Being Certain in an Uncertain World

The most important factor in my life was not the result of a conscious decision — although aspects of the decision making process were present. Most important was my recognition — at an early age — that there was something out there beyond the physical, something of a more ethereal nature.

Once your psyche perceives this, you are hooked because you take on the challenge of proving it to yourself, a challenge you never relinquish. It may take a lifetime, but this recognition provides the basis for building a life founded on searching for certainty in an uncertain world.

This is not something derived from traditional religion; it comes from within. It happens in spite of the influence of the elemental world around you. In fact, it is counter to everything the world teaches you, counter to all its conditioning and indoctrination. For me, the final step in my process of self-knowledge was listening to my body after mindlessly damaging it:

"The mind and the body really aren’t friends. The mind is a tool of the culture, an expert propagandist for fitting in. Yet, as the mind drowns out the truth, the body continues to tell it. Which is your real friend? The body, you say. Do you listen to it? I didn’t. And yet, at some level, I must have. I never would have made it back otherwise. Spiraling out control, there has to be some measure of omniscience, or else recovery is impossible. The mind is just too strong. It campaigns incessantly for all the things you think you ought to be doing, all the things you think you are missing. How can you possibly stand up to the supplications of the mind? Nevertheless, as my abilities decline, I keep a sense of awareness in spite of the things my new persona tells me about myself. Without it, I would never have found a way to restore myself."

~ Deciphering the Golden Flower One Secret at a Time – JJ Semple

At an early age, a jolt of higher consciousness invaded my psyche and set me deliberating on the possibility that something greater surrounded me, that I was attached to a field of existential wisdom or consciousness, which, in daily life, manifested itself through a knowledge not acknowledged by the orthodoxies of worldly life. Gopi Krishna explains it thusly:

"The first reality we come across is consciousness. The world comes later. We know first ourselves and then the world. So the wiser course is first to understand the knower. What modern thinkers have done is to ignore or bypass the knower, forgetting that it is the knower that is doing it."
~ The Awakening of Kundalini—Gopi Krishna

These early murmurs of the psyche were almost immediately buried beneath the so-called "adjustment process" that fitting into worldly life requires us to follow. Buried, but not dead. Inert, but not extinct. All it took was an occasional murmur of the heart to awaken it.

Gee, maybe there is something out there. Maybe, I should explore it. But where to start? Could I be missing something in the sermon? At church? I feel it but have no idea of how to reach for it. Don't wait so long to think about it again. Maybe I'll understand it better the next time.

And there is always a next time. Whether it's a stirring in the body, or an instance of thrall. A chord struck while reading a novel. A sunset. A passionate kiss. An itch waiting to be scratched.

Eventually, I did something about the itch. I started to explore self-hypnosis, yoga, all methods of meditation, and I started to do a whole lot of reading; I was about 27 years old at the time.

At first, I didn't associate my dabbling in spiritual practices with the presentiment that there was something out there, albeit running in parallel on two separate tracks:

1. The occasional presentiment that there was something behind the material world.
2. My practice of yoga and meditation.

I hadn't practiced enough to realize the two would eventually meet up. Although I began to see the elemental, material world for what it was — a kind of illusory distraction — I wasn't able to connect my childhood presentiments to the yoga and meditation I was practicing. In other words, I had no coherent ontological model. That would come later...after much more practice.

What does this ontology consist of? Adi Da Samraj describes it thusly:

"Precisely what is wrong with the universal scientism of modern society — and the forms of politics that derive from that scientism — is that the modern scientific 'world'-view and modern politics do not permit the human being his or her psyche.

"Scientism constantly forces the human being to stand face to face with nothing but elemental 'experience.' It denies all reality to the higher dimensions — which, since ancient times, have been recognized by human beings as their fundamental resource.

"Scientism denies the connection to the energies and 'creative' sources of the 'world.' Human beings are denied right 'religion' and true Spirituality by scientism.

"Scientism is simply an activity of the verbal mind. It is oriented toward the investigation of elemental phenomena without any psychic participation in the 'world.'

"Even when scientists investigate phenomena that are not merely elemental, but that belong to the realm of energies and the psyche, they do not study these things through the psyche. They study them 'objectively,' as if these invisibles were butterflies under a pin.

"However, in order to investigate such phenomena, one must enter into 'consideration' of them through the medium of the psyche — through feeling, through intuition, through all the aspects of the mind and heart that precede verbal consciousness.

"In this 'late-time' (or 'dark' epoch), people are not permitted to recognize and acknowledge the invisible dimensions of existence. Nor are they permitted any psychic connection to those dimensions, or to anything else for that matter.

"People are encouraged to watch TV and go to work and wait for science to save everyone. But science can never save anyone. Science is not a 'method' of salvation."

~ The Gnosticon - Adi Da Samraj

Science is supposedly value neutral, but is it? Even back then, when I started exploring, I came to realize that science was not the answer. It was always one step forward-one step back. The Salk vaccine-the atom bomb...scientists ready to dedicate themselves to research, no matter how benevolent, how heinous. As in the Dr. Strangelove-esque, I'm only a scientist; I was ordered to do it. They told me it was for the good of mankind.

Abandoned Nuclear Energy Plant

And what about Kundalini? How does it fit into the above ontology?

For me, Kundalini is the ultimate confirmation that existence is something more than the "scientismistic" definition we limit it to. For me, it signaled the meeting up of the two tracks that had been running in parallel. Not only did Kundalini make sense of the cosmology that reaffirmed my Being's relationship to "higher dimensions," it also made sense of science. If the Kundalini sub-system exists in our bodies, it must be there for a reason, and that reason boils down to the realization that human evolution is a work in progress.

Kundalini is the instrument that links human biology to higher consciousness. It is responsible for our bodily substantiation, and for our past, present, and future evolution. Our form, our brain, our consciousness! All are related to the Kundalini in us and all are still evolving. And that is what science should be studying — the biological aspects of Kundalini and its connection to consciousness.

Suppose you do have an itch to explore beyond the elemental. Young or old, it makes no difference. In your heart you know there's something out there. Metaphysical, astral, causal, etheric. Whatever you want to call it. No matter. Nurturing the recognition, never letting go of it leads to a series of innate revelations that no amount of propaganda can dispel. To be certain of one thing in life is an immense accomplishment.

And unlike most of the underlying assumptions of elemental life, based on sensory programming and hand-me-down opinions, you don't have to take someone else's word for what you discover along the Way. By finding out for yourself, you have emptied the memory banks of preconceived notions, zeroed the atomic clock back to its primordial beginning, stripped the psyche bare, and started over.

Finding certainty in an uncertain world takes courage. So does unbelieving all acquired beliefs. Yet compared to what you've been told about the world and how it functions, being certain of even one little thing, when those around you are certain of nothing, is not only a whole different paradigm, it's a manifest advantage in exploring the infinite reaches of consciousness. Finding certainty in an uncertain world helps you understand the cosmology of life and discover a "peace that passeth all understanding."