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.