I. VAMA MARGA Foundations Of The Left-Hand Path - staticfly.net

distance until I became entirely unconscious of it. I was now all
consciousness ..."
The sensation of the feminine kundalini energy rising up the spine, or
"piercing the chakras" if one prefers, is commonly accompanied by a
purifying feeling of emotional blockages being set free – a sense of
liberation. Just as with very intense genital orgasms, the "mental climax" of
kundalini can cause the initiate to uncontrollably laugh or cry as superfluous
aspects of self are jettisoned. Such an experience can appear to be
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indistinguishable from Western concepts of madness, and has led many
unprepared solo practitioners to doubt their own sanity. This is only one of
the reasons that we recommend that anyone seriously interested in pursuing
this method of initiation should do so under the guidance of a teacher who
has already gone through the ordeal.
Another commonly reported side-effect of kundalini, the frequency
of which accounts for its reputation as a psychically dangerous practice, is
the sometimes extreme conditions of spiritual dislocation it can give rise to.
Gopi Krishna describes these disturbing altered states of consciousness,
particularly evident among those upon whom kundalini appears out of the
blue without warning or preparation as "Black Kundalini". He left this record
of his own excruciating experience of this unexpected numinous turmoil, an
ordeal he remembered as a "prolonged nightmare", a drug-free displacement
of consciousness some Westerners may have only encountered in their worst
"bad trip":
"A feeling of the horror of the supernatural ... a sudden distaste for work and
conversation with the inevitable result that, being left with nothing to keep
myself engaged, time hung heavily on me, adding to the already distraught
condition of my mind. The nights were even more terrible. I could not bear to
have a light in my room ... Whenever I closed my eyes I found myself
looking into a weird circle of light, in which luminous currents swirled and
eddied, moving rapidly from side to side. The spectacle was fascinating but
awful, invested with a supernatural awe which sometimes chilled the very
marrow in my bones."
Traditionally, kundalini is said to radiate from the svadhisthana
chakra, which Tantra describes as the sexual center of the human body,
located right above the genitals. Whether this is a physiological fact or not,
another commonly described effect of kundalini is its powerful impact on
human sexuality. This may range from extreme sexual arousal, including
spontaneous orgasm, to a dramatic diminishing of sexual desire. Swami
Muktananda's account of his personal experience of Kundalini in his 1974
book The Play Of Consciousness describes the erotic trauma he experienced
during the arousal of the Kundalini: "All the love and intoxication I had felt
in meditation left me ... Instead, in their place came a powerful sexual desire
... I could think of nothing but sex! ... My whole body boiled with lust, and I
cannot describe the agony of my sexual organ ..."
Once this concupiscence subsided, Muktananda concluded that,
"When the Svadhisthana chakra is pierced, sexual desire becomes very
strong, but this happens so that the flow of sexual fluid may be turned
upward and the sadhaka's lust destroyed forever." This interpretation, it
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should be clarified, is from a right-hand path perspective; the left-hand path
initiate would not necessarily share the Swami's conviction that lust is a
negative energy to be destroyed. Pandit Gopi Krishna, although far from the
left-hand path, takes a less condemnatory view of Kundalini's impact on
sexuality, asking rhetorically: "Is the creator... of such limited intelligence
that he should build man in such a way that the sexual urge is the most awful
impulse in him, attended by such an intense pleasure, and then rule that he is
not to touch it?" On the contrary, he maintains that the "unbelievably