Kundalini Splendor

Zimmer Imagines Heaven
                  For Merrill Leffler

I sit with Joseph Conrad in Monet’s garden.
We are listening to Yeats chant his poems,
A breeze stirs through Thomas Hardy’s moustache,
John Skelton has gone to the house for beer,
Wanda Landowska lightly fingers the clavichord,
Along the spruce tree walk Roberto Clemente and
Thurman Munson whistle a baseball back and forth.
Mozart chants with Ellington in the roses.

Monet smokes and dabs his canvas in the sun,
Brueghel and Turner set easels behind the wisteria.
The band is warming up in the Big Studio:
Bean, Brute, Bird, and Serge on saxes,
Kai, Bill Harris, Lawrence Brown, trombones,
Little Jazz, Clifford, Fats on trumpets,
Klook plays drums, Mingus bass, Bud the piano.
Later Madam Schumann-Heink will sing Schubert,
The monks of Benedictine Abbey will chant.
There will be more poems from Emily Dickinson,
James Wright, John Clare, Walt Whitman.
Shakespeare rehearses players for King Lear.

At dusk Alice Toklas brings out platters
Of Sweetbreads a la Napolitaine, Salad Livoniere,
And a tureen of Gaspacho of Malaga.
After the meal Brahms passes fine cigars.
God comes then radiant with a bottle of cognac,
She pours generously into the snifters,
I tell Her I have begun to learn what
Heaven is about.  She wants to hear.
It is, I say, being thankful for eternity.
Her smile is the best part of the day.

 Paul Zimmer


At first glance, this poem might seem to have little or nothing to do with Kundalini,
but I feel that this, like many other works of art, is intimately related to the transformation process.  All art--including poetry and other forms of literature, music, painting, dance and sculpture--can carry us close to the transcendent realms.  Lisel Muller, reflecting on a concert she has just attended, says that for two hours she was lifted into those regions "where the enchanted live."   Indeed, such experiences literally transport us, in effect "speak to our souls" by carrying us into a different state of consciousness, to a world beyond the mundane.

One who experiences such elevations gains delightful and fulfilling responses.  Often these are even visceral in nature.  No wonder art has been sought after and preserved through the ages.

For someone like the poet of the above poem, heaven itself would be existence in the constant presence of the famous poets, painters and musicians of past ages, as well as notables from the world of "popular" culture (jazz, baseball and such).
What the poet (and others like him) does not realize that there is, in fact, a realm beyond the world of art.  Art carries us to the doorway of the essential mystery, but it does not often break open our senses and awaken our ecstatic being the way Kundalini does.  Kundaliniis that which "lies beyond the veil," exposing the "next level" of response, and allowing us to experience in full--in somatic and mental delight-- that for which art has been a preparation or foretaste.  Now we become the sounding board, and--when all is in alignment-- respond to the "artist within" in ways previously unimaginable.  Art is still a comfort and a joy, but Kundalini takes us over to the next stage in our unfolding.

(picture from internet site)
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