Cultural Evasion - Sacralising Sexuality

I have suggested in previous postings that the attempt to take language and conceptualisation from a traditionalist culture (such as South Asian) into a modernised and modernising one was more likely to obfuscate than enlighten. On the other hand, I suggested that traditionalist cultures had a great deal of a practical nature to teach us about techniques for personal development. The problem here is that the West’s tendency is either to dismiss non-Western thinking entirely as non-scientific, or even dangerous if mishandled, or to turn it into a fetish by adopting the forms of a tradition but not investigate the deep meaning of the thinking involved with a philosophical eye.

The classic case study is Neo-Tantra where the use of sexual activity for personal transformation on an occasional and highly disciplined basis linked to a very traditionalist vision of society has been transformed into a sort of couple guidance therapy for confused liberal adults. These ‘followers’ persist in using Sanskrit names, about which most must have limited understanding, to act as cover and excuse for something for which there should be no cover or excuse at all – good sex between willing adults.

The sacralisation of sexuality is getting out of hand. One of the reasons for this is that sexually healthy Westerners, especially women, constantly have to make excuses in our prevailing culture for having a perfectly healthy or business-like attitude to what is often a risky (though less so today than at any time in history) but otherwise highly pleasurable, amusing and very creative activity. Having to engage in personal relations with a ‘blessed be’ or a ‘namaste’ in tow is a back-handed compliment to the dominant repressive culture. It takes open attitudes to the body and sexuality (and to transgression that harms no one) and puts them into a box that contains the libido as far away from the ‘normal’ world as is possible in a free society.

This containment process uses ritual and strange language forms in order to make a high price of entry to anyone who wants to express themselves openly but without the ritual baggage. It is self censorship with sacral sub-cultures doing the system's work for it. ‘Conventional’ culture, outside these ‘sacred’ models to which we might add Thelema and many others, then throws healthy sexuality into two challenging pots – the ‘normal’ which avoids the subject altogether and ‘swinger’ or ‘fetish’ sub-cultures where identity is sexual and little more. True sexual normality is avoided in every way possible – conventional, sacral or sub-cultural.

Those who lose themselves in ritualised separation are not to be condemned or blamed for this at all. As we have seen from the sheer effort required to expose something that was an ‘absolute wrong’ yet protected by conventional attitudes to the inconvenient truth (priestly child abuse), those with a radical or free sexuality, having seen previous waves of liberation crushed by material reality and cultural conformity, have every reason to create closed self-protective societies. In this, they are like early Reformation reformers faced with the sheer weight of Catholic cultural power. The excessive sacralisation of sexuality in mock-traditional clothing liberates in one direction only to create psychological bondage in another.

The Early Reformation analogy is a good one. The Reformers rebelled against the Church but only within some of the same assumptions about the existence of God on peculiarly Christian magical lines and men were killed over transubstantiation in a way that now seems absurd. A genuine revolution against deist obscurantism only seriously took hold in the eighteenth century and saw equal status for conventional God-worshippers and more relaxed and indifferent others (and then only in the most advanced communities in the world which still do not include those of the American backwoods) in the last fifty or so years.

You still do not get much a choice in the matter across the bulk of the Islamic world or, if you accept communism as a world religion, where Communists rule. Our current revolution in sexuality is still operating on Judaeo-Christian assumptions redrafted in the forms of nature religion and traditionalism. It has still to break free and become a non-essentialist and humanist response to the scientific understanding of the merging of brain and body. Let us concentrate on just one concept that has migrated from the East to the West – Kundalini, the coiled bodily energy allegedly positioned at the base of the spine that is analogous to the source of libido in the West, unconscious and instinctive.

This energy, which some of us feel more than others, was placed in the Western brain by scientists at the beginning of the last century but is now seen to be as much operative in the flow of chemicals throughout the body as in some free-floating unconscious.  The South Asians literally embodied this force, with great imagination, as a snake or as a goddess. The force is Shakti and it comes into play when Shiva and her consort make love. We (as humans) repeat with appropriate reverence this divine coupling when we make love. It is an approach to 'spiritual experience' deliberately abandoned by the Christian priesthood.

But this is not going to be a polemic against the New Age appropriation of the idea of Kundalini or against the simplicities of Neo-Tantra. On the contrary, the arrival of every new idea has to be seen in its context – what purpose did it serve that made it attractive? The arrival of bastardised forms of South Asian thinking have proved a powerful liberating half-way house between a previous state – in which Judaeo-Christian mentality wholly disembodied libido – and a future state in which (thanks more to the slow process of scientific discovery than revelation) libido and embodiment require no special rationale but are seen as two sides of the same coin of simple human ‘being’.

One of the great questions here, because Kundalini is described in goddess and snake terms, is whether art or imagination hinders or helps true understanding. I would contend that, where there is no materialist or scientific language for what we ‘know’ from introspection or experience (but which a whole culture insists on denying), art and imagination have to come into force to avoid total dessication of the soul. But sometimes art or imagination can become neurotic, obfuscate and cause us to avoid the truths that scientific investigation reveals. So it is with sexuality and Kundalini. The reality of Kundalini is ignored in one culture (the West) but then turned into a goddess or sleeping serpent in the other (the East).

The latter is an improvement on the former but it is not ‘truth’ and it gives excessive power to priests and gurus and teachers who allegedly interpret the signs and symbols of the practice. The point being that the central lesson of Kundalini thinking is that it must be a release from signs and symbols. In a traditional society, the language of signs and symbols are less easy to escape than in a modern society precisely because we have so many of them. We have so much choice that we can be cavalier about their importance and being cavalier about signs and symbols is the first step towards rejecting them to ‘find oneself’. Simply replacing one set of signs and symbols with another – as in Neo-Tantra – misses the point.

The truths in Kundalini are perhaps best understood in terms of ‘visualisation’ – the ability to master the body through the systematic use of imagination (which involves focusing down on signs and symbols in order to eliminate them) is analogous to the rational mental modelling used to master one’s immediate social environment. The self and society are interlocked through body. The body encases the physical systems that underpin the emotion and instincts that interpret perception and make the paradigms of thought. The body is also the tool by which the mind communicates both directly and through social signs to others.

The body, in short, is central to the flow from mind to society and from society to mind. Social control of the body is a means of controlling the mind and mental command of the body liberates one from enslavement to others. Disembodied mind (especially when infected by pure reason) is useless in managing society effectively. The body in its animal state cannot have any form of meaningful consciousness, let alone a ‘spiritual’ one. The coil that is Kundalini sits at the core of the sacrum bone. This, in itself, is significant. It is where our ‘gut’ meets the ground when we sit, rested. Our feet connect to the ground, of course, but our feet connect in action and action is our working on the world, our social self.

When we think we sit - just as we lie down to sleep and lose ourselves in our unconscious dreams at the other end of the awareness spectrum. Sitting places the base of the spine close to the ground. In the visualisation, we uncoil ourselves from our base in matter, not accidentally closest to the point where we exude matter in defecation, in a series of stages up to the highest experience of being within the mind itself. The process of unravelling self from ground to mind can presuppose what that ground is (all matter is much the same at core) but cannot presuppose how the expression of self will develop though to the final state of alleged ‘pure consciousness’ which seems also to be much the same at core whoever experiences it.

The variability of imaginative meanings for Kundalini matches the variability in selves so that the libidinous truly represents only one type of mind that is of equal value to the mind whose highest method is thinking and another whose method already implies the sense of being ‘at one’ with all things as pure consciousness from the beginning. The common denominator is that the highest state of possible being is one where a person recognises themselves as integrated with matter as matter-consciousness even if some are deluded into thinking that they have become pure consciousness (as if the mind can ever actually detach itself from the body).

Does pineal gland activation have some link to the sense of heightened awareness associated with reality (confirming an intuition of Descartes)? The research is unclear but the scientific exploration of ‘spiritual states’ is still in its infancy - some of it indicates that “the practice of meditation activates neural structures involved in attention and control of the autonomic nervous system.” The physiological basis of spiritual states seems increasingly likely to be demonstrated as biochemically connected without in the least diminishing the importance and value of those states.

The self-awareness of matter-consciousness arises ultimately and only from the manipulation of matter in stages - not always through conscious mastery of the body but also (as in the tantric or shamanistic approaches) through the employment of different aspects of the body, moving stage by stage until that aspect of the body that is mind-without-social-signs-and-symbols can come into play. A combination of visualisation and the awareness of the different aspects of the body can become the means to experience the body-mind as far from its social creation as is possible. The mind is not detached from matter at all but only from the signification of the social which is presumed to be matter because it is based on matter (which is not quite the same thing).

Indeed, against all doctrine, it might be said that the final stage of awareness is as much pure matter as pure consciousness. It is not a stance that we can hold for long without a large peasantry servicing our needs or a very modern leisure economy – there were good socio-economic reasons for the turning away from sacral ideas in modernity: they become inutile, unnecessary. The full range of techniques to be desacralised are varied – meditation, breath control, physical movement, chanting. I have privileged visualisation only because this is the technique that is most conscious of the breadth of symbols that surround us and which will detach us from our own matter-mind best, not by isolating the brain into one set of symbols (such as sound or patterned image) but by developing a narrative of symbols that shift and change to reduce phenomenal noise.

All techniques may have the ultimate effect of detaching us from a world made up of signs and symbols and attuning us with our own inner matter as refined ‘consciousness’. Both alchemical analogies of moving from base lead to gold and various Gnostic formulations spring to mind. The difficulty lies when we detach a convenient tradition from the scientific basis to the process. The ‘shaktipat’ (blessing) of the Siddha-Guru may be regarded as a signal of permission to begin but there is no reason why, after a commitment arising from oneself, one might not bless oneself, give oneself permission, if you like, to exist.

Injunctions on purification and strengthening of the body might equally be seen as a discipline of detachment – a removal of distractions in order to concentrate on the job at hand and it should need no funny little rituals if the mind is aligned properly. The aim is to ‘sense’ the energy move from sacral bone to crown of the head and the metaphor of unification of the goddess with the Lord Shiva of Creation is only a metaphor of apparent unity of personal matter-consciousness. The profound illusion that the mind is one with the greater matter-consciousness of the Absolute is a physiological one but the illusion does not matter. The transformative power of the experience is what matters.

Far from not being a physical matter (as Eastern adepts insist), the final moment is the ultimate physical occurrence where we use ‘consciousness’ to describe only a state of a matter that we have not described before. It is not the world that is the illusion (except insofar as the signs and symbols of social intercourse are an illusory shell over very real matter) but our own pretensions. In gnosis, our mind is physically enabled to see things and to make connections that mere rational thought does not permit. If this is gnosis’, it is gnosis of a higher state of matter that embodies a consciousness of a more sophisticated nature, detached from phenomenal distractions. The state of being that arises – repeated in its attributes amongst people from many different cultures – is ‘gnosis’ of oneself and one’s place in the world and it tells us nothing about an Absolute which remains unknowable.

To experience this state of being and to allow oneself to wallow in its illusion is to misuse the experience. Its purpose is to re-ground us in the world, giving us a more critical understanding of the reality of the world that has been presented to us as real but is actually based on perceptions of underlying reality that are so often given to us rather than chosen by us. Similarly, despite the fears of ‘experts’ at the dangers of this sort of thinking, it is wonderfully democratic in its potential – once the priests and gurus have been put in their feudal place, modern man can make eclectic use of these techniques and others to develop a critical stance to authority and the ‘given’ without becoming lawless.

The energy derived is natural (in the original culture, Shakti is also Prakriti which is associated with the idea of nature) and as much a part of the world of science as the building of an aeroplane. The base of the experience is the formlessness of all of our past, including forgotten things that make our habits what they are. The start of the visualisation process requires an engagement with the fact of the unconscious, the deep well of rubbish that is ourselves as constructed by others. From that simple truth, the serpent uncoils, forcing its away up - unless impeded by a fearful conscious will. Even amongst the scientific papers, you can sometimes sense the fear of the rational mind at what this thinking might do to their world of signs and symbols.

The principle is also feminine for only accidental cultural reasons. It is a principle in defiance of order and the order of society is presented as a male principle. It suits the male who is an adept to see the principle as operating against his given nature which is male and it is no accident that the final stage has the principle of the feminine uncoiling and then bumping against a masculinised Absolute. This, in itself, should make us cautious about the tradition as it is promoted in the West because the energy does have libidinous and erotic aspects and does involve coupling of sorts and yet it might be considered in other ways by other minds. The sexuality involved though is 'normal' - a means to an outcome.

Nor is there anything inevitable in nature about the process. The normal mode of being in the world is actually to avoid questioning and to embed one’s self in given signs and symbols. Only a few people, often because of an edgy dissatisfaction about the given world, feel obliged to start a search for ‘meaning’ (in itself a futile search except in the performing). It requires much hard work and some risk in terms of social benefits to pursue something that may be a necessity for some (and so ‘natural’) but by no means for all. There are no intrinsic impulses in nature, only in some persons. The particular association of the sexual and spiritual, for example, is a private one (even when such practices involve groups engaged in experimentation) but all methods have in common a sense of increasing internal unification based on a ‘working’ of the libido and the body. Jung seems to have grasped this better than most in seeing the process as one, essentially, of individuation.

Kundalini Thinking

Some believe that there is an unconscious and instinctive, indeed libidinal, force that can be felt as a physical phenomenon. Others deny its existence. Those who say it exists win the argument for the simple reason that, if they feel it, then it is there as a reality for themselves. If it is a reality in the context of their own perception, then, unless they are outright liars, even if it cannot be measured scientifically, it exists - end of story.

A mental state does not require general social approval to exist. It merely has to be experienced as real. A delusion is a real mental state but it is a delusion in the context of social and not individual reality and so not a delusion about its own state of delusion-ness. We may go on to apply all sorts of metaphor to such a felt libidinal force. We may develop vitalist theories or call it a serpent power or a goddess or use lots of sanskrit gobbledygook. We may try to make it more than it is by giving it value and romance - but at the end of the day, it is simply what it is: a sense of experienced reality that is real to the person experiencing it and different from mundane 'normal' existence in the world.

This force may, of course, not be experienced identically in every person who experiences it (as we write there is a furore on the internet over whether a dress is blue and black or white and gold which is really a furore over human perception in the face of the variable outputs of our electronic world) but there are some common denominators in the descriptions of such forces (once we get past the spiritual guff) that suggest that people who have this sense, whether intrinsic to their nature or intermittently experienced, are all experiencing the same phenomenon.

There is no issue with saying that the experience might be bio-chemical nor that the experience has such meaning to a person that this meaning might force a person to engage in some sort of struggle with others, indeed with society, to be permitted to engage with his or her own experience as good and worthwhile. It might be this that forces us to have to face the 'reality' of Islamist gnosis. Experience of, and existence with, this force is a defining issue in human freedom because the spiritual guff may well be nothing more than a pragmatic attempt to 'justify' (when no justification should be necessary) something that is difficult to communicate and is not a universal phenomenon in a social context. The issue is not the normalisation of people but the harm done to others by abnormalised experience - which would brings us back to statue-smashing Islamists.

For historical and cultural reasons related to the pragmatic exercise of power and the discomfort and anxiety of the those who cannot comprehend this force, or perhaps to relieve the anxiety of those who experience this force but are not given a language for it that is positive, the force’s own existence and value may be denied but only as once it might have been denied that the earth could be round. It may be that the person who feels this force is faced with such resentment and incomprehension from those who do not feel it that they are obliged to create a mythology and religious or cultic context rather than be able simply to say what should be said - 'this is what I am and you just have to live with it'.

Perhaps organized religion was and is the revenge of those who feel this force on the uncomprehending only, in one of many paradoxes that will we see in this Note, to see this revenge appropriated by pragmatists who thereby exerted their revenge on the revengers in turn! The lack of a language of assertion in the modern world for those who feel this energy means that the force-full are always placed on the defensive. This defensiveness extends to their very natures, in the round, as people different to the pragmatic mainstream. They constantly have to justify their difference!

A barrier is equally set up for 'intermittent' experiencers who learn to experience their difference in shame or silence instead of discussing their moments of difference openly or being permitted to create some personal meaning out of it, while those who live in a permanent state of relationship with this force are obliged to become not merely silent but secretive - or cloak themselves in that cultic nonsense we have already noted.

Perhaps much of the essentialist nonsense surrounding spirit that seems to have led to the absurd institutions of organised religion come down to little more than this - that non-sense has been a necessary defensive weapon for those who feel this libidinous force in an uncomprehending society. They are obliged to re-cast that which is not permitted in order to be open and then turn it into something false but socially acceptable. Of two main strategies for coping, our culture may have chosen the wrong one in the past because of resource constraints and the need to maintain social order but our social order may now no longer require communitarian falsehoods.

There is the opportunity to replace a strategy of silences and displacements with a new strategy of assertiveness and for the stripping away of all those accretions that force those who have a sense of their internal biochemical power to give absurd meanings to a surprisingly simple phenomenon. Social authoritarians remain rather frightened of this force because it is creative and innovative but it is also centred on a gnostic relationship to itself as not only desire is but as all other forms of high emotion and constructed meaning are so centred. High emotion and intense meaning are frightening to many people. The co-existence of non-reason with reason causes anxiety.

For social authoritarians, an inner force that cannot be reasoned into ‘normality’ must be repressed and contained. In the worst case, it becomes redrafted as 'sin' or even into particular 'sins' such as Lust which may then be rationally contained in a numbering system (the '7 Deadly Sins', for example). Nor is this force to be assumed to be simply sexual (the sexual may have a higher or lower place in its expression in particular individuals). The force is a general force that is not easily explained in conventional language. It may also have very different expressions in different people - the 'desire' that exists within it is also a form of yearning or love that need not at all be focused on, say, orgasm at all.

The force may equally well be focused simply on a state of being, one that has had accreted to it terms like 'spiritual' but whose terms are far too limited by such language, language designed merely (as I suggested above) to contain, channel and socialise something infinitely more complex that, in itself, needs no myth of universal consciousness or divinity. The ancient Indians would have seen this force as sleeping, dormant, a potential in the human condition. I am not so sure. Their analysis is based on a determination to see human beings as operating within some universal type or essence of human nature.

It is far more likely that it is present or not present to different degrees of intensity, possibly even circumstantial in its form to environmental conditions, in different persons, often at different times of their lives. This lack of essence to the force is why it presents such a difficulty to men and women who demand fixed essences instead of accepting existence as Heraclitean flux. It is why it is not merely contentious but a subject of anxiety, horror, social control and re-invention.

Whatever this thing is, it presents two immediate problems – how do I describe it to myself in order to manage it and how do I explain it to the world? Both exercises require that it be expressed linguistically or in terms of some ritual which, in itself, starts to remove a person from the actual experience. The degree to which this ‘force’ is shared is the degree to which it becomes exponentially attenuated so that the intense connection between individual persons (‘love’ included) becomes revised into a weak spirituality that ultimately leads to the psychic onanism of universalism and the covering of the experience with cultural layers and language that bend the experience into tribal or, again, cultic paths.

To some extent, it might be useful to create a theory of the force – in the Indian tradition, there are introspective models that lead to concepts of energy channels (nadis), subtle energy (prana) and essential elements (bindu) within a subtle body. Something similar takes place in the Chinese Taoist and Western alchemical traditions. But it is important to see these descriptions as allegorical and not as necessary truths. They exist to manage, control and communicate but not to ‘live’. The practitioner who believes in these forms has taken a step away from the truth.

Hindu, Chinese and Western language of the force should really be seen not as truths in themselves but as different technologies of 'spiritual' exploitation to which many other technologies of the past and the future might be added – including, possibly, a monist materialist scientific one as the science of mind and body progresses. The descriptions of the schools all taken together are mistakenly read as referring to some ‘perennial philosophy’ where the underlying reality is assumed to be of some universal quality where consciousness is to be set against matter. This is absurd because it mistakes the effect for the cause.

Instead, we have to think of the sensation of 'spirit' as an intrinsic quality of some forms of matter, arising naturally under certain conditions of evolution, where ‘spiritual technologies’ merely represent pre-scientific methods of dealing (through experience) with something that scence should theoretically (though possibly never actually) resolve through its methods of investigating the material plane, the only plane that ‘matters’ for descriptive purposes. This presents us with another paradox because the language that best describes what is going on is a phenomenological language, a description of experience in which cultural and personal metaphor, even poetry or visual symbolism in the form of art, best describes what is to be scientifically explained.

A scientific explanation may thus lie not in the description of things in mathematical terms but in the refinement of shared artistic representations that accumulate to become a paradoxically 'scientific' description of the phenomenon, one that has to be ‘felt’ as true because the artistic description in its right context (looked at with apollonian detachment) becomes the intellectual ‘last man standing’ - based on ‘praxis’, the doing of things that elicit or make use of the force. There is an existent Hindu technology (not the only technology) of systematically raising, containing, directing and using the force that is sensed as a physical sensation of movement from base through spine and upwards. This is Kundalini yoga.

The point today, though, is that such techniques should be looked at afresh primarily as technologies and not permit obfuscation with strange Sanskrit words and unscientific explanations that require the experience to represent more reality than it can take. We have covered this at length in our Tantra series but both these technologies and drugs should be able to recreate high-level experiences of a delusory nature that have effects on persons that are highly fulfilling and life-changing without demanding belief in God, gods or universal consciousness.

A further paradox must be that the delusion of universality becomes an apparent reality, not the ostensible reality of the vision (the absurdities of universal consciousness or reincarnation), but the felt reality of dramatic changes in personality, mind and the relationship between mind and body and then between mind, body and social reality. Some Indian sages will be usefully clear that the energy of which we speak is just the natural energy of the self but they then go on to make the unproven and unprovable assertion that this self is somehow dissipated as universal and is to be found in every being at the same time. This may help us to love rocks, spiders and frogs but it is a distraction.

Instead of seeing our experience of the universal as an attribute of an integral self to be mastered and understood, the Hindu sage somewhat foolishly takes the attribute for the whole and then dissipates the self into all sorts of creative invention. The ultimate absurdity becomes planet-worship, where rock displaces mind. This is not merely the general-universal but universals that then become re-personalised as God or turned into a nothingness (Nirvana) that is supposed to be higher than Man and still have meaning as a No-Thing in which he is to be merged in the future rather than contended with as 'Le Neant' in the present.

Humanity is unlikely to be free of its own delusions until it can face the awful fact (to many of its number) that its experiences are entirely contingent on the material structures of the brain in the body. This is not cause for gloom but for joy because it states that the person, though destined (at this point in history) for death, is his own invention and is not merely the fluff on the back-side of eternity.

Above all, this is an opportunity to recapture the various mythologies about the inner force and make them work as technologies rather than as eternal belief systems. By yet another paradox, this may 'save' the religious impulse by permitting many systems to co-exist as technologies without going through knots trying to find some perennial common denominator at the philosophical level.

To believe for the purpose of transformation in, say, Freyja or Shakti, is a wholly legitimate method of personal transformation, so long as the practitioner fully understands that, existentially, he is engaged in a technology in which the goddess both exists (as means) and does not exist (as ultimate reality) at the same time. The end of the technology is very similar to that of the ancient sages – a ‘gnosis’ or self-realisation that has been falsely connected to the idea of God or to an external wisdom. To think that some 'divine' external force transforms us is to diminish the power of one's own intrinsic resources.

Wisdom is connected to a self-knowledge that need have no connection with the universal except that it is an illusory experience shared biologically with some others of one’s own species, without any necessary specific connection to what it appears to be. The genius of self-knowledge lies not in knowing the other (impossible) or knowing the universal (illusion) but in knowing that the knowing of the other or of the universal is an illusion but one that is embraced as transforming.

Again we are into a paradox because the transformation into a state of understanding that all universalisms and all other-knowing is illusory – which may cause a passage through the ‘dark night of the soul’ – is ultimately so liberating that this knowledge of our lack of knowledge permits a much healthier relationship with others and with society. It is this state that the sages will refer to as an ‘awakening of inner knowledge’ or ‘pure joy, pure knowledge and pure love’ but is here taken to the next stage existentially, one where one observes objectively the illusion of this knowledge so that it can become the 'highest' form of knowledge – the knowledge that the illusion lies not in the Self but in the projection of Self into the universal.

From this perspective, a key figure in our understanding (though the existentialist perspective in this paper is different) is Jung who linked the process of Kundalini yoga with individuation. Another such figure is Wilhelm Reich who identified the ‘drives’ involved with more perspicacity than he has been given credit for – a failure created by his many other errors of judgement. Jung put it succinctly (in relation to the Eastern exploration of these issues): “… the concept of Kundalini has for us, only one use, that is, to describe our own experiences with the unconscious”. We only differ from Jung in our view of that unconscious as being possibly far more materially based than perhaps he considered likely.

The issue raised here is thus only whether individuation must be illusion-full (essentialist) or illusion-less (existentialist). We are discomfited in the West by the value placed on being ‘without illusions’ in spiritual matters but a position that is filled with illusion (whether generated by meditation or Ayahuasca) is not, in value terms, any better or worse than one that is without illusions (existential) or perhaps is one of having the illusion that one is without illusions.

There is a point where we cannot know anything but merely are forced to make choices (even if less than conscious choices) of the level of illusion we find acceptable. It is merely the contention of this Posting that full individuation probably requires that we go beyond the comfort zone of the illusion of having gone beyond material illusion into high essentialism (the construction of pragmatic but false meaning) and re-engage with our materialism as 'no-meaning' other than the meaning we create out of our material being (existentialism).

There is, however, no obligation on us to do so and no moral superiority in moving beyond the ‘spiritual’ back into the material. It is simply a choice for full individuation – an individuation that might well be in danger of detaching oneself entirely from the social (as pre-eminent value system) and into a state that might almost be considered intellectually post-human. This would simply be, then, a matter of choice ... the embracing of Existence, including the felt forces of Existence, without illusions because Life is in itself sufficient to justify the ways of Man to Man.

On Kundalini, the Serpent ...

Our Tantric series has been designed, in part, to transliterate an Eastern way of thinking into Western philosophical language. We do not think it useful to mask phenomena with obscure terms derived from exotic languages and faraway cultures - what I call the namastisation of language.

Not 'Namaste', please, but 'Yours Sincerely' at the end of a communication ... and yet the concept of Kundalini remains useful because there is no Western equivalent. The Qabala perhaps expresses the same concept to a degree but with an excess of intellect involved.

Kundalini, a serpentine Eastern goddess, conceptually represents the flow of psychic power coursing through the body from root to perceived transcendence far better than anything that has emerged out of late nineteenth century Vienna or mid twentieth century California.

We do require some term to describe how it feels to have an energy flow from Will in the mind down through the body and back up to the brain as a sensation. This serpent goddess and the identification of nodal body points called Chakras is the best that we have at this time.

Exactly what is a Chakra and what is not is disputed by the 'authorities' but the matter is probably best considered expansively as what nodal points seem to work for each person regardless of doctrine.

What flows of energy are felt between nodal points are equally a personal matter. The point is only that there are nodal points and that there are flows.

The consequent process of psychic management is essentially one of 'visualisation' - a mental concentration on nodal points and on flows in order to work inner change. We will return to visualisation later because not everyone can visualise easily and 'pure' visualisation overlaps with narrative dreaming.

The traditions might best be regarded as teaching methods but a certain autodidacticism is reasonable once the principles are established. Sometimes one has to accept a weak theory from a 'guru' in order to get access to the technique but one should always be cynical about theory. Ideologies rarely reflect all reality.

Let us demystify the chakras by translating the six widely established nodal points into language we can all understand:-

• The root of the system is where we start. It is basically the near-arse where all the tension lies that needs exploding upwards. It is as if one shits one's liberation upwards. Waste out, enlightenment. up.The root, where we expel waste, is our link to the matter of the world through our adding to it. The metaphorical link with money and stress, or rather to our need to eat to add to a messy matter which takes us away from ourselves, is apposite.
• The sex organs are the driver for enlightenment. It is our actual unconscious and libidinous centre. It is from where we may decide to move no further. It is the bit of us that we are socially and unconsciously (and incorrectly) inclined to see as monstrous and inchoate. Ordering this towards individuation and self is the necessary precursor to the next stage
• The third chakra is the navel - rather it is our centre and our gut. It can be lower down in the abdomen in some and higher in the stomach in others but it is our bodily material core when we bother to think about it 
• The heart is not the beating life-giver but where we feel high stress and emotion. It needs to be calmed for the next stage psychotherapeutically when our relationship to matter, the unconscious and to our 'root' have been dealt with.
• The throat is the place from which the sounds arising from our heart are made real. It is the place of communication with existence, a connection with being. It is perhaps the hardest to understand. 
• The 'third eye' is the expression of that mind as pure power, a surge of ultimately libidinous energy that not so much commands the world as makes the world irrelevant except in the light of the mind's command. Its action is non-magical because the world of matter itself is not changed but the view of the world is transformed - and so the world is transformed insofar as the world is imagined and magic returns by the back door. 

Above all this is a narrative of perceived transcendence which is a sensation of rising above and out of oneself that comes, as in a sequential flow, from the root, driven as an escape from the world, through awareness of material reality, emotional existence, the presence of existence and a sense of inward power towards something that, even if momentary, can be life-changing.

The concept of Kundalini as an unwinding serpent captures this process conceptually as libidinous energy operating beyond thought and reason as one's very core in action. All the attempts to conceptualise this process analogically and allegorically come down to variations on this theme.

We have the earthiness of our arse and the liquidity of our libido working through the furnace of our gut  to float free in our heart and into the sound-space of our throat - whatever! The symbolism is all very well for teaching but it obscures the path for the natural 'adept' who simply feels what is true in the core process.

The Nath sect's simplification into sexual organs, heart and head is equally intuitively right even if simplistic - libidinous drive, emotional somatic response and thought all driven towards the transcendent point that makes life more than just the drudgery of duty and social obligation.

The root or point between arse and genitals, the earthing point, is the threshold between being human and being unconscious matter, effectively between life and death. The Kundalini is cthonic, not accidentally a serpent, coming out of the Ground of Being to become transcendent from the death to which we will return.

What is being said here is that transcendence is the precise opposite of death, the counter-point where, albeit briefly perhaps and sometimes accidentally, the human being experiences the life-changing illusion of immortality, the eternal and the absolute - in a rewiring of the brain that permits new ways of seeing reality.

This brings us on to technique. Each of the traditional techniques is fundamentally physiological rather than spiritual (unlike, say Christian prayer). This gives us a clue to what is going on here. This is not an attempt to seek help from outside as in the Christian tradition but an active attempt to manipulate one's own matter.

This is not to say that 'prayer' does not work to achieve some desirable ends - including the suspension of disbelief to effect healing - but only that transformation of mind, rather than of body, requires a transformation of body through an aggressive engagement with it.

Physical re-positioning (yoga) and breathing exercises (pranayama) are rigorous, potentially dangerous, techniques that manipulate physiology in order to trigger biochemical change.

The rousing of the Kundalini through pranayama (and the equivalent Taoist exercises) are proven techniques for driving the sense of 'flow' upwards through the body. The surrounding analyses of what is going on may be absurd but that something is going on is a fact from the ground.

If symbolism and ritual enter into the process, this is based on the suggestibility of the body to the mind (as of the mind to the body). Pure visualisation can achieve transcendent ends as can pure physical technique while combinations of both may be regarded as 'pure'. What floats your boat is all that is required.

Different body/minds (aka persons) will have different abilities to 'think' somatically and conceptually. Most minds tend to fall on either side of dead centre of the continuum between the two.

The truth is that the body/mind is variably pre-geared to the possibility of transcendence and that it is the will to technique that is more vital than the precise method. Some literally 'yearn' for transcendent experience and other have no interest at all - neither type is superior to the other, simply different.

One might be aroused by sounds or words (which have physical aspects as sound waves), by mental images, by sexual excitation, by asceticism but the central point is that, by whatever means, a flow of energy is ready to roll and it just needs the trigger that suits that person.

The central question is always - who am I? Am I centred on the physical or the mental, on mind-emptying or mind-filling or on some combination of both? Katon Shual (Mogg Morgan) has a useful mental model, derived from Eastern practice, reproducing one's own body/mind as a visualised external temple.

Part of the success in this and other visualisations lies in the fixedness of perception inwardness away from external sensory distraction. All models - physical and mental - rely on a reduction of sensory inputs and their replacement by repetitiveness of function (stillness or concentration) or a fixedness of internal imagery.

It is the removal of the mind from the process of editing out extraneous data (including memory data) that permits that same mind to turn inward towards the body and so allow the flow of internal energy to start to work the 'non-magic' that will eventually result in the transcendent experience or such near-analogues that make the hard labour worthwhile.

This is also close to 'pathworking' in the neo-pagan community and is a technique that extends far beyond the usual tantric suspects. Or it is 'guided imagery' for those who see it as a technique for life without any attempt to add a spiritual gloss. Intensity of the experience can build up into a trance-like status of perceived non-magical 'magical' power.

A real adept at visualisation can construct whole worlds that are coherent, meaningful and perfectly reflective of specific personal issues, constructing a flow that mimics the 'goddess' Kundalini. She can create 'gods' or 'goddesses' integrated with herself to reflect and express aspects that are hard otherwise to articulate.

Personally, I have a set of separate coherent worlds all accessible through a defined portal and each framed by a narrative. There is a physicality about these worlds that can take them to the edge of and even over the line of alternate reality, usually with some symbolic starting point or core image.

As I get older and resolve conflicts, I need the narratives less and the process centres on a 'state'. But the given task of the narrative is to reproduce those aspects of the unconscious that are not merely stress-relieving but permit psychological machinery to emerge which can face fears or uncover truths.

Ultimately, while the narrative visualisation process is never likely to trigger transcendence in itself, it can create the conditions by which other things can trigger transformation.

Whether managed through a therapeutic or self-managed engagement with the body or through an imaginative re-ordering of the mind, something can be done to sense and manage the flow of energy within the body that can result ultimately in individuation or transcendence - which is really self-possession.

Although Wilhelm Reich may have identified the disease of blocked flow in the West, the best therapeutic cures still remain Eastern - as adaptations, without the cultural baggage, of Taoist and Tantric technique. And we still have no better alternative to Eastern terms, Kundalini or Ch'i, in describing the experience and the process.