy. Need to unwind? Grab a book and read or watch a great movie.

Your consciousness is involved in an imaginary world and the world around you is temporarily suspended. Relax, close your eyes, take a deep breath. Exhale. Feel ……. (Fill in the blank.)

Get it? All the behavioral routines you are engaged in and all your responsibilities are temporarily put on hold and you are focused within—toward the imagery of the astral plane which is like a dream that you have created.

My uncles were obsessed with racing cars. For them, the addiction gave a greater high than the inspiration provided by any religion. Five thousand years of riding horses and suddenly in one generation there are cars. It was a monumental and world historic change they were rehearsing and celebrating through the ritual of racing cars.

During my generation we witnessed the birth of computer games. What movie, play, dance, musical, or opera could compete with you yourself leading a band of warriors and magicians into a dark dungeon to gain unknown treasures and slay dragons or whatever? And worse yet, you can play these games with other people around the world as members of your team through on-line games.

In sitting down at eight PM and playing non stop until dawn the energy of the second chakra in the spine overflows into the body. Like an electric current, the nervous system is hypnotized by the presence of kundalini. Consciousness is drawn into fantasy and there is a withdrawal from the world granting a temporary detachment for life.

Unfortunately, the games and symbols and images are not always life giving. When misdirected, kundalini, blind and insatiable, consumes the individual’s life and may leave nothing of value behind.

So here I am in the spine guiding the kundalini through this second chakra area. Shall I pause again and allow the presence of kundalini in the spine to vibrate through this part of my body? Give me a moment.

There are many petals in the second chakra. But what I am getting right now is the yogi’s feeling of being intoxicated with bliss. There is no desire to move or to do anything at all. If I were a yogi in a cave who felt this way I would say, “Why would I ever want to leave this cave? I have everything I crave. Every desire is satisfied beyond what I could have wished for or imagined.”

And so we get the legend of the arhat who in himself has attained freedom from suffering. But, having not raised the kundalini to the heart chakra, he could care less about the suffering of others. History and social interaction in the third chakra have no meaning for him. He is self-contained.

What is my response to this feeling of self-contained bliss that totally saturates the nervous system and suspends all interest in the outer world? My first thought is that anyone who has this bliss had better hide it so no one else can sense it. Because its very presence among other human beings awakens the insatiable hunger of kundalini in them. They will want to seize and devour whoever can feel this satisfied in order to gain a small taste of pleasure that is this exquisite.

And my second thought? My second thought is that in the crown chakra—the goal of the journey—all chakras become one. This bliss is meant to always accompany an individual on his journeys.

Like love, one should never be without it. Like a lover who is your friend and companion, though she be on the other side of the world, she is still within you. The love is an unending stream, regardless of whatever realms or worlds each of us may be passing through.

But for the Western world, the body itself is a dark dungeon. Who has the keys? And who can take us down into it and then free us from its terrors and its anguish after two thousand years of repression and self-hatred in the name of religion or just simply ignorance. Obviously, it will take a little work to attain to inner bliss which heals and renews both body and soul.

Third Chakra

The greatest wealth in all the world is a woman who loves a man with all of her heart.

--a lunar spirit

Now then, as we continue our journey up the spine, the kundalini may spill over into the third chakra relating to the solar plexus. Hopefully, an individual has had a vast range of experiences in working with other human beings in ways that are fair, productive, loving, and creative.

But again, kundalini embodies primordial instinct. In the first or root chakra is the survival instinct in its most basic level. To survive you have to keep alive. Kundalini on that level heightens your sense of warning about danger. It clears every other issue and concern off the table because it focuses solely on doing what is necessary to survive.

This survival or primordial instinct takes a different turn in the third chakra. It turns into the desire to dominate others. In a civilizated society, we learn how to be assertive and communicate with others in a straight forward manner, without threats, bullying, or extortion.

But kundalini is on a divine mission. Misdirected from the spine into the third lotus blossom or chakra, it examines the environment and seeks to gather all the energy it needs to continue its journey.

This chakra, among other things, enables an individual to have direct contact with others. It is body to body in a sense, gut to gut, and in your face kind of thing.

As a psychic power the kundalini enables an individual to extend his aura out into and through others. It takes control of others’ emotions. It is like a boa constrictor in sensing the pulse of life in others and how to squeeze and control them so they yield their will to the kundalini driven individual.

Your alpha males, when they are negative, are typical of this form of kundalini. They take control of others and use them for their own ends. But the kundalini is more mesmeric than this. Like a highly skilled charismatic speaker, preacher, seminar leader, or cult figure, it hypnotizes others with its charm and persuasion.

It binds them to its will. It is inside of these other people with its aura and energy. When it speaks, others take those thoughts as their own.

This mesmeric “I take control of you” kind of thing is not very common in Western societies. Occasionally it shows up but you would be hard pressed to ever meet someone who sits down with you, has a conversation, and suddenly you find yourself under the power of their will.

Then again, if it is done effectively, you do not even realize you have been mesmerized until the spell is broken. Do those who run ponzi schemes such as Madoff possess mesmeric abilities? How about some famous TV talk show hosts or actors with great stage presence?

Looking back, there is often a hypnotic element present, but everyone tends to agree that it was not really mesmeric—people always had a choice to reject the persuasion occurring. With real mesmerism, the individual’s consciousness is altered without him knowing it so he sees the world in a different way.

Of course, the skilled yogi can skipped the third chakra by keeping the kundalini energy focused within the spine. But without real life experience in the third chakra, an individual will tend to feel vulnerable and without strong and dynamic relationships with others. There is a failure to bond which is in part the basis of relationships for lovers, family, friends, and community.

The third chakra is going to give you your best shot at developing and maintaining a strong personal identity. Without such an identity, you have little real presence in the social world and a weak connection to others.

Your failure in this realm will come back to haunt you later on no matter how advanced you may be because to other human beings you are nothing more than a ghost—a shadowy figure without substance or the ability to connect and affect others.

Should the yogi skipped the third chakra and unite the kundalini with the crown chakra, he fails to comprehend the saying that the seven stars of the Pleiades cling to each other. If you bypass a chakra, the other chakras will eventually send you back to acquire what you missed out on during your spiritual journey.

Perhaps our yogi who skips the third chakra will one day incarnate as a Lindsey Lohan or a Lady Gaga. His entire existence will then be focused on presenting to the world an enchanting presence. Her personal beauty and charm, her power to bond, will mesmerize others and take the money out of their pockets and put it into her own. All the other chakras will be on hold until this one catches up on its own.

When an individual is weak in a certain area of life, he or she will often gravitate first to negative expressions or experiences in that area. The negative is quicker and more seductive as one individual describes it.

I pause again focusing on the kundalini within my spine and allowing it to vibrate through this part of my body. What occurs is that I immediately sense the presence of many of my friends. It is like space is suspended. There is a direct connection I feel to them as if we are sitting immediately in front of each other.

This is another mermaid woman quality. They can instantly sense anyone else they think about. They have a direct psychic connection to these individuals. Space is suspended.

Someone might think of this as a third eye psychic ability. But the third chakra also has a close tie to the astral plane and to the ability to extend one’s aura outward to form direct connections to others.

Watch a really gifted speaker as he speaks to his audience. He is not just talking to them. He is extending his third chaka out, into, and through them. He creates inspiration and motivation in others because he is charging them with the energy of his own emotions and aura.

A great coach during half time does not just do a pep talk. Through his voice, he shoves his aura and nervous system directly into the players imprinting upon them his own drives and motivations. This is another kind of transmission of the essence of one’s tradition, a sports based shaktipat.

Mermaid queens do this sort of thing automatically. When you are in their presence their aura is like a magnetic field and this field extends right through you. They are as much aware of you as you are aware of yourself.

The Fourth Chakra—the Heart Center

As long as suffering remains to sentient beings, I will remain to serve.

--the Dalai Lama

Now we are continuing to move the kundalini energy up the spine to the height of the heart. Nothing happens if you remain focused. No energy escapes into the body or becomes focused in the actual psycho-nervous plexus of the heart chakra.

But what if I pause? Okay. Let’s try that. Pausing. I am lingering here in close proximity or within the heart chakra. What happens?

Almost immediately I get an astral affect. There is a burst of emotion. What do I feel? I feel that I love every human being on earth.

It would be easy to think to myself, “What? I am now a bleeding heart liberal?” But like I say, there is no mental component to the chakras. Any ideas or concepts that I use to describe these experiences are created from scratch out of my mind and imposed upon the experience.

The chakra itself has no religion, doctrine, ideology or psychological system attached to it. I swear, I am seeing the world in pink. Love is everywhere.

You can just hear the voice of the heart chakra saying aloud, “Come on now. Give me a big hug.”

Or, in a more serious vein, “Your sins are forgiven.”

If I stay with it a little longer it becomes, “We are all brothers and sisters on this planet. Every one of us.”

And in the next moment, “The only real work or purpose on this planet is love. Everything else is secondary.”

And in another moment or two I reach that state that I am researching that belongs to hard core mermaid women—women who are mermaids inside of the body of women. I feel that there is no experience, no memory or perception, that any other human being has on earth that I can not feel exactly as they felt and experienced it.

I could go on like this for hours. But you get the idea. The heart chakra is empathy, not as lovers experience it in the third chakra where it is used for bonding and attaining intimacy with another. No, this empathy is universal, global. It extends in and through every other being.

I have written elsewhere, but if you take the time to master Bardon’s third chapter of Initiation into Hermetics you can do things like project your consciousness into the heart chakra of the Dalai Lama. Here, let us take a moment to do that.

Yes, there it is again, exactly what I have sensed in his heart chakra every time I enter it over the last twenty years. His mind may not be very well trained in communication (being enlightened gives one no advantage in engaging in cross cultural communication), but the man is a living god on earth in terms of his heart chakra.

Here is a compassion, a love, that is like a sea without shores—there is no end to it. In terms of love, he has infinite resources to draw upon to free others from suffering. He is like the incarnation of an earthzone spirit, a least in terms of his ability to empathize with and attempt to offer assistance to others.

Ah, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. The Dalai Lama has trained to draw up the kundalini to the crown chakra. What I am sensing is the overflow of that higher energy as it then flows down and back into the heart chakra.

I tell you, speaking as an agent of the Judges of Saturn: when we have four or five individuals with the Dalai Lama’s quality of heart chakra on earth and when they are also trained magicians who understand the power of Saturn, we shall have no more wars on earth.

More typically, there are individuals who stumble into this chakra. Inadvertently or for other reasons have overdeveloped their heart chakras. This means they are too empathic. They easily feel what others feel and in doing so take on the others illnesses or bad energy, drawing it into themselves where they dissolve it within their own auras.

This is the reverse of a vampire. Instead of stealing others energy, they are natural healers who are spontaneously giving to others in such a way so as to heal them. This is not always a good idea because for one it is exhausting.

For two, others will take advantage of you since being around you feels so good they become addicted to getting what you give. And also it outright interferes at times without others need to learn from their own experience and take responsibility for themselves. How is the addict ever going to learn if someone is always there to make all the bad symptoms of his addiction go away?

But as with the second and third chakra, there is a pure kundalini effect that occurs in the third chakra—a blind, insatiable, and devouring craving. This relates to what is called Vishnu’s Knot.

In this case, the heart chakra is stimulated by the presence of kundalini but there is no Dalai Lama effect. The empathy never reaches the level of pure compassion and universal love.

Where you see this most typically is in things like Evangelical Christianity or other religious or social movements when they reach the level of fanaticism. It is in any fanatical movement, ism, ideology, etc. What has happened is that the individual has some intense experience, insight, realization, as in feeling born again, or liberated, or united with a group, a cause, or an ideal.

The individual has a genuine first hand experience with love and compassion and a sense of community, but the energy is not strong and pure enough to transform the individual any further. There is a taste of kundalini in terms of it lighting up the chakra, but there is then a diminishing of the original experience.

So the individual has to try to renew or revisit or have a revival of the conversion experience vicariously through converting others. When you can lead another to experience that first, genuine joy or love that you experienced, the insatiable hunger and emptiness within you is temporarily appeased.

The problem with the Vishnu’s Knot is that the community simply lacks the ability, methods, or training necessary to sustain the level of power that is necessary for the kundalini to fill the heart chakra so it is overflowing with love to others. Instead, they use strict rules and regulations to get community or group members to confirm so they think the same thoughts, feel the same feelings, and act the same way. Yuck!

This is a low grade ritual method of gathering and focusing energy. If they would get off their fat asses and actually train themselves they could then sit down again and concentrate whatever energy they needed into the heart chakra and, if nothing else, rise to the level of whatever world teacher they wished to emulate.

All fanaticism involves being an emotional vampire. It steals others life (and even sacrifices its own) to sustain its own motivation, inspiration, will, and commitment.

We also see in the heart chakra the different issues surrounding sex for men and women. As others have pointed out, sex can trigger a temporary awakening of kundalini in the man. The vitality in his body is amplified through making love such that it rises up through his spine and floods his heart chakra.

Then, even if he was just having casual sex, the effect is that for a brief time until the energy wears off he is genuinely in love with the woman. The actual love is there. He is willing to sacrifice himself for her.

But as with the Vishnu’s knot syndrome, he needs to repeat the sex to get the high that produces the feelings of love. The woman is perhaps playing the opposite role. She is like Shiva who says, “What I need from you is absolute devotion; focus your total being on me and then I will respond.” In other words, “create those special moments which mark our relationship as distinct from all others and then I will give you my body so you can know my bliss.”

And often the devotion remains even though the bliss is gone. Ask even divorcing couples about the first time they met and how they fell in love with each other and often you catch a brief glimpse of the love that ignited their original bond.

There are many other inspirational energies that are found within the heart chakra. Such as pure devotion that has no relationship to religion. It has no selfish, self-serving component.

There is the light that shines very bright like the sun. This may manifest as a charismatic leader who without agenda wishes to assist others to also shine bright.

You will rarely witness such light among human masters. Where is the human master who ever refers someone to another tradition? What Buddhist says to a young student, “Oh, what you really want is found in Taoism.” Or what Christian ever says, “Oh, you really need a nature religion or shamanism to attain the goal you seek.” Or, “what Hindu says to a student, “Ah yes, I see now that your work during this incarnation is best fulfilled by becoming a scientist who introduces some new technology to benefit mankind.” In my forty years as a spiritual anthropologist, I have never witnessed a spiritual teacher who could consider a student’s needs above the needs of his own lineage and tradition.

The Fifth Chakra—the Throat Chakra

The chakra produces an empty quality like a mirror that simply reflects the reality that is there. Yet it is ready to seize and act on any opportunity the instant it appears. Consequently, the firth chakra is very creative if not hyperactive.

For those focused in the throat chakra, why talk about the past or future? What is important is what we feel and are able to act on right now.

Like a singer or an actor, want to feel an emotion? Sing a song and put yourself one hundred per cent into the song. You will then feel the feelings of the song. Or want to change your self-image and the way you think about and perceive yourself? Write your self a part to play, a role with a script to follow. Act the part you choose to play. You become what you imagine your self to be.

Like Shakespeare, you may not be able to control your external environment, but every Shakespearean created character has a choice about how they respond to what is going on around them. The problem is that people get caught up in the roles they think have been assigned to play.

A mirror has no attachment to the images that appear within it and neither does the throat chakra individual. The moment defines existence. Who you are is who you choose to be in this moment.
If the kundalini gets too active or out of control in this chakra, the individual becomes hyper active. They can not stop doing what they are working on. They are obsessed with creating something new. They don’t know how to relax and let go.

Consequently, the second chakra balances this throat chakra. If they can sustain the inner feeling of being content and happy inside of themselves, then there is no obsession with accomplishing something in the outer world. They are then free to do both: to create in a way that involves living a healthy and harmonious personal life style.

Your second chakra yogi in a cave drunk on bliss, your beautiful young woman who is happy in herself and hiding that happiness from others in order to survive in our world, and your obsessed computer game playing geek are all pretty much operating out of the second chakra.

They are failing to simply look around and notice the infinite opportunities for creative action and self-transformation that exist in the world around them. And the opposite of these--those obsessed with creativity in the throat chakra make terrible mistakes by taking drugs or pushing themselves to extremes to sustain their creativity thus risking dying young as a result.

I pause again vibrating the kundalini through this chakra. The sensation is awareness without any kind of form attachment. What is real is the present moment. Past and future are at best tenuous. Their existence depends on ideas and concepts and this state of awareness does not need ideas in order to operate.

Past and future are like a dream from which I have awakened. The only value of the dream is what I can take from it that is useful right now. Put simply, this is an intensely alert state of awareness in which there is not even personal identity present. There is no self to refer to. Only the open and free capacity to act in the now.

Third Eye—The Sixth Chakra

The third eye chakra has two petals in its lotus blossom or chakra. For simplicity, we could say one refers to the past and one to the future.

This may seem odd since we just reached a state of “nothing exists but the present moment” in the throat chakra. But the third eye is all about perception and this includes seeing through space and time.

Typically, when the kundalini spills over into the third eye individuals become psychic in ways that they may have little control over. Among other things, they see events from the past and future.

This kind of perception is dependent on the strength of vitality in the first or root chakra. If there is little excess or abundance of vitality in an individual, the third eye becomes very limited and rigid in the way the individual uses it. If there is a great deal of vitality in the body, then the psychic can extend his perception through a great variety of different activities.

Many psychics have weak health. This is because in part psychic activities suspend the link of the senses to the external world. The vitality in the sense of perception is greatly weakened, such as in the eyes for clairvoyance or in the ears for telepathy. The individual must then recharge the physical body after the vitality is drained away or used up through psychic activity.

Obviously, kundalini spilling over into this chakra can make an individual obsessed with the past or future. This may work out well if the individual is an archeologist or an investment advisor. The profession may reward obsession.

Some investment advisors live and breathe the stock market ten hours of every day. They write a review each day of why the market did what it did and what to expect next. This is valuable stuff if they do it well. If you think there is an ancient Troy and no one else believes you, it helps to persist in your obsession until you discover that city. Then honor and rewards come your way.

Kundalini at its worst in this chakra draws an individual into another world. The person may see and engage the astral plane or some other inner world or imaginary reality that no one else perceives. In this case, the individual suffers acute isolation from the rest of mankind.

For example, astral experiences can easily feel and seem more real than our world. You can do everything there you can do in our world but the experiences are more vivid, intense, and alive.

An individual may say, “I am a part of so much more than this world that we see.” This is fine if you have dual citizenship and belong equally to two different worlds. When you are in one realm, you act according to its rules and customs and when you are in the other you accommodate yourself to its reality.

But most human beings lack that capacity to move freely between the worlds. An individual often has to focus himself a hundred per cent on what he is doing to accomplish anything in our world. Add in another reality and the individual risks, as with the third chakra, becoming a ghost barely here and barely able to function.

For kundalini, our world is a tiny reality, a small part of the immensity that human awareness can penetrate and interact with. But again if the individual is not extremely well trained, this sojourning between the realms is a terrible distraction and a huge risk to one’s health.

Even masters in various traditions fall victim to this problem. Because the astral plane is so real to them, they lose interact in remaining in a physical body unless there is some compelling reason to stay here.

Again, I pause and allow the presence of kundalini to vibrate through my third eye. What happens is that in my awareness my body turns into the goddess kundalini in the form of a regal queen. My eyes become her eyes and I see what she sees.

She speaks to me. “Time is an illusion like a dream, though for you it is a dream that is consistent, extended, and has history. In your Kaballah, the physical world is referred to as Malkuth, the kingdom. Be that as it may, in this chakra I am the wings of perception.

“I am alive in whoever sees through time as I see. The prophets in Judaism accomplished their prophecies through me, though I am known in that religion by another name. In Christianity I am present only on rare occasions.
“I have stalked you your entire life as a cat stalks, pounces on, and toys with a mouse for entertainment to keep away the boredom. But finally I see the mouse has awakened to his true nature—you realize you are pure perception and an awareness without need of form identification.

“Understand, if you would open the veils and perceive the mysteries of time, I honor no one except my supreme master, the transcendental one, the destroyer of worlds because his clarity of perception perceives the beginnings and the ends of all things.

“You may call him as you will—Shiva, God, Divine Providence, the Divine Majesty, or the One as you called him once before during the time of Atlantis. All his powers exist within me, for I hold him within my heart. We are lovers and as lovers we are one without separation.

“As you well know, there is a great celebration. Drink from our cup. Join with us. Share our elixir. Our love is now and forever without beginning or end.”

I am going to take a break now to let her words sink in.

The Crown Chakra

If a spilling of kundalini energy into the third eye may cause dissociation with reality, the over-stimulation of the crown chakra is worse. One of the problems that occurs in Israel is that when tourists get off the plane, a few of them are overpowered by the legends and histories of the Holy Land. A few individuals then walk around thinking that they are God or some famous prophet. But once they get back on the plane and leave, this inflation of ego and God identification quickly fades.

The same applies to the crown chakra. If its energy is present and an individual is not experienced and trained in how to use it, the person can end up attaching his personal ego to some deity. His personal identity loses its boundaries and he begins to think of himself as some great being with powers far beyond those he actually possesses.

The crown chakra is not without its charm. It does stimulate conscience and a desire for perfection. Its awareness of perfection in fact demands that at some point an individual return and master whatever experiences he has not yet encountered in the other six chakras. Thus again, the advanced yogi adept having to reincarnate as a Lindsey Lohan or perhaps a Mick Jagger or even a Hugh Heffner.

Am I being profane? Maybe those Japanese tourists are attracted to that stripper wearing a blond wig not because of the hair color but because she was a Zen master in another life time. They know to treat her with great respect without even a thought entering their minds. They recognize the eyes—that all that exists for her is this moment of time and that thoughts are of no value as compared direct perception.

Ideals and dreams also can become inflated with the crown chakra. The individual may slip into thinking there is some great spiritual mission he is to accomplish. Or perhaps there is some great demand or geas placed upon him by the divine world. It may not be quite clear exactly what it is but there is a strong sense of its presence.

This of course can lead to great humor. Thus the card of the Fool in the Tarot. The Fool says, “The universe! Wow. Wonderful.” And this as he is about to step off a cliff, though there is a little dog barking or a thorn in the person’s side to try to draw the individual back to the world we share in common with others.

Some individuals who are obsessed with magic and spiritual activities should swear off all magic and mysticism during the rest of this incarnation. Any attempt to touch magic or mysticism will destroy them. They did too much in another life time and now they are here “to get real.”

Get a job. Make some money. Run a company. Do these things successfully and prove you are of benefit to society and then perhaps you might be granted an exemption from your karma and allowed to indulge yourself once again.

One of the tricks with the kundalini is that after you unite it with the crown chakra, there is a kind of new energy created that results from the union of shiva and shakti or kundalini—the dense, mesmeric physical energy--and the utmost spiritual energy in the body. You allow or let this new energy to overflow and fill the lower chakras according to one version or method.

Part of the task of any genuine mythology is to enable us to attain union with our divine parents. This journey of kundalini represents an inner union with our divine parents. It joins together the opposites of masculine and feminine within the body. The result is an elixir, a cup with a divine wine which is used to celebrate the beauty of creation.

As an ordinary guy, a typical male, I have a healthy interest in sexuality. My society is kind of brain dead about the spiritual applications of sexuality. In another context, I often write about the electric and magnetic fluids in magic. These are the perfection of masculine and feminine creative energies according to the Baron hermetic system.

This kundalini practice I describe here has a great advantage for me, in my limited practice of it. In joining with the feminine, I ease the excessive pressure in my head due to a highly developed level of concentration. At the same time, the masculine transcendence heightens direct perception into how sexuality or polar attraction operates on all levels of consciousness and in all human and inner worlds. It is nice to have that balance and harmony.

Let me take a moment and pause again. I shall allow the kundalini to vibrate through the crown chakra without focusing on uniting the kundalini with this chakra.

The result is that in this instance the kundalini does not vibrate within the crown chakra. It is interested in uniting with it and resists any attempt to hold back.

There is an intense power that localizes itself at the top of my head. The rest of my body seems to dissolve in my awareness. And then I get the imagery of the masculine Shiva in yabyum or united to the goddess kundalini.

In this case, Shiva represents akasha—the one, ineffable awareness penetrating through all of space and time and the goddess kundalini represents all experience that can be experienced on the physical, astral, and mental planes.

This is similar to the imagery Franz Bardon utilizes in his first book in which there is a figure embodying akasha and the electric and magnetic fluids in yabyum and sitting on a lotus blossom above the magician’s head. There is a ruby present representing the quintessence of all wisdom—all that can be learned on this planet.

I am sure there are endless varieties of experiences associated with the crown chakra. This happens to be the experience that that occurs for me today.

In effect, in this experience, I am floating in a vastness that is simultaneously transcendent and yet intimately involved in all of life experience. Shiva is total detachment and transcendence and Shakti, the kundalini, is the energy present in every sensory experience we encounter in space and time.

Who am I? This is all occurring within my body. I am both Shiva and Shakti. I am the opposites joined. Welcome to the crown of creation.

Sometimes Vishnu is associated with the crown chakra. He has his own way of expressing this experience. As the avatar Krishna he says of himself,

I am the infinite, eternal, and the immortal Self--no fire can burn, no water dissolve, no air dry, and no sword pierce…. Before such gory space melts away into nothingness, time vanishes into non-existence, and causation dwindles into emptiness. Ranging beyond names and forms, passing free into woods and forests, mountains and rivers, into day and night, clouds and stars, passing free into men and women, animals and angels, as the Self of each and all am I. Truth flows from me just as light radiates from the sun and fragrance emanates from a flower...I am the transcendental bliss, the absolute intelligence, the supreme synthesis of consciousness that shines in the shrine of every heart.

Well, you get the idea. The thing about Krishna in the Mahabarata is that he too has a sense of humor. And he is supremely practical. He knows everyone better than they know themselves. And he strives for peace and yet is unafraid of war. He is more of a dove than any dove and yet as a hawk he has already won.

Summary

If we think of the body as the temple of God, then there are as many gates to this temple as there are religions. No. Make that as many religions times some number, say a thousand.

On a personal note, I seem to a have a gift to run simulations of others’ magical training systems. If I telepathically ask Swami Rama for a transmission of the essence of his tradition to me, I don’t get the seven hours of experience he got when he asked for it from his master. I get seven minutes.

It is still pretty amazing. But it still takes a lot of training in order to expand on this experience and come to understand it. Often I can train with a system for six months or a year and really understand and embody it in myself. And then it breaks down. My body demands I have balance. A particular system of training, no matter how useful, usually lacks some component that allows it to be truly harmonious, universal, or cosmic.

This is hard on me but then I get to write all these different essays. Hopefully, one day I’ll get a workable system put together that I can actually live with.

Best wishes and good luck.