As a Westerner who had no goal of awakening kundalini, I came to it without the underpinnings of belief or practice beyond my own self-fashioned meditation technique I had practiced for years. No guru, no teacher…
I remember reading somewhere that upon awakening one becomes a yogi. The first awakening dream that I had had me taking a shortcut through a town which I took and found a house that looked like a cross between a Shinto temple and an arts and crafts style house. House is for me, the self. In it sprang two streams of water in the main front room, one on the left and one on the right. The waters were, I would find, the “two” currents within consciousness that would later merge into one, via the sushumna nadi. Water which had light within it. I would see the three people who would be part of my first four years of my awakening journey there, bathing in these waters. Once awakening came, it was as though I was opened to a stream of inner knowing about just about anything I was interested in. As I got situated in this “new normal” and began to learn more about my new state, I would from time to time find things that felt like they were….off about the subject that some teachers had addressed. It was interesting to see how ideas would emerge from the popular culture about the phenomenon, too. They sounded good, but they didn’t land well with me (but what did I know, right?). Of course, these people certainly knew what they were talking about, but an inner prompting said otherwise to me. As I began to question these things, I had someone enter my life who was both friend and teacher. Her approach was different from just about everyone I knew who was on to awakening. She had counseled hundreds of people in her practice, helping people overcoming some of the greatest challenges of their lives. She literally worked miracles with her clients. Some of them were impromptu meetings with neighbors who had come over to say hi and there we would be in a healing session involving a woman releasing a past trauma that had kept her unknowingly tangled in herself. And just like that, she trotted off into the night, ready to take the ferry to the mainland the next morning, transformed from a hurdle that now no longer laid in her path. “What just happened here?” I would ask and she would smile and say, “Welcome to my world.”
In another situation while over the phone she performed what I have called a “reset” of my energy. Up until this time I had familiarity with the phenomenon of “painbody” but after the reset, it was as if I had not known the degree to which I had this in my system. While the effects of this “reset” were pretty miserable, it also made me more aware of my own energy. It was as if I was gifted with a keener awareness of my own inner system than before. While I winced through my days, this new awareness also focused me on my own challenges in a clear-eyed way. It also put a fire under me to learn how to make myself more available to the energy which was there remaking me. It worked: I entered into a period where I released hundreds of blocks that had been driven down into my subconscious. It also accelerated changes in how I acted, reacted, and felt. I was returning to a truer version of myself. While this meant for me that some of my relationships would go away with a fair degree of malice on the side of those who rejected this new me, it also helped to illustrate to me what happens when we think we can make deals with the world that go against our deeper more authentic selves.
She was the most gifted person psychically I have known and when she explained her gifts she said how she was not born with the filters most have in place. She said that she had to feel her way through her life. When she did that, she was always guided to just the right place, the right situation where she needed to be. It seemed to me that it left her without an idea of a plan in the day to day. She emphasized to me how important it was to learn to feel, to be more aware of how to feel more deeply in one’s life than to be so rational in it. She explained that by being both clear within and being more connected to feeling, one could navigate this new kind of life much easier. By remaining stuck in the rational mind, all sorts of ideas a person could glom onto and take as true because the rational doesn’t have the same capacity for emotional intelligence that the feeling side of the self has. The problem, though, we look askance at feeling as some kind of emotional wilderness.
I have seen how the rational mind is that part of our brain that has specialized for all things linear and process-based. Language emerges there, the ability to identify the things that are most immediately important in the moment or the process. This is where abstractions emerge, and for as helpful as they are, abstractions are one step removed from what is real. The left brain, lacking feeling, can draw from larger concepts smaller subsets for use outside of a larger context. It isn’t that this isn’t important. It is in fact what has given birth to language, to logic, and to all kinds of technologies all dependent on process-based methods, including knowing order and placement. Language makes no sense when it lack order and strict rules. The same is true for many computer languages, mathematical processes, for example. We made it to the moon using this part of our minds. What it does lack is the bigger picture. This part of the mind we call masculine. Concrete, linear, rational, and largely unfeeling. I saw how the ego that we tend to know best springs from this part of the mind.
When we awaken, it is said that kundalini is a “goddess” a feminine aspect within ourselves, regardless of whether you are male or female. It is less a literal feminine aspect as it is a quality in all of us, be we male or female. We do, though, connect into the feminine through this aspect in each of us. It brings all of us closer to this part within the human family. Two streams rise upward, some downward, merging in the center of the sushumna nadi. It is here that one finds the meta-view, the big picture, the holistic and nonlinear presence of mind. It has its own form of ego, but it is so large that it is wide like the sky. It is not easily upset like her “masculine” ego counterpart is. In this part of the mind, there is emotional intelligence so this ego could be called more mature, less upset by the vagaries of human events. This is the realm of the superego. It is also here where we navigate through cosmic mind by way of a depth of feeling and awareness that the other side of our being does not possess. While we can build things and follow processes through the left mind, it cannot give us the broadness of view to see those things that are products of its own creative output in context with the world as a living breathing whole. This is, I think, one reason why we as humans can create technologies that destroy our world without any awareness of how this could even be a possibility. We often think how cruel this is, but I tend to think that it is a lack of awareness that this part of our minds simply does not possess. This is the wrong kind of “single-mindedness” that humans so often have that does so much bad in the world. The “Shakti” part of us is what has this kind of awareness.
I think we often think that feeling is the irrational side of us, something to be held at arm’s length. What I have found is that feeling is simply a capacity. Feeling is not the same as emotion. Emotion operates much as thought. We choose our thoughts just as we choose our emotions. The only difference is that most people are driven by their emotions and don’t know the degree to which they do choose them. In the same way that we have thoughts at the subconscious level, the same processes that drive emotion often emerge from the same place. In a very important way, this is what forms the “veil” so often talked about that begins to be pulled away during the process of awakening. What remains, though, is an intact “architecture” of subconscious activity and patterns that remain to be taken apart, cleared, cleansed from awareness, be they in full awareness or buried in the subconscious by the effect that kundalini brings to free them.
In the book “The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness” by Bob Samples, the author quotes Albert Einstein and in the process, makes a summary of the quote that many attribute to Einstein himself (and which is a very good lead-in to what I am pointing to here). Regardless, the quote and the summary suits my discussion here. The first part is Einstein and the part in bold is Samples:
The metaphoric mind is a maverick. It is as wild and unruly as a child. It follows us doggedly and plagues us with its presence as we wander the contrived corridors of rationality. It is a metaphoric link with the unknown called religion that causes us to build cathedrals — and the very cathedrals are built with rational, logical plans. When some personal crisis or the bewildering chaos of everyday life closes in on us, we often rush to worship the rationally-planned cathedral and ignore the religion. Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.
I have come to see that the left “masculine” mind only works when it is a servant to the broader mind of the feminine, which is the right hemisphere, not the other way around. We have for centuries run our bodies and minds in a backwards fashion from what is most natural for us, and the result has been great short-sightedness. And while it is tempting to ascribe this to the patriachy, it has become a part of most everyone’s way of thinking and being regardless of its source. It has belonged to all of us (even as many have chaffed against it). This is a human issue and we exit it through doing and being differently (but not for the sake of “different” but through a native state that can be known to all and which often lies hidden within each of us).
Rationality cuts us off from the great ocean of our awareness and depth of feeling. It is in feeling that we connect with the inner compass within. We all know what is right and what is wrong but through the rational, we often explain it away or make deals or think that this is how we must behave in order to “get along” in this world. I know I thought this way once, but with awakening, there has been a steady unwinding of my own beliefs and inner programming. Instead of being just rational, I took the advice of my friend and began feeling my way through it all. I can say that while you might not know the “plan” in its entirety, our own actions in the moment when advanced by our feeling selves allows the correct plan to become manifest. It isn’t like it comes freshly born the moment we awaken, either. It is instead a process, and to allow it to happen by bowing down in humility to this greater self, is the fastest and most effective means I have seen to reach a more enlightened, inclusive, state. I can’t even say that enlightenment comes at the moment of awakening, but is instead a journey through a deepening of awareness that comes to the degree that our fingers uncurl from those pieces of baggage that we reflexively clutch by our sides and hold in our hearts.
I am not fond of quoting teachers, but since I have already quoted Einstein, I will mention how Taisen Deshimaru, the Zen master who explained the workings of cosmic mind. One reaches this state of cosmic mind not by seeking to clutch it, but to wait for it with an openness of mind. He explained that as long one does this, all of the sand of all the deserts will flow through your hand. “Try to grasp it, and you only get a little bit of grit.”
This is not the work of the rational mind at all. It is made more difficult that language springs from the part of the brain that has no capacity to really comprehend this cosmic mind at all. Words are themselves a very poor way, an extremely awkward way, to go about expressing what it is. The rational linear mind cannot begin to grasp the enormity of what the nonlinear more feminine side of our consciousness can. It is perhaps one reason why so much teaching along these lines involve a look, the movement of the body, the tone in the voice, and a presence in the room which transcends all reason or logic. This is because this part of us defies what our species has created thus far in terms of understanding. The understanding of the awakened mind is a quantum leap beyond the rational, and it must be. The left brain must remain in awe if it can….spinning stories that only tell half of the content contained within it (or less). We live in a very small circumscribed reality fence. We don’t know what lies beyond that fence. Much of what is in our cultures have been designed to keep us in that fence. I don’t see it as any sort of conspiracy except one of ignorance. We can break free from this. While it can also break through some old trusted beliefs and show them to be based on a limited understanding, the result is that a much bigger picture emerges.
The simplest manner in which to go forward is to learn to cultivate feeling. Even if it seems like it might be messy or scary to you, it is the genuine path forward in my experience. You might not always hit the bullseye every time when you do this, but as you find where you were off and where you were right on, you will learn your way. If you are like me, and you are interested in gathering data about the experience, you ask questions and see if what was being sensed remotely has a basis in reality (instances of feeling a person’s thoughts, or seeing scenes from a distance, for example, all of which are some outcomes of the awakened state). As I have done this I have been able to see quite clearly where I have had accurate intuitions or perceptions that go beyond the five physical senses and dip into the realm of the mind and its ability to know what is beyond itself. Instead of senses, you use the portal of feeling. It seems that the more we can relate to this type of material, the more successful or the greatest “hits” are. Until you begin doing this kind of work and inquiry, you might feel like you are all thumbs or it may feel unfamiliar to you.
It will feel like feeling yourself in a dark room at first. It was for me. But then I found that I could feel my way through that room through my inner senses. I learned by testing my perceptions in this inner room that my perceptions were often highly detailed and amazingly on the mark. There is a world within each of us in which half of ourselves have been hidden from our own view. Cultivating this side of ourselves also cultivates the power of intuition, and this is itself based in feeling. There is a reason for this that has everything to do with what happens when you stare at a blank page of paper or are in a dark room of the mind where you believe that you are blind. By feeling and feeling clearly and not just inserting what you think needs to be there, you are in fact opening up to a latent ability that resides in all of us. The result of this work? I can only speak for myself. I have felt for a very long time that these inner senses are what we use beyond this one life and we carry them into countless lives and find them manifesting themselves in different ways. Here, we speak of five physical senses, but these senses are a subset of many senses that we have in consciousness. Why it is that most people are cut off from these inner senses is itself a story, and part of it is told and known by tapping into our capacity to feel for surely that is where these senses emerge, the inner ones. They do defy what we currently think we know about material reality, or what the mainstream does, that is. While they can often be fickle or seemingly unreliable at first, continued work with your own mind and body and the blocks that you still have all serve to also block them from your own conscious awareness, or can often make you second guess yourself when they do not always work perfectly 100 percent of the time. When we are clearer, they are more easily accessible. By clear I mean not interfering with them through the beliefs that we still hold that serve to limit them.
In time you will likely find yourself “feeling” your way through everything, and more often than not, you will find that for reasons you might not have known at the time, you were right in your inner sensing. This includes every possible situation and event, even those in the future. Slowly that veil or filter falls away to the degree that you learn to use this part of yourself. It can take time to learn how to do this, but like how fish know where to go to spawn in the same waters where they were born, you also know how to navigate the waters of your own consciousness, perhaps first with trepidation and uncertainty, but then more and more boldly. What you do now and over the years accrues to your own self and cannot be taken away. All of this is within our capacities as human beings. it is a birthright that has been forgotten. It is also a birthright that in some cases will be treated in superstitious ways by the “believers” among us that this is somehow demonic, evil, unnatural, or bad. This, I contend, is how humans have inoculated themselves against discovering the rich bed of awareness that is available to all of us. While some will be better at it than others, studies have shown that every person tested thus far has some degree of second sight or inner knowing about things they could not have known anything about. Personally, I think what makes the difference here is the degree to which a person can cause the mind to go blank. This is not something most people feel comfortable with, but is described by genuine psychics. By doing this, they also describe feeling as though they are tuning in some other wavelength or “channel” of information. They are able to get the information through the feeling self, that part that is expertly capable of “assembling” the information streaming in in a coherent and understandable reconstruction that is intelligible to both themselves and to others.
When I look at the cramped quarters that people lives in in their own minds, I see how much they are governed by their unacknowledged beliefs, I see how limited they have allowed themselves to be. I was once like that, and I no doubt may still have some beliefs still lurking in the shadows that might still be serving to limit me along these lines. People often they feel estranged from nature because they are themselves a part of all nature but they have become distrustful for one reason or another. There is this natural self within that includes a balance of the two sides and when those two are allowed to merge into a unity, they form a level of ongoing bliss that is hard to believe is even possible. While I do feel all of this can be explained physiologically, I also know that it is sustained in the same way that a tight-wire walker is able to balance on the wire and more forward, never going too far to one side or the other. This is a balance of the two, a very specific form of balance, and it seems nature prefers it and will reward you greatly for finding it. It may not sound scientific for me to say, “just feel it” but the thing is, the feeling side already knows. It doesn’t need to be taught. It is already immensely capable. It knows. What needs to happen is for you to acknowledge what is already there within. The yogis and yoginis have been saying for a very long time that kundalini is not something that you get but is instead something that you already are. Our awakenings, then, may well be a conscious recognition of something that had not occurred to us until the moment that the floodgates seemed to open all on their own (which they most likely didn’t, you just weren’t cognizant of what it was at the time that catalyzed the change that seemed to “bring it on”).
Feeling is of immense importance. Don’t be troubled when you allow yourself the luxury of doing so. When you do, you will no doubt find a closet full of skeletons. Yes, there will be intervening feelings or emotions that you will have to navigate through first. Cast them aside, turn them out, looking at each one and forgiving yourself for allowing them to be there in the first place. Yes, it is likely that there is a lot of buried energy there and it can go back a very long time.
I have read of accounts where people began to suspect that the energy was satanic or dark. I have observed that the truth is perhaps a little less dramatic. Instead, it is our own subsumed junk and it needs to be dug out of the psyche by giving it expression. “Give it expression? Are you crazy??” What I have found and what many others are also finding, is that when you give it a voice, especially when it is repressed, its force bleeds away. The scary lion becomes a meek mouse. This is how all material that is pushed down comes back up. You let it up to let it out. Just by reaching the air, it disperses. The real problem is in keeping it down where it remains active and creates all sorts of problems for us by “running the show” so to speak. Perhaps you have seen this in yourself where you are triggered by something someone says and you react in an over the top manner, only later asking yourself why you reacted so passionately. This is what this material does. But unlike those who would push the emotion back down, you can allow it to break the surface and bleed itself of its energy, after which there is this reintegration that often takes place that is the heart of healing. It isn’t enough to just talk about it and acknowledge it; allowing it to break to the surface of your awareness so that you can see it once and for all is to me the lost aspect of how to heal. Many are experiencing this kind of healing today and they are doing so without a therapist but with a wisdom and awareness native to all of us. The more you do it, the more it shows itself. Anyone can do this, and yes, you have to have a good sound tether to reality.
This is an awareness as humans we seem to either have lost, or are so uncomfortable with doing, that it isn’t something that is in most people’s wheel house. Certainly this is what talk therapy is built around, but when you begin to make a deep connection to the subconscious, a link with it, more and more material can be released which accrues to ones own sense of peace and inner stability. Slowly, bit by bit, those dark closets of self, the shadow lands, will become full of light and the self will be seen less as one strange annex of self after another and more a unified self with less reason to be so sliced up and divided within itself. By being more at ease with feeling you will be better able to navigate these issues.
In the same way that the feminine has been pushed down and out of the world stage for eons, so too has our more intuitive abilities been subsumed and not give voice. While I think that developing the rational side was the easiest and most obvious part of ourselves to work on over the ages, it wasn’t something that needed to be done at the expense of our other more mystical cosmic side. What I hope is that we are entering a period where people who are more free than ever to be themselves (men and women both), that we will see an expansion of our abilities as a race emerge more and more. I think that awakenings are an outcome of a liberalization of human behavior, in essence, people being free to just be themselves and not shackled by societal norms. While doing this may cause the pendulum to swing to extremes, it also frees a lot of people to be at ease with aspects of themselves that they had not been able to acknowledge.
When I awakened I was keenly aware of two qualities in my consciousness that were responsible for the transcendent state of awareness that is a feature of awakening. It felt like how two materials when kept separate were ineffectual, which when put together, set off a chemical reaction that begins transforming the self. The more they moved into a state of union, the more powerful the effect. All of my notions about how I thought things were went out the window. I also realized that THIS was what I had been searching for my whole life. I had finally found it. What came, I suppose, was this missing element within me that I had kept at bay and that every person keeps at bay, which is the more feminine feeling side of ourselves. When that part emerges, so much changes.
…feeling is in fact a super intelligence that is designed to deal with the transcendent.
My advice to you is to cultivate this more feminine side that we all possess. It isn’t literally female, but it is enough of it to bring greater awareness to both women of the importance of their feminine natures and it will aid men in beginning to understand the benefits of cultivating the more feeling side of themselves while also having greater empathy for their female counterparts. Feeling may seem at first glance to be nebulous or vague, but what I have found is that feeling is in fact a super intelligence that is designed to deal with the transcendent. And if it might seem unimportant to you now, the big picture is key to knowing our place in the order, in being able to experience how we are connected to everything else, and how we exist beyond this one self, this one life and this one world. It is the path to awe and it is also where the great inspired minds go in order to glimpse the next big discovery. We tend to think that we cannot tap into knowledge or information that we ourselves have not learned before, that everything we know is what we have picked up as we have read and experienced in life. I am here to tell you that there is another side to the coin, and while it may seem elusive at first, it can be cultivated as you learn how to swim in its limitless waters. It isn’t “magic” and it isn’t “woo-woo” but is instead poorly understood. When we investigate the unknown, it goes from mysterious to a normal facet of our world. We don’t need to languish in superstitious thinking anymore.
Waking The Infinite 