kenlee said:
Gurdjieff called the power of this imagination... 'Kundalini', which represents itself as all outer form with no essential content. I think you can say that Kundalini is an inverted form of true cosmic creativity. With this 'Kundalini force' the impersonal becomes personal, the non-actual becomes a substitute forthe actual resulting in the appearance of expansion and growth without its substance.
Sometimes I think it might be wise to throw the whole wagon of esoteric concepts over a cliff and start from scratch. Unfortunately, new observations would eventually become corrupted, and these days we don't seem to have the luxury of spending years carving out new maps to old territories.
Kundalini is an Indian terms, with its own cultural background. It seems to be the response of the body to forces stimulating it to transcendent states. This response can very well be an inverted form of cosmic creativity. It can also be a mirrored response to cosmic creativity.
I think Gurdjieff or his teachers came into contact with many cases of deviant kundalini, where the biopsychic response led to delusionary states. These are by far the majority of the cases, when mechanical methods of transcendence are used, especially emergent when people push their bodies (and minds) beyond the capacity of their awareness to contain transcendent states.
I think Gurdjieff's view is based on the understanding that when awareness develops, the body will respond naturally, so it's best to throw the whole kundalini concept out the window.
Personally, I think he was trying to protect seekers from misunderstandings surrounding this phenomenon, considering it erroneous when one completely avoids mechanical methods of transcendence.
In doing so, he may have thrown out the baby with the bathwater, because psycho-physiological responses to stimuli leading to self-transcendence can also be a gradual process of adjustment.
Denying it just to be on the safe side might deprive us of a chance to understand our own development. There is also the case where there are gaps between development of awareness and the capacity of our psycho-physiological to respond to that awareness. These can be experienced as crises, and resistance to the elimination of programming because the lower centres cannot relate to unconditioned states.
Eventually, we accommodate and adapt, but this can be a rough ride. It pays to be aware of kundalini as the adaptation dynamics of our bodies.
kenlee said:
With Kundalini real transformations become imaginary ones, and the essential and non-essential cannot be differentiated from one another. Under the power of Kundalini the essential becomes a kind of 'pseudo essentiality' since the mind can become so deluded it can lose its power of discrimination so as to make realistic distinctions between outer form and inner content.
This can be true, but is not always the rule. Kundalini is the response of the material nature of the individual to the forces of creative transcendence. It varies greatly with each individual.
It is, furthermore, misleading to think that this experience is always a one shot deal. That is the mistake of many who have experienced psycho-physiological responses, and concluded that they crossed some "great threshold".
Ideally, these experiences come in cycles as one grows within. Sometimes there are initial experiences of acute adjustment that can lead to imbalance when one is not conscious enough or when the body is not strong enough to handle the consciousness.
Kundalini in its harmonized form represents the marriage of the body's sentience with mind-transcendent consciousness. After initial "breakthrough" experiences, the process of increase in consciousness, and subsequent response and marriage of higher and lower, can be almost unnoticeable. When we confront points of high inertia and resistance, however, it can become acute no matter what our stage.
Sometimes, an initial experience is considered "final", especially if it is profound, and the body is inhibited from responding further. Consciousness can then increase, and depersonalisation of self can occur, where emotions, desires and instincts seem to be controlled, but are instead shut off. The "enlightened" being then is "liberated" from the lower self, and goes off to teach others to do the same.
This shift from essential to pseudo-essentiality can occur when the lower nature does not ground the higher one, and consciousness has little sense of physicality. It can also occur when the lower nature is mechanically stimulated to exceed awareness potential, so the corresponding bridegroom is not spirit, but programming. Then we end up "divinising" programming, and become deluded.
kenlee said:
The pseudo essential is different from the non-essential. In order to recognize the non-essential one must also recognize the essential. But under the spell of Kundalini one loses the ability to make such real distinctions.
Again, this demonization of Kundalini was probably intended to take emphasis away from the lower nature, and mechanical means of stimulating it. Kundalini, however, is a word here that is falsely applied to what constitutes a symptomology of psychoses due to internal imbalances.
Many reactions of mild psychopathy in seekers can be kundalini experiences where the psycho-physiology of the seeker (rooted in his/her biochemical make-up) is trying to rid itself of formations and addictive responses, similar to running a fever, only here the clash is within the very identity, and neural circuitry and biochemical responses of the seeker.
kenlee said:
Under the power of Kundalini the essential reality does not really become non-reality but rather the real becomes a pseudo reality, reflecting the form of reality without its essential content. A good example of a person living in this pseudo essential world are George Bush with his Christian fundamentalism and in the occult 'magick' of Vincent Bridges and those like him (The Adventures Series describes this well).
What is described here is the psycho-physiological response of a psychopath substituting deluded awareness for objective consciousness. Although some psychopaths are individuated (and these I think are not true psychopaths, but distorters of natural empathy toward what might be called an extreme STS orientation), these are probably a minority.
Most are probably "failed OP's". Maybe psychopaths form a schizoid group soul complex, and through this they can recognize each other. Anyway, even a failed OP can stimulate psycho-physiological overload.
On the other hand, I doubt that either G.W.B or V.B. experienced anything close to a healthy kundalini experience, although VB's apparent fear of interdimensional states does indicate he may have had some sort of imbalanced internal response stimulated by his occult dabblings.
