Hi Phil,
I've just read your book: Kundalini Energy and Christian Spirituality and found it a great comfort!
Thanks so much for writing of your experience.
As I am currently experiencing most of what you wrote about and felt terribly isolated. This book gave me hope that I can be a Christian and move through this Kundalini energy.
Thanks again.
Anne Marie.

Thanks for sharing, that, Anne Marie.
You can indeed be a Christian going through the kundalini process. My second book (see titles above) goes into the relationship between kundalini and Christianity in more detail, if interested.

Thanks Phil I read the second book it was great. Can you recommend any other books. I'm enjoying the forum what a blessing! God bless you.
Anne Marie.

Hi, Anne Marie, I'm not Phil, but you might like the books by Bonnie Greenwell. As far as specifically Christian books on kundalini are concerned, I think Phil's are unique.

Thanks

Hijacking this thread here because I can't find anywhere else to put this contribution ...

I was re-reading parts of Kundalini Energy and Christian Spirituality when I came across a reference to the Comte de Gabalis (1670). You mentioned that you couldn't find a copy of that work when you wrote your book in 1991.

That was before the web. Nowadays the text is freely available on the Sacred Texts website.

Unfortunately the passages that Gene Kieffer quotes are not from the 1670 work, but from a commentary in the 1914 edition attributed only to "The Brothers."

This explains why the ideas in the quote resemble the nineteenth-century syncretism of Blavatsky. The commentary was written centuries after the base text.

Thanks Derek. I'll have to look up that original work and see what was said.

No problem. It just shows you how much the world has changed since the invention the world wide web. You can now find scans of obscure historical books in less than a minute of online searching.

The reason I was re-reading Kundalini Energy and Christian Spirituality was because that book has the clearest explanation of what kundalini actually is. Prior to re-reading the book, I was looking on YouTube, but the material there is absolutely useless. Hundreds of videos will tell you that "kundalini is the work of the devil," while a few go to the other extreme and claim that "the Bible teaches kundalini yoga." Neither extreme seems convincing.

Your explanation (in the SUMMARY) makes perfect sense to me. The store of kundalini is basic life-energy that was repressed as a result of very early trauma. And then I maybe expand a bit beyond what you say in the book. The defense mechanisms involved in repressing this basic life-energy are so primitive that they take the form of chronic muscular tension. All subsequent physical and mental development builds on top of that chronic muscular tension. This is why release of the repressed bio-energy produces strange muscular twitches as it unravels (the kriyas) and temporarily shatters the psychological structures until they can re-form around the new muscular and nervous systems.

The demonic manifestations are the result of unintegrated personality fragments coming to the surface. These were formed in response to very early trauma. The only part this theory doesn't explain is how demons can be passed from person to person. In The Kundalini Process, you document examples of "dirty shaktipat," where people have become infected by nasty demons as a result of contact with malevolent gurus. On the other hand, the New Testament is full of examples of the Holy Spirit being received by the laying on of hands. Perhaps that is a different mechanism.

Probably kundalini awakenings were very rare before the twentieth century because most people were preoccupied by basic survival. It was only liberal child-rearing practices and an industrial economy that gave people large amounts of free time that allowed kundalini awakenings to become common. The only conducive environments prior to the twentieth century would have been ashrams and monasteries. Evelyn Underhill documents some examples of contemplatives experiencing inner heat or fire in her introduction to Richard Rolle's Fire of Love:

quote:

The “first state” of burning love to which Rolle attained when his purification was at an end, does seem to have produced in him such a psycho-physical hallucination. He makes it plain in the prologue of the Incendium that he felt, in a physical sense, the spiritual fire, truly, not imaginingly; as St. Teresa -- to take a well-known historical example -- felt the transverberation of the seraph’s spear which pierced her heart. This form of automatism, though not perhaps very common, is well known in the history of religious experience; and many ascetic writers discuss it. Thus in that classic of spiritual common sense, “The Cloud of Unknowing,” we find amongst the many delusions which may beset “young presumptuous contemplatives,” “Many quaint heats and burnings in their bodily breasts” -- which may sometimes indeed be the work of good angels (i.e., the physical reflection of true spiritual ardour) yet should ever be had suspect, as possible devices of the devil. Again, Walter Hilton includes in his list of mystical automatisms, and views with the same suspicion, “sensible heat, as it were fire, glowing and warming the breast.” In the seventeenth century Augustine Baker, in his authoritative work on the prayer of contemplation mentions “warmth about the heart” as one of the “sensible graces,” or physical sensations of religious origin, known to those who aspire to union with God. In our own day, the Carmelite nun Soeur Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus describes an experience in which she “felt herself suddenly pierced by a dart of fire.” “I cannot,” she says, “explain this transport, nor can any comparison express the intensity of this flame. It seemed to me that an invisible force immersed me completely in fire.” Allowing for the strong probability that the form of Soeur Thérèse’s transport was influenced by her knowledge of the life of her great namesake, we have no grounds for doubting the honesty of her report; the fact that she felt in a literal sense, though in a way hard for less ardent temperaments to understand, the burning of the divine fire. Her simple account -- glossing, as it were, the declarations of the historian and the psychologist -- surely gives us a hint as to the way in which we ought to read the statements of other mystics, concerning their knowledge of the “fire of love.”

(I don't think Evelyn Underhill understood kundalini, since she uses words such as "hallucinations" and "delusions." She published her introduction to Richard Rolle in 1914, while Arthur Avalon's Serpent Power didn't come out until 1918.)

Thanks for sharing this reflection, Derek. I'm much indebted to Michael Washburn's book, "The Ego and the Dynamic Ground," for the understanding of kundalini I shared in the first book. I continue to find it relevant, and also think we have much to learn from Eastern spiritualities about chi/ki/prana, etc. It seems to me that this is the energy that becomes constricted and even blocked early in life, and its release can indeed be exhillerating but also disturbing if one is not accusomed to the experience. It can be painful, too, as it attempts to push through its unique channels, or nadis, which acupuncture and other disciplines work with. How this all relates to the Holy Spirit is most interesting and complicated.

It certainly does seem that people are all over the map in their descriptions and understanding of kundalini. I tried to offer a way of talking about this in the Process book -- one that recognizes a continuum of activation experiences. I'm not the only one who teaches that, of course, but let's just say it hasn't caught on.

Good point about the new lifestyle possibilities from the 20th C. onward. I'm concerned now that our incessant interaction with our digital devices has jeopardized the contemplative possibilities that more leisure time made possible.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Phil,

quote:

Originally posted by Phil:
I'm concerned now that our incessant interaction with our digital devices has jeopardized the contemplative possibilities that more leisure time made possible.

Haha that's probably true. BR reports that during her "conversion experience" at the age of 15, she spent all night, and most of the next morning, in prayer. Few 15-year-olds would do that nowadays. They would be constantly checking their phones.

Father John Main used to remark that, in the old days, at 7 p.m. all of Montreal would be on its knees (for family rosary). Television put an end to that. Without a grounding in kataphatic spirituality, people will never discover the apophatic. And the interest in Eastern contemplative forms depended on post-war prosperity allowing people to spend weeks or months away from education and employment.

There's also the loss of supportive environments. You probably heard that Father Keating's monastery in Snowmass has closed and the premises are up for sale. Mount Melleray in Ireland is another Trappist monastery that has closed.

"Without silence, God disappears in the noise" (Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise).

All good points, Derek.

I've been meeting with people for spiritual direction for around 40 years and haven't really had more than a few who were what I would consider contemplatives. They have all been prayerful people with much spiritual fruit in their lives, so we should never underestimate the efficacy of kataphatic spirituality. It does produce holy people! But I've never really seen much evidence of kundalini apart from contemplative spirituality, and even then, it's not that common.

That's my subjective impression, too, even though I don't have your extensive experience of talking with directees. Ordinary Bible-reading, intercessory prayer, rosary, etc., are just fine for producing admirable human beings.

Before I saw your post, I happened to come across a paper, "Differential relationship between meditation methods and psychotic-like and mystical experiences." (They view mystical experiences as a subcategory of psychotic-like experiences, which seems unduly pessimistic to me, but that's another issue.)

The authors divide meditation methods into three categories:

NDM - null-directed methods, which would include apophatic prayer or "just sitting" styles of meditation

CDM - cognitively-directed methods, which means awareness of content, whether body sensations or words from Scripture

ADM - affectively-directed methods, which would mean devotional practices

After a long and inordinately complicated analysis, the authors come to the conclusion that null-directed methods are more likely to produce mystical experiences. It's the same point as you made more succinctly in The Kundalini Process: A Christian Perspective: "Almost everyone who has active kundalini has been involved with apophatic practice. The correlation is very strong!"

But I have also read quite a few accounts of kundalini awakening through shaktipat, the results being unpredictable and often dangerous.

And then Tara reports in Enlightenment Through the Path of Kundalini a different method. I think of it in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. Apophatic prayer makes the noise very quiet. Tara's method made the signal very strong!

"My kundalini awakened at the age of 24 during a series of bio-energetic therapy sessions. This form of therapy uses painful body postures accompanied by screaming to deal with the ensuing pain. It is a rather rough approach that literally breaks through one's ego defences and releases the painful emotions that had previously been suppressed. As a result of this therapy my kundalini awakened, my body shook, quivered and swayed, and my mind underwent a complete transformation."

My experience is that, once one has opened these depths, whether kundalini-like or not, it's not possible to go back. Jack Kornfield reports that, at a talk in Berkeley, California, Chogyam Trungpa said something similar of the spiritual path: "Best not to begin, but if you do start, best to finish." [1]

Note

[1] Reported in Jack Kornfield's book Bringing Home the Dharma and also in a YouTube video "Jack Kornfield on the Lion's Roar of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche" originally published on DharmaSeed dot org.