Aghora II: Kundalini

So long as the urge toward individuation is mainly directed toward benefiting your own limited temporary individual self it is called ahamkara, or egoism, the force which makes it possible for you to unquestioningly accept the world as it is on the surface. This same force is called Kundalini when it turns away from the mundane and toward the spiritual, the permanent and eternal. After Kundalini awakes it becomes impossible to continue believing that external reality is the sole reality. Ahamkara makes you who you are now; Kundalini makes you into what you will become.

Kundalini has remained secret for so long because, as Jung notes, it cannot be understood; it can only be experienced. The process of spiritual evolution cannot be objectified and separated from the subject who evolves, for Kundalini functions simultaneously as descriptive consciousness, as the thing described, and as its description. Since human language is made up of subjects and objects, descriptions of Kundalini tend to be skewed, either toward objective comment on the experience, which devitalizes it, or toward description of the raw subjective experience itself, which is usually distorted by the experiencer’s mental imbalances, stresses and fantasies.

Among the writers who have made valuable contributions to the literature on Kundalini are Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon), an Englishman who was initiated into Tantra while serving as a judge in India; and Gopi Krishna, a Kashmiri Pandit who suffered terrifying consequences when his own Kundalini was awakened before he knew how to deal with it. While neither perfectly conveys Kundalini’s incomprehensible secrets, since their words get in their way, here and there in inspired passages Kundalini’s radiance flashes momentarily through, like lightning through a somber sky.

These accounts succeed, albeit partially, because their information has not been lifted out of context. Kundalini can be understood solely within the context of Indian culture. But ever since the time of the early Theosophists most Western interpreters of Kundalini, unfortunately, in order to import into their own systems of psychology concepts which they believe to be Tantric, have not hesitated to assign to Tantric words denotations which often vary significantly from their original meanings. Jung himself borrowed concepts from Kundalini Yoga, including the very concept of Kundalini, which he called the anima, and so he bears some of the blame for this situation. At least he was more forthright than are most distorters of Kundalini:

One needs a great deal of psychology in order to make these matters palatable to the Western mind, and unless we try hard and dare to commit many errors in assimilating it to our Westernmentality, we simply get poisoned. For these symbols have a terribly clinging tendency. They catch the unconscious somehow and cling to us. But they are a foreign body in our system—corpus alienum—and they inhibit the natural growth and development of our own psychology. It is like a secondary growth or poison. Therefore one has to make really heroic attempts to master these

things, to stand up against these symbols, in order to deprive them

of their influence. Perhaps you cannot fully realize what I say, but

take it as a hypothesis—though it is more than a hypothesis. It is

a truth I have seen too often how dangerous their influence may be. (Jung, p. 9)