Swami Rama On Shaktipot

Shaktipot or Shaktipata is the process by which a teacher aids the student in stepping over the last barrier that divides them from an ordinary state of being and the expansion of consciousness that takes place with kundalini. If used incorrectly, it can awaken students who are not yet ready and it can cause problems. It can also not “take” because the student is not sufficiently prepared. However, it is possible to use it correctly when the teacher has a discerning mind to aid the person to step over that last barrier.

The great yogi and teacher Swami Rama speaks to this issue in a way that I think is one of the more enlightened and balanced ways of any teacher I have ever had the chance to listen to speak. Swami Rama also has many other teachings which have been recorded and are available online to watch. I have found that his approach has been the most sound and the most balanced.

For example, he points out that kundalini is not a goddess only, but is instead a fusion of the opposites of those qualities which we consider to be masculine and feminine within our consciousness. This is important to understand if you wish to understand what is at work with kundalini. Most say it is a goddess. If you know why that is, you might understand how “masculine” we are in our thinking and being. This in no way takes away from the experience the importance of the feminine, but it helps to show how kundalini is itself an act and phenomenon that seeks balance. I will say that what we term the feminine aspect in all of our consciousness (men and women both) is normally dormant, and it has as much to do with the “cosmic egg” resting at the base of the spine as it does with the two hemispheres of the brain.

For anyone who has experienced awakening you may have felt how a very feminine quality has suddenly come online. Have you ever considered why this is so? Could it be that as a culture and a species that we have favored the rational, linear and logical parts (and thus “masculine”) of ourselves more than the nonlinear, holistic, emotional (and thus “feminine”) aspects of ourselves? I consider kundalini to be a way whereby the two powers of mind are now brought into a unity, which then leads to the generation of a “new” mind which we call cosmic consciousness. If you take one away, the wave of awareness collapses. Both are necessary to produce this kind of mind I call the Meta Mind. It also shows us in our own lives how all of life matters, how all people matter. If we lose sight of this kundalini becames one-sided and our minds become one-sided, too. I know that I digress a bit, but sometimes these small points are important for helping iron out confusion.

Kundalini will clear the self of blocked emotion, and this is itself the imperative that kundalini has, which is to bring the person to greater balance, not drama or intensity or just “cosmic” experiences. For a time it feels dramatic as the kundalini is clearing out the blocks, but once this is done the energy settles down. The ancients describe how it becomes smooth. No ripples, no disturbances.

As a result, there is an entire generation of awakened people who have gotten used to its “intensity” when in fact it is kundalini doing what it does in the early stages of the process. The endgame is peace. The problem is that people can get stuck on the intensity and not let kundalini do its work. They like the intensity, the drama, the strong emotions that it brings up all without realizing that this emotion is the poison leaving the system. So to say that kundalini is one or the other misses the point and can leave you “one-sided” in your awareness. Yes, it connects us to higher order energies and those energies include what we think of as divine feminine and masculine….but so too does it connect us to other energies in consciousness that are just as beneficial to us.

Swami Rama’s teachings have been the most consistent in how it goes beyond any agenda. These kinds of teachers often are not as interesting to people who want something dramatic, but he is a teacher who has gotten beyond many of the conceits that often plague non-dual teachers. These conceits as I call them, often result in distortions of awareness and become an article of belief (which stills further investigation). As a result, these teachers repeat teachings that can only go so far and are not born out in more final or complete results. What do you think the result is when you have a teacher who does not know the true nature of self? Ideas like the self is an illusion, that all of life and reality are illusory, not real. While it is true that we are constantly judging or filtering what we see in the world, that alone is not what makes our world illusory. It is possible to see into the core of physical reality to see how it is composed. When I did that, it wasn’t that the world was an illusion but rather that it was a creation that was creating the appearance of solid matter from a source of great energy and purpose.

This is one example of how these teachers, no matter how much acclaim that they get from their followers, have missed important realities of the self and how it relates to cosmic consciousness. But who would know if the teacher him or herself does not know?

The teacher teaches something that is based on his or her own lack of understanding and awareness and this gets handed down and gets passed around to all of the other students, and it get repeated until everyone takes it as an article of faith. What do you think that person’s capacity for discernment might be under such a situation as this? But it gets worse; teacher after teacher then goes on repeating the same ideas and it seems to others who study their teachings that it must be, and the pattern only gets more deeply impressed on the community at large. If you say an untruth enough times it has a way of being accepted as truth and no one bothers to question it.

In my own experience I have seen that we take on selves and identities as an important part in our learning process. At no point have I ever seen self as false but instead as part of the process of becoming. But do not mistake the expansion of consciousness that comes with awakening to mean that the self is somehow false, it is simply part of a much larger story of how varied our consciousness is. We can experience both feeling separate as well as one. Both. They are not mutually exclusive. Why would they be? You come from the infinite and you have divided part of yourself to fit into this body, one chapter in a host of chapters called lifetimes. And despite how the self is decried as false, there is not a single one of these teachers who have shown how they can remove it with a waive of their own awareness. If it is an illusion, then why not pierce that illusion once and for all? Not a one. And so this is telling, the elephant in the room. Hopefully that elephant is Ganesh, the remover of obstacles, lol! Rama has much to say about ego, not as something to kill off, but to master. He even touches on this in the short but revealing video below.

So Rama is unique in the field. His teachings continue to show a great deal of awareness on a host of fronts. I am not one who “follows” a teacher, but what I have seen in his work has been a considerable level of insight. Yes, it is because without a teacher I have seen how his teachings have aligned with my direct experience.

How do I know that I myself am not buying into a belief? My earliest memory in this life was of choosing my parents. This was before I had a body. If ego is false and identity is false, how did I manage to have a sense of self at that point? Further, how did I recall numerous past lives? Given my level of recall (including two lost languages and historical accounts to back up some of my memories) I see the chance of simply “imagining” these things hard to square with Occams Razor.

I invite you to watch what he has to say about what a teacher can do for the student when it is done correctly…

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Can Others Feel Kundalini?

This was a question that came up a while ago and it was something I was certain was obvious to anyone who would be around me after whatever it was that had happened to me: blast of light, lightening strike, rocket engines taking off, take your pick of what “that” thing was that happened on that fateful day that left you in deep mystery about what had happened.  Well it was kundalini, that’s what.  I was asked if this energy was obvious to others and it triggered an old memory I had those first few weeks after my awakening. And the answer is no.  Those not awake will not feel your energy.  Okay, mostly. Sometimes they can.  Alright, that didn’t sound very clear, did it?

Clearly, no one was feeling my energy. I literally thought that I had a giant neon sign over my head that first month after the energy raised.  I really felt exactly that way until I realized, no, no one was picking up on this!  What a relief!

Except that as time went on, I began to see clusters of curious behavior that suggested that some people, not everyone, was feeling something. I wasn’t sure at first, so I did what I always do: I sat back and observed to see if I could gather enough data on the subject that would inform me more one way or the other.  All of this took a while, it didn’t happen overnight.  So the answer here is that in some cases, yes, some people can.  Mostly, they don’t. Clear as mud?  Read on.

This is why it may be that you might want to be aware of this when or if someone starts acting weird around you.  It seems that there is a range of reactions in my experience.  It tends to be either a bliss response (or approaching that-say an unusual attraction or enthusiasm in your direction) or the opposite, which could present itself along the lines of anger, upset, frustration, and fear.  I am telling you this because it has been an observation of mine and it might help to clarify some odd instances of how some people will react to you.  I have had both.  I really wish that it was more nuanced, but in my experience it usually isn’t, at least for me.  People here are not mature enough to know how to deal with the energy that could catalyze their own flow of prana in themselves.  I am hopeful that this trend will change and I think that if it is going to change, now would be the time in our history that it would do so (fingers crossed).  To do this, I think that we need people who are more accepting and surrendered in their lives.

In my garden…

I think that the best thing to always do is to remain neutral when it happens.  Someone is responding to something in you a certain way and my sense is that it can move them to extremes.  I now prefer to keep my bliss to myself and not have hitchikers or hijackers along for the ride. For those who act more peaceful and give me that look that tells me they are spellbound, I have to realize that they aren’t spellbound by me at all, they are actually responding to their own insides and how it makes them feel.  Yes, in some cases they may think it is coming form me, and in a sense they are right, but what they feel as a result of that actually has more to do with their own capacity to feel what they are capable of when it comes to a flow of prana and the bliss it can bring.  In short, when someone is feeling prana that might be attributed to me they are feeling it in their own world on their own.  It is like how we are all breathing the same air.  Is the air me? Is it you?  Well now perhaps you can see how silly it might be to think the air comes from someone like myself or anyone for that matter.

I will add one caveat to all of this, which is that you can project this energy to a person. The energy body is not limited to location, and this is why people can do reiki atunements, or why the power of prayer can make sudden changes in outcomes.  We can send energy to people, yes, it is true, but I don’t know that we really know everything there is to know about how this even works from an energy standpoint, we just knows that it can and does work. Are we sending energy or are we communicating with that person’s own higher self or energy body and they accept the idea that there is more energy available to them?  I say this in the way I do because it is like me bringing you a bucket of water that I just filled from a boundless ocean just fifty feet away from us.  Do you see what I mean by that? Am I actually sending energy or am I sending the suggestion that more energy could be available to them, and because they pick up on it, they do….and they do this based on my own thought of sending X amount of energy to them? And who knows, it could be a bit of both.  I really wish we were further along in our study of this energy than we are.  I suppose we could set up experiments to make some important determinations about how this all works. Okay, I know, you probably think I am just splitting hairs, here.  You might be right, but this is what I think about because I have always taken this attempt at being objective and asking lots of questions that maybe most don’t think to ask, but might be worth looking into if only for curiosities’ sake.

The best thing to my mind is to always bring it back to the person so they don’t focus on you as the source when these odd interactions happen.  There are gentle ways that you can do this and it all has to do with intention.  If they can feel the vibe then they can also pick up, perhaps subconsciously, your intention which might be that while you might inspire the energy, the energy is theirs.  If there is a conversation, keep bringing the talk back to how great it is that they are feeling what they feel and how it is something that they are doing and how great is that?  I have had people ask me if I was doing something to them.  I said each time that no, I was not doing something to them.  Instead, I would say, I was just serving as inspiration, nothing more.  I think this is correct and also keeps everything appropriate.  People can get hung up on the small truth and not be able to see the bigger truth that is looming.

I went through a period, a very definite one, where I was literally turning heads.  This started to happen when I was myself at peace with the energy flowing through me.  I just let it flow and didn’t worry about it. As a result, I felt so much better.  It was a breakthrough for me, actually.  I was able to embrace the inherent sensuality of the experience without feeling like I needed to tamp it down or feel shame about it. Its odd to think that I once felt shame about something so incredible, but I did.  But once that was being released,  and this happened quite suddenly in my life, I noticed how all of a sudden I would have these really quite comical things happen to me with the people around me.  It was the double-take or the rubberneck effect as I think of it. Maybe you have experienced this.  I might be walking down the street or driving in my car and I would see these people craning their necks to look at me.  In many cases these were people looking in my general direction with a look like they were trying to find something.  I had many instances where a woman would walk past me and would turn on her heel to scan the street in my direction as soon as she passed me, with a looks like she was trying to find something but had no idea what it was she as looking for, only to give up and keep walking. It was worth a giggle or two, yes.  I knew it wasn’t me, it was the energy.  If it had only happened once or twice it would not have meant much to me, but it was happening multiple times a day during a particular period in my process.

I have also experienced the dark side of what this energy can do to people.  I knew two people who quite literally wanted to destroy me because of it.  Both behaved nearly identically and instead of being able to part as friends, they had to demonize me just to move forward.  I also saw that as I removed blocked energy one ex would go into fits of rage within a 12 hour period of each block that I removed.  I have written about this before on the blog.  I counted nine times in a row where I had released blocked material and the person I was with would go into this rage meltdown each time within about a 12 hour period each and every time.  It continued to happen, but nine times in a row was enough for me to make a causal connection to what was happening.  There was NOTHING that I did to cause the person to go into a rage meltdown.  It was always something that she had somehow procured within herself as the source of the problem.  You just never knew who she was going to focus her rage at at any given time.  So there is that.  Usually in these cases, in my experience, there is always some kind of resistance in the person that precludes them from embracing whatever this seemingly disruptive energy means for them on a personal level.

People who are resistant to change will tend I think (just my own opinion thus far) to go into the negative range of expression or reaction.  Either you realize this and seek to engender a more compassionate understanding and patient approach with encouragement, or you just leave well enough alone.  In my case, I knew that nothing I could do would amount to any substantive change in their reaction.  And it is just that-a reaction-so don’t beat yourself up about it. It really isn’t about you.  It is very easy to hop on their karmic merry-go-round and then get caught up in their own pattern, which can be very hard for you.  It is sometimes better to leave well enough alone.

Those are my two cents on the matter. I think that if you yourself go in the direction of using it to your advantage, this will only result in bad karma, so please don’t do that.  Let it be what it is, a sign, an indication, but nothing more.

There is another instance where your own energy is affecting another person and this is what I would call the twin experience.  Some call it twin flames or twin souls or rays, take your pick. In this case, two people have become effectively entangled in their soul energy where a significant degree of telepathy is involved. These in my experience have always been karmic in nature even though those who have been so affected will hold out for this being something divine. While it leads to our divinity, it is a connection to the soul-self which operates under a very different sort of premise than the self in time and space (in this lifetime).  As a result, there is an overpowering draw to that person that goes beyond mere location and transcends the physical senses. It feels significant, and it is, but it is what happens when two people become connected, and it is always because of karma.  If anyone can illustrate situations where there is no karma whatsoever in one of these connections, I would like to learn more about that case because I have yet to see an instance where karma is not involved as the trigger into the experience.  It isn’t that I am narrow minded, it is that I have looked and observed and experienced this phenomenon and at no point have I found a compelling reason to say that this is a horse of a different color beyond karma being one important element in kicking off the connection.  So I am open to having my mind changed, I just haven’t seen it happen yet.

These are unusual instances and are unique to the two people involved, although there are many cases where once someone has had one connection, they may wind up with another, or several.  Again, all have karmic material at its foundation. That isn’t to say it is bad, not at all.  It does present challenges, though, very real ones, and you should be aware of this.  It can lead to loving their soul but having real challenges that are nearly diametrically opposed to that soul which feels perfect to you about who that person is in their present life. This leads to a conundrum for people in relationships like this.  It is, to my mind, a call to learning how to step into the soul-self in a more embodied and authentic way.  This takes real work to do and it can take a lot of time and requires a lot of patience.  The soul, though, will always seem beyond your reach in this lifetime for the simple reason that it does not exist in time, but rather projects parts of itself into time in order to become flesh.  In so doing, there is a new version of the soul created with a personality and a body, all of which were chosen in order to hopefully achieve certain specific goals. The soul does not appear to have any of this. It just IS.  I suspect this is why we reincarnate in the first place, which is to work through things that the soul cannot in its no-time-space state.  There is a song that says, “In heaven, nothing ever happens at all…” and there is a certain truth to this.  How do you have things happen when there is no time or space?  Where is there to go when you can be aware of being potentially everywhere and everywhen?  It seems the soul needs these projections in order to focus itself more narrowly, to take on roles, conditions, and the mask of personality in order to work through certain dramas central to its needs and concerns, whatever those might be.

Those are my two cents on the phenomenon, and it isn’t to strip it of its meaning or importance, only to leaven it with what I think is an important ingredient so that we don’t have a blindside to some important aspects of the experience.  There might just be a very real reason why you react and respond to the Other the way that you do especially when it is a negative reaction.  That bit of resistance that you are feeling is pointing out  the work you need to do most likely. I think this is the only way these unions will ever see a significant level of peace within them, which is to say they could be a call to change, real substantive change.  Otherwise, you will be caught up in the maelstrom of your own triggers, all karmic in their foundation, and it is possible you will be something like those people I discuss earlier who would go into melt-down after melt-down.  If you have had an experience along these lines, I am all ears (and eyes).  I am open to learning more, so if you have something to add, I would love to hear about it.

Blessings, P.