Kundalini Splendor

Brahman is Atman


When I was about eleven I read these words in a history book and they made perfect sense to me. Later on, I got a bit confused when I discovered that various writers and sects have varying interpretations of their meaning.

However, I think the simplest interpretation is often the best, so I cling to my early perception, which was, simply, that the highest part of our "selves" (our souls or spirits or essential core self-ness) is one with the vast, immeasurable, inscrutable power we term the divine or ultimate reality or Emerson's Oversoul or God or whatever word we use to designate that which is beyond description.

For years, that notion remained in my mind as a thought or concept, something I felt strongly, and sensed from time to time as, say, in the midst of some natural wonder or exhilarated by a piece of poetry or music.

After Kundalini, we know that this idea is not merely a concept, but something that is available to be realized in our deepest selves, an experience of union and oneness that simply cannot be denied. Kundalini awakening (and its later mysterious visitations as bliss or rapture)needs no proof besides itself. It tells us who we are at the deepest levels. It takes us into the presence of God and we revel in that profound connection. True, we sometimes experience pain along with the bliss, but how much of God can we receive into out bodies? To enter such extreme bliss implies a willingness to be "ravished by God" again and again, as our bodies adjust to this new level of being.

I am not saying that in this way we become God. In this way we know that we are a minute part of that infinite being, whose power and vast energies are beyond comprehension.

To go beyond this state is to risk total annihilation. We remain grateful that what is afforded to us is not more than we can bear.



Braman (ब्रह्मन्, brahman, nominative brahma, ब्रह्म) is a concept of Hinduism. Brahman is the unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe in the Hindu religion.

(from Wikipedia)




But those who fully worship the unmanifested, that which lies beyond the perception of the senses, the all-pervading, inconceivable, unchanging, fixed and immovable--the impersonal conception of the Absolute Truth--by controlling the various senses and being equally disposed to everyone, such personas, engaged in the welfare of all, at last achieve Me."

(from the Bhagavad Gita 12:3-4)




(The image is a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti entitled "Beatrice in Rapture.")