From Id to Ego in the Orient:  Kundalini Yoga, Part I

 

The idea of yoga is already given in the name, yoga. It comes from the root yuj, which means "to yoke; to connect or join something to something else.” What is being yoked is our ego consciousness, the aham consciousness, to the source of consciousness. Just as the idea of deity in these perennial traditions greatly differs from our Western idea of deity, so does the idea of consciousness. In speaking of deities in the terms that are proper to these mythologically grounded traditions, I'd say the deity is a personification of the energy. It's a personification of an energy that informs life - all life, your life, the world's life. The nature of the personification will be determined by historical circumstances. The personification is folk; the energy is human. Deities proceed from the energies. They are the messengers and vehicles, so to say, of the energies.  

 

                  Our idea of deity is that the deity is a fact, and it's from that fact that the energies proceed. Likewise, with respect to consciousness, our notion is that the brain is the source of consciousness. The traditional idea is that the brain is a function of consciousness. Consciousness is first. The brain is an organ that encapsulates consciousness and focuses it in a certain direction, in the direction of time and space knowledge, which is secondary knowledge. The notion that we are all manifestations of that transcendent consciousness, which goes beyond all our powers to think and to name, is the basic idea of all of this life. In our Western thinking there have been moments when this has come in, against what might be called mainstream philosophy, or the school philosophies. 

 

                  Long before the Middle Ages, we have Dionysius the Areopagite, a mystical philosopher. His philosophy is picked up in the eighth and ninth centuries in Ireland by John Scotus Erigena, a gnostic philosopher of magnificent concepts. In the High Middle Ages, Meister Fckhart uses the complicated, concretizing language of Christianity, but he blows it apart and you have the recognition of the relationship of the deity to the knower of the deity. 

 

                  In Renaissance Italy, Cosimo de' Medici invited Marsiho Ficino to translate a text that had been brought from Byzantium by a Byzantine monk. This was the Greek text of the Corpus Hermeticum, the hermetic philosophy of the first centuries A.D., contemporary with early Christianity but in the pagan terminology. When this appeared, the excitement in the whole world of the arts was enormous. Botticelli's work is full of all of this, and the wonderful flowering of Renaissance art is eloquent of these very ideas that I am talking about. Later you have people like Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake in Rome in the year 1600 for saying these things. 

 

                  Then, in later times, we have Immanuel Kant. There are two kinds of philosophies in the world; there is English philosophy, where nobody really understood what Kant was saying, and there's the philosophy that we

find just implicit, for example, in the middle European systems. What Kant recognized, in his Critique of Pure Reason, was that all of our knowledge, all of our experience, is conditioned by the organs of experience and the organs of knowledge. A priori, primary, antecedent to our experience of anything is our knowledge of time and space. Everything comes to us in a field of time and space. In that wonderful work of his called The Foundation of Metaphysics, Kant asked this question: “How is it that we can make determinations for relationships in space here and know that these will work in space there?" And he answers, "It's because the laws of space are right in our own mind." Well, this struck me like dynamite. 

 

                  During the Apollo flight around the moon, the one that preceded the landing, Ground Control in Houston asked, "Who's navigating now?" The answer that came back, and I heard it with amazement, was "Newton."

Now the laws that would work in that space up there, where nobody had ever been before, were known so perfectly that it was possible to bring that little spacecraft back from around the moon and land it within a mile of a little boat in the Pacific Ocean. No matter how far these vehicles go out into space, we've enveloped it. We know it. But when Neil Armstrong's foot came down on the moon, nobody knew how deeply it was going to sink into the moon dust. That is a posteriori knowledge. But the framing order of knowledge, through which all of our experiences come, this we already know.

 

                  But what is the thing that we're coming to know through time and space? Is it a thing? No. Things are in time and space. You've gone into the transcendent there. So Kant calls this "transcendental  aesthetics."  After you've seen everything you begin thinking about it, and the laws of your thinking are what determine what you can think. These are the laws of logic, the categories, and you can't think of anything that doesn't fit in those. So you are enclosed. This is maya-exactly. 

 

                  It was Schopenhauer who first recognized that the Indian concept of maya and Kant's concept of the forms of sensibility and the categories of logic were equivalent. So in his World as Will and Idea he's able to talk about Western thinking in terms of Oriental thinking. The two come right together there. Nietzsche also picked this up, and we have a whole new thrust in Western school philosophy. So these are very important moments in the Western philosophical tradition - these recognitions of the breakthrough of this elementary idea system, the perennial philosophy, into what might be called the school system. 

 

                  Yoga, then, is a linking of consciousness, this aham consciousness, this ego consciousness, to the source of consciousness. The source of consciousness is, of course, transcendent of all our concepts. 

 

                  When you ask "Is God one or many?" one and many are concepts. These are the categories of thought. And the word God is not supposed to refer to a personality. It's supposed to refer past the personality to that which is really transcendent of thought. The mythic symbols open like that to transcendence. 

 

                  Jung makes a distinction between the word symbol and the word sign. This is an arbitrary definition that he uses. A symbol is a mythic symbol which has one leg here and the other in infinity. It points to the

transcendent. A sign points to something here. As normally interpreted, God is a sign, not a symbol. The word God refers to what is supposed to be a fact. There is a saying I like to quote that came up in

the gnostic period, "The problem with Yahweh is that he thinks he's God." That is to say, he says, "I'm it! I'm no symbol." And then, of course, when he's the only one that's it, then everybody else's god is no god at all. 

 

                  In proper language, concretizing the image, concretizing the symbol, is what we call idolatry, so that our

whole religion from this standpoint is an idolatrous system. Perhaps it's because of this unconscious idolatry of

our own that we see idolatry in everybody else and smash their idols. That's just a little thought for the day. 

 

                  The classic book of yoga is called the Yoga Sutra. The word sutra is related to our own suture, the thread that a doctor uses to sew you up. So yoga sutra means "the thread of yoga." There is a type of book from India called a sutra. There are a lot of sutras, and they are the sorts of books students buy the night before an examination. In very short concise formulae they summarize the work that you've been doing all year, but you can't really understand the book unless you already know the subject. 

 

                  Now the opening aphorism of the Yoga Sutra, which is attributed to a legendary sage named Patanjali, is the classic definition of yoga: "Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind stuff." 

 

                  There are two aspects to the physiology of the mind. One is the nerves, the gray matter, and the other is the energy that lives in the nerves. The energy is what communicates the messages. The gross matter is called, in Sanskrit sthula. The subtle matter, the energy inside, the activating principle, is called sukshma ("subtle"). 

 

                  This subtle matter within the brain takes the forms of what impacts the senses. We see things as though they are in our heads because the subtle matter has taken their forms. And we hear things for the same reason, and so forth, and so on. Move your eyes quickly, and you'll see how quickly the subtle matter changes. The problem is that it continues to change even when you want it to stand still. Suppose you wanted to hold in your mind one thought, or one image, something you think you'd like to hold there. You will find that within four or five seconds you are having associated thoughts. The mind is moving. 

 

                  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. 

 

                  Schopenhauer's World as Will and Idea is full of this. The book is a symphony of rapture dealing with this matter. He uses an image that I like to bring up in relation to this in his Foundations of Morality. He asks, "How is it that a human being can so participate in the danger and peril of another that, forgetting his own self-protection, he moves spontaneously to that person's rescue?" How is it that what we take to be the first law of nature, preserving this separate entity, this ego, is suddenly dissolved; and, as though one were that other, one acts spontaneously in the interests of that other - even at the risk of one's own life. One acts spontaneously to save a little child that's about to be run over. Schopenhauer answers by saying, "This is a metaphysical realization that has broken through which is usually not there." It's the realization of the universal consciousness of which we are all manifestations. So in that sense you and that other are one. 

 

                  The experience of separateness is only a secondary experience within the a priori frame of time and space which is the separating principle, what Nietzsche calls the principium individuationis, the individuating principle of time and space. If it weren't for time and space we would not be separate here. So this is our secondary experience. You have to have this experience in order to live in the world, but every now and then there's a breakthrough to the other realization.

 

                  So the function of yoga is to release us from the time-space commitment, introduce us to the transcendent. Then comes the problem of bringing us back so that we can operate in both knowledges. 

 

                  The dates for the sutras are usually given as sometime between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200. In those four hundred years this thing took its shape. The yoga that I want to discuss is a specific late form of yoga that developed in the fourth and fifth centuries. It's known as Kundalini yoga, and it affected all of the Eastern religious structures. It appears in Buddhism, in Jainism, in Hinduism, almost simultaneously. So I'm going to use both Buddhist and Hindu images to illustrate it. 

 

                  Kundalini comes from the word kundalin, which means "coiled up." The reference is to the spiritual energy that is coiled up, as it were, at the base of the spine, the base of the body. When it is in that condition, coiled up down there, there's not much spiritual life. The spiritually energized organs are in the lower pelvic area. 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. Action is also female, shakti. It's a little female serpent called the kundalini, a 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 at the base of the body also. This is all "subtle" substance. You won't find it on the operating table. It is coiled three and a half times, with the head of the serpent over what is called the Brahma door of the lingam so that the energies do not come up. The goal of the yoga is to wake that serpent and bring her up the spine. On the way up she passes seven centers. The center at the base is called muladhara, the root base; the center at the crown of the head is called sahasrara, the thousand-petaled lotus; and in between are five other centers. As that serpent power enters the field of those sequential centers, the whole psychology of the individual is transformed. 

 

                  I'm going to use this as a means to link into our Western philosophies and see where each of them stands in relation to this. It's a very, very recondite and long-seasoned philosophical concept, as Jung says when he discusses the Tibetan Book of the Dead: "These people are so far ahead of us that we've got only up to the third cakra." Jung himself, I would say, had got to the fourth. "But," he says, "we've got to move into this slowly, and don't have the notion that we understand all these things, because we have not had the experience systems yet that interprets them." 

 

                  So with that little introduction, we start, and we start by meditating. This is said to be a comfortable posture. We are to sit with the spine perfectly erect. Since the human body and the cosmic body are equivalent, our spine is comparable to the world axis. So we have reached the world axis, the central point, the immovable spot, and we are now in meditation.  

 

                  You begin by breath control, breathing to certain paces, and the breath is very curious. You breathe in through one nostril, hold, breathe out through the other nostril, hold, in through the second, hold, out through the first, and so forth and so on. The notion is that emotion and feeling and state of the mind are related to breath. When you are at rest, the breathing is in a nice, even order. When you are stirred with shock the breathing changes. With passion the breathing changes.

Change the breathing and you change the state. What we are trying to do is smooth the waters of the rippled pond by slow breathing. The length of the breath of one of these priests is terrific. The practiced yogi has a great chestful of breathing possibilities. 

 

                  So we're going to calm the waters. And when the waters are calm, that image of images appears, is known to us. Now comes a point. Here is the gross outer body, and held in the hands is a representation of the subtle body. Do not identify the gross body with the subtle body. If you do that, you are crazy, and you think you are it. So we must disengage. This image represents the totality of the energies of life pouring into the field of time and space; it is what we call God. God is a personification of the energies, and that's it. But these energies show themselves in the world in many aspects. Each organ of the body has its own impulse to action, and the whole problem for our psychology is the conflict of those impulse systems. Each of the organs of nature and of the body has its own inflection of this form. 

 

                  In the East there are five elements. In the West there are four, but then there are love and hate which pull them together and separate them,

which represent the fifth. Now here the fifth is space, akasha, or as they usually translate it, ether. And then there come air, fire, water, and earth. So this system is a pantheon. There is a Buddha associated with each of the five, a named Buddha. There's the Buddha of the Center and the Buddhas of the Fast, the West, the South, and the North. 

 

                  This whole theme of east, south, west, and north associated with the solar course is a common feature in mythologies everywhere. The sun rises, the new day. The sun at noon is in the south, so the south represents the height, the culmination moment of consciousness in the field of time. In the west, it sinks into transcendence again, and we speak about "going west" when one dies. In the north it is, as it were, under the earth, and that's the area from which demons come, disease comes, dangers come, and tyrannical force comes. In American Indian mythologies, the little heroes who are going to save their mother from the monsters are warned by her not to go north, that's where danger is. They can go east, south, or west. So the boys go north. The only way to get past the rules of the society is to go north, to break the rules. You find something that the society knows nothing about and you bring it back, and that serves as a saving, amplifying, force. So in this eleventh-century

Tibetan figure, we have a central Buddha and four more representing east, south, west, and north. The Buddha himself sits at the immovable point - BodhGaya, the Bo tree, the tree of illumination, the Bodhi tree, the tree of awakening. 

 

                  The word Buddha means "the one who has waked up, whose eyes have opened." We carry the eye in our pocket all the time. It is on the back of the dollar bill, at the top of the pyramid, where the sides, the pairs of opposites, come together. There the eye of knowledge opens. But in the field of action you are down on the side. You are on this side and the other guy is on the other side, and so you have action. But this eye is the middle eye, the eye of the referee in the tennis match. It doesn't care which side wins. You can't have a match unless there is some serious intention to knock the other chap out. So time asks for violence. But this eye asks for the recognition behind the violence, of peace, where the lion lies down with the lamb. This doesn't mean the lion isn't going to eat the lamb. Of course he is going to eat the lamb. But it means nothing is happening when that happens. That's just a temporal thing, and you must realize the peace that lies behind that act. So we have the Buddha under the tree. His eyes have opened as a result of the influence of these other Buddhas. These are meditation Buddhas, Dhyani Buddhas. They are not historical Buddhas; they are subtle matter. It's through their influence that he comes to this knowledge. Ignorance is represented by a pig and is pierced by a lance. With the opening of the eye ignorance is wiped out. 

 

                  These are the subtle nerves, each one with a name. The word up here is pranayama, which means breath control. You breathe in and imagine the breath is filling all of these nerves, activating all the senses, all the organs of consciousness. We're going to be more and more conscious. That's the whole point. Demons or monsters are what inhibit consciousness. Many of the demons are our professors and teachers. They set up rules for how we should think, and they are not always helpful. So of this multitude of nerves there are three that are the most important. Here they are, and here are the seven centers. We have a central spine nerve, running up the center of the spine, called sushumna. And on each side is a side nerve.

 

The one that is here rendered gray is called ida and refers to lunar consciousness. This is the most important clue to the whole thing - lunar consciousness, consciousness that dies, as the moon does, and is resurrected. The serpent casts away its skin to be born again. So it represents the power of life, energy, and consciousness to throw off death. But it is in the field of death. It is consciousness in the field of death, throwing off death and putting on new bodies - reincarnation or the sequence of the generations. Every time a new generation is begotten, the death of this generation is thrown off and life has moved on. 

 

                  This throwing off of these bodies and putting on new is symbolic of life energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, the field of death and birth. The moon sheds its shadow to be born again. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again. They are symbolic of this power. 

 

                  The other nerve is called pin gala and represents solar consciousness. The sun does not die. When it sets it takes life with it. It does not carry death in itself. This is consciousness disengaged from the field of time. 

 

                  There are those who begin to feel so very spiritual. You run into them in ashrams. They walk a little above the ground. For them, life is vulgar. I'll never forget my experience the first time I was in an ashram, years and years ago. It was a beautiful place with deer grazing on the lawns and girls in saris on bridges looking down at the goldfish swimming in the pools. It was simply ravishing. Then some vulgarian came into the group. We thought, "How can we tolerate this gross body?" So when you think of your spiritual life as relieving you of the physical, you are going up this track. You are going to have a great disappointment somewhere along the line because your body is still there. This is known as manic-depressive experience. You've identified yourself with the subtle body, but you're still gross. You're trying to become immortal while you are still on earth. 

 

                  Jesus rejected the devil when the devil said, "Look, young man, you look hungry. Why don't you turn the

stones into bread?" Jesus said, "One lives not by bread alone, but by every word out of the mouth of God." Then the devil says, "I'll take you up onto a mountaintop and show you the kingdoms of the world. All you have to do is bow to me and you can rule these." This is how to become a politician. And Jesus says, "Get thee behind me, Satan." So the devil says, "Oh, you are so, so subtle. Let's go up on the top of Herod's temple. Now cast yourself down, God will bear you up.” And Jesus said, "No. I am still alive. I am still a body." This is the virtue known as temperance. "I am still a body. Get thee behind me, Satan." He rejects him three times and the third time is this one of having surpassed economics and politics. "You are just a spirit." "Not so." So Jesus is recognizing the gross body as well. 

 

                  Now people who don't know anything about the spiritual reference of symbols interpret them in gross matter and get involved in pretty gross activities. That is to say, it you interpret the spiritual symbol as concrete, then you get involved with the concrete action associated with the concrete body and you have lost the spiritual message. 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 light 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. 

 

                  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 India which we're going to find out a little bit about in following the Kundalini. Now, this is important, and it's of the same date, 2000 B.C. It is a libation cup of King Gudea of Lagash in Mesopotomia. Lagash was one of the important cities of Sumer during the Sumerian renaissance. Two lion birds, these are later known as cherubim, open the portals of a shrine. Within the shrine are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven centers formed from two interlocking serpents. This is the earliest appearance in the world, as far as we know, of the caduceus of Hermes/Mercury - the guide of souls to knowledge of immortal life. 

 

                  The cherubim who guard the gate of Paradise, the two cherubim that God placed at the gate to keep man away from the tree of immortal life, are now opening the portal. So you can go in, and there is the tree of life, under which the Buddha sat. And where is that tree? It's right in every one of us. So you don't have to go to Bodh-Gaya. However, if you are interpreting this whole thing purely materially, not spiritually, you will go to Bohh-Gaya. 

 

                  So now we start up the line. These centers are called in Sanskrit padmas (lotuses) or cakras (wheels). The c is transliterated from Sanskrit and pronounced as though it were ch. The first center, at the base of the body between the rectum and the sex organs - at the very root of the body - is called the muladhara (root base). The yoga posture that we saw before is the mulabandhasana, the binding posture, binding the mula. At this level the psyche is practically inert. It is just hanging on to life, and my mental image for this is dragons, which, as we know from biology, guard things in caves. The customs of the dragon have been studied for many millennia. They guard things in caves - beautiful virgins, symbols of Cakra 2, the cakra of sexuality; and heaps of gold, Cakra 3, possession and winning. They don't know what to do with either, but they simply guard. This is the condition of the whole psyche when the energy is bound up in the muladhara, no zeal for life, no positive action, only reaction. 

 

                  The psychology appropriate to this dull condition is that of behaviorism. You don't have an active psyche, only a reactive one. Nietzsche calls this position that of groveling before sheer fact. Actually, there's no such thing as sheer fact; it's the object for a subject. The attitude of the mind beholding the object is what changes the character and meaning of the fact. People who hang on like this we call creeps. They are exactly, you might say, the incarnation of the character of Cakra 1. Art on this level is simply sentimental naturalism. It has no breakthrough to the radiance. 

 

                  Here is a representation of Cakra 1. The rectangle is of the element earth, the grossest of the elements. In the center is a red triangle, the yoni. This is the womb, or the sex organ, of mother cosmos. We are within her womb. She is time-space, including a priori forms of sensibility and of the categories of knowledge. It is within that womb that we are. 

 

                  The lingam here, the male organ, represents the energy that breaks into that womb. Now this is interesting and important: the lingam represents the energy coming from the transcendent, coming into the womb, but the lingam is not antecedent to the womb, because there are no things; there are no pairs of opposites until you get within the womb. So this is a manner of symbolization that's proper to already being in time and space. There is no pair of opposites in the transcendent. It is neither male nor female. When we talk about brahman being the still energy and maya the active energy, we are talking in dualistic terms again. The transcendent is transcendent. It transcends all thinking. And so we can't think about it. As Heinrich Zimmer used to say, "The best things can't be said." This is why. "The second best are misunderstood." That's because the second best are using the objects of time and space to refer to transcendence. And so they are always misunderstood by being interpreted in terms of time and space. The third best is conversation. We're trying to use the second best now in order to talk about the first. 

 

                  So this is the symbol of the generating mystery of the universe. The central form here is the Sanskrit letter lam; when the yogi pronounces it, he's activating the energy of this center. 

 

                  In certain myths, elephants originally could fly and now are bound to the earth. The elephant here is bound to the earth, supporting the whole Kundalini. He has seven trunks and his name is Airavata. He is the cloud on which the god Indra rides. He is the Vedic counterpart of the classical Zeus, king of the gods. Now when Brahma the Creator opened the world egg out of which the whole universe came - we're talking mythologically; the Hindus don't think there was an egg that the god opened - out came nine elephants. One of them was Airavata. The other eight were in four pairs, and they went off to the four directions and supported the upper shell. So, the elephants are the caryatids of the universe. It's nice to go to a temple, knowing this thing about elephants, and see the elephants holding up the universe. They are clouds that have been condemned to this job. So when you see elephants walking along in the street all clothed and caparisoned, with howdahs on top, remember they're symbolic. You are in the presence of a meditation. 

 

                  There's a nice story about elephants. A student had just learned from his guru that he was divine. He was what God is. "I am God. Shivoham, I am Siva." Deeply meditating on this and wonderfully impressed by himself as God he goes out for a stroll down the street. As he's walking, here comes an elephant his way with a howdah with people up on top. The mahout, the elephant driver seated on the elephant's head, says, Get out of the way, you fool." The student thinks, "I am God, and the elephant is God. Should God get out of the way of God?" So that's the situation when the elephant comes upon him and simply wraps his trunk around him and tosses him off to the side. He's completely disheveled and psychologically greatly shocked. He goes back to his guru in this terrible shape. The guru sees him coming and says, "So what happened to you?" "Well," the student says, "an elephant threw me off the road. They were shouting for me to get out of the way, but I was in your meditation, what you told me, and I thought, I'm God and the elephant's God, should God get out of the way of God?" "Well," says the guru, "why didn't you listen to voice of God shouting at you to get out of the way?" That's the identification of the gross body with the subtle. 

 

                  Well, this is known as Sri Yantra. You've seen it, I'm sure, frequently. A yantra is a machine. It's from the verbal root yan, to help us do something. A yantra is a machine to help us meditate, a support for meditation. What you see in the very center is the triangle that we've just seen. Instead of having the lingam represented here, we're seeing it from above. This is called the bindu, the drop, the impact of the eternal energy in and on the field of time. When the field of time is struck, it breaks into pairs of opposites. So we always have pairs of opposites. 

 

                  I was in Japan and was taken to Nagasaki, where the second atom bomb was dropped. I was with a group of Japanese, and I must say I felt mortified, being an American, and responsible – remotely - for this horrific act. The extent of devastation was still evident. They have an enormous image just pointing up, exactly to the place from which the bomb came. My Japanese friends felt no malice, no sense of my being to blame. We had been enemies, pairs of opposites, two aspects of the same thing - beautiful. If you begin to think of things that way, it's the process of Brahman. 

 

                  There is a little meditation for meals of the Ramakrishna monks. It's right out of the Bhagavad-Gita. Brahman is the sacrifice, what is being killed. Brahman is the ladle of the sacrifice, the instrument through which the sacrifice takes place. Brahman is the fire of the sacrifice, that fire which then consumes the sacrifice. He who sees the operation of the Brahman in all things is on the way to realizing himself as a Brahman. So, the most horrible thing that can happen to you, or to your friends, is of Brahman. To see it, then, in the way of a sacrifice and the mystery of the process disengages you from the values of time and space and links you to this other thing: you yourself are simply a bubble, a wave on the rippling surface. 

 

                  A series of red petals represents the subtle body, a blue, the gross. And in medieval symbology we have the same colors. Mary, who represents the earthly mother, is always blue; and Christ, in her womb or born, is red. This is the blood of the savior, the subtle mystery. This is the carrier of it all. In your meditation you may think of these triangles as proceeding from the center; that's meditating on creation. You can also see them as going back to the center; that's a meditation on disillusion, or prayala. The universe comes and goes. Brahma opens his eyes and closes his eyes, and opens his eyes and closes his eyes. And so all the anxiety about the atom bomb? Meditate on disillusion, that's all. The whole world - not you alone - the whole world comes and goes and comes and goes. It's in the process. This doesn't mean that you mustn't go to work to stop atom bombs. This has

to do with relationship to the whole mystery in terms of its metaphysics and with your relationship to the mystery of being. So we can meditate now on disillusion. 

 

                  Christianity was born out of a meditation on disillusion. In the first centuries B.C. and A.D., the whole Jewish race was excited about the end of the world. The Dead Sea Scrolls tell us all about this. It was going to come. Christianity was born out of this. And then every thousand years the Christians think the world is going to end again. In the year 1000 there were people in France who gave their property to the church, to gain merit just before the end of the world. Some of their descendants are still in the courts, I understand, trying to get the land back. Now, of course, we're coming to the year 2000, so it's time to give it back again. People are meditating on the atom bomb and so forth, so this is a regular cycle in our culture - every thousand years, we have disillusion meditations.