Intestine

It's a remote, windswept, little-visited corner of the universe. Viking country. I've never been there before. Guidebooks often give it a bad press, but I find it fascinating, beguiled by its many atmospheres.

I'm here for the hernia. It's the only place that I can get the surgery done, without waiting for months or paying thousands of pounds. The hernia's been around for almost a year now. To begin with, I fancied it to be a strange outgrowth of fat, but then realised it was more than that. Reluctantly I came to accept that surgery was going to be the only viable course of action. The hernia wasn't very sexy, and was getting bigger all the time. Time to go to Viking country.

I'm in the ante-room before the operating theatre. "Any tattoos or piercings?" I am asked for the twentieth time, this time by a young lady in those green hospital overall things. "No. I suppose they must be an issue these days." "We had a woman in for gyno.She had a piercing that she didn't tell us about." The expression on the hospital worker's face suggests it was not a good experience.

The anaesthetist arrives. He is tall, rangy, well-spoken, rather old-school English. His eyes bulge out almost as much as a hernia, and I fancy him to have a serious interest in real-deal strong drugs and their effects, not the Sunday picnic psychedelics that folk like me have had a leaning towards.

"First we give you a happy drug. Makes you relaxed." He punctures the skin on the back of my hand. "Just like a wee dram." Then a little needle goes in, almost painless. The next thing I know I am in the recovery room.

I was fortunate to be first on the list for the day. I am coming round, and it's only just gone midday. Not much pain at all. Don't feel very disoriented either. Just lots of belching and burping: anaesthetic on migraine tummy, I suppose.

Strength begins to return. My wife comes to visit. "You can leave after you've had a pee" the nurse tells me. Only trouble is, I can't pee. Just vague stinging sensations where peeing habitually takes place.

"Drink water, drink" the nurses urge me. It goes on a long time. I continue to drink water.

There are two of us in the same situation. The other man is in for bilateral hernia - two for the price of one-, and the nurses start mumbling about catheters. This freaks the other guy out completely, so much so that he goes to the loo and comes back immediately with a slightly filled pot and an enormous grin on his face. Now it's just me.

"We'll have to keep you in overnight," a nurse eventually tells me at about 8pm. My wife gallantly sticks around for a while longer, before being sent off to our accommodation and a late dinner.

By now I have drunk the equivalent of half Loch Ness. "We'll do a bladder scan" pipes up another nurse. "Look. It's half empty. Drink more water, drink, drink."

I recall the fates of those occasional victims of ecstasy consumption, a grisly death normally brought on by drinking so much water to avoid the dreaded dehydration that their brain turns to sponge. I give up on the drinking, and lie back to muse on the resting place of all that liquid.

A short while later I am up again, vomiting the equivalent of half Loch Ness down the pan. My migraine years have provided good training for such occurrences, and I am not fazed. In these circumstances, my stomach won't digest water, even. I know the ropes.

Around midnight a nurse comes round and inquires. "How are you feeling?" "A bit nauseous." "I'll fetch you a pill for that." I haven't the will to tell her. Ten minutes later the tablet is thrown up, along with loads more liquid, rejected by a body in full protest.

At 2.30am I pee. Just a little, and painfully. But it's all that's needed. I can go now.

Around 9am my wife comes to collect me. We go to the river for a therapeutic hobble. We move slowly along its banks, then on alongside misty pastures. I imagine those Norse folk of the past here. Catching fish from the slow-moving river; tending their animals - sheep? goats? what animals did Norse folk keep? - beside the river, cultivating a little grain. It's a funny place here, but I quite like it. I am unexpectedly free of bodily pain. And, to my relief, kundalini appears to have come through the ordeal unscathed. Soon time to go home......

   
     

Kundalini Report

It is now over a year since the energy, or force, sometimes called kundalini first made itself known within the battered temple of my physical body. At first it appeared fitfully, but for most of the past year it has been a constant companion, manifesting in one way or another 24/7.

It is not something I feel inclined to write about very much. The time may come when I have greater perspective, and fuller communication in a relatively public medium I deem suitable. At the moment I remain in the throes of a process which will continue for an indefinite period, quite possibly until I drop dead; and whose goal, should there be one, and direction are out of my control and beyond my current perceptual limits.

It is, for me, an enormously significant element in my life. Sometimes it seems as if my entire life until then had been geared towards the eventual appearance of the kundalini. In contrast to various non-dual groups and individuals who adopt an evangelical stance, I have no appetite to proselytise whatsoever. The opposite, in fact. The effects are personal, intimate we could say. It is more like a love affair than an election campaign.

Once it had established itself as a newly-installed aspect of my being, the kundalini energy worked mainly through my abdominal regions, on the areas related to the muladhara, svadhistana, and manipura chakras. This involved a lot of breaking through energetic and emotional blockages. In more recent times, the energy has moved upwards, more into my head. This has catalysed an enforced assault course on different aspects of personal conditioning, a factor influencing the subject matter of some of my more recent posts. I am beginning to experience more clearly how conditioning acts as an overlay on direct experience. It has to be shed, elegantly put aside, and kundalini insists that this does indeed take place.

Kundalini and sexual energy: there's a definite connection. This in itself is enough to put it outside the self-created walls of most spiritual schools and traditions. Sex and the spiritual are adversaries in most people' book. Traditions emanating from Asia appear to, generally speaking, underplay the sexual aspect to kundalini. There are various individuals in the modern west who tend to the other extreme, equating kundalini with sexual energy. The relationship is rarely expressed very clearly, probably because it's a bit oblique and subtle.

Kundalini, nested at the base of the spine, is not 'sexual energy' as such, my limited experience suggests to me. Nevertheless, a subtle form of sexual energy seems to act as the fuel necessary for kundalini to really be effective. It is as if energy is activated, located around my genitals and the two lower body chakras, and worked backwards, to eventually meet the base of the spine and ignite the kundalini, which then flows upwards.

To begin with, this was often an energetic struggle taking place inside my body. It was as if very basic energy was being re-routed. With time, the process takes place more smoothly, though it still varies.

Union of opposites: the key to kundalini, I think. Especially masculine and feminine, within the individual being and within the universe at large. If we seek an image which says something about the essential dynamic of kundalini, the yab-yum of Buddhist and Hindu tantra probably best fits the bill.

It is as if the Undifferentiated splits into two; that's its first act. Conversely, that pairs of opposites is only one small step away from the All, the Godhead, call it what you will. Don't tell anyone, especially organised religion in any form. It's taboo, its secret getting out meaning the end of all priest-and-power based religious systems.

Libido, for want of a better word: an essential prerequisite for Kundalini movement. At the same time, that libido is a bit different to what is the normal experience. In the male, instead of wanting to go forwards and out, it seeks to reroute to inwards, back, and up - to put things crudely. It's a pretty basic change.

Which brings me to a reflection on Darwin. Good old Charles Darwin. The one who came up with a most convenient theory for our materialistic linear modern world. In the world of Darwin, and pretty much everything you will read or come across on television, sex has its place and its purposes. To create babies, to catalyse and cement companionship, a partner, and to provide fun and entertainment. If kundalini turns up in your body, another purpose to sex begins to appear. And it has nothing to do with the other functions, the Darwin ones. In fact it doesn't seem to fit into the Darwin view of life and death at all.

The use of sexual energy at the service of 'the spiritual' is nevertheless hard-wired into the human body. This is what I have been able to experience. It seems inherent to the human: you don't reroute sexual energy, the process appears to be natural, spontaneous, and inbuilt. It just begins to happen, like being hungry or being tired. And the point is that this does not fit into Darwinian 'survival' theory at all. Nevertheless, to repeat myself, it is there, coded into the possibilities of the human body. Darwin, modern worldview, has no answer. It deals with the situation the way that the modern medical world does, by denying the existence of kundalini altogether, rendering its symptoms fit for tranquillisers and the psychiatric ward only. Which is funny, since an increasing number of people are coming to experience kundalini, as real as wanting a pee.

So it's not exactly 'bye bye Darwin'. I suppose there is some reality in Darwinian musings. But as a description, or even more, explanation, of life, it is profoundly wanting. There is, I feel from my own experience - which is all I have to go on - a lot more going on, which today's Darwinians refuse to acknowledge as existing at all.