WHAT IS KUNDALINI
Kundalini is the primordial energy, the source of all energy. It is a living energy that knows how to act. Before Self-Realization, it is potential divine energy.
It is completely pure and immaculate (Nirmala in Sanskrit). It cannot be stained or tarnished.
The Kundalini goes against the force of gravity. It rises on its own, like fire. It purifies, consumes and cleanses all that is useless (ideas, desires, feelings that take us away from spirituality). It doesn’t absorb imperfections--it removes them. This is why we sometimes feel heat.
It is the reflection of the power of God inside every human being. Human beings are made in the image of God. With respect to their spiritual potential, all human beings are the same.
She is the spiritual Mother of each and every one of us, who nurtures and energizes our spirit. She has always been with us, and gives us the capacity for love and compassion.
In the Christian tradition, the Kundalini is the Holy Spirit. Her awakening is the true baptism.
There are many ancient symbols of the Kundalini, including serpent and river of celestial water. The dawning of the Age of Aquarius signaled her awakening.
She emits the impulse to search for something higher, for spiritual seeking.
She generates the power of pure desire—the power to evolve and to become one with the spirit.
THE AWAKENING
She is protected by the Mooladhara Chakra, the center of innocence. This chakra produces effects in the nervous system when someone tries to use unauthorized techniques, such as sex, to awaken the Kundalini.
Before Shri Mataji started Sahaja Yoga in 1970, getting self-realization was very difficult. It was done on a one-on-one basis. The disciple lived in isolation from society. The chakras were cleansed through many austerities over many years and Kundalini was awakened only after the cleansing process was complete.
Today with Sahaja Yoga, Self-Realization is possible en masse. The vibrations are perceived by the Mooladhara Chakra, which informs the Kundalini, waking her from her dormant state.
The Kundalini rises through the Central Channel in the spine. When she reaches the fontanelle bone at the top of the head, the Kundalini achieves the connection with the all-pervading power of the Divine in the Sahasrara chakra.
It can be felt as a cool breeze in the palms of the hands. It also starts a flow of Divine Grace inside us. For the first time we can feel the presence of the Divine. It purifies the attention of the person, and establishes his awareness in the state of meditation.
When the Kundalini rises, she awakens the Spirit which is located in the heart. When she touches the center of the Sahasrara Chakra (which is also the seat of the Spirit), we are bathed in vibrations. Then, the awakened Kundalini helps establish the sovereignty of the Spirit over the different aspects of the subtle being and of our life.
The Kundalini nourishes any of our chakras that are out of balance and corrects them. When the chakras are clear enough for the Kundalini to rise without obstacles, we can feel the peace and enjoy thoughtless awareness.
The Kundalini can be understood as consisting of many strands of energy. The more we meditate, the more strands rise, and the stronger our Central Channel becomes. This helps us to live more in the present.
Shri Mataji's talk on Kundalini
The Practice of
Sahaja Yoga - A guide for beginners
THE POWER OF THE
KUNDALINI
Extract from a Talk
by Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi
in London on the
17th May 1981.
Yesterday I
told you about the Kundalini and that Kundalini is the pure desire within us
that manifests, or is awakened to give us our self realization. That means
that the desire is only fulfilled when you get your realization, otherwise
it is not manifest, it is just dormant, it is still residual. It creates a
hollow feeling within us, but unless and until you get Self Realization,
unless and until you become one with your spirit, you do not achieve the
manifestation of this power. So it will go on making you run and run and run,
feeling that you have not yet achieved, or you have not yet found out your “meaning”. It will be there, all the time sleeping but giving you a sense of (its) rapture. So this power must be energized to manifest.This power has got certain qualities. The first quality is that it goes against gravity, it rises against gravity. So a person has to be aspiring by nature; if a person is not the aspiring type, the Kundalini does not rise. Like, when food passes down our stomach, it presses the sides of the intestines. This causes the movements for the food to go downwards, you see. So when the KUNDALINI starts, and starts pressing on the sides of the charkas, she creates the feeling for Her to be raised higher and higher, so the charkas pass Her upward. All the heavy things go down, but the Kundalini rises higher and higher and higher because she is like fire. Fire never burns downwards, it always burns upwards.
She also looks like fire and she has the capacity of fire (within us)… a capacity to purify and to burn off whatever can be burnt off. Fire purifies things which it cannot burn and burns things which are flammable, which can be burnt…
So the quality of fire that exists in the Kundalini burns off whatever is useless. Like, in our house, we find all the useless things and we take them to the garden and burn them – finished! Once and for all they are finished. So when the Kundalini rises she also burns off useless things. That is all your useless desires, your useless ideas of action, all sorts of useless accumulations of feeling and egos and every sort of nonsensical thing that is in between. All the things that are burnt off by Her are done so because they can be burnt, they are not eternal by nature. They are temporarily.
All that is temporary she burns away and that is how she enlightens the spirit, because spirit cannot be burnt by anything. But this burning is so beautiful. It burns off all that is bad, stagnating, all that is polluting, all that is disease, and pulls down the filth.
It is very interesting to see how this power of fire becomes the cool breeze. But in science also you will find that electricity can give you a hot breeze or cool breeze. You can transform from one to the another. But there is no ultimate for these things, they are always reversible.
Supposing something becomes magnetic, you can always convert it to electricity. Electricity can always be converted into magnetism. But Kundalini is such a thing that once she has burnt out everything that is there – that is how you get heat, because she is burning – when she cools down, then she is not reversing. That is why it is a living process. A living process is never reversible, but all dead process can be reversible.
Now supposing you are grown up, you cannot become a little baby, whatever you may try. You may have any number of operations, but you cannot be little once you are grown up. Now you are ‘modern’, ‘overdeveloped’, you may try anything to become primitive person, but you cannot, you just cannot, whatever you may try. That will be all artificial. You just may feel that you have become primitive by wearing some sort of dress, by feeling that “oh now there’s no modernism in us and now we have become very subdued’. Nothing. It is curable but not reversible,
But god is a living process. So Kundalini is the living process within us of our evolution.
So the power of the Kundalini is to purify. She purifies us like fire. She does not purify us like water. Surprisingly, she does not purify us like water.
Now water, what does water do? Water never burns off anything, but it dissolves certain things. It can take in something within itself. Supposing you put color in water, it assumes the color.
The Kundalini does not assume color. She burns away, do you follow the point? So if you have anything wrong within you, she will burn it off, but she will not absorb. She is pure. She cannot absorb those things into her that will pollute her. She cannot be polluted. This quality of fire: For example if you put gold in fire, or silver in fire you can purify it, a pure form comes, that is how you would know. But if you put gold and silver in water nothing will happen. At the most you can wash them on the outside; but you cannot do the outside and the inside.
You can do the same with other things, outwardly. But with Kundalini it works outside and inside. The face looks beautiful, as if some glazing has taken place, giving a bright new face. It is not sallow, neither is it horribly burning nor is it pale and ugly looking, but it becomes radiant…radiance is what the Kundalini gives you.
Another example is molten iron. Have you seen molten iron? Supposing you take a pillar of iron and heat it to a point, it starts showing copper and all sorts of colors, golden copperish and everything, like in a furnace…
Now the sound of Kundalini… For example, at Visshudhi (1) creates the sound of all the vowels that are in the Sanskrit language(2) . These are the sounds you can hear at Visshudhi. You see English vowels are very few. She creates sounds on all the chakras, but when she comes to the Nabhi (3) it becomes a whine. Whining means information, coded information. That is the nearest way you can say that she gives coded information.
At first you do not hear the ‘Paramaya’ , the coded information of the desire you have. Then it rises from the Kundalini point, the Mooladhara charka (4), where it is not heard, where there is no sound. When it comes to the stomach the Paramaya starts. Then it comes to the heart centre….where you can hear it “Rab dab,. You can hear it with a stethoscope, just like the heart. Then it comes to the visshudhi where it becomes a witness, Pashanti, ‘The one who sees’. You might have noticed yourself, when you are caught up in the visshudhi, you might have felt it there. When this sound, which is the sound which we speak, comes to the throat, it becomes Vaikari (The power of speech), it speaks. This is even before the Kundalini is there, whining the coded information. Here the language, which is only coded, becomes decoded so it is called Vaikari, it talks.
After realization the Kundalini enlightens…everything else.
Like if you have say, a thing like this, (lamp) and you have all the oil, and everything there, it still will not give light until it is ‘enlightened’ by Kundalini. Until then it becomes from ordinary ‘whining’ which cannot give enlightenment to the mantras, and that is why those mantras have no meaning at all.
For a person whose spirit is enlightened and his ‘whining’ enlightened, for such a person, whatever he says come true, whatever he asks for happens, even before he speaks. The desire within , the Paramaya, becomes enlightened and that is how you get the results, that is how it works.
The whole system of Kundalini works out this way. So this pure Kundalini creates purity within us. Without the purity we cannot see what is impure. Say if my hands are not clean, then I cannot see the lines on them. You cannot see the real pictures of anything that is dirtied, you cannot see the reality of it, if it has not been purified. Even if something has been superficially or artificially purified, or painted over, you can always tell. You cannot see its beauty because whatever has been done to it was artificial.
Thus Kundalini burns off energy, (basfaysan), makes everything into ashes and whatever remains is the pure gold of the spirit within us.
