Monday, March 21, 2016
Andrew Harvey on Kundalini
Participant: Indeed. My question originally when I pressed 1 minutes ago was to ask you about your perception of kundalini energy and whether that's on this energy quality you speak of, whether it's related to that and whether it's time for humanity to have a kundalini awakening, which seems to be happening to a lot of people in one form or another, and whether you could just say something about that.
Andrew: Well, I believe that the kundalini is the evolutionary love power, creative power of the mother herself and that it's installed as tradition tells us, and as I myself and so many others have experienced at the bottom of the spine, and when it rises either fast or slowly, what it does is unveil the burning, dancing cosmic reality of our universe. I feel that the tremendous explosion, if you like, of kundalini experiences all over the world, they’re a sign that this birth that I'm talking about is rising from the very depths of matter itself. It's being activated by her in the depths of matter to make available to us beyond religion and beyond the patriarchal, controlling, mystical systems a holy, astounding, new range of experience.
I've had my own kundalini awakening, but I've also had the privilege of working with a woman who is one of my greatest friends who wrote, I think, the most important book on the kundalini ever written, which is Unmasking the Rose. If you haven't read Unmasking the Rose by Dorothy Walters, please, please get it. It's an absolutely extraordinary account of a 40-year unfolding kundalini journey. Dorothy was a school nurse, no, she was a university teacher in Kansas. She was the other Dorothy of Kansas. At the age of 50, she had a kundalini experience without knowing anything really about kundalini. It completely owned her, shattered her, remade her, and she's worked with the kundalini since then. Her meditations on both what the kundalini is, how it works, its crisscross, zigzag ways, and also the importance of understanding the kundalini as this primordial, evolutionary force at the core of ourselves being activated now for the great revolution of evolution, I think these perceptions are priceless. . .
Near the end of Unmasking the Rose, Dorothy Walters writes, "Our world today is at once a theater of disaster and a stage for universal transfiguration." What an extraordinary statement, "a theater of disaster and a stage for universal transfiguration." "We are at once Christ hanging on the cross and the splendor of the reawakened self."
And then a few lines later, Dorothy writes, "I realized that mine was not merely a private experience, but part of a larger process of planetary awakening, of bringing the body and spirit into alignment with divine love unlike anything humanity had previously known. This, I sensed, was the moment in history that we had awaited so long. I felt deeply privileged to be a participant of this difficult, but immensely significant process of human transfiguration." Dorothy is one of the people who is birthing the new divine human and this is an extraordinary account of that birth, so please get it. . . .
Andrew: Well, can I ask you a question? Have you experienced directly the kundalini rising in you?
Participant: Yes, I have and I've been doing work with Sally Kempton for a couple of years, and with all the other teachers. It's been a very gentle process for me, but I know that for many people, it's been quite disturbing. There was so much ignorance around it and there's such confusion around what's difficult and what's energetic and so on. I've come across --
Andrew: There's no difference.
Participant: Yeah. Go on.
Andrew: Well, the body is condensed, crystallized light energy, so energies are physical and the body is energy.
Participant: Indeed, but some people can still have physical aches and pains and think that it's just physical and not energetic, and it might be coming from something they've eaten, food or something --
Andrew: Unlikely in the kundalini process because as Dorothy explains, the kundalini seems to work with -- it opens up wholly new realms and then it ruthlessly goes to those blockages of energy, which are results of karmic or traumatic experience, so there can be very deep, deep traumas hidden in the psychosomatic spiritual body, which then it works on and that of course can manifest as illness or deep suffering.
Participant: Which raises the question as to whether one should have a teacher when something is happening or can we trust our own personal connection with the Divine to actually work through these things, or should we rush off to someone like Sally or yourself? Because it's more about the --
Andrew: Well, I think there's an intermediary path. I don't think of myself as a guru. I hope I'm a friend and I don't believe in the guru system. I think what you need for the evolutionary path is a sincere, passionate, knowledgeable practitioner who is also humble, who is also aware of what he or she doesn't know, and who models how to learn. If you can find someone like that -- and you could go to Dorothy directly. Dorothy is available for consultation. This is what she's doing in her 89th year. She's talking to people. She's sharing, she's loving, but she's not doing so as Madame Kundalini. She's doing so as a loving, tender friend and I feel that that is the most wonderful kind of companion for the journey, a wise, practiced friend, mentor who never lauds it over you, but always is willing to share what they know and is deeply compassionate about your journey and holds that journey in deep reverence and respect.
