2) Kundalini Experience

[Excerpts from case histories and personal reports]

Case #10: Female Librarian

This woman, now in her mid-fifties, had been a meditator in her own
style for many years. One day, in 1968, she lost awareness while meditating
with her hands on a table. She awoke to find char marks on the table
corresponding to her hand prints. She had the table refinished before I
could examine it. No heat manifestation of this kind ever happened again.
Because she did not show a regular progression of symptoms, I regarded her
as a possible case of arrested physio-kundalini.
In 1969 she acquired a "psychic guide," which she found very useful
in her daily life. Three years later she became involved in the study of
the dreams and drawings of children and even completed an impressive
manuscript on this theme. With this newfound interest, the intervention of
her guide has ceased.

Case #11: Male Writer-Psychic

This forty-year-old, who is a productive writer and successful wood
sculptor, had been meditating for two years when he began to experience
heat sensations. During one such episode he took his oral temperature with
an electronic thermometer: It read 101 degrees Fahrenheit, but dropped
within a minute or two to 99 degrees. A short time later, his hand
temperature was 104 degrees. He was not ill.
Around the same time, he started to experience spontaneous trance
states. During these he would receive information psychically, some of
which was confirmed. He came to my attention because of marital
difficulties brought on by his trance states. I encouraged him to learn to
enter a light trance at will, and his spontaneous trance states stopped.
The physical signs of this man were similar to those of the
preceding two cases. His personality and orientation were similar to those
of the librarian. He made no connections to traditional methods of
meditation, though he did study briefly with a curandero healer not unlike
Carlos Castaneda's (1968) Don Juan. He was more attracted to psychic
phenomena and powers than to what C. G. Jung called the "inner dialogue."
This may partially explain his being overpowered by trance states. Jung has
repeatedly emphasized that, unless hidden inner drives are somehow dealt
with in dreams or through some form of inner dialogue, they will manifest
obliquely, in autonomous ways that can cause emotional and physical
difficulties.

Case #12: Male Artist-Healer

This man, now in his late thirties, remembers his earliest psychic
experiences as being lucid dreams in childhood. During one such dream, he
saw his "double" pick up the bed clothes, which had fallen off, and hand
them to him. He was frightened by the vividness of the experience.
Aged twenty-two, he began to practice Transcendental
Meditation. He had many insights and achieved much tension release. But
then he made such rapid progress in meditation that, lacking proper
guidance, he started to have anxiety attacks during his sittings. Once he
had a vision of white light and lost consciousness. Just preceding this
vision, he experienced a flow of energy that started in his abdomen and
proceeded to his back, up to his neck, and then to the back of his head,
where it burst into brilliant light. He also felt heat in his abdomen and
head.
Subsequently, hissing and roaring sounds occurred during his
meditations. As his anxiety grew worse, he shifted to Zen meditation and
found some relief. Then he experienced another vision of white light. Next
he went abroad with his family, visiting several psychic healers. He had
"psychic surgery" for lifelong migraine headaches and since then has had no
recurrences. Members of his family were likewise healed of a number of
chronic disorders.
He was so impressed with psychic healing that he returned to
film one of the healers. Shortly before his return he began to have
precognitive visions. In the end he decided to apprentice with one of the
healers. For two years he learned all he could about psychic healing and
found that he became more and more successful at it. He would experience
energy flows and clairvoyantly sense a person's malady, healing friends and
acquaintances whenever the opportunity presented itself. His artistic work
started to flourish.
At first he was quite unsure of his newly acquired abilities. His
old anxiety returned for a while, but subsided when he saw several persons
recover from serious illnesses after his healing work with them. Throughout
this time he continued to practice meditation, and he would occasionally
experience some tingling in his cheeks and along both sides of his nose.

Case #15: Housewife

This woman, now in her late thirties, began Transcendental
Meditation in the mid-70s. She quickly developed tingling and occasional
stocking-type numbness in her left foot and leg. When her mother-in-law
moved into the house with her and her husband, the symptoms grew worse; she
got a stiff leg and developed foot drop. She went for medical help, and a
myelogram was done. Subsequently the symptoms increased, and she was put on
cortisone. She was told by her neurologist that she might never recover
full use of her leg. This severely depressed her, and she became almost
nonfunctional. It was at this time that she came to my attention.
This woman had an extraordinarily sensitive nervous system, and
was clearly in the early stages of the physio-kundalini cycle. Her worry
about the prognosis and the effect of the cortisone treatment had led to
pain and stiffness in her back and legs. Once her symptoms were correctly
identified as resulting from an awakened kundalini, her full recovery was
guaranteed. Today, with ten more years of experience with similar cases, I
would say that some slight residual impairment of function is not unusual.

Case #16: Housewife

In 1972 this woman, who was then in her mid-fifties, experienced
the onset of an intense and disturbing process. She suddenly felt that
something was descending over her head. Indira Devi (see Roy and Devi 1974)
described in almost identical words this experience, which happened during
her first meditation and which was soon followed by a spontaneous kundalini
awakening. In the case of our woman, this feeling or sensation was followed
by a fainting spell.
This pattern recurred several times. Remarkably, she was never groggy after
regaining awareness, as might be expected with a convulsive disorder.
Physicians were unable to give her any relief.
Then, one time, she heard a voice saying inside her head: "Are
you ready?" Later she heard internal music. One day she was feeling well
until late in the afternoon when the base of her left big toe started to
ache. Soon the pain extended up her shin, and she could feel the workings
of her knee ioint. The pain was intermittent but disabling. She spent a few
days in bed, where she spontaneously assumed many yogic poses.
Several days later, her body felt "worked on" from the toes up
the back in segments. This process was accompanied by pain on both sides of
her nose and by waves of energy and tingling sensations up her neck and
down her face. There was also the sensation of intense heat in her back,
and she experienced severe viselike pressure around her head. During some
of these energy flows she was forced to breathe in a sighing manner.
Occasionally there were torsional whipping movements of her head and neck,
and once the energy moved down into her head, causing her scalp to get cold
and her face to get hot.
Over a period of about three years, she slowly became convinced
that she had been selected by God to be born anew as an advanced human
being. Thus she yielded to the tendency that Jung (1975) had warned
against: that of claiming this impersonal force as her own ego creation
and, as a result, of falling into the trap of ego inflation and false
superiority. She expected others to understand exactly what she was
speaking about and to accept her word unquestioningly, and she grew
distrustful of anyone who disagreed with her interpretations. This woman
has never submitted to the discipline of regular meditation, and was also
not interested in any help I had to offer.

Male Psychiatrist

This middle-aged man is a practicing Jungian analyst in whom the
kundalini process was triggered through body work. Here is his account of
his encounter with this great force.

Following medical school in the late 1950s, I embarked upon a
psychiatric career that was first channeled through a conservative, mostly
Freudian residency. Next followed six years of personal psychoanalysis.
During this time I accepted reductive interpretations of numerous religious
dreams as well as what I later discovered to be bona fide telepathic
dreams, which intruded into my analyst's personal life. These latter dreams
created some unsettling moments in this overly rational analysis.
During the final year of this analysis, C. G. Jung began appearing
in my dreams, and I soon discovered his three-dimensional view of the
psyche.
Once solidly engaged in my personal Jungian analysis and in
training as a candidate at the local Jungian Institute, my dreams began
beckoning me to explore the realm of body awareness.
My entrance into this work was accompanied by great skepticism. I
had shunned readings and discussions in this area. Still influenced by the
dogmatic pronouncements of one of my professors that Wilhelm Reich's
writing on the armoring of the body occurred during his psychotic phase, I
was very wary. Yoga and other Eastern practices and philosophies were
likewise suspect to me, and I had never paid any serious attention to them.
Utter surprise overtook me about six months into this body work
(which consisted in deep breathing and extremely slow movements of small
segments of the body) when the areas around my eyes started convulsive-like
activities. After each bout of this automatic muscular activity, I
experienced a gentle vibratory sensation that grew more intense and
pleasurable as time passed.
Gradually section after section of my body underwent similar
movements, with the throat area being the last affected.
The pleasurable vibrating sensations gradually increased, and it
took time to develop my tolerance for this pleasure. But there were also
painful experiences. For several months intense heat radiated from my
abdomen making it too uncomfortable for my partner to sleep close to me.
When the vibrations began entering my head, I suffered three months of
headaches and fears that I would become psychotic.
Over the course of seven years, these totally autonomous
vibrations gradually came under the control of my ego. Presently I can tune
in to the vibrations simply by closing my eyes and by directing the energy
into any energy center, or cakra, desired.
Numerous benefits have accrued through this long process. I am able to
experience total bodily pleasure, which is in fact a meditation experience.
I can free myself from stress almost immediately, distract myself from
physical pain, and recharge my energy supply when depleted.
In the beginning, when the energy in my head provided me with a
wonderful high, I would overindulge and find myself with a hangover effect
the next day. Greed in this area also extracts a price--a refractory period
of dysphoria.
My dreams often gave me directions on how to use the energy and
they also warned me about dangerous pitfalls ahead. I was fortunate to be
in analysis with an analyst who understood this process and the symbolic
dream material.
During some of these periods of intensive energy activity,
several patients reported similar activities in their own bodies in my
presence.
Reflecting on the twelve years since my first experience of this
inner energy, I feel I have been blessed to have experienced the unfolding
and constant refinement of the kundalini force in my life. In the most
uncanny ways I find myself attracted to strangers who, I discover
afterward, have undergone profound body awareness work that has opened them
up to a deeper spiritual awakening and a more meaningful life. I have the
sense that this process is ongoing and I await further developments.

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[From section on symptoms]

Detachment. The individual undergoing the physio-kundalini process may feel
that he or she is observing, from a distance, his or her own thoughts,
feelings, and sensations. This witnessing consciousness differs from mere
aloofness or anxious withdrawal inasmuch as the observer-self experiences
itself in opposition to the observed mental activities. This condition is
hinted at, for instance, in the Sufi expression "the fire of separation"
and in the concept of the "seer" (drashtri) of the Yoga [Sutras] of
Patanjali. This condition does not commonly interfere with the individual's
normal functioning.

Dissociation. The state of detachment, or the witnessing consciousness, is
attained through the withdrawal of the self from identification or active
involvement with its associated mental processes. This detached disposition
can be imbalanced when deep psychological resistances, fear, confusion, or
social and other environmental pressures are present. In that case, the
disposition of detachment may be accompanied by, or result in, hysteria or
a state akin to schizophrenia. Also, the person may become egotistically
identified with the physio-kundalini process, leading, for instance, to the
delusion that he or she has been divinely chosen for some great mission.
Imbalances of this kind can usually be overcome in time and through a
supportive environment.

Single Seeing. This phenomenon can be easily identified as a distinct state
by the typical and graphic metaphors used by those who have had this
experience. For example, in his remarkable autobiography, Swami Muktananda
(1971) referred to it in the following words:

My eyes gradually rolled up and became centered on the
akasha [space] of sahasrara [crown center] . . . Now instead of
seeing separately, they saw as one. (p. 132)

In a lecture given in February of 1976, he described a state in which his
eyes seemed turned equally inward and outward, "seeing" both inner and
outer landscapes.
The artist whose case I related in Chapter 6 reported that her
"eyes seemed to move separately and the pupils felt like holes which bored
into my head and met in the center." Flora Courtois (1970), a modern
mystic, wrote of her own experience thus:

My sight had changed, sharpened to an infinitely small point
which moved ceaselessly in paths totally free of the old accus-
tomed ones, as if flowing from a new source . . . It was as if some
inner eye, some ancient center of awareness which extended
equally and at once in all directions without limit and which had
been there all along, had been restored. This inner vision seemed
to be focused on infinity in a way that was detached from
immediate sight and yet had a profound effect on sight.
(pp. 30-35)

This remarkable phenomenon of single seeing is further elucidated
by an observation made by C. G. Jung in his 1932 seminar on the kundalini.
Asked whether it was not Wotan who lost one eye, he agreed, adding that
Osiris did also. Then he went on to say:

Wotan has to sacrifice his one eye to the well of Mimir, the
well of wisdom, which is the unconscious; you see, one eye will
remain in the depths or turned towards it. Therefore Jakob
Boehme, when he was "enchanted into the centre of nature," as
he says, wrote his book about the "Reversed Eye"; one of his
eyes was turned inward, it kept on looking into the underworld,
which amounts to the loss of one eye; he had no longer two eyes
for this world.

Perhaps this is the meaning, or at least part of it, that we must
assign to the well-known biblical saying found in Luke 11:34: "The light of
the body is the eye; therefore when thine eye is single thy whole body is
also full of light." This is the text according to the King James version.
In a more recent edition of the Bible the word "single" has been changed to
"sound," which is an exoteric reinterpretation of an essentially esoteric
experience.
One is also reminded of the single eye of the cyclops in Greek
mythology. Here the British classicist E. A. S. Butterworth (1970) has the
following insightful comments:

I know of no possible explanation of the "eye" in the
forehead of the Cyclops if it is not the Ajna-cakra of a form of
yoga. Odysseus, as I suggest, in grinding out the "third eye,"
shows, in our Odyssey, his antagonism to any such view of man.
(P. 175)

The "third eye" is iconographically depicted as located in the
middle of the forehead. But as Da Love-Ananda (1978a) has made clear, its
true location is in the brain core itself.
Alyce Green (1975), interestingly, reported that some of her
biofeedback subjects saw an inner vision of a single eye confronting them
while they were deeply relaxed. Perhaps we can see in this a symbolic
representation of the third eye.
Single seeing has thus many aspects, but in the present
context it is understood to be an actual change in visual functioning.

"Great Body" Experience. Occasionally the physio-kundalini process is
accompanied by the sensation of being larger than the physical body.
Perhaps this phenomenon is an intensified version of the state of joy that
is described as "feeling ten feet tall." Here the kinesthetic sense seems
to extend beyond the normally experienced boundaries
of the body. The person feels as if his or her bodily being has ballooned out.

Nonphysiological Phenomena

Out-of-Body Experiences. Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) involve the
subjective feeling of leaving the physical body either as a formless
conscious identity or in the form of a supraphysical counterpart ("etheric
double" or "astral body," etc.). This phenomenon has come to the attention
of the medical establishment through the large number of patients who have
reported having had....
--------------------
>From the bibliography

Jung, C. G. 1964. Civilization in Transition. New York: Pantheon Books.
--------------- 1975. "Psychological Commentarv on Kundalini Yoga." Spring.
---------------, and J. W. Hauer. 1932. "Kundalini Yoga." Unpublished
manuscript.