Kundalini Yoga
The spiritual path is not a matter of fixing yourself or “destroying” your ego as if
you were something broken that needed to be replaced. The message of Kundalini
is that your own present awareness, pristine and eternal, is already divine. Even
egohood and negativity are just dynamic expressions of your inherent divinity. So
the spiritual path is not about a process of making yourself better. It’s about a
process of preparing yourself for the recognition of the reality that already exists in
the here and now.
This way of thinking unites the human and the divine, the transcendent and the
immanent, permanent and impermanent, mind and body. It is quite alien to our
usual Western way of understanding spirituality. In Western religions, individual
humans are flawed, mortal creatures who are trying to relate to a perfect, immortal
God who must remain forever separate from them.
Moreover, the legacy of modern thinking since Descartes has left us with a
mind-body problem: how is this mind, which seems knowing and subjective, re-
lated to the physical body, which is objective, dumb, mechanical matter? This is
not just a philosophical problem, but a cultural and personal one. It has to do with
a modern malaise, our sense of alienation from ourselves. The responses to this
have not been entirely satisfying: either deny the existence of the mental entirely
and ascribe it to physical causes, or else hold on to mind-body dualism, the idea
that somehow mind and body are separate things with independent existence.
you were something broken that needed to be replaced. The message of Kundalini is that your own present awareness, pristine and eternal, is already divine. Even egohood and negativity are just dynamic expressions of your inherent divinity. So the spiritual path is not about a process of making yourself better. It’s about a process of preparing yourself for the recognition of the reality that already exists in the here and now. This way of thinking unites the human and the divine, the transcendent and the immanent, permanent and impermanent, mind and body. It is quite alien to our usual Western way of understanding spirituality. In Western religions, individual humans are flawed, mortal creatures who are trying to relate to a perfect, immortal God who must remain forever separate from them. Moreover, the legacy of modern thinking since Descartes has left us with a
mind-body problem: how is this mind, which seems knowing and subjective, re- lated to the physical body, which is objective, dumb, mechanical matter? This is not just a philosophical problem, but a cultural and personal one. It has to do with a modern malaise, our sense of alienation from ourselves. The responses to this have not been entirely satisfying: either deny the existence of the mental entirely and ascribe it to physical causes, or else hold on to mind-body dualism, the idea that somehow mind and body are separate things with independent existence. The idea of Kundalini, with its nondual view, directly addresses this lacuna in the Western mindset. Your own consciousness is never separate from the richness of embodied experience. It is rather the source of all such experience. The various parts of your psyche map onto your subtle body, which acts as an intermediary be- tween the gross physical body and the rarefied atmosphere of mind. The move- ment of subtle energies through the channels and chakras of the subtle body is the basis of the inner life of the mind. In the Kundalini worldview, which derives from Shaiva tantra, body and mind form an integral unity. Mind and body are just two ways of experiencing divinity. That’s why many in the yoga community speak of a single bodymind instead of artificially separating these polarities of experience.
