re: similarities and differences between kundalini and the Holy Spirit (your response to SJ)

Phil, I know I danced around this issue of different energies, once again, in this thread. You had responded, last year, to another musing of mine, with this:

While I don't have a problem speaking of created energy and uncreated energy, it seems to me that what we call created energy can be accounted for just as easily by acknowledging the fact of created form. Perhaps there is created energy, but it would be impossible to distinguish it from uncreated energy expressing through created form. In other words, it may well be that form (creation) is truly empty of energy, as the Zen people have been proclaiming for centuries: and that what we experience as energy is not at all "ours," but the divine itself. Our form, or soul, provides refraction through the various levels it contains, producing a rainbow of expression of the one White Light. Soul can constrict the light, hide it, distort it, but even this movement of soul is enabled by the Energy it conducts. Soul is a potentiality for becoming a likeness of the divine, which it images, and whose Energy it is given to enable it to live and move and have its being. The more it opens to Energy, the more freedom and movement it realizes. The more it closes, the less, so that Hell would be a state of being frozen--as, in fact, Dante understood.

This view of all energy as expression of Energy through created form resolves the question of the ultimate source of Kundalini while recognizing that Energy can activate in the Soul a movement of reaching for God, or it can be perceived as gratuitous blessing, or both (as in the case of kristi).

Just in the brainstorming mode, let me throw out this idea. How might we differentiate kundalini from the Holy Spirit from the strong and weak forces, from gravity or from electricity, for that matter, if we conceptualized in terms that included both created form and created energy? Would the full spectrum of Aristotelean causation (as nuanced by a Thomist philosophy/metaphysics) give us a more robust ontology with which to deal with these differentiations? and a better heuristic or set of hatracks or placeholders/bookmarks for conducting our East-West dialogue?

Specifically, I mean we might talk in terms of essence and existence, of creature and Creator, of efficient causes, formal causes, material causes and final causes. Or, do you view your existing schema to have been fully cognizant of all of these "differentiators" already? In other words, in terms of Aristotelean metaphysics, what, to you, is the difference between pantheism and panentheism? Is it merely a matter of created form? of the tacit or nonenergetic dimension of reality? Is it more than that? Have I even framed up a meaningful question here? How do you and Arraj square up on this?

The reason I raise these issues is because I sense a resonance between Wilber's thoughts (which SJ has great familiarity with) and your and Arraj's schemas. The great similarity is the concept of the Great Chain of Being. Here, our nondual experience of humanity is that of being divinized when humanized and humanized when divinized. Still, as we ascend the chain of being within oursleves, activating each level with soul energy, which is sustained by God, we are realizing our "spiritual being in potency", our ontogeny recapitualating our phylogeny with increasing levels of "ontological density". I would resolve this by suggesting that we are dealing with both natural and supernatural processes, immanent being and transcendent being, impersonal and personal being/form. There is a not one-not two aspect that gets resolved in the proper [real] distinction between creature from Creator, for again, we are made in God's image, are analogous to God, alike Him in many ways but unlike Her in many more ways, infinitely more. Is this not true for material cause and efficient cause and formal cause, for forms and energies? The realm transcendent to ours must remain ontologically occulted, must it not? Aren't we fish in search for the Holy Grail, which is water? Our final cause, our teleological goal, may be what we most share -- relationality, interpersonal relatedness with a radical alterity, a profound otherness (energetically and nonenergetically)? There is never going to be a Grand Unified Theory = Mind of God, not even in Eternity, that gifts us with complete explanatory adequacy? In other words, we will eternally grow in knowledge of and knowledge about The Other with our knowledge of always exceeding our knowledge about, our God experience always outdistancing our theology (which matters but which must remain in its proper place, ordinately). Sorry for the lack of clarity, but this is supposed to be simple, not easy

Please keep your answer short (JUST KIDDING )

pax,
jb

Want to have some fun? Try reading this.

JB -

To throw another bone into the fire, re clarity in eternity. What of people who claim to have had Near Death Experiences, have met up with the Divine Ones, and come back with such clarity, re their mission and their theology? (Also the fact that NDEs have been found to have links to kundalini awakenings? So many NDEs are similar in content, particularly what they've garnered on the other side. (If they're aren't meeting directly with Christ and Mary, its some "light being," with a similar message. I haven't seen much confusion in all the accounts I've read (and heard) re theology. Universal message is similar, and a near dismissal of creed and type of "religious" practice is common, in fact, most judgement dropped except anything that pits man against man against God.

Does that mean we Earth souls are trapped in the same energy loop that leads us to various levels of eternity- energy transferences shaped by centuries of thought forms? Is kundalini and/or Holy Spirit just different molecular expressions of these levels?

Does e=mc2 transfer to kundalini? My own personal experience. I've listened to actual transcripts of atom bomb trials for reasons I won't go into and found that I could feel the weird energy bubbles up my back that can signal a kundalini eruption (worried me a bit, let me tell you, because the last thing I wanted was to trigger another explosion in myself).

A swaimi, kundalini "expert" told me I didn't understand kundalini, that it was the energy/life force of the universe. How does that make it separate from the holy spirit? The Holy Spirit the highest divine expression of soul purity, and kundalini, the raw, unfiltered explosion of a soul? (if its at the base of the spine, and has to travel through the classic tunnel of light that NDEs describe as they leave their bodies into the sea of the universe, then is the Holy Spirit just a kind of parallel universe that travels with the soul energy of the kundalini, that as it purifies eventually aligns itself with the Holy Spirit to create a lighter density frequency of love which then transforms the larger whole?

Kind of works with the string theory of the universe that Hawking and others promote. Afterall, time is relative, isn't it? A matter of frequency and density in terms of dimensional understanding. In that sense, the energy universe of the Holy Spirit runs in parallel time with kundalini/soul energy, tapped and untapped, with certain appointed souls pushing upwards to raise their kundalini, conscious awareness, spiritual intent through practices developed through the centuries and the Holy Spirit working alongside for the past 2000 years to help the process become easier because somehow who we are on their earth and its spiritual expression plays some larger mysterious role in the cosmic chess game, and some larger force of love out there is trying to make sure our planet's tilt is as pure a divine expression as possible.

Any thoughts? And, by the way, I don't read any science fiction. I hope I don't sound like something out of Lord of the Rings.

Phil

What I'm looking for ? Clarity of course! There seems to be no common consensus about the Kundalini phenomena, especially about what is really happening when things go wrong. There seems to be almost as many different opinions as there are people who have voiced them. To me the 'Ida, Pingala, Sushumna Nadi' explanations seems to be the closest attempt made to give everything a scientific equivalent.

As I gather, you are perhaps the only one who has written about Kundalini from a Christian perspective. Therefore I addressed my questions regarding the comparison of the Holy Spirit and Kundalini to you. Yes, I am trying to understand things - first Kundalini in relation to Hindu philosophy and then in relation to Christian principles. My questions I hope will highlight the problems that people dealing with this issue have and your answers I hope will add more clarity to the discussion. After all, this topic is vast and nobody has all the answers.

To my mind as I understand it, the only comparison that sounds logical in the discussion Holy Spirit vs Kundalini is: the devil has sometimes been referred to as part of God, following the precept there is nothing outside God. The devil is treated as an illusion by some (C.S.Lewis called it Satan's greatest achievement!), or as a part of God used by Him to purify us. Whatever that means, Jesus didn't talk of the devil in that way. I understand that evil and good is real, although on the other side of eternity evil will disappear/have no power, like the mist when the sun shines. But on this side of eternity I believe the mist is real and it can blind and confuse. The reference made is non-duality, not oneness. It is one thing to say that the mist is a passing reality, having no substance when the sun shines but quite another to say that the mist doesn't exist.

Since the concept of Kundalini has been developed in Hindu philosophy, I thought it would be worthwhile to find out its place in Hinduism for the sake of clarity. I have only quoted other sources, none of the explanation is mine (except the asparagus in the nose comparison!).

Rishikesh is considered the place where the highest Hindu philosophy originates from because that is where many Rishis spent their lifetimes in seeking union with God. Sri Swami Sivananda Saraswathi of the The Divine Life Society has written a wonderful book on Kundalini Yoga. Here is the link:

http://www.sivanandadlshq.org/...ndalini.htm#_VPID_39

May we all gain more clarity on Kundalini from a Hindu perspective by reading that book!

Om Namah Christaya!
Jesu Jesu Jaya Jaya Namo!
Om Shanthi! Shanthi! Shanthi!

You know, Linda, I never finished Lord of the Rings, but I would not at all be put off by any explanation of these phenomena in mythic terms, whether of Tolkien or of the different versions of the Holy Grail. I might come back to that.

Your discussion of NDE's is very pertinent, to me. I think various categories of ADC's (after death communications) and other psychic phenomena are worth studying also, all toward the end of discerning the subtle and not so subtle differentiation(s) between energies.

What I share below are more bones for the fire, nothing taking exception to or moving over-against your musing, Linda.

To the extent that modern cosmologists and particle physicists see space-time-matter-energy on a continuum, whether in a multiverse or universe, one must wonder what we could possibly mean when we use the word eternal. I recall that St. Augustine notes, via his Creation Ex Nihilo, that Creation was made with time and not in time.

Another way of saying this is that eternity is not just a whole lot of time, it is totally outside of time. So, if we are dealing not with space-time-matter-energy exclusively, what are we dealing with? Is there a nonspatial, atemporal, immaterial, nonenergetic realm? I think so but what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, such are such other realms. As they say, reality is not stranger than we conceive but is stranger than we can conceive! So, the nonspatial is not a very tiny, point or singularity but outside of space. Same thing with matter and energy, where the immaterial and nonenergetic are concerned; they are distinctly different realities, some natural and some supernatural, some impersonal and some Personal. What keeps this all from deteriorating into pure dualism is the introduction of an hypothetical, hierarchical realm and/or transcendent reality, one we cannot grasp but which grasps us.

There may be a realm where created form exists, a tacit dimension. Even then, as Wittgenstein says: It is not how things are but that things are which is the mystical. Thus, true mysticism is not satisfied even with the answer of God as unmoved Mover, but always finds the fact that there is something rather than nothing positively beyond words, ineffable. There is an occulting, in principle, of all things ontological in their relationship to ultimates. Back to the context of the Great Chain of Being, I suppose that, in a nutshell, I don't view kundalini and the Holy Spirit to have the same "ontological density". This density may reside moreso in the "form" as Phil referred to created form (neatly allowing immanence without pantheism) or, maybe more appropriately, may derive from a potency inherent in the form? Still, where would be the locus of the faculty we call the will? Radical alterity and otherness call for some radical discontinuity, somewhere and somehow. We aren't all just different capacitors and resistors of created forms on some gigantic transitorized circuit board, each doing something fun and different with the ubiquitous current, which is flowing through us all (to use an analogy). We have an autonomy, a volitional faculty, that transcends all of these phenomena in a nonmechanistic, nondeterministic way. However constrained in our range of motion, we are still open-ended processors influencing these energies, directing and redirecting them, cooperating with them or not, however Personal or impersonal.

From a practical perspective, for example, it would seem nonsensical, to me, to substitute the word kundalini in the Gospels, every place we see the word Holy Spirit. Conversely, it would seem nonsensical to substitute Holy Spirit every place the word kundalini is used in Gopi Krishna's Living with Kundalini. Every creature of God is sacred, including electricity and kundalini, but not every creature is a person, like a human being, and not every person is a creature, such as the Members of the Trinity.

Well, that's quite enough. Tolkien must wait ('til we do Harry Potter).

Peace, friends
johnboy

SJ - I think I understand some of what it is you are seeking to clarify and maybe you can see some of my own grappling in an essay I wrote several years ago: Aridity, Desolation & Dark Nights as Eros

I would rewrite it now, more heavily nuance it and all, but does it at all touch upon your issues ? I'm feeling like it might but am not entirely sure I have heard you correctly. Thanks for your thoughts. I especially liked what you said about evil. It is curious that, in the Old Testament, there was not a lot of scandal at the thought of evil issuing forth from God's left hand, rather than Satan, apart from God. The authors who wrote of Abandonment and Surrender to Divine Providence perhaps best nuanced the situation by distinguishing between physical and moral actions, ascribing responsibility to God for every physical action but not for every moral action. Thus, if you strike me, God struck me (via His permissive will). He did not participate in your motivation, however. That's just an aside. Let me know if I am interpreting your questions properly. I look forward to others' responses, too.

pax tibi,
jb

JB,

Its strange, but with all the energy experiences I've had, both good and bad, via my kundalini imbalance, I have to say I've never felt a discontinuity in energy realities. The locus of "will" it seems to be is only a disconnection between highest intent and self intent. And I haven't experienced energy in the sense of positive or negative space, though I suppose the black holes of the universe sort of prove otherwise. In surfing strange realms, as I have unintentionally, and well as some divine ones (verified as I've read, only afterwards, of others' experiences which have been similar), I've never sensed a reality "outside." It just seems all a matter of frequencies and what one's personal radar is catching, and the channel depends on the mind/body/connection of the receiver. Which means there are all kinds of realities, but the energy has always seemed connected to me.

Ever study astrology? In that context, there is no such thing as will, except when the planets (which I really take as symbols of frequencies, such as names for notes on a scale) form certain angles, so to speak, that allow for an energy opening, good or bad, to another realm. As times, I can feel these frequencies and even identify them, and I'll look at what the astrology report is for the day just like the weather report. Sort of like seeing clouds and knowing there's a possiblity of rain.

I can't frame my reply merely through an intellectual argument. With kundalini, it really becomes experiential.

At the same time I had writtenAridity, Desolation & Dark Nights as Eros , in conversation with some newly graduated spiritual directors, I had also written this: http://www.geocities.com/campmerci/freedom.html . Again, I would rewrite and re-nuance both of them, especially in the light of what Jim Arraj has written about contemplation, in general, and kundalini, in particular. Still, I think I was onto some important distinctions in framing up my questions about natural mysticism versus infused contemplation. While recognizing the integrative and holistic manner of human transformative processes, still there are important differentiations and distinctions to be made, I believe. I appreciate what SJ is trying to do by way of clarification. We need to know how kundalini fits in to a distinctly Christian philosophy and metaphysic if we are to advance our dialogue with the Eastern traditions.

Changing gears:

Linda wrote: Its strange, but with all the energy experiences I've had, both good and bad, via my kundalini imbalance, I have to say I've never felt a discontinuity in energy realities.

Linda, this seems like an important statement with implications for advancing dialogue. Maybe you (and Phil) could elaborate even more as you did here, for instance: In surfing strange realms, as I have unintentionally, and well as some divine ones (verified as I've read, only afterwards, of others' experiences which have been similar), I've never sensed a reality "outside." It just seems all a matter of frequencies and what one's personal radar is catching, and the channel depends on the mind/body/connection of the receiver. Which means there are all kinds of realities, but the energy has always seemed connected to me.

I think you did an excellent job of putting into words what can be so very difficult to articulate. Phil, would this description "fit" your metaphysics, which would consider Linda's all kinds of realities to be due to created forms , while the energy ... always seeming connected might correspond to immanent being or Aristotle's material cause, the ontological density deriving from where on the Great Chain of Being an experience is realized, created form being differentiated as we move along the chain, even within ourselves? Linda, you spoke, too, of not experiencing a reality "outside". That, too, is worth fleshing out.

My own energy upheavals , for the most part, weren't at all disruptive and most definitely felt as though they were coursing, uncontrollably, from within ... but I had, at the same time, a profound intuition of a Presence, of an Other that was deeply felt.

While I am thinking about it, I think there is much wisdom in St. Ignatius' rules for discernment of movements , addressing such matters as whether or not certain experiences had a preceding cause, for instance. This just comes to mind in association with my own "upheaval discerment", which sent me running to a spiritual director, finally, after three or more years.

I snipped this from the above quote, from Linda: "The locus of "will" it seems to be is only a disconnection between highest intent and self intent."

This reminds me of so many dynamisms: from ego to Self (Jungian), from me to God, from Fisher King to Grail King, etc and touches upon what I was talking about in my essay regarding freedom and intentionality and valence of the will. Would that locus more appropriately be described as a switch or even a junction box where both disconnects and connects are made? I think the "locus of the will" issue is important, but difficult. It is important, under any circumstances, to acknowledge its existence and its function (inasmuch as it may be responsible for as much as 10% of all my behavior!)

Linda wrote: Ever study astrology?

No. I was forbidden But, my particular, grown-up Catholic view is open to truth wherever it is found, all emanating from One Source (an anological imagination is more fun than a dialectical one!), even while acknowledging some articulations are more nearly perfect and while eschewing facile syncretisms. Your analogy was well made regarding alignments and axes. It fits with Phil's radio receiver analogies used long ago in his Pathways to Serenity talks.

Linda closed with: I can't frame my reply merely through an intellectual argument. With kundalini, it really becomes experiential.

I certainly understand this but you did a very good job of making your experience at least a little intelligible (and that's all one can hope for in relaying such experiences and, further, not to say I didn't misconstrue some of it). Linda, thanks for your continued generosity and depth of personal sharing (you even coaxed me to share a little on the experiential side --- now back to safety ).

Phil, does your head ache yet ? Sorry

pax tibi,
jb

As I gather, you are perhaps the only one who has written about Kundalini from a Christian perspective. Therefore I addressed my questions regarding the comparison of the Holy Spirit and Kundalini to you. Yes, I am trying to understand things - first Kundalini in relation to Hindu philosophy and then in relation to Christian principles. My questions I hope will highlight the problems that people dealing with this issue have and your answers I hope will add more clarity to the discussion. After all, this topic is vast and nobody has all the answers.

SJ, it helped me to hear more of what you're seeking, and so thank you for that. I don't know what to say any more than what I've already said in other threads and in my books, however, namely that, in my view, kundalini is our experience of a deep and powerful energy process which, once activated, seems absolutely intent on awakening and engineering a capacity for the embodiment of enlightenment, as understood and articulated by Jim Arraj. My position is based on observation of what this process is trying to accomplish in me--what I discern to be it's goal. What I read in the Hindu literature resonates in many ways, and so I have great respect for that body of wisdom.

In my experience, the Holy Spirit is the love of God mediated by Jesus Christ which communicates a sense of connection with Christ and the Father. The "goal" of the Holy Spirit's work in me seems to be more about making Christ's work known, giving glory to the Father, building Christian community, and helping others to grow in Christ.

I find nothing of kundalini which negates the work of the Holy Spirit and vice versa. But I also know nothing about the ultimate nature of each to be able to comment on what kind of energy it is, its relation to strong and weak forces, etc. Once I leave the facts of my experience behind as summarized so briefly above, I'm into the realm of conceptual speculation, which is helpful to the mind in some ways, but difficult to verify with certainty. The model I have chosen to express my understanding makes use of the chain of being and Thomism, but I wouldn't bet my retirement savings on this being the best way to express it. (Oh wait, what retirement savings? Damnable stock market!).

Why there are bum kundalini awakenings is not as hard to understand. I think the Gospel concept of new wine and old wineskins makes a lot of sense. Most of these seem to be "premature," but not all, of course. There is much about all this that I don't understand, and so I'm still learning just as you and the rest of the participants on this forum are doing. Still, I've never seen a case where surrendering this process to Christ and the care of His Spirit hasn't brought improvement, which leads me to believe that Christ's configuration of the human form helps to mediate a smoother flow of kundalini energy.

I hope this all helps. I realize I haven't touched on many of the points and questions raised recently, and so maybe I'll get back to some of those later. What might help is follow-up questions in the light of my response.

Shalom,

Phil

Are we not connected to the eternal by faith alone, not experience?It seems to me there are intermediary zones which can be accessed by NDEs etc. but to be truly "outside" is to be "in" or "one with" Christ. I'm referencing Paul in Ephesians 2:6. ".. seated with him in the heavenly realms.." not in the future, not in the present but outside time, outside space, outside the multiverse and levels of dimensionality being explored by science.
Part of us, pure spirit, sanctified by Holy Spirit is there, in Christ (and yet Christ is there AS A MAN is he not, or does that depend on your notion of the Christ?) and we access this by faith, not meditation or yoga .
Kundalini seems to me to be insignificant in this union and placement.Where it is significant, atleast in my experience, is in the way it chops up pieces of future time/mind and brings them into present mind and breaks down the spatial zones where individual mind exists so that mind is unified. This unification need not be Divine but can be satanic, unlike the unity of the Spirit, which is truly Divine. Therefore references to Kun as divine energy are misleading as the unity it brings only exists within time and space.Ofcourse the energy may access astral zones where angels and demons are at play but they are never told to sit at God's right hand as Christ is (Hebrews 1) .That's where the Holy Spirit takes US, not Kundalini.

Having said this, I used to dream as a child of a light being(humanoid body made of light) which because of my upbringing I interpreted as the Holy Spirit. Now that I'm older, I see this dream, which was vivid and recurring and set in heaven, as a kind of memory or accessing of another reality. The being may have been my own soul waiting to come into the world. I don't believe in reincarnation but am into the idea that part of us dwells in God , outside of time and space but also before time.Therefore my dream seemed to take me there.(This may be hogwash, but what the heck, I've thrown it in now.) I choose, at the moment, to interpret some sciptures as pointing to this eg. - Jeremiah 1:5 - " I knew you before I formed you in your mother's womb"(ofcourse this could be fore-knowledge, but there are other verses)Sorry if this is a digression and a bit too sci-fi and I don't put any great personal significance on it or any other psychic phenomenon, after the ordeals of the past 7 years. I only mention it as a reference to other phenomenon talked about(NDEs etc.)
The K energy I've experienced was also always connected to me, but also was more about my connectednes to everything else - time, space(or lack of it, as it seemed to condense space and physically connect me to matter which was kilometres away).

re: I realize I haven't touched on many of the points and questions raised recently, and so maybe I'll get back to some of those later. What might help is follow-up questions in the light of my response.

Phil, in light of your response, my questions are answered, insofar as they deal with trying to understand your understanding

The questions that remain with me have to do with whether or not I even partially grasp what Jim Arraj is saying, and I think I do, but I suspect I will grasp it more fully through time, as has been my experience with both of you

So, my "follow-up" question is: Does the nature of my comments and questions fall within the Arraj framework? Is "created form", in and of itself, the end around pantheism in the Thomistic approach?

pax,
jb

Interesting set of observations to all who are posting on this thread.

I need to clarify, however, something I wrote about the energy feeling connected to me. I meant that the energy itself feels connected, just that there are different layers, not "holes," or space and non-space, so to speak. The "To me" portion just meant in my perception, not that I particularly felt connected to the energy, in the sense, the energy of the whole, but more as the fragment, whatever, I was experiencing at any given time in my kundalini experience.

And not that I interpret my experience itself loaded with any particular truth, it's just my experience. When I first started having any energy experiences due to the kundalini awakening/imbalance, I had no framework at all to put it in - i.e. pscyhological or theological, and nothing in terms of spiritual or contemplative practices. I simply lived through it, saw and felt other dimensional realities, from the deep past (past lives? who knows?) to potential future events,both for myself and the world at large, light beings, demons, the whole range, from various spiritual walks (and still do, depending on where the kundalini inside me decides to move). The only thing I know for sure is that the soul doesn't die. It moves on, somewhere, and as a Christian, I believe it is union with Christ. Where that reality exists, in terms like eternity or anything else, just seems like a label to me.

And, on another note, I went to a Catholic charismatic healing day-seminar here in LA two weekends ago and met an extraordinary woman who says she had NDE. Her experiences were classic, in terms that she died (brain tumor burst in her head), crossed over, and met, she says with Mary, Christ and Father God.Irony is that she was kind of a lapsed Catholic, and in her return has become devout, but not judgemental about other spiritual walks. In her NDE, she was told her mission, that she'd be returning, and other details that I won't go into, extremely similar to others who have reported NDEs.

But whatever she experienced was a true reality for her, no doubts in her mind that it was real and certainly doesn't analyze the energy around it (I asked her, believe me). And she's a living miracle. She returned and was completely healed, although given, she told me, a 1% chance of survival without any brain damage, etc. Instead, she's completely healthy, walking, talking, etc. The only consequence, she says, is that her short term memory is gone compared to the past. She said she was the kind of person who could do 5 things at once and had a t0-do list pages long, and today (3 years after her NDE), she just lives in the moment, and feels totally guided by God. Her other remaining symptoms are completely imitiative a full kundalini awakening (which she kenw about) - she has pranic energy surges, which aren't uncomfortable, she says, she is totally energy sensitive, has psychic experiences, is audioclarvoyiant, gets guidance, she claims, from the heavenly realm for those around her, can hear celestial music, has prayed over people who are suddenly healed (this was confirmed by the head of conference, whom I know, and was standing next to me while she related a lot of her experiences to me). And she has the auric field of a saint - gold/white calm light just oozes out of her, her eyes shine with a light and something I can't even identify, and her face is as smooth as five year olds, despite the fact that she's in her 50-s.

What I really liked about her is that she wasn't full of any platitudes like "It's all about love," blah-blah. But she did say that she now takes the bible very literally and that the NDE brought her a whole new understanding of it, particularly the Old Testament, the convenants, etc. And, of course, she is in perpetual adoration of Christ, whom she says really forgives us and that man has created all the hoop jumping of pentenance, etc. That it isn't necessarily. Just acknowledge sin, repent, you're forgiven, let go and let God lead. TO her, none of it was very complicated.

Needless to say, I found her incredibly inspiring and felt blessed to meet her and hear her story.

Linda wrote: Needless to say, I found her incredibly inspiring and felt blessed to meet her and hear her story.

WOW! Thanks, Linda. You were indeed blessed and, now, so am I.

pax tibi,
AMDG
jb

This topic is gaining greater depth and width with each sharing! There are so many thoughts that go through my head now as a result of the wonderful thoughts expressed by each one, that I can't go into each one at one go.

But for starters - JB, you wrote something truly brilliant:

it would seem nonsensical, to me, to substitute the word kundalini in the Gospels, every place we see the word Holy Spirit. Conversely, it would seem nonsensical to substitute Holy Spirit every place the word kundalini is used in Gopi Krishna's Living with Kundalini.

Building on that I it would be helpful to know if the 'numbing of the emotions, darkness/dryness of the soul' can compare with the spiritual struggles and dark night that the Christian mystics were talking about. One thing we know for certain is that although the mystics went through hell in their spiritual life, their external lives were not disrupted, their lives were marked by great love for God and man at all times. They lived lives of impeccable morality and a very strict ascetic life.

To be continued...

Fr. THOMAS KEATING ( 7 August 2002)

As far as I know, Philip St. Romain's book is the only in-depth discussion of the kundalini experience and its symptoms in Christian spiritual literature. Meanwhile, people with these symptoms can get help from experts in other spiritual traditions where it is fully described and discussed. We had a meeting here at the monastery some years ago of such people and drew up some brief guidelines for people in great distress who suffer from these symptoms. We have to wait until more Christians experience kundalini and who can write about it and provide the kind of guidance you lament the lack of. Probably the chief advice is not to resist the rising of the energy and to moderate the amount of time given to meditative practices when the symptoms are present. Some effort to balance the energies in the body seem to help some persons also. Yet each case is distinct and also has a variety of phases. One thing all experts agree upon is not deliberately to awaken the energies or to stimulate it once it is awakened. For most Christians on the spiritual journey that I know, the kundalini energy evolves unnoticeably and manifests more in interior stages of prayer such as the dark nights, than in external manifestations.

I thank you for inviting me to comment on this subject and I wish I could bring some light to the situation, but I do not feel qualified for this task. It needs someone like Philip who has gone through a full-blown kundalini awakening and who can speak from experience. The general guidelines from the conference mentioned above are available and could be helpful up to a point, but not as much as you rightly desire.

PS: It was I who used italics to emphasise the observations made by Fr. Thomas Keating. Has anybody the link to the particular 'Snowmass Interreligious Conference', he is referrring to?