Vimalananda developed close personal relationships with his racehorses, visiting then regularly at the racing stables to feed them treats and love. He continued to call on his mares even after they had been retired to stud. It was on one such visit to a stud farm near Poona that the driver of the autorickshaw in which we were travelling abruptly refused to go any farther out of town, leaving us to trudge irately down the road during the heat of midday to cover the remaining half-mile.
A massive heart attack a few years previously had forced Vimalananda to carry with him pills to treat angina. Perhaps it was solely the combination of the heat, the exertion and his exasperation with the rickshaw driver that pre cipitated an attack that day, though there may also have been an internal reason to which I was never made privy. Whatever the cause, this particular attack was much more intense than ordinary angina, and the pills failed to relieve it. Despite his heart condition Vimalananda had continued to smoke, and I lit a cigarette for him as he stood stock still trying to minimize his anguish.
There we were on a deserted road, with no medicine other than the inef fectual pills, with no way to get Vimalananda to a doctor short of walking him there. As the pain had become too great for him even to walk, the only thing left to do was to move out of the road where we were standing, find a place to sit quietly in the nonexistent shade, and wait for destiny’s gambit to unfold. As we headed toward a leafless thom tree, Vimalananda flicked his
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cigarette butt despairingly into the air.
He sat on the ground beneath the tree and I stood behind him, reduced to wondering what would happen next, when some inspiration caused me to look up. There in the tree was his still-smoldering cigarette butt, precisely impaled on a long, sharp acacia thom. My heart leapt into my throat: an omen! I shouted to Vimalananda to look, and when he saw it he smiled, then started to laugh and said, “Well, well, Robby, it looks as if I’m not going to die here after all. Nature hasn’t deserted me yet!" Immediately his pain began to recede.
Vimalananda loved Nature, and Nature loved him. There is order in Nature, a grand rhythm called in Sanskrit rtam to which all the celestial bod ies promenade. Because Vimalananda habitually moved in harmony with this cosmic rhythm the universe had become habituated to cooperate with him. When he tossed away his cigarette with a silent, desperate prayer to Nature, probably something like, “Don’t let me die by the side of this road!” back came the answer in a sign from Nature: “Don’t worry, you are still safe with Me!"
Dying cigarettes usually do not find their way to and impale themselves on acacia thorns. Perhaps a highly improbable coincidence chose to ran domly occur there and then; but such “coincidences” happened day in and day out with Vimalananda, so a better explanation than “chance” is neces sary. The unerring flight of that aerodynamically unsound projectile was an external reflection of the internal event which precipitated it: a cry for assis tance in extremis. Vimalananda’s prayer hit the cosmic bull’s-eye with the same accuracy and force that his cigarette hit its bull’s-eye; the latter event demonstrated, on the gross physical plane for all to see, the former event that was hidden within, like iron filings on a piece of paper conform to the lines of force projected by a magnet held beneath them.
The ancient Law of Microcosm and Macrocosm tells us there is no real difference between the vast external universe and the limited internal uni verse of the human body, except that the individual believes itself to be dif ferent. A human being is a living microcosm of the universe, and the universe is a living macrocosm of a human being. Each cosmos affects the other; the universe affects us, moment to moment, and each one of us by our actions influences the entire cosmos, for good or ill. The cosmos is the body of the Absolute, the vessel through which the Absolute expresses Itself. Every created thing in the universe contains at least a spark of the uni versal consciousness which is the Absolute, but most things cannot ade quately express this consciousness.
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Vimalananda explains:
“Chit Shakti (the power of consciousness or subjectivity) identifies with the Unmanifested Absolute, and Maya Shakti (the power of unconscious ness or objectivity) identifies with the world, the manifestation of the Abso lute. These two Shaktis cannot exist without one another. Even in the grossest matter there is a spark of consciousness–this is why I say that even rocks are alive and even in the highest states of consciousness there is a particle of Maya, as long as there is even the least sense of individuality. Once you learn the truth of the universe, you forget your own individuality, and remember your true nature; only then, when you no longer exist, does Maya no longer exist for you.”
The One exists in the All, and the All defines the One; unity and duality both exist simultaneously. Wherever Chit Shakti is displayed there is intelli gence and sensation; otherwise there is ignorance and insensibility. The human body is a vessel into which consciousness pours, according to indi vidual capacity, filling the body via the nervous system. The spine and spi nal cord extend consciousness from the brain, the pole of greatest awareness which is called Shiva, to the coccyx, the pole of greatest density. Each body cell expresses its own sort of consciousness according to its own capacity.
At the base of the subtle spinal cord in the subtle body lies the residual shakti of individuation, an energy which remains unavailable to the individ ual so long as his or her consciousness remains firmly entrenched in the mundane. This energy is our personal fragment of the cosmic power of self identification. Thanks solely to this sense of I-ness called ahamkara (literally ‘the I-causer’) we exist as individuals. When Vimalananda spoke of the ego it was ahamkara that he meant, not the Freudian ego.
Just as discrimination is the chief characteristic of the intellect, aham kara’s chief characteristic is possessiveness, that proprietary overlordship of the organism which remembers your self-definition and allows you to hold your own in the world. Ahamkara self-identifies with every cell of your body from conception until death; you instantly die as soon as She ceases to self identify with you. The more you identify with your individuality, your microcosm, the more She functions as your own personal Maya and the less She reflects the macrocosm; as you identify less with your individuality She is freed to reflect more of the macrocosm, to increase Her awareness of the One. Ahamkara and Kundalini are two names for the same power mani fested in two different directions: ahamkara connotes Maya Shakti and Kun dalini, Chit Shakti.
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Maya Shakti keeps you awake to the world and asleep to the Absolute, while Chit Shakti awakens you to Reality and puts you to sleep with regard to worldly matters. Since the consciousness of a living being is conditioned by the matter in which it resides, the greatest Maya that we experience is the Maya of the matter which makes up our bodies. So long as we live the embodied life each one of us participates in the play of Nature, binding our selves to the world by the “things” we accrete in our personalities. No incar nate being can be either wholly worldly or wholly spiritual, no matter how filled with light you may become, you never quite transcend your dark side fully so long as you remain embodied.
The expression of shakti in the physical body is prana, the life force, the power which keeps body, mind and spirit functioning together as a living unit. All parts of one’s being require prana. Physical life, health and longev ity require that ahamkara self-identify strongly with the individual organism so that sufficient prana will enliven the body, while spiritual health requires ahamkara to relinquish most of this attachment. Just as every plant requires just the proper amount of both sunshine and rain to flourish, so does a human being require just the right amounts of the sunlight of spiritual awareness and of the cloud cover of ego-attachment in order to thrive. Too much spirit burns the world out of you and makes it impossible for you to retain your body; too much attachment drowns your consciousness in worldliness.
In the ordinary human the ego is fully identified with the body and the limited personality, and all actions are centered around this temporary “self.” Each microcosmic reality is influenced by every other; all of us are caught in each other’s projections and are defined in large part by them. Our conscious personalities that we like to think of as stable and constant are in fact merely aggregates of ideas with which we temporarily self-identify. The conscious personality is a sort of museum whose curator-ahamkara selects objects for display to others from the museum’s warehouse, the sub conscious. These objects are assembled into exhibits, the personality frag ments which each act as if it were “the” personality while it operates. Popular exhibits enjoy a longer run, while less-patronized exhibits are changed more quickly. Eventually the museum goes out of business, at the moment of death when the ego completely forsakes the limited, limiting personality which it has supported for so many years.
Most people never notice the fluctuations of the ceaseless creation and destruction of their personalities any more than they notice the individual frames of film in a motion picture. This perpetual shifting of self-identifica
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tion among all these personality pieces consumes tremendous amounts of energy and keeps ahamkara quite preoccupied. Only when some life-chang ing event forces the issue do you begin to wake from the sleep of content ment with Maya, like the Prodigal Son woke to find himself dining from the pig trough, and to take the first few toddling steps toward the light of Chit.
Kundalini will eventually awaken in every being in the universe. If you prefer to enjoy the vicissitudes of karma you can wait for that awakening to dawn; otherwise you can actively try to find your way to that state. Vimalananda outlined the choices:
“Whatever you desire will eventually come to you; this is the magnanim ity of Nature. She will always eventually give you what you ask for; it is only a question of time. If your desire is the product of a controlled, coherent mind you will achieve it quickly. This is how the Rishi Vishwamitra created an entire parallel universe: the force of his austerities was so powerful that when he set his mind to it, it took shape immediately.
“If you desire God you will eventually get to God; about this there is not one iota of doubt. How long it takes you to get to God, how much of a gap there is between your desire and its achievement, depends on how much you want God. Once you become really anxious to locate God and your mind becomes focused on this desire you can achieve without much delay.
“Lord Krishna says, ‘Bahunam janmanam ante’: only after millions of births does an individual soul get the desire to return to God. Only after many, many rounds of physical existence does the soul finally say, ‘Now I’m tired, Lord, tired of all this birth and death. Please take me away from all this.’ As the soul becomes more and more desperate interiority develops, and if he keeps to it eventually he achieves.
“The first sutra of the Brahma Sutras is ‘Atha ato brahma jijnasa,’ which means, “‘Now there is a sincere desire for knowledge of the Ultimate.’ The Brahma Sutras have already existed for thousands of years, and will probably continue to exist for thousands more. The use of the word atha (’now’) here indicates that there is no limitation of time when it comes to spiritual advancement. Whether it is today or ten thousand years into the past or one million years into the future, atha means ‘whenever there is a sincere desire for spiritual knowledge.’ ‘Now’ is thus different for everyone. Right now is the ’now’ of the Brahma Sutras for all those of us who are trying to grope our way back to God in spite of the terrific Maya which assails us.”
The Maya which assails us is our own, of course, and that of our friends, neighbors and other co-conspirators who share a consensus reality. Most
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people do not want to rock the boat, much less go overboard, and many do not take kindly to the defection of their fellows. Vimalananda used to say, “Human beings are nothing but sheep. I used to be in the flock of sheep, but I ran away, so it’s no surprise that everyone else, all the so-called normal people, thinks I’m insane or, at the least, abnormal. And I think the same about them. Only one of us can be right.” (Aghora, p. 297)
Only those brave enough to disturb the somnolence of the world around them and shout that the Emperor is nude possess the strength to withstand the censure of the remaining sheep. Those who shout, “Beware of Maya!” malign Maya, for Ma always only gives us that which we ask for. When we call on the Goddess to ask Her for mundane boons, which bind us to lim ited forms, She appears to us as Maya; when we pray to Her power and energy She manifests as Shakti; and to those few who relate to Her mater nally she reveals Herself as Ma, God the Mother. Those who remain stuck in Maya do so because they do not try to redirect their urge to individuation from Maya to Chit; they allow themselves to be carried along by the current of their lives, and of their neighbors’ lives.
Aghoris never permit themselves to be passively defined by the external environment; they define themselves, and by so doing define their sur roundings. Vimalananda’s control of an awakened Kundalini gave his self expression such accuracy and force that incidents which would be out of the ordinary for most of us, like that of the cigarette and the thom, became commonplace in his life. He never hesitated to define his surroundings, even if doing so landed him in hot water:
“One day one of these people who call themselves ‘Bhagavan’ (‘God’) was having a big meeting down at Chowpatty (Bombay’s downtown beach). They were charging Rs. 25 to get in. I didn’t want to go in the first place, especially to see someone selling spirituality like that, but one of my friends insisted that I must see this great saint,’ and he paid my way.
“Everyone who went to the saint was supposed to bring along a flower. I said to hell with that and didn’t take along any flower or anything else. When we got there the so-called Bhagavan told everyone to take his or her ego, put it into the flower, and then put it at the ‘guru’s’ feet. He called this the great ‘Mohini Prayoga.’
“When it was my turn I went up to him, and he looked at me and made a gesture to say, ‘Where is your flower?’
“I told him, Please let me know one thing. If I put my ego into a flower I will die phat right here; it is because of my ego that I am alive. My ego self identifies with this body, and if it were to leave my body would immediately
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become limp and dead. And then how would I be talking to you here? So will you please explain to me how to do it? How to put my ego into a flower?’
“He looked at me in a peculiar way and then looked at one of his disciples who caught the cue and told me to get out. I thought I might be beaten, the way all his disciples gathered around us and threatened us. So we left. This was the same fellow who advises his disciples that they can go into samadhi by putting all their energy into the sex center, awakening Kundalini and hav ing a great cosmic orgasm. What nonsense! Has Kundalini become so cheap? You know, in India you can get away with anything in the name of religion.”
Ahamkara uses the body as ballast for the mind, that it may not drift away and be lost like a runaway balloon on a breezy day. When Kundalini awak ens before death She will try to return to and unite with Her opposite pole, the pole of greatest awareness which is Shiva, by reversing the outward pro jection of energy which led to incarnation. While She slumbers She sup ports the body; once She is aroused and throws back the covers which bind Her down, the body-mind-spirit complex starts to unravel as the life force is released from its bondage to the organism.
If your awakening Kundalini unites totally with Her Shiva you will cease to exist, since nothing will remain to identify with your body. If She awakens slowly enough that you can “digest” the tremendous energies which are released as She lets go of everything that has been holding Her down, you will become a man or woman of God. If, however, She awakens too quickly to be controlled, and too slowly to kill you outright, you will be catapulted into the maelstrom of a “spiritual emergency,” a Kundalini crisis.
Some modern writers inaccurately blame all human illness on such spiri tual crises. While it is true that all disease is due, directly or indirectly, to ahamkara, to one’s sense of ego and identity, all neuroses are not signs of incipient Kundalini arousal; and while a Kundalini crisis may produce a ner vous breakdown, every nervous breakdown is not a spiritual emergency. Most of those who maintain that the awakening of Kundalini is the root cause of all their imbalances are merely experiencing the consequences of Her first stirrings from sleep; this is more a crisis of ahamkara than of Kun dalini.
The “physio-Kundalini process,” touted by some as a form of “natural stress release,” is merely the preliminary purification of the ethereal nerves in which Kundalini will eventually move. The awakening of Kundalini is a “stress release” only in the sense that as the bonds of body and personality
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that hold Kundalini down are undone, the energy that had been used to self-identify with these “stresses” is released for the organism to otherwise allocate. The awakening of Kundalini releases all stresses, not merely those which produce neuroses; relief of neurosis is not regeneration of identity.
If Kundalini be triggered suddenly in an unprepared nervous system, the shock produced resembles that delivered to an unsuspecting toddler who grasps a live wire. When an unreconstructed personality tries to resist Kun dalini, consciously or unconsciously, She may fry nerves and blow out endocrine fuses, shorting out the nervous system at its weakest point and blowing a hole in the victim’s aura. Since the aura’s job is to insulate us psy chically from one another and from disembodied influences, holes in the aura permit all sorts of chaotic, negative mental vibrations, including even ethereal parasites, to enter the individual’s field as they like and spread ruin.
If the individual remains functional, Kundalini may inflate and empower his or her limitations. That person into whose genitals Kundalini is diverted full force, for example, will begin to live, eat and breathe sex, and may misi dentify as spiritual experiences the colossal lusts which arise. Or, should Kundalini become lodged in the digestive organs, insatiable hunger may supervene.
Even if overt calamity is avoided worse dangers await, for the ensuing catharsis can actually reinforce the limitations of the personality instead of releasing them. Those half-baked spiritual aspirants (called ardha dagdha, lit erally “half-burned,” in Sanskrit) who permit the power to swell their heads, like gas inflating a balloon, may believe themselves to have achieved exalted states. Because the power of Kundalini that buoys them confers an aura of seeming truth to their words they may shoot up to the heights of self-confi dence as pseudo-gurus, commanding others with confident persuasiveness to follow them until one day the pressure of temptation becomes too great and there is a cataclysmic fall.
Such self-inflation may proceed insidiously; as Gopi Krishna observes “… the desire for power, the yearning for mental conquest… often accompanies the activity of Kundalini in the intellectual center, causing a slight intoxicated condition of the brain too subtle to be noticed by the subject himself or by his uninformed companions, however erudite and intelligent they may be.” (Gopi Krishna, p. 176) A spiritual aspirant may not intend to go wrong, but the power of even a half-awakened Kundalini often proves to be dangerous.
Which illustrates the great danger in the notion that all one’s problems will be solved if one can just awaken Kundalini; problems are solved if and
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only if Kundalini awakens in a slow, controlled way. When She does awaken in a controlled way, She awakens slowly and reveals Herself gradually; only very rarely, as with Vimalananda, does She shine forth in nearly fully devel oped form almost from the start. What many people believe to be the culmi nation of their spiritual practices is thus really only the beginning, only a brief, tantalizing disengagement of Kundalini from Her normal self-identifi cation with the mundane. Should this happen to you, you must then methodically follow up on it with measures to guide and channel Her if you hope to survive because Kundalini progressively unties every knot that binds the personality together.
Though I had been introduced to the idea of Kundalini before I met Vimalananda, She became real for me only after I began to glimpse Her peculiar path through his life. Because he was concemed to remove the idea of quick achievement from my mind, he never sat me down and said, “This is what Kundalini is all about.” Instead he provided me with little bites of information from time to time, encouraging me to digest each morsel thor oughly and assimilate it efficiently. As he liked to say, “Never be in a hurry; start with a sip and end with the bottle.” The long conversation reproduced below did not occur at one sitting; various snippets have been spliced together to provide an overall glimpse of his approach to Kundalini Yoga.