KUNDALINI AND THE DRAGON RODEO

Dear Ones,

At once, my beingness is of two ways with Kundalini:  one is experiential, ephemeral, hedonistic, terrifying and ecstatic; the other is informational, knowledge-based, arm's length, inexpert, and experimental.  These two elements spiral about one another within me as yin and yang, as warm/moist and cool/dry air, as one elegant blob chasing the other elegant blob, as those blobs fractalized again and again about each other, releasing energy deeper into an accelerating  infinitude of smallness; the yang - a mind-centric intellectual capacity and the will to use it in self-examination; the yin - a body-centric everything else of blood, vibration, bone, and emotions.  The energy level of this tornadic state of being with Kundalini - the virtual power of this life vortex - is driven by the amount of attention I give to the play of consciousness, or the risk I am willing to take by ignoring it. 

Though I have no tutorial expertise, I will provide a lightly fleshed outline of Kundalini from my own knowledge perspective, such as it is.  Following that, I will share some of my personal experiences and reflections and then conclude with a case study of a particular, Kundalini-fueled, state-transformation experience.

Oh, before I begin, I would like to say a few words about my own kosmic address. 

KOSMIC ADDRESS

Orientation

I was born into an extensive, Irish Catholic family in Portland, OR in 1945.  My parents lived together amicably for 65 years before my mother died a couple of years ago.  They were married in St. Patrick's, the church featured in the film, "What the Bleep. . ."  I have one brother and two sisters.  I am the #2 child.  My father will be 95 this year and shows no signs of leaving either his senses or the planet behind.

There were a myriad of cousins and we all grew up in a pile in a city park that was more or less central to the various family houses.  We Sheppard's were the lefties, the progressives, the better educated, lived higher on the "hill," and generally elicited an ill-disguised contempt from our markedly less-hip relatives.  My mother (whose memory I cherish) made no secret of her top priority in life:  to see me into the seminary, not the monastery mind you, where I would be cloistered away and unable to bring her glory except "through the walls," oh no, she wanted me out there in the parishes on the high trail to cardinalburg.  Apparently, I looked the part as my mother's powerful and contriving sisters had secretly instructed my cousins to support this endeavor by reminding me that I was "destined," and had a "special" calling, a "vocation to the priesthood."

"Hmmmm . . ." I would say, and "Well, we'll see when the time comes."  And, when the first time came near the end of the 7^th grade when I was supposed to declare for the seminary in another year at the end of grade school, and go off to high school by myself with nothing but other terrified little sissypants and men-in-black lurking around, well, I said, "er . . . hmmm . . . I think I will let the calling get a little stronger before I . . . hmmm. . . er . . ." and my mother and her sisters and the parish priests and nuns and my cousins and people off the street that my mother would chum in by putting my cardinal red hair up in egg-white bolstered curls would look at me, looming in with their heads tilted ever so slightly and say, "Ah wee Michael, what a grand priest ye'll make!"

Soon the "next time" was the next day, and the day after that, and week-in, week-out the pressure built and all the while I wondered what they knew that I didn't, for inside of me, a lying, cheating little would-be fornicator was straining at the bars.  I'll tell you what was "special" about me back then, I was preoccupied with showing off how smart I was in such a way that I appeared modest, and I was preoccupied with sexual ambition, lust, and the mystery of the feminine.  I could give a shit about guys except that I needed to fit into the "boy" thing and I learned that my smarts could get my ass beat, but my fastball ruled.  Beyond that, it was babes, babes, babes - constant distraction at the hands of my stayed-under-the-sex-hose-way-too-long libido.  Thank god I discovered masturbation or I would have probably ridden my bike off the nearest cliff out of sheer frustration.

Thus, no seminary for me, but the pressure was still unrelenting and, as much as I wanted a girlfriend with whom I could "experiment," it was not to happen primarily because I was too damned afraid of the consequences of my very un-priestly and erotic intentions ever coming under public scrutiny.

Absolutely nothing of spiritual significance ever occurred to me in those days unless you could call having radium-isotopes stuck up my nose to burn out my adenoids, "spiritual."  Oh, and one other thing, I did think that I could start busses on fire if I just concentrated hard enough.  I actually tried it once but quit before the bus got to my stop as I didn't relish the sight of passengers screaming at me as they rolled by in flames.

Not much room for spirituality in that little head.

That was then, and now, I am the result of lots of experimentation, study, contemplation, humiliation, triumph, addiction, generosity and discovery.  I will not tell much of the story of how I came to be a neo-Hindu as it is long and irrelevant, but my spiritual orientation can be summed up by saying that, after 50+ years of mostly unsupervised but persistent study of  spirituality, philosophy, and the history of religion,  I have found that Kashmiri Saivism, (Shaivism) rings the most true for me.  It is as fundamental-as-it-gets non-dualism.

My method, if you could call it that, is hopelessly non-academic.  Functionally dyslexic, I must be strongly motivated to even begin to scan an essay.  Several "scannings" are required if I am really going to get (and retain) the author's message and point of view.  It is a blessing that I am benefited by a powerful intuitive faculty which has demonstrated itself faithfully most of my life.  By experience I have learned that the essential concepts of any treatise are revealed in the first few pages - the rest is mostly rationalization and repetition.  My practice is to read until I feel the transition to argument and repetition begin and then turn the ideas over to my intuitional faculty and it, (don't laugh now,) well, it feels for the feng shui of the proposal. You know what I'm talking about - a "bullshit detector."  Some of us (me) can hear/entertain a novel concept and come to "grok" it so to speak, without wasting much time plowing through the "enlightened messenger's" rationales and repetitions.  For example, though Hinduism in the broadest sense is a complexity beyond my expertise intellectually, historically, or categorically, it is not mysterious to me at all regarding its spiritual, philosophic, and scientific fundamentals.  Buddhism is more illusive to me.

I do know, that when Siddhartha came along, Hinduism had long-since passed the "flourish" phase and was mired in confusion, decadence, and impossibly complex ritual.  In a very real sense, Buddhism saved the great spiritual tradition that spawned Hinduism, as well as Hinduism itself, from totally going down the toilet.

Yet, I am drawn by the heart to Hinduism. It calls with a resonance that cannot be met, for me, by the more astringent, cooler, dryer "vibes" of Buddhism.  I suppose my current and sustained attraction to the Saivite line of Tantric Shiva/Shakti Hinduism reflects that earlier trait in my youth to seek fulfillment through relationship with the feminine, the lush, the moist, the theatrically tantric, and not the ascetic, the cooler, dryer, the preferentially celibate masculine.

Thus, the orientation part of my kosmic address is centered on resonance with the cognitively unimaginable Absolute state being at once Shiva and Shakti as polar consorts, and Shiva/Shakti as realized, undifferentiated stasis - Tantra.  For me, the non-dual is a view of "reality" as it appears before our very eyes.  That what we see is the ultimate, the absolute, it is just that the "resplendent truth" of it is partially hidden from us because of egoic distraction.   Buddha's great insight, boiled down to concept sans rationalization, explanation, and practice, is that the void, the nothingness, the vastly black and empty turiya state, the end all realization, is what is left of our sense of ourselves as identified with one particular part of the illusion rather than another.  Thus liberation, or "moksha," is the total surrender of any partial identification with apparent reality and the utter acceptance of, and abandon to, our birthright identification with the One, the Divine manifestation.

Personally, I would love to see the Buddhist and Hindu lines re-converge.  I imagine that many of us feel this way.

State

Shorthand ok?  I'm still pretty confused about a lot of things and that suggests that I am probably not stable wherever it is that I "am" on the great coil.  I do bridle less these days at the meanness of green and, though teal was my favorite color for many years, I now feel a willingness to seek in indigo what I once found in teal.  This suggests a turquoise residence, (maybe not downtown . . . suburban perhaps.)  I am growing more comfortable with what seem like new responsibilities and confess to being deeply, achingly aware of how lonely I have been all my life.  Imagine that, finally experiencing 2^nd Tier communion here at IIZaadz, and now I get the big ride through the tunnel of lonesome?  I suppose I will choose to see this as a good thing because it implies that some of my galactic-class ego might have slipped far enough out of the way to let a little Divine emotional "resplendence" into my life.  Fresh horses have arrived and the path, narrower now, seems better-traveled and carefully maintained.  I'm gardening more and liking it.  My son is living with me and bringing his brand of unconditional love with which he awakened me from my addictive trance nearly 20 years ago.  I love what I am doing: this study, contemplation, devotion, and meditation practice.  I love to write, and I feel as if I am just getting started - a beginner in your midst, talkative, smart, not so preoccupied with false modesty, but still compelled to share with you the brilliance I see, and bloom in the face of your brilliance as you share it with me.  (Brilliance of course being a knowing of what you don't know as well as a knowing of what you do know.)

So, onward!

KUNDALINI  SHAKTI

The Doctrine of Vibration, a principal text of Kashmiri Saivism, says that everything is Shakti - every thing is Shakti.  Shiva, incomprehensibly, is intention - the pure potential for "thingness" but not a thing in itself.  Whatever you or any jackrabbit out there might imagine, is a thing.  Thoughts are things.  Places out there in the bottomless voids beyond space time and all knowing are things.  Rocks are things and the unimaginably small sub-atomic dots and squiggles of nothingness that are the only substance of rocks are things.  The myriad dimensions and the wormholes and dark matter and dark energy, and the wave energies permeating this whole mélange are things.  Still, Shiva is not a thing, and since this topic, ordained by non other than Julian, Mr. Integral Healin' Walker Himself, to be "Kundalini, Riding the Dragon," well then Kundalini and Dragons its going to be.

First though, we have to establish what difference there is between the two terms, Shakti and Kundalini.  There are many ways to describe this difference, but it is important to remember that what is different is the name, not the substance.  Every thing is Shakti, remember?  Everything.  The only change is in its apparent location and/or affect.  The "thingness" remains the same - Shakti.  The "name" is more of an address or location or relationship than a separate thing. 

A classic way to look at this is to imagine yourself standing in a river with a bowl in your hand.  Imagine this river of water as pure Shakti, a boundless force pouring day and night across the land.  You dip your bowl into the river and as the river flows into the confines or "location" of the bowl, it's new name is "water".  It is still pure Shakti, it is just that its location has been now defined by the bowl.  As located in the bowl, it is now distinguished from "river" but still contains all the force that it had in the river state.  The force of the river has reverted from gross manifestation to the subtle.  Actually, the "Shak" part of Shakti means "force."

Many spiritual traditions agree with the concept that "beingness" includes both gross and subtle realities.  Shakti constantly arises through its location in the subtle to manifest in the gross.  Without much controversy, the consensus among these mostly "eastern" spiritual traditions is that, in the subtle form of the human being, there is a bowl at the base of the spine filled with Shakti.  In this location, the Shakti is called Kundalini Shakti, or, just Kundalini. 

There is no doubt that this particular topic is one of the most researched and contemplated phenomena in all of human history.  I could not possibly add to the scholarship on this subject and, if you haven't already noticed, the Internet is loaded with opinion on every conceivable aspect.  As I said before, I am not here to provide a tutorial on Kundalini Shakti.  I am, however, pleased to briefly allude to what I have learned about the way that it appears and operates in me.

First, a question and then an image or two:  what is the difference between dormant and awakened Kundalini?  Well, observing the Kundalini as quiescent water in the location of the pelvic bowl, we might see a faint evaporation manifesting or potentiating out of the subtle.  This minimal emanation of Kundalini is necessary to sustain the normal, sleepwalking automaton human lost in its daily grind.  This "evaporative" process is another location change as Kundalini Shakti releases or manifests its force potential from the subtle into the gross at the new location.  This new location change and behavioral affect is called Prana.  Prana is still both Kundalini and Shakti.  The importance of this constant reminder to see the Shakti as always the same, ever the same, no matter what its location or affect cannot be overstated and is critical to an eventual appreciation of the non-dual.  Prana is highly mobile and moves in patterns and through channels called "Nadis" (another location change) and on to where the patterns and channels weave together in the locations known as the "Chakras."  Here, we will stop with the knowledge-based primer on various locations for the Kundalini and move towards the more personal realm through another visualization process.  Our object is to awaken the Kundalini while knowing that it is always somewhat restless in its dormant state.

Imagine the gross energetic potential of the human - awesome really.  A bazillion gigs of memory up there with terabits of multi-channel ram, plus it doesn't just consume energy, it converts it from air, potato chips, ju ju bees or whatever into highly conditioned electrical energy, glandular hormones and neuro-peptides that instruct and support us sleepwalkers through our "days of the dead."  We do not need to know shit to function on the basic animal level of our potential range, to eat, sleep, fuck and work - that can all be done sleepwalking.  We can even win the friggin' Olympics on testosterone and determination alone - no Kundalini necessarily required.  Still, it is there, a mist on the pool, rising, Nadi'ing into the ignored Chakras, no lights on, but everything more or less oiled and ready to go.  Significantly, this system is like a series of jet turbines that have not been fired up yet by their currently unwitting pilot - that's you and I.

WARNING!!!!  OVER YOUR HEAD RAPIDS WITH PSYCHOTIC EPISODES, BREAKS AND LETHAL DIMINISHMENTS IN ALTITUDE APPROACHING.

I am not going to be coy here.  Toying with Kundalini Shakti, or taking a "more is better" approach to its awakening is dangerous in ways that you might not expect.  It is not an accident that "awakening" practices were kept secret for thousands of years.  Yes, of course, the first goal of spiritual practice is, after years of study, devotion, service and meditation plus oodles of well-supervised hatha yoga, to receive Shaktipat, or the sponsored awakening of Kundalini in the seeker.  That is goal # 1.  Careful preparation is required to survive this moment without sustaining possibly serious damage to one or more organs in the subtle or gross body.

RIDING THE DRAGON (or, alternatively, having the dragon ride you)

Kundalini Shakti first came to me in the darkened steerage quarters of a ship on its way from British Columbia to Alaska when I was 24.  I had returned to the states a year or so before after serving-my-country (heh heh) as a combat medic in Vietnam. Just days before I left for Alaska, I had encountered a swami from a great distance while exploring a farm on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge east of Portland.  He was dressed in red robes, was bearded and wore this impossibly orange stocking cap.  Our eyes met, I swear, across 400 yds of open fields.  That night on the ship in April of 1971, I dreamt of an island shore littered with dead stone monuments to fallen gods.  As I wandered between them realizing they held nothing for me, a robed figure in a stocking cap appeared at the other end of the beach and stood there waiting to see what I would do. I turned to the water and approaching its edge, leapt from the beach into the air over the incoming waves.  Gaining altitude quickly, I flew widely to the right and as I rose, the realization that I had done what I was there to do manifest in wave after wave of molecular ecstasy.  It was like an orgasm having an orgasm having an orgasm.  I awoke in the stateroom bunk as if electrocuted by some divine force.  My spine was convulsing in ribbons of energy originating way low in the pelvis and blasting upwards through what I now know to be the shushumna or subtle central channel and on through each successive chakra and out the crown of my head like a friggin' roman candle.  My head was thrown back and the sounds coming from my throat were not what you might expect from someone in the throes of ecstasy.  I have no idea how long it lasted but I do remember coming out of it gradually with sounds like "nnnngggghhhh . . . nnnngggghhhh . . ." and "Jaysus, Jaysus, Jaysus . . . ssssshhhhhiiiiiittttt!"

I had three other dreams over the next 25 years where a similarly impossible situation was solved by a surrendering action.  Each time, this surrender precipitated a protracted ecstatic state. Some years after the shipboard event, I dreamt that I was living in an upstairs flat and was awakened to the window as a ball of electrical lightning made its sizzling way along the street below.  It paused at my street door, crashed it down and rushed up the staircase to my apartment.  Blasting my door down it confronted me in the corner by the window with the most destructive malevolence that I had ever encountered.  It hesitated for a second and then, as it rushed towards me I let go of my defensiveness and bid it welcome - again with the protracted, sheet-rending, uber-erotic convulsions. 

Another time I was the bell-ringing sacristan in a church with school attached.  My quarters were in the bell tower and I came to inherit a small girl baby who I attended with unbroken devotion.  One day, a bullied fight broke out in the yard below and I left her sleeping for the first time as I went down to settle the fight.  On my way back up the stairs, I could tell that the energy in the tower had changed profoundly.  When I got to my room, a sulphurous fume seemed to be rising from the girl's cradle.  Peering in, "she" had changed into a "he," a little beast of a fellow who looked remarkably like Chucky, the homicidal doll-boy.  Well, as little Chucky wound up to disembowel me with what I knew was going to be one hellacious scream, I reached down there, picked up his woeful ass and clutched him to me like the baby Jesus.  Again I was reduced (or elevated) to star- spangled bliss.

The last time this happened, I found myself paralyzed in the foyer of an outwardly non-descript house in SE Portland.  I could soon see that this place was the clearing center and primary "surgery" of an illicit organ transplant operation the owner and chief surgeon of which was going blind.  Well, lucky me, he wanted my eyes and had me laid out on the operating room table while preparing to take them.  "Beautiful" he said, leaning over me with a syringe glinting in his hand.  "Hmmm . . ." I thought, not remembering any of my previous escapes from such impossible situations, "what might be my most dignified option here?"  In a rush, it came to me that I could simply surrender my eyes willingly to this freak as he would surely take them by force if I didn't.  The moment this thought fully formed in my head, the surgeon dropped the syringe, took off his cap and mask and backed away from the table while smiling and saying "Well done, well done, well done."  Cue the angels who know just where to tickle.

Having heard that Kundalini Awakening was serious business and suspecting that this series of dreams was such an experience of awakening, I was primed to take my life a bit more seriously.  This realization coincided with the birth of my son who quickly required that I decide whether it was to be him or alcohol. I haven't had a drop since the choice became apparent.  Today, I count that moment to be my true awakening.  It was the unconditional love of an infant for his father, this gift of purest Shakti that initiated my return to humility, sobriety, faith, and self-love. 

Since then, I have read extensively on the subject and discussed the content of my dreams with a couple of truly heads-up swamis.  One, who was my meditation supervisor while I was TDY in an Indian ashram for several months, said that I was fortunate to have been asleep each time as I was thus prepared to move the extraordinary energies generated through my system without blocking the flow.  "Blocking, or resisting in any way will precipitate damage." he told me.  "It is very unusual," he went on, "to have such a series of dream encounters with the Shakti."  He then asked me about my meditation and hatha yoga experiences over the last couple of years, (the late ‘90's.)  At that time, I was married to a fire-breathing accupuncturin' yogini of the Siddha Yoga tradition.  Two nights after we met, while sitting on the couch in her meditation center-like home, she showed me a picture of her meditation teacher, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, third in the Siddha Yoga lineage.  It was a small picture and she handed it to me face down.  I turned it up to look at it and a shock wave of recognition blasted me back into the couch.  I looked at my girlfriend who had big tears springing into her eyes while struggling for something to say.  She handed me another picture.  I turned it over and stared at the man who I had seen across the fields nearly 30 years earlier, the one who had appeared in my first dream, and Gurumayi's guru, Baba Muktananda, 2^nd in the Siddha Yoga lineage.

A year later after much hatha yoga, chanting, meditation and several multi-day intensives I was in India, at the mother ashram and talking to the fellow who was to ask me about my experiences with Kundalini and the nature of my meditations.  In India, I was free to meditate to my heart's content - morning, noon, and night.  Anyone familiar with a high-end ashram in India is aware of how "Shakti-fied" such a place can get.  Gurudev Siddha Peeth, near Ganeshpuri just north of Mumbai in Maharashtra State is such a place. Here, there are meditation halls and other "places" that are so loaded with the devotions of realized beings that merely being in them is consciousness altering.   Inside its walls, the air scintillates with chitishakti.  To see it in its wild "chi" form, go outside on a bright day and look into the sky while facing away from the sun.  Sunlit grey clouds will provide the best backdrop.  Without much effort, while looking into the space between yourself and the clouds, you will see brilliant white, sparklets flashing quickly in and out of view.  This is chiti-shakti, Shakti in the "bit" form, the "particle" component of light, manifesting its way out of the subtle into view bringing light, warmth, and vigor to us sleepwalkers.

The principal goal of all spiritual ascension or expansion in the traditional sense (and I stress traditional) is to focus attention on the bindu, or pearl - home of the absolute - and penetrate it to experience the divine state of Siddha Loca - the home of the Saints.  Some traditions locate the bindu in the forehead, some in the heart.  Siddha Yoga centers the bindu in the heart. 

I have never seen the full face of the pearl.  I have seen its indigo light blazing from behind a shifting cloudscape that lies between my perspective and the pearl.  Significantly however, I have spent much time in the turiya, a state location beyond Siddha Loca.  Until I met a particular teacher in India who quizzed me about my experiences with the Shakti and meditation, I had no clue as to what was or was not appropriate in meditation sequencing.  He became very quiet when I told him of my history.  When I was done, he told me to lay off on the meditation.  "Continue to chant, engage in dance, do your seva and study if you choose, but only meditate lightly.  The Kundalini is so strong in you that when you get to the turiya state and are essentially defenseless, the Kundalini will actually embrittle your bones and you will burn up from the inside out."

I asked him how this could be and he said,  "I have not heard of this kind of expression of the Shakti before.  It may be that you are already close to realization if not born realized but something has interfered with your capacity to bear it.  That you are capable of obtaining the turiya state without having penetrated the blue pearl is a mystery."

A couple of days later, the SYDA foundation, which runs Siddha Yoga world-wide, asked me to consider staying on at the ashram and take a position in the facilities development office.  After agonizing for a week, I declined and prepared to head back to nightmare Amerika, my marriage, child, and business as a materials engineer/entrepreneur.

A few months later, I was working on a ladder 5-6 ft in the air, looked down, and panicked at the height.  This was very odd as I have climbed half of the peaks in Oregon and Washington as well as some of the easier routes in Yosemite.  I began to lose sleep, my hands, always steady, trembled and I began to avoid my friends, stopped playing golf or going fishing and retreated in my marriage.  The change was so striking that I thought I had better get some counseling.  I took the standard tests for depression and was told that I was clinical and would I please take this next test for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which I did and was then told that I was off the charts there too.  Soon, I was in a 3 month in-patient treatment program for PTSD which helped prepare me for a prostate cancer diagnosis which appeared 6 months later, 3 months of daily radiation, 3 years of "recovery," some kind of strange waist-down neuropathy that has taken over half of my lower body strength and responsiveness, prostate cancer recurrence and recent surgery to deal with it, plus 1 yr of swollen neck lymph nodes, blocked sinuses, and hideously sore throat that was recently diagnosed as non-Hodgkins lymphoma (cancer) of the mantle-cell type. 

The doctor who informed me of the recent lymph tissue diagnosis last week, remarked to me that I was oddly "peaceful" about it.  To be true, I didn't know what was going on with me at the time.  I'd heard what he said and knew that it was "not-good-news," but my body and mind were not reacting that way at all.  Neither was I numb.  More, I was alive with something, a lightness of being, curiosity arose as to why I was not crushed.  I left his office and the hospital in that state and went outside to wait for my cab.  I had a bit of a cry out there alone, but it was more of the grief-for-all variety, and again my attention returned to this puzzling state of oddly excited curiosity.  All of a sudden, I remembered about my adenoidal bout with the radium-isotopes as a child.  As soon as I could get my computer online I went into the database on Mantle cell lymphoma and discovered that it indeed was showing up more frequently in people who had received this long-discredited adenoid treatment than could be accounted for by coincidence.

To put this discovery in context, you have to realize that my steady-state opinion of my overall health for the past few years is that I have been slowly dying in as dignified a manner as possible.  The prostate cancer and all of its assorted symptoms and side-effects do not account for much of the overall health "trial" I have "enjoyed" these past 6 years.  It is the partial lower body paralysis and intense head and neck constellation that have overwhelmed the prostate scenario since my "visit to the ashram" and my intense encounter with the power of Kundalini operating in the turiya state.

Do you see?  Just this week I believe that I now may have the answer to what has bothered me for much of my life.  I spoke to my ENT guy about it as we planned the next steps of confirming the diagnosis and designing the treatment plan.  He says that there is a good chance that this pirate population of genetically "modified" lymph cells can be wiped out by either chemo or gene therapy.  "If so," he says, "you might regain a level of health that you haven't experienced for 20 years or more."

So, if this is true, that the unfolding events of my life have been partially guided by some wild-ass nookuler ‘50's medicine gone mutant, and resurfaced 55 years later as a sequence of trial by fire to arrive at this place where I am sharing with you this preposterous story, then I suppose I owe my parents and the idiots who approved this method some thanks as I love my life today, warts and all, cancer and all, me and all.  All you that is, who live on this planet with me, you who have chosen to take responsibility for your lives, chosen to give your time to these pursuits and share your brilliance with your families and other loved ones;  you who remember that it is all Shakti, this radium up the nose and the love we feel for one another - all Shakti.

Conclusions:

Why a snake?  Why a dragon? Why a salamander or a lizard?  How did these images come to represent this Kundalini phenomenon?  I cannot answer this question with any authority for the trail grows murky indeed as it winds into the past.  One thing is for sure though, snake, salamander, dragon, lizard, they all share the same capacity to writhe and coil. 

Anyone who has experienced the Shakti manifesting as Kundalini in themselves or as a bystander when another does, will admit that a good deal of rhythmic, coiling energy seems to play through the body.  This rhythmic movement typically happens on a large scale with waves rolling up and down the torso and legs.  It also happens on a smaller scale evident in the long muscles of the limbs, and smaller in the fingers, neck muscles, and face.  Sheet and ribbon movements of the back, chest, and stomach muscles can also be seen.  It seems that all of these larger scale movements are accompanied by finer and finer waves, chattering, tremors and vibrations scaling past the surface and in through the tissues and organs to the very bones themselves.

Whenever confronted by such mystery as the origins of dragon/snake association with Kundalini Shakti, I look to the natural world to see if there are any analogues that might help.  Above all, one stands out:  the tornado.  Most of us know that the tornado is formed under the right atmospheric conditions when there are strong sources of warm/moist air and cool/dry air.  As these two discrete air masses "pass by each other" overhead, they intermix and immediately begin to cycle around one another in a dance of physics that is beyond my powers of description, but cycle they do.

Here, we can apply the Yin/Yang symbol as a three-dimensional spiral rather than the customary two-dimensional overview.  Imagine that Yin/Yang was the very top of a vortex just starting to rotate and reach downward to the earth. Big blobs of warm moist air begin to cycle around big blobs of cool dry air.  Get it?  Doing so, these blobs begin to stretch against one another without actually mixing.  Energetically, as the big blobs become radically longer and thinner, the surface-to-volume relationship between what was first a fat mass, gets exponentially higher and the interface between the two different "airs" comes alive with the differential in heat energy and here (I contend) the latent power (Shakti) in the moisture of the warm/moist side of the equation is released explosively into the power of a tornado.  This is the nature of Kundalini energy when fully released in the body.  It is tornadic, cyclonic, twisting and turning exactly like the dragon.  I contend the scales of the dragon or snake, which are very important in the depictions, symbolize the fractal quality of the phenomenon occurring massively and minutely in the gross as well as massively and minutely in the subtle.

Additionally, it seems, this visitation by Kundalini can flow both ways:  self-originating in the pelvic bowl as an upward-rising vortex the narrow writhing end of which, after penetrating the chakras in succession will exit the body through the crown chakra.

In the other direction, when "visited" by the Kundalini, the process might work in reverse.  Here, the vortex is formed from above and the narrow end penetrates the subtle body through the crown Chakra descending through the shushumna to the pelvic bowl.  It is thought that Shaktipat, or the sponsored initiation of Awakening may be ignited in this way.

Dear Ones, this is my frontier, this vortex phenomenon and how it seems to be at the dynamic heart of all things, both subtle and gross.  Of greatest interest to me is the way that the vortex seems to combine both the Yin and Yang of energy qualities as well as the fecund spiraling coil of the Golden Mean fractal Phi (1.618. . . ) and the organizing Pi (3.1416) intelligence of the confining circle.  Think Yin and Yang as galaxies, as wormholes, as relationships, as the tunnel of love, as the madhouse of duality blazing manifestation, and the Divine Union in Tantric stasis.

In closing, I ask for your understanding regarding the disclosure above.  It had not been my plan to write about such things and it had not been my plan to discover such things while writing about my bouts with Kundalini.  So much for plans.

Yer pal,

Michael