Thanks for your consideration , jb.

I thought it best to post most of your reply below:

re: What is the role of divine incarnation - God manifest in flesh - in relation to the three contemplations.

As far as God becoming flesh in Jesus, in general, you may enjoy the following:Phil and I fleshed out the role of the Incarnation, metaphorically, using computer operating systems, in a simulated bulletin board called Christ OS. Click on this link.

As far as in relation to the three contemplations? Your question is so depthful that it actually goes beyond the scope of what I feel I could do justice to in a post. It also would be one Phil could better answer from his formal academic studies. I will say that what it is all about is communion, about relationship, about being together, about the unitive with one another through our God and with our God through one another, in His Creation for all Eternity. Perhaps I could say that God is the Author of our faith, that the Father through His Creation created human beings on that special rung of the great chain of being whereby we straddle the human and the divine. As the Author, He gifted us with human potentialities and made it possible for us to know the Unknown God, Whom St. Paul spoke of. The philosophical contemplation might very well be the God of the Greeks. The mysticism of the self takes this philosophical/metaphysical contemplation, of which all humans are !
capable, and goes deeper to a meta-philosophical experience that is profoundly nonconceptual and therefore VERY difficult to put into words, which are symbols for concepts. Still, we are dealing with a natural state and with a subjective experience of reality, which intuits a unity of all being reflecting moreso on the fact of existence itself, that is to say focused on the thatness of it all and speechless at the marvel that there is something rather than nothing and not fully satisfied with any answer whatsoever as regarding how this can be (including a God hypothesis). If you can get caught up in this experience, whatsoever, from my freewheeling discussion here, sit with it and marvel and feel the wonder. All of this led to natural explanations for reality and cosmological arguments for God as the answer for why we exist, and ontological arguments as the answer for why He exists, etc, really long before any Revelation entered the scene in many cultures. !
So, in a sense, its seems that these two contemplations are a!
kin to the praeambula fidei, the natural ways of knowing God, Who is, therefore, the Author of such faith.

Therefore, re: Is it [the Incarnation] simply an aid to MYSTICAL CONTEMPLATION? , I'd have to say that it is not just an aid but that it is actually the Ways & Means of Mystical Contemplation, which however unitive it may be, however relational, however communal - is only a foretatse of the Beatific Vision. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are also, therefore, the FINISHERS of our faith, of our contemplation.

Although we distinguish between the three contemplations, the distinctions don't really imply a separate process of transformation but maybe moreso different aspects of one journey, a journey to God sometimes done explicitly and sometimes implicitly (such as by nonbelievers who live good and upright lives).

reoes it contradict or compliment the MYST. OF SELF if God is experienced therein as NO THING NESS?

There are no contradictions. These are indeed complementary ways of experiencing God, apophatically versus kataphatically, personally vs impersonally, etc Is it in Job 19 where we realize that, for all we see in Creation, in the entire Cosmos, still we have only viewed the fringes of God's garment? The no-thing-ness becomes an accurate descriptor insofar as, ontologically, God is outside of space-time-matter-energy. Descriptive accuracy can therefore increase through negations sometimes.

re: Also, re. the "two-tier system" - my experience of Kundalini has been of a natural soul energy rather than a Spirit energy.

This statement is founded on ontological presuppositions I assume? or have you some subjective experience to relate to in making these distinctions? At any rate, I'd agree. This fits my paradigm and that of most Christians. It is actually mostly those in the Eastern traditions who have speculated that kundalini and the Holy Spirit are identical, (until they dialogue with us on nonduality and we arrive at irreconcilable ontologies).

re: Any positive transformation in me has been activated by Holy Spirit.

It would be expected that the Holy Spirit has guided both your soul energy and your subjective experiences of it and your response to it. Even someone experiencing an imbalance can benefit from Romans 8, with all things working together for the good.

It is quite possible to have different paradigms for all such experiences. People simply do. And we impose interpretations on them based on our cultural milieus, our religious upbringing and tradition, our worldviews and philosophy. All I am doing is responding with as orthodox a Catholic Christian view as I am able. It is limited even at its best. I deeply honor your own perspective on YOUR experiences. I feel a deep reverance for both you and your experiences and want you to fully appreciate that, once we get off the academic considerations and theological speculations, however honorable they are, and begin to share personal experiences, I truly feel we are on very sacred ground and I reverance you and the God within you with a deep sense of gratitude for being a bystander in another souls's journey back to God. This is a difficult medium to handle personal sharing. Thanks for your great generosity, Stephen.

re: I'm interested in the "transcendental/anthropological theological methods of Rahner" in Vat II. Could you simplify them?

Not trying to be silly, I really can't simplify them. The most important affirmation related to our discussion is that God wants a relationship with every human being, even those who've never heard the Gospel preached and He goes after them with everything He's got (Creation). Rahner coined the term "anonymous Christian", which basically captures the Catholic view that salvation is available to all, including those of nonChristian faiths and even atheists who lead the good and moral life. Grace is working in everyone. The holy Spirit is making its rounds. One way you could say it is that Rahner's methods help explain how a human (anthropologically) who hasn't heard the Gospel (a transcendent reality) can be saved. The technical term is Christocentric inclusivism. View that they can't be saved are called exclusivism.

re: You realise that I'm trying to integrate my Kundalini into a evangelical protestant
tradition

One of the best ways to frame up the philosophical and theological issues you may be faced with is by studying this schema: Catholic-Protestant Schema II by The White Robed Monks of St. Benedict.

Although some elements of liberal Protestantism embrace a Christocentric Inclusivism, a Protestantism that uses a dialectical imagination will have difficulty reconciling the amount of immanence implied in panentheistic views that suggest an immanent-transcendent reality of God. Mysticism is pretty much suspect in more fundamentalist circles for these and other reasons. In the Protestant section of the Spirtual Journey Press , you'll find some good links. It occurs to me that a Jungian framework for viewing your experiences might be a nice complement to other perspectives (although the writings of Kelsey, an Anglican, linked to here, probably moreso reflect, as you'd expect, a "catholic" hermeneutic). There are many ways to integrate your experiences using different "languages" of philosophy, psychology and theology, and you may be able to convey your experiences in a nonthreatening terminology, using t!
he more neuroscientific paradigms. After all, these life energies are a big focus of clinical trials and complementary-alternative medicine funded by the National Institute of Health. Perhaps you'd be more comfortable using the lingo of Jung and neuroscience to explain your journey to physical-emotional-mental-spiritual health and wholeness, energy upheavals and all, although, assuredly, some very irreducible distinctions about the specific kundalini phenomena will impoverish your sharing a tad? (but that may be an inaccessible conceptualization for your audience anyway)?"

Phil

Just to make sure that there are no misunderstandings, I'd like to clarify what I meant.

1. If I understood right, your Kundalini arousal came in the over-emotionalised, energy charged context of a Charismatic meeting/retreat.

2. You not only have a PhD in spirituality, you are a professional retreat master, specialising in contemplative Christianity, with past experience in drug abuse counselling. So your knowledge of theology, spirituality, psychology, Christian mysticism are academically professional.

3. You are actively involved in all of this, so the reference to lifelong spiritual guidance, simplified knowledge of all these things being discussed on these forums does NOT apply to you. I was having ordinary people like me in mind - with no knowledge of philosophy, theology, psychology and only superficial acquaintence with the theory of spiritual matters discussed; people who live ordinary lives and have only sporadic contact with these matters and yet may end up being faced with a spiritual crisis like an imbalanced Kundalini, who may not even know how and where to look for help because they don't even know their problems by the name of Kundalini.

4. You were part of the Snowmass Interreligious Conference, Fr. Thomas Keating has written the forward to your book on Kundalini, you are following and leading other people along the path of Christian contemplation using centering prayer. So I was recommending the path of Christian mysticism as a safe path, which prevents extreme Kundalini arousals and integrates the arousals without throwing the person out of balance.

JB

Thanks immensely for narrowing the list down to two. In fact what I had additionally in mind was what Fr. Thomas Keating was referring to. He pointed out that other religious traditions have explained the phenomenon of Kundalini arousal and imbalance fully and have worked out ways of treating the 'disorder'. I was hoping you could get some of that literature, as I couldn't trace it. The only literature I could find which seemed relevant and attracted my attention was the selection from the book 'Taming the Serpent' and the book on Kundalini Yoga by Sri Swami Sivananda Saraswathi of Rishikesh/India.

WOW! WOW! WOW! If your professional life was all about banking until retirement, then hats off to you for acquiring such an in-depth knowledge of theology, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and Eastern thought in such a short time!!! Since you mentioned your essays on these topics, I thought you were a professional in the field. The fact that you are not makes your knowledge even more impressive. I can absorb very little of theology, metaphysics and philosophy by reading on my own, so I don't strain myself too much. I find it easier to understand spiritual matters when it is expressed in the form of 'wisdom for the simple minded'. I do believe in grand oversimplifications. I believe that is how the Holy Spirit speaks to the vast majority of mankind, reserving His high flown vocabulary for the theologians, philosophers, metaphysicists, to give them employment.

Stephen,

I apologise for implying in one of my earlier posts, that you might not be too heavily into the technical language and concepts of the theologians and philosophers like me. Your questions and JB's anwers suggest that you are way ahead of me in understanding these concepts and articulating them in the language of the professionals in the field

The 'highest vocabulary' that I can understand regarding these matters are the simple stories written and compiled by Fr. Anthony de Mello S.J.

Incentally JB,

I don't know if you mentioned in your thread/ referrences somewhere that the Theosophical Society (HQ - Madras/India) experimented extensively with all sorts of phenomena and energies, minus the clinical trials, long before NIH. The quote from George Arundale from his book 'Kundalini - an Occult Experience' about Kundalini is a result of those studies.

The world renowned Jiddu Krishnamurthy was chosen as the leader of the Theosophical Society because of the purity of his aura. The world knows him more from the time after he broke away from the theosophical society and became a one-man institution. After he broke away, he left all discussion of the various energies behind and talked mostly about the importance of love and the limitations of philosophies and theories in the experience of the ultimate reality. He was a zen master who did not belong to any zen school.

CORRECTION :

Incidentally JB (meaning a gossip value aside)

Jiddu Krishnamurthy was considered a zen master (who did not belong to any particular zen school) only because he argued and behaved like one.

I wish to take this opportunity to thank Phil for providing the facility on these forums for people like me to share comments and views. I thank you for the encouragement and support provided on these forums for all those, including me, who have wanted to share profound or less profound thoughts.

I for one, because of my lack of formal qualifications in these areas and my lack of personal experience about things being discussed here (my luke-warm personal spiritual journey being totally uneventful as far as Kundalini experiences go, including other experiences both blissful or terrorising), there is more intellectual interest in these matters than anything else.

JB, you have been a great inspiration and help. Your valuable contributions in the form of sharing your insights, your support and affirmation of others, the vast treasure of links and information you have gleaned from the ocean of the Internet to guide and help those participating/reading these forums, your eagerness to learn, your openness to accept all points of view as being valid for its difference in perspective - tells me to go and do likewise - to acquire relevant knowledge before talking knowledgeably and get personal experience which lies beyond theories and philosophies.

I'll close with a story compiled by Fr. Anthony de Mello SJ.

Four blind men were asked to describe an elephant. One blind man got hold of the trunk and felt around it and convinced he had discovered all there was to discover about the elephant, did not search further. Another blind man restricted himself to discovering the tail, the third one to the legs and the fourth one felt only the belly of the elephant. In the end each man described the elephant as the part he had felt. Was any blind man wrong? No! He was right about what he had felt. Was every blind man right? No! Each had felt only one part of the elephant and thought it was the whole elephant.

So it is with the knowledge in the East and West. Both are right and both are incomplete. All the wisdom of the world put together makes up the wisdom of God as revealed to human beings.

To know more about this concept, read the book, The Marriage of East and West, by Dom Bede Griffiths.

Thank you Phil, thank you JB, thank you Terri, thank you each and everyone with whom I have interacted on these forums! Bye for now until I can get back to ask Phil more questions on his book.

And so, in a nutshell, we have been studying what some of the Early Fathers considered morphosis and metamorphosis. They are inextricably intertwined and the distinctions we have drawn do not imply separation.

I must take a break and get my children back to primary school, high school and college.

pax tibi,
jb

No need to apologise , SJ.

My understanding of the concepts and , in particular, the technical language of theology/philosophy is rather limited. It takes me a while to get to grips with some of it but it does afford me great pleasure when I do. I still haven't ingested a lot of jb's posts and am glad that they will be preseved here for some time to come

Lv and Pce,

Stephen.

quote:

1. If I understood right, your Kundalini arousal came in the over-emotionalised, energy charged context of a Charismatic meeting/retreat.

No, it came during the course of the deepening of my prayer to a more contemplative mode. This was years after my involvement in charasmitic renewal. My book recounts all of that, so you will see.

quote:

2. You not only have a PhD in spirituality, you are a professional retreat master, specialising in contemplative Christianity, with past experience in drug abuse counselling. So your knowledge of theology, spirituality, psychology, Christian mysticism are academically professional.

The credentials are Doctor of Ministry in Spiritual Direction, Master of Science in Biology, and Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor certification (now lapsed). FWIW, nothing I learned there was really very helpful unto the understanding and integration of kundalini.

quote:

3. . . .people who live ordinary lives and have only sporadic contact with these matters and yet may end up being faced with a spiritual crisis like an imbalanced Kundalini, who may not even know how and where to look for help because they don't even know their problems by the name of Kundalini.

That's just not likely, SJ. It's very correlated with contemplative spirituality and/or Eastern meditation practices--hardly found outside that realm, unless one buys into the very broad concept of kundalini in which virtually all neuroses and psychoses like bipolar disorders are considered examples of bum kundalini awakenings. But that's a whole other discussion!

quote:

4. You were part of the Snowmass Interreligious Conference, Fr. Thomas Keating has written the forward to your book on Kundalini, you are following and leading other people along the path of Christian contemplation using centering prayer. So I was recommending the path of Christian mysticism as a safe path, which prevents extreme Kundalini arousals and integrates the arousals without throwing the person out of balance.

Yes to the Snowmass conference and Fr. Thomas' Introduction, but I do not teach centering prayer or any particular "method" of prayer. I see lots of value in a practice like c.p., but have some of the same reservations about it that Jim Arraj has expressed, and which JB has pointed us to. I really waver about the idea of "acquired contemplation," and c.p. is of that approach.

I don't think it can be said that kundalini awakenings and arousals are absent in the lives of Christian mystics, and my book points out numerous examples of how it's shown up in their lives. We do have our Dark Nights and "fireworks," some of which seem very kundalini related.

What I have said is that I've never seen anyone get worse when coming from an Eastern tradition into Christian spiritual practices, but I have seen things deteriorate when going the other way.

Thanks for spending some time with us. You've stimulated some good discussion. Please feel free to drop in any time you wish.

Phil

re: SJ's musing: 3. . . .people who live ordinary lives and have only sporadic contact with these matters and yet may end up being faced with a spiritual crisis like an imbalanced Kundalini, who may not even know how and where to look for help because they don't even know their problems by the name of Kundalini. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- and Phil's response:

That's just not likely, SJ. It's very correlated with contemplative spirituality and/or Eastern meditation practices--hardly found outside that realm, unless one buys into the very broad concept of kundalini in which virtually all neuroses and psychoses like bipolar disorders are considered examples of bum kundalini awakenings. But that's a whole other discussion!

Well said, Phil. There are manifold and multiform energy dynamisms involved in all things having to do with our morphosis or individuation or psychological integration & growth, as well as with our metamorphosis and growth in the Spirit.

The proof in this pudding, regarding the dynamisms connected with morphosis, can be tasted by viewing them through the lenses of both alternative health approaches, as set forth in The Alternative Health Dictionary , which is, by the way, a most excellent glossary for those who are trying to make their ways around in this particular forum, as well as through the conventional approaches to pathology, such as set forth in the DSM-IV - Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition.

To help y'all taste the same pudding regarding metamorphosis, I'm going to upload some old spiritual direction resources to the Christian Spirituality forum.

Thanks to all who've contributed to this recent flourish of discussions. Thanks for your kind and generous words. Please pray for a very close spiritual friend of me and my spouse; her eleven year old daughter was diagnosed with lymphoma yesterday.

pax tibi,
AMDG,
jb

Are there not states of mind reached in non-meditative practise which correspond to those achieved through contemlpation - eg. during pregancy, through drug taking etc. And can Kundalini awakening not relate to an over stressed physiological system ,or, does that then become physio-kundalini(Sanella). Forgive my ignorance of the difference, its been some time since I read of it. If the difference is only in what context Kundalini manifests itself then it doesn't seem that much of a difference - Kundalini is still Kundalini.

Perhaps other threads have gone over this ground.

Lv and Pc,

Stephen.

Yes, Stephen, there are indeed other experiences besides meditation or contemplative experience which can trigger kundalini arousals and even awakenings--Lamaze breathing during pregnancy being a good example. This is one reason I've not been inclined to view Kundalini as another way of talking about the Holy Spirit.

My point was that outside of Eastern practices and contemplative prayer, it seems very rare--unless one broadens the kundalini concept like Gene Kieffer and others have done to include just about any kind of interior activity/process. But as I told Gene many times years ago, if everything is kundalini, then the concept is meaningless. I'm still of that opinion.

Further regarding the role of the Incarnation in the three contemplations -

I don't have the book with me, but have it loaned out, that book being: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Heaven (But Never Dreamed of Asking) by Peter Kreeft, so this will be an imperfect rendering (crude and maybe moreso my own idea with his being a catalyst). Kreeft said something akin to the notion that all of the information generated from the Big Bang forward in time, about everything and everyone, would be available for everyone (great implications for a Creation Spirituality - the natural world is here so we can become spiritual, paradoxically, by realizing as individuals and the Cosmos, without distinction, our fullest natural potential). I am pretty sure this is what he said because he even treated such implications as, for instance, why we would not be embarrassed to no end about having our every thought, word and deed laid bare to all (along with all other info).

Now, metaphysically, I have often conceived of such info as "floating around" along side morphogenetic fields, implicate ordering and other information-related aspects of the "tacit dimension" of reality, including such created forms as the human soul --- all of this information interconnected and interwoven and forming a unity of sorts (in formal and final causation, even), maybe not too far astray of a type of cosmic consciousness. And in this mother lode of information, which is available to all, readily in eternity, partially accessible even now, of course lies our human consciousness, whether conceived as ego consciousness, infraconsciousness, the unconscious and/or the spiritual unconscious. And if this is true, so too is Jesus' human consciousness "laying around" accessible to us all. And I'm talkin about his natural consciousness, which would not be ontologically distinct from ours. When, through contemplation, we tap into the deepest reality of ourselves as created human form in potential as spiritual beings, and recognize the cosmos as an anthropic necessity for human realization, we get in touch with a natural beatitude. Most importantly, once we think about the implications of how Jesus' Divinized supernatural unconscious influenced his natural consciousness and spiritual unconscious, etc (His equivalent, while on earth, of our experience of a transcedent but otherwise tacit dimension, but on an ontologically different plane of course), we can conceive of how transforming Jesus' contribution to the totality of created consciousness really was/IS.

There is a link in the chain of being, right at the juncture where humans straddle the material and spiritual realms, right at the spot where Jesus inhabited our realm --- and it is THE LINK of all links. This gifts us with a tremendous "modeling power" for a comprehensive grasp of ultimate reality, a modeling power which gets enhanced and enlarged when we are confronted intellectually and challenged, or when suffering and pain confront us existentially, causing us to re-model our consciousness to better accomdate the depth of info, the ontological density which is ours, if only we'd drink it in with gusto. I said this poorly, but it is 3:00 in the morning and I wanted to toss it out in rudimentary form for anyone who wants to attempt a restatement or construct a metaphor. The major thrust is how CLOSE Jesus is to us always and in all ways! Accessible now and, with our increases in our own individual "modeling powers" (grasps of reality) even more accessible -- 'til eschatologically, absolutely accessible in this ontologically continuous-informational sense, while remaining ontologically discontinuous and transcendent in another sense. Thus we "put on Christ", even in natural mysticism, which is a nice distinction but not a totally separate reality from mystical contemplation. These contemplations are interwoven, complementary and integrated and they make possible supernatural communication with divinized consciousness. We partake of His Divinity precisely because He took on our humanity. We are thus divinized in an analogous manner to how Jesus' own natural conciousness/infraconscious/spiritual unconscious communicated in His inmost Being with His divinized supernatural unconscious. Our unity with God is communication-based or comm-union, is relational and not an ontological identity-- and incredible to ponder. OK - bedtime.

pax,
jb

ps I may have taken the thread astray but it was based on my intuition that by going deeply into each tradition (and even some humanisms), we inevitable awaken to solidarity and compassion ensues. And I was wondering why? The above sets forth the mechanism and is thus integral to an East-West dialogue, or at least gives a Christian perspective to the anthropology-theology of nonChristian experiences, theistic, nontheistic and even atheisic, on occasion.