“I have always said that life is a memory. There are actually two types of memory: conscious and unconscious. The conscious memory is very fickle and inconstant; it is directed outwards towards mundane objects, which are temporary and transitory but seem eternal to the ignorant mind. The unconscious memory is permanent; it has been collecting all your karmas from tens of millions of births without any lapse or distortion. So the uncon scious memory is actually conscious, since it perfectly records everything that happens to you, and the conscious memory is actually unconscious. People say, ‘I did it because of the force of circumstance,’ when what they mean is that they were not conscious enough to remember not to yield to
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KUNDALINI
the pressure of all the karmas encouraging them to do it.
“The result of the above is Maya. Through sadhana you can make the con scious memory truly conscious, and you can return the unconscious mem ory to unconsciousness. When these two merge, the result is the superconscious memory—the consciousness of reality–and in that state you exist in the causal body. Then you must go even further, from vijnana to ananda, the unlimited bliss of pure existence. When the last shred of ego is dissolved only awareness is left: Nirvikalpa Samadhi.
“Ordinarily no one ever comes back from Nirvikalpa Samadhi. Once the Kundalini Shakti enters the Muladhara Chakra the entire Earth Element must be transformed before she can move to the Svadhishthana Chakra. If even a tiny bit of Earth remains untransformed there will be no further rise. She can remain partly awakened, but She will be unable to awaken com pletely. This is true for every chakra. When Kundalini finally reaches the Sahasrara, therefore, She has relinquished all connection to the Five Ele ments, and the soul can no longer remain in the mundane world, where you must be imperfect in order to survive.
“You cannot last for more than twenty-one days in Nirvikalpa Samadhi; if you stay longer you can never return to your body. For the first twenty-one days you are in Nirvikalpa Samadhi your body does not decay. Not one hair falls, no animal bothers it, no insect disturbs it. After that it begins to decay because the causal body ceases to exist. Without a causal body how can the subtle and physical bodies continue to exist? You have become desireless.
“You can return to Earth from Nirvikalpa Samadhi only if Nature has a mission for you. If that is the case, or if you get permission to return to Earth to conduct your own research or just to play about, then you must select some karmas with which to self-identify to enable you to drop back into your body. They may be karmas from a tree, or a rock, or any sort of being; but there is no other way to return. You are like an insect that has escaped its cocoon, a cocoon of karmas. Once a worm becomes a butterfly it cannot return to wormhood unless it takes on new karmas, like Jesus did.”