From Psychology to Spirituality;  Kundalini Yoga, Part II

 

I was awakened recently by the ringing of the Angelus, which rings nine times and then nine times again. What it is talking about when it rings is the conception of the Christ Child - the pouring of eternal energy into the field of time. That's what the Angelus is. That's what the 108 names of the goddess is. It's all one story. 

 

                  When I was in Kashmir, I came upon a ruined temple and in the middle of it there was a yoni, the symbol of the female organ. In a temple devoted to the goddess, this is the altar. I later went into one such temple with some Indian friends. We brought offerings of fruit and such, and the priest took some of the red powder that women wear on their foreheads and sprinkled it into the yoni, reciting the 108 names of the goddess. And 108 times 4 is 432, the number of years in the cycle of time. The goddess is the cycle of time. She is time. She is the womb.

 

                  The lingam is the male energy of the god. So these are the two symbols of the ultimate energies, the male and female energies, both of which come into separation in the field of time, and neither of which exists transcendent of time. But that which breaks them into the field of time is the female power. So the goddess in this mythology is the high power. In this figure from China, there are one, two, three-and-a-half turns of the serpent power. That's exactly the kundalini. The figure is in bronze, from the period of the contending states,  which puts it around the fifth century B.C., the time of Confucius. This is earlier than any indication of the kundalini in the symbolism of India. A similar serpent is pictured in a basket, the sacred object of the goddess Isis, from Rome, about A.D. 50, the period of Caligula. Again, the serpent is related to the moon: the serpent sheds its skin, the moon sheds its shadow. So you can see that what I'm talking about covers the whole of Eurasia, all the way from Rome to China. But it's only in India that it was brought to full expression and

elucidation through the experiences and analyses of these yogic masters.

 

                  Let's look back at the representation of Cakra 1. In the upper-right corner is the Hindu God of creation, Brahma, who sits on the lotus that grows from Vishnu's navel. There is his consort Sarasvati. Here is a beautiful representation from Aihole, from about the fifth century, of Brahma the Creator. He's not really the creator because he's sitting on a lotus. “that is to say, the world has already come into being. But what he represents, in these four faces, is the throwing of the light of consciousness out over the field of being, which the lotus represents. Now the lotus is female. This is the goddess herself.”

 

                  With respect to worship, Brahma holds the ladle of public worship – sacrifice - and the rosary of private

meditation. Those are the two ways of approaching the god. What you get from the god is the knowledge of immortality-the elixir of the knowledge of immortality is in the jar. And you receive boons from the god of

harmonious life. 

 

                  At his right knee is a gander, the wild goose, which is at home on the land, in the water, and in the high air. Consequently he is symbolic of the spirit of the lord of the three worlds and informs all of the worlds. The word for gander in Sanskrit is hamsa. When you breathe in you hear ham, when you breathe out you hear sa.

Your very breath is telling you all the time you are that hamsa. When you hear it not as ham-sa, but as sa-ham, it means, "I am that." This is meditation on the breath. Every breath is telling you that what you really are is this spirit that informs the universe. Roundabout are the Rhishis, the saints, in rapture at the very knowledge of the being of Brahma. 

 

                  A favorite of mine depicts the bird of the spirit of the breath holding the nine elephants - the nine elephants that support the wworld. They represent the gross power, and the subtle power supports them. So we've dealt with muladhara. 

 

                  We move up now to Cakra 2, svadhisthana, which means "her favorite resort," her favorite standing place. This is the sex organs. At this cakra the psychology is transformed. It is no longer behaviorism but, rather, the psychology of Dr. Freud. Everything is exciting. Sex is the aim of life. Everything is coming up roses. The birds are singing. The bells are ringing for me and my gal. 

 

                  The frustrations of sex are also to be recognized here. If the frustrations are continuous, then one turns one's mind to something else, and civilization comes into being. This is what is known as sublimation. 

 

                  Here is a representation of Cakra 2,

and we can see the symbology of the world associated with the psychology of this cakra. In the inner field is a crescent moon. The moon is governor of the tides of life. The whole sex thing is the tide of life; when the moon is full, people are lunatics for sex. The dogs bark, the coyotes howl, and I'm told that the crabs come out and dance on the beach. Within the crescent is a makara, the symbolic animal of the Ganges, the goddess Ganga. The pouring of the waters of the Ganges is this energy, the erotic source of life and of excitement and of being in the world. But Ganga is not the only source. In the Vedic pantheon the god Varuna represents the rhythm of the rolling heavens. In the night sky you can see it moving, and that rhythm is the rhythm of the universe and is of Varuna. The Hindu deity of this cakra is Vishnu, who is associated with the erotic. We see him here, wearing a yellow garment, and he is essentially in an erotic mood. 

 

                  The incarnation of Vishnu in this aspect that is the favorite in India is Krishna. He who fell in love with

Radha, a little married woman. We're breaking past ethics here. This is the love of God for the world, eternity in

love with the forms of time. God falls utterly in love with Radha. 

 

                  There's a beautiful, very voluptuous, poem about this called the Gita-Govinda ("The Song of the Cow-

herd"), composed by a young Brahmin who was in love with the daughter of his guru and saw himself as Krishna and her as Radha. He writes of his love as Krishna informing him, Krishna's love animating his own love.

It is a long, rich, very human and yet divine work. The date for this poem is the twelfth century, about 1170 to

1180, the dates for the Tristan romance in Europe. The whole theme of this "rule-breaking erotics," which

underlies the courtly love tradition, belongs to exactly the same century in India. In Japan you have Lady Murasaki's Genji, which is about a century earlier and again in the erotic mood. It is through sheer Cakra 2 experience that one can come to divine realization. This is the Vaishnava tradition-the tradition associated with Vishnu-which is of this erotic mode, the way of love. Christ also is love. His love brings him to death on the cross. He is a kind of Vaishnavite incarnation. There are many such parallels between Christianity and Vaishnavism. 

 

                  There are five orders of love. The earliest and lowest and simplest, for people who are principally interested in something else, is that of master and servant, the servant for the master. "O Lord, you are the master, I the servant. Give me rules to live by and I will live by them. I will do your will." This is for people who are engaged in the activities of life without much time for religious thought. That's about the level on which they worship. You get a heavy dose of this rule-giving principle in the Old Testament with the Book of Laws, and so forth - rules, rules, rules by which God subjugates you. 

 

                  The second order of love is that of friend for friend. With the friend you are thinking of him more. This is the order in India of the Pandavas, the boys of the Mahabharata and Krishna. It is the order in the Christian tradition of the apostles of Christ. They are close in, they can ask questions, they are thinking of him more, and they come to realizations. 

 

                  The third order of love is that of parent for child, where the deity is the child. Thiis is the order of the Christmas crib. It's the order of the love in the Hindu tradition for the little naughty boy Krishna, the butter thief,

and so forth. This represents the birth of the spiritual life in your heart. It is just born, it's a tender child. It must be fostered. Now where do you find it? A woman came to Ramakrishna and said, "I find that I do not love God.

The concept does not move me." Ramakrishna asked her, "Is there nothing in the world that you do love?" And she said, "Yes, I love my little nephew." He said, "There he is." 

 

                  There's recognition of the divine in the activities of life. This is good Hinduism, it's good Tantra, it's good Buddhism. Going to temple is quite secondary. Our religious life is here and now. This is the idea that Eliot was trying to incorporate in The Cocktail Party, that is, the ritual, the relationship; for it's through relationship - this is the Confucian idea, too, of relationship, person to person - that the Tao is realized. 

 

                  Then we come to the fourth order of love, marriage, spouse for spouse. The Hindus make much more of the woman's relationship to the husband than of his relationship to her. But the principle is: In the life of marriage and the life together of two people, this is the ritual field. You say, "I do not love God." But there she is, your wife. 

 

                  The highest order of love is where there is nothing but love - mad, engaged, illicit, careless of the rules of the world, a breakthrough into the transcendent. This is the comparable experience to that of saving somebody at the risk of your own life. Passion, impulse has taken over to such extent that the world has dropped off. This is the idea of courtly love. And believe me, this was a risk in those days, because the punishment for adultery was death. 

 

                  We've seen these Apsaras, the heavenly dancers riding on the thighs and legs of the heavenly musicians, soaring in rapturous love. We have examples of this on our roads all over the country.  The motorcycle couples, cruising along, are perfect incarnations of these Apsaras. 

 

                  So we come to Cakra 3, manipura, at the level of the navel. Manipura means "City of the Shining Jewel." Here the energy is aggressive: to conquer, to consume, to turn everything into one-self. We have an Adlerian psychology at this point, a total transformation. One of the problems in the early Freud camp was already recognized here. For Freud, sex was the prime energy; for Adler, it was the will to power. For some people it is one, for some the other. Jung comes in as these two are fighting this thing out and says, "Yes, there are people running this way; there are also people running that way. All of us have both. One is recessive and the other dominant in any given case." So he had this psychology of the duality in what he called enantiodromia; you tip over and your sex drive suddenly gives way to a violence drive. Or your winning drive suddenly gives way to sex. They are in opposition to each other in our lives. 

 

                  So Cakra 3 is a primarily power-dominated cakra, and the Sanskrit here is very important. This is the one from which most of the energies have to be generated. Look at this ominous lotus. The petals are described as having the color of lightning-laden thunderclouds. In the center is the womb, the yoni-fire, energy. The swastika motif means movement, energy, violence. The syllable is ram, and the animal is a ram. He represents the vehicle of the god of fire, Agni, the fire of the womb, the fire of the sun, the fire of the sacrificial altar. These are all the same fire. They are the transforming fire. The womb is the transforming medium, transforming past into future. The gods here are Shiva, in his violent aspect, and his consort, Lakini, her jaws and breasts smeared with the blood and fat of sacrifices. 

 

                  Now we get to the deep stuff. Kali is in her Durga aspect. But she is as black time, Kali. Kali means "black"; kali means "time." That's her name. She is black time out of which all things come, back into which they go-the void, the transcendent, the mother and tomb of all things. "Don't be afraid. Nothing's happening, just a

ripple on the surface." Her prime altar is the battlefield, sacrifice. This is the yoga of war. The individual gives himself up to the Lord Death and is not in protection of himself but is moved by the tides of history. 

 

                  People living on the levels of Cakras 1, 2, or 3 are living on animal levels. Animals, too, cling to life. Animals, too, beget their future. Animals, too, fight to win. So people on these levels have to be controlled by social law, dharma. Just think of what our popular religions are concerned with - prayers for health, wealth, progeny, and victory. That is asking the gods to serve your animal nature. This is popular religion. It doesn't matter what the god's name is. I'll never forget being in Mexico City at the church of the Virgin of Guadalupe. There were swarms of people; and the women, holding their little babies, had traveled on their knees from blocks away to thank the Virgin for their healthy infants. The last time I had seen anything quite like that was at Pun, at the Temple of the Juggernaut. It was the same kind of popular religiosity. And I thought, What is it the popular world wants? It's health, wealth, and progeny, and it doesn't matter what the god's name is. So that's the one religion, the one popular religion all over the world, no matter what the name of the god is. The job of the priests, those in charge of the historical temple, is to get the name of their god linked up with this thing, and the money pours in like crazy. 

 

                  Think of the first temptations of the Buddha: the temptation of lust, Cakra 2; temptation of fear, Cakra 3; and the temptation of duty, dharma. He had gone past this. We're not in the field of authentic religious life, in the field of the spiritual birth, until we come up to Cakra 4. This is at the level of the heart - the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Jesus, as Leopold Bloom says in Ulysses, "with his heart on his sleeve." 

 

                  Cakra 4 is anahata, which means "not hit." Ana~ is "not." Hata is "hit." What this refers to is the sound that is not made by any two things striking together. The sound of my voice, any sound you hear, is made by two things striking together. The voice is air striking the vocal cords. What is the sound that is not made by any two things

striking together? It is om. It is the sound of the energy of the universe of which all things are manifestations. The energy is what underlies all the forms- F-MC2 - and the sound of that energy is said to be om. 

 

                  Now om can be written in Roman letters either as o-m or a-u-m; o in Sanskrit is analyzed into a and U. It is the four-element syllable: a, oo, mm, and the silence out of which om comes and back into which it goes. The Indians will always recognize that ground in silence, in the infinite, in transcendent, in the void. Om, pronounced, starts in the back of the mouth, a then fills the mouth cavity, ooo, then closes the lips, mmm. When properly pronounced, you have made all the noises, and so all words are simply fragments of om. Just as all the images of the broken forms of the world are fragments of the form of forms, so all words are fragments of om. Om is the sound of the radiance of God. 

 

                  Om is discussed in a very interesting two-page Upanishad, Mandukya, in terms of its four elements, the four stages. A is associated with waking consciousness, the gross bodies of the forms in which we dwell, and of which we are one. Here, I am not you, you are not I, and a duality prevails, an Aristotelian logic. A is not Not-A. Aristotle's logic is the logic of waking consciousness carried right through, and he's not letting anything else break in there. Gross bodies are not self-luminous. They have to be illuminated from without. Oo is of dream. When you dream, you are surprised by your dream, and yet the dream is you. You as subject are surprised by yourself as object. You seem to be two, you and your dream, but you are one. So subject and object, though they seem to be two, are the same. I and you are the same. This is the breakthrough of the metaphysical realization that the two that seem to be separate are really one. This is the midway point to transcendence, realizing the relationship as identity. The objects of dream are subtle objects, self-radiant, changing form rapidly - dream, vision, god. The gods and heavens and hells are what might be called the cosmic aspect of dream. The dream is the personal aspect of myth. Dream and myth are of the same order. They are of the order of oo, dream consciousness. You and your god are one, just as you and your dream are. But your god isn't my god, so don't try to push it on me. Every one has his own being and consciousness. 

 

                  The third order then is mmm, which is deep, dreamless sleep. Consciousness is there. The heart is ticking. The body will respond to heat and cold. But waking consciousness, the aham consciousness, the ego-consciousness, is not in touch with pure consciousness. It is wiped out by darkness. The goal of yoga is to bring your waking consciousness into that field of mmm, awake. Then what it will experience is undifferentiated consciousness, not the consciousness of any thing, but that primary consciousness to which we are trying to "yoga," to link, our waking consciousness. That's what we're talking about. 

 

                  The deity in the Sanskrit system representative of this is Shiva as the dancer. Look at the shape here, the arms and the head. And then look at om. In other words, while looking at the image of Shiva, you are hearing the syllable om, the sound of the radiance. Now, when lecturing to Methodists about graven images, I tell them this is a permanent meditation. It's not idolatry. You're not idolizing this image; it's the opening to the radiance. Shiva helps you go through Shiva, you don't stop with him. He dances on the little dwarf Forgetfulness, is fascinated by the serpent of the world and ignorant of the fact of this weight on his back, just as we all are. But Shiva is right there, waiting for us to recognize him. 

 

                  Cakra 4 is the heart cakra. This is the cakra of this transformation. The little foyer is the foyer of the wish-fulfilling tree. As the energies and as the illumination begin to approach this breakthrough, one has the feeling, "All my wishes are about to be realized." And they are. The crucial thing here is the center, where again we have the yoni. The last time we saw it with the lingam within it was at Cakra 1. But this is the golden lingam-yoni of the virgin birth. This is the yoni of the birth of the spiritual as opposed to the merely physical life, a new trajectory of ideas that no animal can have. With the notion of a spiritual life, the first three cakras fall into a secondary position. People can go so far, as I said, going up that pingala, line, as to reject altogether their bodies which have fallen into a secondary place. The problem is to come to this realization through the body, so

that it's in the body that the spiritual life is realized. The animal here is an antelope, or a gazelle, which is the

vehicle of Prana, the Lord of the Wind, the breath. This is the place where breath takes over and is in charge. 

 

                  Two triangles form the six-pointed star. The first represents aspiration. You have heard the syllable om resounding through all things. You don't have to go anywhere, it's here, it's here. Om. That's the sense of the

inward-turned meditation. "I've got it within me. The fire is here, it's there, but I don't have to go there to capture

it. I am there in this." The experience of the sound of om is ubiquitous. And now you want to hear the sound

directly, not simply through things, but directly. That is the aspiration, then, of spiritual striving. The lower triangle pointing down is inertia, physical inertia. 

 

                  So now we are going to have a system of symbols of trying to put down the inertia system, the cravings of the mere physical body, so that a spiritual realization and amplification can be realized, and the energy can be carried on up. That's the center of transformation. 

 

                  The next, Cakra 5, is visuddha. The word means "purgation," the purging of the merely animal, physical system. Or rather, not purging it so much as sublimating it, making it open up, so that through its experiences the transcendent can be experienced. Cakra 5 is at the throat. The petals are of the same dark, threatening color as those of Cakra 3. In other words, and here's the whole secret, the energy that was formerly projected out to conquering others is now turned back against yourself. This is called the turning about of the shakti. The shakti, your energy, is not facing outward anymore, but facing inward. These representations of the Yab-Yum, the male deity in embrace with the female, are the turning about of the shakti. It's all right here. They say that God created the world in order to enjoy himself, and the world must turn toward him. So there we are. 

 

                  We had the red fiery yoni in Cakra 3. Here it is of ether, and our elephant has come on up. The syllable is ham. Having come to Cakra 4, we've taken the energy of Cakra 3 and pulled it up to Cakra 5, against ourselves. 

 

                  We have the deity putting down the physical man. That's the sense of these things in Tibet and China and Japan, wherever we have Mahayana. The necklace of severed heads means "We're cutting off the body." We have weapons and the flower of the new life that comes from having killed the old. 

 

                  Our highest god is our highest obstruction. It represents the consummation of the highest thoughts and

feelings you can have. Go past that. Meister Eckhart says, "The ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of god [that

is to say, the folk god] for god [that is to say, the elementary idea]." This breakthrough is very difficult. In her

hand is the head of Brahma, the creator of the world. We're going past that, and all its values. 

 

                  Kali also appears with nine elephants on her shashlick, impaled human beings on her tusks, and her

hand raised in the abhaya mudra, meaning "Do not be afraid." We address her thus as "Our dear Mother." Shiva is sometimes represented with five heads, the five senses brought to a point. 

 

                  And so through our effort, we have come to the vision of God, Cakra 6, ajna, "authority or power." The soul beholds its object. What has happened? We have a two-petaled lotus, the soul and its god, Jiva and Ishvara. The goddess Hakini, on the soul of her own love, is the dominant figure here. This is Maya with six heads. The sixth head is mind. In her six hands are the tick of time, "do not be afraid," meditation, the scriptures, "boon-bestowing," and the severed head of the creator of the world. The energy of Cakra 3 was brought to Cakra 5. Through its exercise we've broken through, and the energy of love, of Cakra 2, is now experienced in its sublime form of love for God. 

 

                  When Dante beheld Beatrice, it was in the way not of Cakra 2 but of Cakra 6. He saw her not as an object of lust but as a manifestation of the beauty of God's grace and love for the world. Through contemplating her in that way he was brought to the throne of final realization. That's what we have taking place here. 

 

                  High on a wall at Elephanta Cave is a representation of Shiva as the bindu, as the drop striking the field of time, breaking into the pairs of opposites: Cakra 3, aggression, Cakra 2, erotics, male and female, pairs of opposites in all the aspects. 

 

                  Now comes the final event, Cakra 7, sahasrara. The soul beholds God, but the aim of the mystic is to be one with its beloved. "I and the father are one" (John 10:30). Halaj, the great Sufi mystic, describes the situation this same way. Ramakrishna says, “When you behold god you are not god." There is a pane of glass between. The soul beholds its object, but the goal is to be one with that. How can we break through? How can we remove that barrier and join soul and God? We're beyond pairs of opposites.  

 

                  Halaj says the situation is like that of a moth seeing at night a lantern, and it wants to get to the flame. But the glass keeps it out. It batters itself all night long, and then goes to its friends in the morning and tells them what a wonderful thing it has just seen. They say, "You don't look the better for it." This is the condition of the yogi, the ascetic knocking himself to pieces to get through. The moth goes back the next night and, by luck or device, does break through. For an instant he has achieved his goal and is the flame. That instant is an eternal instant beyond time and space. That is the goal here, to remove the barrier. Bang! 

 

                  In Cakra 7, sahasrara, the serpent becomes one with the thousand-petaled lotus at the crown of the head. Sahasrnra means "thousand petaled." In the center all we see are two footprints. These are the footprints of Vishnu, which are to be worshiped. Why do we have footprints here? We thought we had broken through. They are symbols, and words can act as barriers. We can get stuck with the footprints, or we can pass through. There's a saying that appears both in Lao-tzu's work and in the Upanishads. "Those who know do not speak. And those who speak do not know." That's hard for one giving a lecture, but it's a warning that we've

got to go past the footprints. 

 

                  Cakras 4, 5, 6, and 7 appear on a ninth-century stone cross in Northern Ireland. As early as the fourteenth century B.C. in Egypt, 1, 2, and 3 are depicted at the weighing of the heart against a feather. The monster has his nose right between Cakras 3 and 4. If the spiritual wins, then Thot is the victor, and he is in charge of Cakras 4, 5, 6, and 7. 

 

                  So we come to the final problem. What is this thing between Cakra 6 and Cakra 7? At 6, from Brahma down to the blade of grass, all is pairs of opposites. This is called maya, which is, as it were, the womb. It's from a root, ma, which means "to measure forth." So she is the one that creates all pairs of opposites, creates both the lingam and the yoni. Above that, there is neither you nor God. There is nothing of the kind. The whole universe is the goddess. We are here, hell is down there, heaven is up there. How do you go to hell? You make your ego system harder and harder and harder and are stuck with it. Hell is the place of peopIe stuck on themselves. How do you get to heaven? Open and open and open until finally all is transpersonal. 

 

                  Shiva is the god, creating the world. Shave means "corpse." The corpses in India, when they are about to be burned, are clothed in a yellow garment. Monks wear the yellow garment, meaning "I am a corpse. I have

cut myself off from the world." 

 

                  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven. If we stay up there the body drops off, and we are released from life. The ideal, from the point of view of someone interested in life, is to come back to the heart where the two are together, to Cakra 4, where we realize that the energy of Cakra 3 has functioned at 5, the energy of 2 at 6, and the energy of 1 at 7. Thus we know how to translate our earthly experience into the spiritual exercise.

Cakra 3 - what we are to conquer is ourselves and our attachment and go off to the war. Cakra 2 - through our human love we are to experience the radiance of eternity. 

 

                  The Buddha functions from the heart center. The energy comes right from the heart center. When the Buddha says "No" to the tempter, his hand is in the earth-touching posture. But when he has experienced what is to be experienced, his hand turns around and bestows boons. And so the Buddha returns to bestow boons, returns from his austerities to teach. The lord of the universe himself bows to and embraces himself as the universe, the goddess. So that's the lesson of the Kundalini.