Kundalini.Tantra.by.Satyananda.Saraswati

Chapter 4
Controlling the Nadis and the Brain
The human brain is truly one of the most awesome and amazing of creations. Housed
within the skull, it contains some 12 thousand million cells, and each of these cells has an
estimated 5 hundred thousand possible interconnections; there may be even more that we
do not know about. When the mathematics are computed there are more possible
interconnections in the brain than there are atoms in the universe.
The brain has an almost infinite capacity, and all within the two kilograms or so of
amorphous, pinkish grey brain matter with the consistency of jelly or cold oatmeal
porridge. How this quivering, pulsating, jelly-like substance remembers, thinks, analyzes,
feels, discriminates, intuits, decides, creates and directs all the countless functions of the
body, integrating the whole so that we synchronize action, speech and thought, is
something that each of us should contemplate daily.
Meditation on this miracle of creation, and any attempt to understand how the brain
and mind function, can lead to an understanding of the total process of kundalini
awakening. Indeed, many of our theories of how kundalini works are based on the brain,
and this research can help us to better understand the basis for kundalini awakening, the
nadis and chakras. This is because the brain, housing as it does the master control
systems for the body within its unlimited circuitry, must contain the physical circuits for
the nadis and chakras.
The brain is also the interface between the body and the mind. All sensory
information travels to the brain via the gyanendriyas, the sense organs of knowledge, and
is then fed into the mind, and all decisions in the mind are then translated into the body
via the karmendriyas, the organs of action, in a continuous, synchronous, dynamic
process. Thus within the workings of the brain we can see the workings of the nadis as
described by yogis, and research is deepening our understanding of this. Yogic
techniques utilize this knowledge to stimulate the body so as to achieve higher and better
states of being.
The nadis in the brain
Important research from neuroscience has shown us that the brain fits into the dual
nadi model of man's personality as handed down to us by yoga. In a radical and last ditch
attempt to cure severe, unremitting epilepsy, Roger Sperry and his associates divided the
brains of their patients down the midline structure linking the two brain hemispheres, the
corpus callosum. To their surprise, not only did the epileptics cease seizures, but they
came up with startling new findings which are radically altering our neurophysiological
understanding of how the brain works and are revolutionizing our whole concept of man.