Finding Balance in the Effort to Integrate Kundalini

One day there was a Me; the next day there wasn’t. One day I was practicing meditation, breathing in and out in a rhythmic manner; the next I was transported to another dimension I’ll never be completely able to explain or describe. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying. After all, I have one advantage: I never really returned from that other dimension; I live with a foot in both — the physical world we know as the “real world” and that other dimension. To describe it, I use terms from science as well as those from various spiritual traditions, not because I like arcanum or confusion, but because when I say kundalini, you’ll say chi, someone else will say orgone; and we’ll be talking about the same thing without knowing it.

Are You Upside Down or Rightside Up

Nevertheless, once it happens to you, you'll understand how unimportant terminology is. Each awakening experience is only a different manifestation of the same energy. Sure, it involves struggling with terminology and understanding the same notions phrased in slightly different ways. The closest we get to clarity is a series of approximations of an actual awakening experience. And that's perfectly understandable because it’s not easy to express or describe. But there is a constant: everyone who experiences Kundalini has one foot permanently in that other dimension.

Self-explanatory

There’s a corollary to that constant, one we learn, not during the Kundalini activation experience per se because during the experience we are floating in a no-mind state, at least I was. Immediately after — when we “come back to our senses” — we know there is an all-pervading consciousness behind the universe and behind human evolution. It’s not a hallucination or a projection of aberrant mental activity.

This consciousness is much greater than our bodies or the physical world we perceive. We are part of it, contained in it. In this consciousness, nothing is separate. All is Whole and Undivided. This cannot be learned in school or books, it can only be Known.

Ever Increasing Concentric Circles

Very few of us progress straight from birth to self-actualization. To perceive whole and undivided Oneness, we first serve an apprenticeship, as it were, in a world of duality, a world in which every aspect seems to be in opposition to every other. This is not reality; it is the world of the senses, one we are conditioned to from birth. Once we recognize that we are conditioned to think in terms of duality, we are able to find ways and means of extracting ourselves from that conditioning; and we are offered the opportunity to do so.

Many individuals are so completely conditioned they remain that way for the rest of their lives. Some are able to recognize this conditioning. A few are able to work their way through it to the cosmological Oneness behind duality. Those who achieve this may attempt to integrate this knowledge with their real world lives; others are content to remain immersed in the bliss they’ve discovered. I chose a balance: remaining in the world, at the same time, realizing I am a part of an Energy Continuum. I didn’t really choose It; It chose me. That’s the kind of purposeful compulsion Kundalini introduces into our lives. After awakening, we can’t take credit for anything we do, say, or write. We are driven to it.

Yet, spurred on by an urge to understand my experience to the extent I can — how conventional science views evolution as opposed to how someone like myself, a person with a foot in two different worlds, perceives it — I concluded that Kundalini is an evolutionary force with a guiding intelligence behind it, and I looked for an evidence-based paradigm for examining it.

Let's All Go to the Movies

Science recognizes “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” as the operative mechanisms behind evolution. But is there another mechanism working at a higher level, one Gopi Krishna called the evolutionary impulse? Not perceptible by everyone at this time, this mechanism drives certain beings toward super-consciousness, allowing them to recognize and access energy fields beyond the confines of the circumscribed physical universe, beyond the five senses. Those who do experience it say this super-consciousness manifests itself as vibrational energy. If so, could it become perceivable at some future time by all humans as a result of a rapid surge in the quality of human evolution? A new tip of Maslow’s pyramid dedicated to higher consciousness? In other words, could all human beings eventually become conscious of consciousness at each and every moment of their lives?

Preparing for the July Fourth Nacho Eating Contest

Is the objective study of Kundalini a fool’s errand? Perhaps, but Kundalini is a many-sided subject. I believe we can learn from an evidence-based approach to studying its role in evolution.