For many years I've wanted to understand the relationship between kundalini, shaktipat, and hypnosis. This led me to purchase this new book by British stage hypnotist Jeremy Wheeler.

At about the age of 11, he has his first awakening when a born-again Christian prays for him.

He trains as a hypnotherapist but discovers there's more money to be made in selling courses about hypnotherapy than in actually delivering the therapy. To improve his income, he switches to being a stage hypnotist.

Then he gets into meditation, psychic healing, and channeled teachings. These lead to what he initially calls "illumination," the dissolution of the personal self into universal feelings of oneness, love, and light. He describes this as "a billion times more powerful" than his awakening at the age of 11. He could enter states of bliss at will.

At some point, and having read Gopi Krishna's books, he recognizes "illumination" as a Kundalini awakening.

After this, he comes to see hypnosis as very much a lower art, and one that might even damage the hypnotized subject. Trance is dissociation from reality, and trance induction is mind-invasion.

He reads spiritual books, travels in search of shaktipat, and goes on meditation retreats. The 10-day Goenka retreat he views as hypnotic and cult-like. "True awakening has never once required you to surrender yourself completely to anyone."

The author sees pranayama as one of the most effective (though also the most dangerous) means of awakening kundalini. Shaktipat, providing one finds a pure source, is also most effective, though it can also be dangerous if received from an impure source.

He attends a meeting of the Vineyard Church and finds that essentially they are working with shaktipat, though in an untutored and unskillful kind of way.

This raises the question I was most interested in: If Pentecostal preachers are in reality working with shaktipat, is this also really a form of hypnosis?

And I'm not really sure what the author's answer is. He remarks that shaktipat and hypnosis are "similar" but "profoundly different" (chapter 34), but I still don't understand in what ways they are similar and in what ways different.

Thanks for the review, Derek. This is a most interesting topic.

I'm wondering what similarities you (or Wheeler) find between shaktipat and hypnosis? I've always thought of shaktipat as a transmission of energy to another person, hence the importance of purity of intent or at least consecrating the practice, as Christian charismatics do (and I agree that there's a shaktipat dynamic involved in laying on of hands). The goal seems to be to stimulate the consciousness of the recipient to a deeper manifestation of the Spirit (though human "spirit" is present as well).
- I spent a little time discussing this in my "Kundalini Process" book, and Jim Arraj has an interesting discussion on charismatic phenomena in relation to the unconscious.
https://www.innerexplorations....theomortext/lack.htm (scroll down a little for the Toronto Blessing part)

It seems that hypnosis could also be imparting some kind of energy and "suggestions" between the hypnotist and recipient. Is that what you have in mind?

Yes. Jeremy Wheeler has vast experience as a hypnotist, so he's certainly well aware of the dangers.

I think this is what he would want to say.

Hypnosis and shaktipat are both forms of mind-over-mind influence. That is what they have in common.

(We should probably understand hypnosis here in the broader sense of Mesmerism, and not in the narrow, soporific sense of James Braid, where the only causal mechanism is the power of suggestion.)

The difference is that hypnosis aims to dominate, manipulate, and control the subject. An external influence is being imposed on the subject. And that is the danger: It is ultimately debilitating as well as immoral. Freud already saw the debilitating effect of hypnosis as far back as the 1880s:

"But in the background there was the warning given by experienced workers against robbing the patient of his self-reliance by frequently repeated hypnosis and so making him an addict to this kind of therapy as though it were a narcotic" (Introductory Lectures #28).

Shaktipat, on the other hand, aims to draw forth from within the subject -- to liberate, to empower, to make autonomous and free of control.

Thanks, Derek.

Shaktipat can, in certain cases, leave one "connected" with the person who transmitted the energy touch. I've had a number of people tell me that they constantly felt the presence of the person who'd administered the transmission -- not that it was an evil presence, only unwelcomed. It is a consciousness to consciousness communication, and who knows what goes with the energy and how it "sticks" to the recipient. In one of the cases I was aware of, the person went and confronted the guru about it, but he was completely unaware of the enmeshment and also unable to break the connection.

I've tended through the years to advise against shaktipat unless the practice is consecrated in the name of Jesus, and even then I prefer it be done in the context of petitionary prayer.