The west and Kundalini

Prānāyāma, then, is in effect a process of bringing under control the Vagus nerve



For as soon

as you keep a secret it is already an open secret; you know about it and

other people know about it, and then it is no longer a secret. The real

secrets are secrets because nobody understands them. One cannot

even talk about them, and of such a kind are the experiences of the

Kundalini yoga. That tendency to keep things secret is merely a natural

consequence when the experience is of such a peculiar kind that you

had better not talk about it, for you expose yourself to the greatest misunderstanding

and misinterpretation. Even if it is a matter of dogmatized

experience of things that already have a certain form, you still feel,

as long as the original fresh impression of such an experience is alive,

that you had better continue to cover it up. You feel that these things will

not fit in, that they may have an almost destructive influence upon the

convictions of the m…lvdhvra world.



I want to put it very emphatically that the awakening of

Kundalini, as we usually talk about it, is only a preliminary to the awakening

which is waiting in vjñv. We are certainly still very far from it, if we

take the evolution of our psychic state in general, but it lies ahead of us.



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This paper will use on a globally

pragmatic approach, viewing Tantra as a fundamental human striving at the highest level of

Maslow's hierarchy of needs.1



I first experienced

an entheogen in the form of "Owsley2 acid," an exceptionally pure form of LSD, on a beach at

a place called Little Sur Creek, just south of Big Sur.

This experience resulted in a major paradigm shift from my previous formed materially

scientific understanding of the universe. Back in school, I found myself spending less time

studying engineering and more time learning hatha yoga, meditation techniques, and reading

Leary's version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead.



The Spandakārika or "Stanzas on Vibration" is



thought to have been compiled by Kallatabhatta. Inhabitants of Kashmir at the time enjoyed

widespread religious tolerance, and for centuries the region experienced a rich confluence of

Hindu and Buddhist thought, including many streams of what is also termed Tantric practice.



Almost two centuries later, Abhinavagupta wrote the Tantrāloka, a detailed

commentary on the Spandakārika. In these works on the doctrine of vibration, stress is laid on

the importance of experiencing Spanda, the vibrating energy of consciousness, in various ways

through various methods and techniques, in order to cultivate a growing interconnection with

the primal vibrating energy of the universe itself. Much of 9th century Kashmir practice "deals

with how to lay hold of this inner power and identify with it."5



Due to the fact that the electric field is perpendicular to the magnetic field, any signal

vibrating in the electric field will have minimal interaction with the magnetic field, and vice

versa. The two should cause minimal interference with one another, and there exists the

distinct possibility of two components of consciousness within the human body: a quasiindependent

electric component and a quasi-independent magnetic component. The possibility

that there may be two components of consciousness is reinforced by human experience in a

number of areas, for example the accounts of an "etheric body" and an "astral body" described

in various traditions discussed later in this paper.



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