Kundalini and the Chakras

When someone in the West first turns inwards towards the source of their own inner wonder, the first exposure to an external source of truth is often through an eastern teaching. This can indeed be beneficial to affirm the sense of having discovered something of infinite value beyond any material acquisition in the world. But the true eastern masters, who personify the beauty and clarity of the earth’s spiritual presence, can only take us of the West so far. This is because the West is an aberration of the mind which has created the world of steel and concrete, symbolic of the hardness of a deadening layer in the psyche – the core resistance of the western culture to the elegance and simplicity of the East.

The eastern teachings of kundalini and the chakras attract many people from the West; but in most cases sooner or later they reach an impasse and are unable to go on since their spiritual progress has levelled out. When someone tries to apply an eastern teaching to their lives, imagination is used to support something fundamentally alien to our western culture. There is no imagination in the spirit. Imagination has its basis in glamour, which is the main appeal of the East for western devotees. Glamour is the sexual self, buffed up and on its best behaviour. The association with anything spiritual usually results in the normal restraint of discrimination being abandoned. This applies particularly in practices involving the sexual interaction between man and woman under the banner of being something spiritual. The delusion of the mind has no limits.

The tantric element often associated with the kundalini life force has its basis in the natural physical exchange between the male and female principles in making love. The purpose of love is to keep the spiritual energy free-flowing within the psyche as a way to eliminate the accrual of past. Without love, the drag of time is registered periodically as the weight of negativity that is the problematical life of the person. As so often happens, the human mind interprets the eastern teachings by unavoidably indulging the imaginative faculty which debases love into sex. People in the West cling to the mysticism of the East due to the absence of true romance in their lives. It’s far more convenient and less confrontational to be associated with something special and exclusive than dying for love and life now. This is to surrender the right to justify any emotional negativity and to take whatever action is required to break the vicious circle of compromise that is stifling the joy of life.

Nevertheless, everything serves in some way in the spiritual life. What’s referred to as the kundalini life force and chakras are aspects of self-knowledge, but only when realised as a totality of being. In reality, there’s no differentiation between this chakra and the next – only as an effect of the mind’s inability to grasp the whole idea of the wondrous spiritual system I am in each body. Any effort or intent to awaken the kundalini life force is potentially a dubious psychic practice. What can happen, and is common, is a degraded psychic effect of the kundalini which reaffirms the experience of others and has little lasting value. The person has the experience without perceiving the true meaning behind it. Furthermore, there’s usually a self-driven urge to repeat the experience, which keeps the person affixed to a position of ignorance consonant with their limited understanding of life. Any true spiritual insight or realisation happens only once and is never repeated. What is then earned in devotion to truth as the unknowable God remains forever.

In the enlightened state, whatever is imparted is supported by the energetic idea behind the concept – which is the way we communicate through words and models in existence. The power of the idea has the effect of removing that particular concept and takes the consciousness deeper into the idea itself as direct knowledge without memorable knowing. But the discussion and interest in kundalini and chakras, as practised in the West, creates more questions and the need to understand – which applies to virtually every other eastern spiritual term. For those of the original East, the chakras and kundalini have no intellectual distinctions outside of their own state of being. But since the East has now succumbed to the western ethic of acquisition as material progress, the task falls to the individual alone to make the ultimate sacrifice for life on earth.

Union with God in our western culture is realised by passing back through the very conditions that each of us have contributed as the overall effect of the crippling chaos and disharmony in the world. The kundalini and chakras, having played no part in the creation of this diabolical world, serve no purpose in the dissolution of self – the emotional force in matter. The West is the ignorance through which I must return; but fortunately it’s only necessary to face what’s been apportioned as the particular challenges in each individual life. The true eastern glory within each man and woman is the rising inner sun of the earth that never sets as the being behind the form.