Two Sides to the Monster of Life

It is as if there are two different programmes running simultaneously in my brain. They treat information differently.

One I can call the Zen Programme. It runs on 'This Is It' software. Everything is simply the way it is, the way it is, and that's pretty much it. Wishing anything different is stupid, because things are the way they are, and that's all we've got. A bird is a bird is a bird, and it does birdie things. The person living next door does what he or she does because it's what he or she does. In the Zen programme, furthermore, not only are things the way they are, but there is a kind of perfection attached to all this. Everything 'is' in precise reflection of its own nature. Taken seriously, the Zen programme gives rise to a certain kind of contentment, a deep acceptance, and possibly feelings of unconditional love.

But there is also running in my brain a second programme. It hasn't got a name. I could call it the Alchemy Programme, but alchemy is all a bit mysterious. I could name it the Jung programme, but I have discovered that there are lots of people who don't like Jung.

It is this second programme which gives rise to sentences such as these in my recent post 'The Bliss'. Speaking of mainstream 'news and current affairs' programmes, I wrote: "Should I stumble into a thirty-second exposure to such programmes, it is like looking at another world on the other side of a pane of glass. And it is a hell world, composed of pure evil." These sentences actually provoked a couple of remarks from readers; and they speak volumes about the nature of this second programme.

Light and dark; good and bad; masculine, feminine; up and down; night, day; sun, moon: these are the stuff of the second programme. It runs on opposites, dualities, couplings, pairs. Polarities. Syzygy, to go Jung and Hillman. Differences, distinctions, discriminations. Even if everything is One, that One is composed of the Two, and of the manifold. The One splits into Two, the Two unite as One. But without due cognisance of the Two, any experience of the One is wan, partial, one-sided, superficial. And, er, delusional and possibly dangerous....

So it is within this context of polarity that I wrote of the hell world on the other side of the pane of glass, composed of pure evil. 'Evil' is one of those words, isn't it? For many people it is a very loaded and emotive word. Philosophers, theologians, and metaphysicians have debated for centuries - nay, millennia - the nature of evil: what it is, or indeed if it exists at all. It goes without saying that we are no closer to knowing the answer now than were folk in Plato's time.

My own use of the word 'evil' comes divested of these big philosophical, ontological speculations. It is actually quite practical and pragmatic. 'What is the greatest good?' I ask myself. The greatest good is human beings fulfilling their potential, their most magnificent possibilities. Contact with Higher Self, with God; growing towards the Absolute; Enlightenment, saturated with Wisdom and unfettered Compassion. Individuality, Authenticity. The variants are many, and I'm not bothered with their differences at the moment. The main point about 'good' is the thing. It has this impulse, this motive, this direction.

If this is the greatest good, then evil is the opposite, the biggest bad. Evil is therefore whatever leads human beings away from achieving their miraculous birthright of 'awakening'. In particular, blinds that are tied before peoples' eyes, so they are unable to see what they could become. Deliberate confusing, deluding. Or denying that such higher potential exists. This, in my book, is evil.

So when I look through that pane of glass, I see the public being presented with a particular version of reality. It is a version in which misery reigns supreme. Fear, insecurity, anxiety, are created by what is spewed forth as 'news' and 'the issues of the day' for the unwitting consumption of the unknowing. It is a manipulation of people into hopelessness and powerlessness; away from their own authenticity into a strange fabricated world. A manipulation into ideology, especially the ideology of political correctness, and away from ones unique and direct personal experience of life. At best it is very partial, at worst completely false. It points away from that most dangerous truth for any powers-that-be: from the knowledge that god lives within, if you like, can be realised, and that everything else just pales in comparison.

This is why 'news' is full of reports of rapes, abuses, murders. Of abject apologies from celebrities and politicians for supposedly sexist or racist tweets or facebook posts. Keep people afraid to speak, afraid to speak. And why 'news' is not full of alchemy, kundalini, seeing God through the assistance of meditation or psychedelic substances; telepathy, advances in energetic treatments for disease, or efforts to produce cheap or free energy, all of which would liberate people from the shackles of the construct which 'news' exists to perpetuate.

There is a thing in human existence, a special evil, we could call it. Light and dark exist in the animal world. A crocodile tearing its prey to pieces, a cat playing with a pain-wracked dying mouse; the horror of a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami. Death through starvation on the desert plains. It all seems pretty harsh and dark to me. But I submit that human existence comes overlaid with an extra layer. It is a layer which appears deliberately intended to keep human beings in ignorance, blind to what they could become, if only somebody showed them. This is what I term 'evil'.

So it is outside the natural cycle of Creation, Preservation, and Destruction, as elucidated by Hinduism, for example. It is another, new, factor fed into that system of nature. Deliberate, synthetic, pulling people away. And this is where, for me, the demiurge and the archons come in.

It is some of the Gnostics who insist upon the reality of the demiurge and his minions, the archons. We can take them literally, or we can take them metaphorically. Whichever, as a story, and as a description of what goes on in human affairs, it speaks to me in a way that nothing else quite does.

The demiurge is a false god. He is an impostor on the godly scene. He stands up and rants about how he is the creator of all, the one and only. It's a bit of a bad joke, until the tragic happens and the mass of humanity actually believes his story. He ends up creating most of the world that gullible people inhabit as a result. His job, his purpose, is to keep people believing this nonsense, and to keep them away from the truth. In order to assist in his subterfuge, he has his hordes of inorganic helpers, the archons.  They are his foot soldiers, engaged in deceiving and deluding  people. They lead humans astray through ideas and ideologies. To continue the computer analogy (a ridiculous thing for me to do, given my own parlous knowledge of things virtual), they are like a virus which infects the workings of the brain.

It's been going on for a long time: our early Gnostics are contemporaries of the first Christians. Mind manipulation, warping humanity's view of reality, is nothing recent. But it is this which, I submit, is the foundation of the really really bad: of evil.    

To look through that pane of glass is to peer from a place of relative authenticity into a synthetic creation, a manufactured bubble, a nightmare induced by the god of falseness. Which is not to say that everything which turns up on the BBC Six o' Clock news is 'untrue' or designed to scare and manipulate. Of course not. But that is the overall context, the general worldview which issues from such a dark place.

It is possible to develop out of, to become free from, the clutches of the demiurge and his nasty minions. Courage to be sovereign, authentic, is the key. This may or may not come with recognised spiritual practice. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are plenty of people who may spend a lifetime sitting on a meditation cushion and go to the grave with their archon-derived notions intact.

No. The key seems to be awaking to the innate power within ones individual life, free of any organisations, systems, gurus, leaders, religious or non-religious traditions, ideologies. The spiritual anarchist stands the best chance. That is not to say that the demiurge will not impact upon ones life. His henchmen may turn up on the doorstep one day and drag you away because you've been a naughty boy or girl. Nothing much to do about that. But emotionally, psychologically, energetically, the person is free. Which is plenty to aim for.

Living and Dying in the Mountains

Every winter people die in the Scottish mountains. This season has been pretty bad, a reflection, in part at least, of the weather. It has been relentless for three months now, and that's at sea level.

I am always affected when people die in the mountains. I know why they went, why it was so important to them: the feeling is one shared among mountain people. I sometimes think: 'It could have been me.' Except that I don't normally go to the mountains when weather conditions are suspicious, in winter time especially.

'Dying on the mountains' is a real enough notion for me to indulge in some morbid fantasising concerning different ways you can perish on the hills. Falling down a cliff face in summer may not be so bad: hard and swift. But winter? Snow, blizzards, hypothermia, slowly losing all bodily sensation, physical and emotional energy, the will to live slowly sapping away. Or it could be quick and horrid: a mighty avalanche sweeping you away, or burying you alive.

It can't get much worse than this. "He died doing what he loved" (it is more often 'he' than 'she' in mountain mortalities) is the theme sometimes expressed in the search for solace, but it fails to convince me really.

The most anguished examples hail, not so much from Scotland, as from Himalayan, and occasionally Alpine, mountaineering. It was with fascinated horror, or horrified fascination, that I used to read about expeditions to the high Himalayan peaks, when only half the team would manage to get back to base camp. There's a mountain - it might be K2, I'm not sure - where climbing it entails passing bodies frozen solid into the snow. They have been there for years, but the oxygen's so thin at that altitude that nobody's got the strength to bring them down.

Closer to home, one incident in particular has affected me. Over a week ago now, two brothers - one in his 50s, the other in his 60s - along with a dog, set off to the mountains from the tiny hamlet of Achnashellach. They didn't return.

The incident has continued to play on and through my mind. I know those mountains well. The brothers set out to traverse the round of summits encircling Achnashellach. I have ascended these mountains many times: they comprise one of my semi-local happy hunting grounds.

On a fine day, there are no special problems for a person who knows what they are doing. But ice, snow, blizzard, wind chill, freezing gales blowing snow horizontally into your face.....

I can imagine in my mind's eye those two guys setting off on the path - across the railway line, turn left through the trees then down beside the cascading stream. Following its course as it climbs up into the mountain-encircled coire. Then choose a peak.

The images continue to play fruitlessly through my mind. What happened? Where did it go wrong? I travel the entire route in imagination: the climb, the ridges, summits, the little scrambles, the stalkers' path of descent. I know it so well. On a fine day......... as I said.

These are serious mountains, outliers of the famous Torridon group. Plenty of vertical faces of cliff, lots of rock. Lots. And, under winter conditions, plenty of places to get avalanched. One March a few years ago I was in these hills. The path cut below an enormous bank of snow. I moved gingerly, ensuring I created no disturbance, at one point diverting away from that bank, keeping all the while a close eye on it.

Those admirable, courageous people from Mountain Rescue found one body. I believe they've given up for now, with the search for the other body considered hopeless until there has been significant snow melt.

Personally, I love mountains, but have grown to feel that there are times when they are not really a suitable haunt for me. We are not 'meant' to be there, similar to how a walrus is not meant to be hanging out in the Atacama Desert. Love gives birth to respect, and to restraint. In my case, at least....

Images: Mountains above Achnashellach, late spring

The Bliss

'Society cannot allow ecstasy. Ecstasy is the greatest revolution.... If people become ecstatic, the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery.' Osho, Body Mind Balancing.

Not everyone in the 'spiritual world' greets ecstasy and bliss with such enthusiasm. Some schools of Buddhism are full of sharp wits queuing up to issue stern warnings. 'Bliss, ecstasy, rapture are all very well, but heed my wise words. They are impermanent, just like anything else, fragile as the leaves on the trees in the autumn wind. Pay them attention, get attached at your peril. Suffering will follow in their wake as sure as night follows day.' 'Lofty but still mundane possibilities' is what Sangharakshita calls the jhanas, or higher states of consciousness, which are suffused by such qualities. And that need to emphasise 'mundane' seems to bring bliss, ecstasy, and rapture down into the same category as queuing up at the supermarket check-out.

Fortunately, not all Buddhism views ecstasy in such a dim light. Vajrayana, Tantra, see the energy of bliss as a quickener, creating a kind of short cut to wisdom, or gnosis as I might prefer to call it. It is fuel for the path, as well as a reflection of the blessedness of gnosis in and of itself.

As I sat in a shrine room full of meditators in the 1970s and early 1980s, a wry sense of humour would come over me whenever these bliss-alerts came to mind. One would-be meditator would be sitting there trying to banish fantasies about the girl he saw on the bus en route to the class. Another would be assailed by an avalanche of jobs that needed to be done by the weekend. Another would be engrossed in irritation at the stupid guy he was talking to over a cup of tea before the meditation. Yet another would be shaking and wobbling internally, undergoing his regular visitation from generalised anxiety. And there we were, told to beware of the dangers of too much bliss and ecstasy.

Jana Dixon amplifies on what 'society based on bliss, rather than misery' is actually about. 'The bliss is a permanent background which is impervious to both suffering and pleasure. The bliss is all pervasive. That is, we can be in the worst physical or emotional suffering and still be in radical bliss. Then on top of the bliss there are emotions, desires, suffering, numbness, anhedonia and whatever our relative response to life is at the time.' (Biology of Kundalini, section 'A tolerance for bliss'.)

So, promoting bliss does not mean becoming a 'lightworker' who shuns the dark side of life. It is about background; the programme running quietly yet continuously in the background.

A better feeling for this may come from considering the opposite. As Osho says, a society based upon misery. Everybody will be familiar with this as the backdrop to existence, either from personal experience or from those they are close to.  It is the wash providing the context, influencing everything and all. Birthday with lots of nice presents: great, but with a background of misery. Promotion at work: yes, but the background's there. Holiday abroad: sun, sea, sand, and a backdrop of misery.

Spend any substantial time in the company of mainstream media, and I suggest that it is almost impossible to experience life as anything but misery. 'News', current affairs progs and documentaries, soul-destroyers like 'Newsnight' and 'Victoria Derbyshire' on BBC in the UK. My own continued 99% boycotting of these noxious programmes has yielded interesting results. Should I stumble into a thirty-second exposure to such programmes, it is like looking at another world on the other side of a pane of glass. And it is a hell world, composed of pure evil. 'Are you telling me that this.... is..... the....world?' I ask slack-jawed in disbelief. It is a synthetic, manufactured version of 'what is important'; and it is purpose-designed to instruct the viewer that life, the world, is misery. It's a lie, a vicious piece of mind control. Better by far the way of bliss.

Image: Chinnamasta. Or, from Tantric Buddhism, it could be Chinnamunda, a form of Vajrayogini. When I saw this thangka, I immediately thought 'Ah, Kundalini.'

Out of the Desert

I have sometimes wondered how much of his readership Carlos Castaneda lost in that one single move. It was a bold step, even for a writer as daring as Castaneda.


We are in Part Two of 'Tales of Power'. Castaneda is in Mexico City on a Sunday afternoon. He is wandering around the market stalls in aimless fashion, when there is a tap on his shoulder. It is none other than Don Juan. And he is wearing a suit.

Castaneda is as dumbfounded as the typical reader probably was. Don Juan has to keep on getting Carlos to close his mouth, which falls open in astonishment at regular intervals.

Not only is Don Juan wearing a suit, but he is apparently wearing it impeccably. He looks, Castaneda tells us, 'an impeccably tailored urban dweller.'

Something of the impact of this event is captured in notes I made in a personal diary-of-sorts. "When Don Juan first turns up in his city suit in 'Tales of Power', it's the moment when you feel like giving up on Castaneda. 'He's gone too far this time. I'm not letting him get away with this.' Gone the solitary nature ascetic, the desert shaman, the wise old sorcerer standing remote and alone, aloft and above it all. Instead we've got this guy in pinstripes who's got a job and goes to restaurants."

For three and a half books we've got accustomed to Don Juan in his sandals and straw hat, leaning against the wall of his rude little house, maybe, or out beneath the unforgiving desert sun, speaking to the plants and the wind. He embodies the image perfectly, the archetype, if you like. And now...... As Castaneda says a few pages on: "Your suit scares me more than anything you've done." And later still: "I did not know what to think. I felt that I had arrived at the end of my path."

So much adheres to an mage. When it collapses, we too can feel lost, or confused at the very least. Merlin, Gandalf, Don Juan: all of a type. Wise old men who live 'out there', deigning to enter our own vulgar, tedious world on the rare occasion. The Don Juan of the desert will always be there. But by turning up in Mexico City in his pin stripes and brown shoes he acquired another dimension altogether.

'Tales of Power' is the fourth and final - I would say climactic - volume in Castaneda's first and best known series of books. It appeared in 1974 to an eager audience of folk like myself, riding the wave of 'back to the land' ethos, and intent on leaving behind as quickly as possible the world of the pin-striped suit. However, any aversion created by Don Juan's newest manifestation was dissolved by some of the content of this book. In my view, it is one of Castaneda's finest works. 'Tales of power': it's not just the incidents themselves, about the power surging through the cosmos. The tales in this book are related in writing that is indeed full of power, some of Castaneda's best.

It is in 'Tales of Power', over a lunch of soup in Mexico City and in his suit, that Don Juan gives his explanation of the tonal and the nagual. "The tonal is everything we know" he informs an increasingly perplexed Carlos, while "The nagual is the part of us for which there is no description." The tonal is like the table we are eating from, continues Don Juan; the known items are the knives, forks, salt cellars and the rest.

In typical fashion, Castaneda tries to get to grips with all this. "Is the nagual the soul?" No. Let's say the soul is the ashtray. "Is it the thoughts of men?" No, these are the silverware. A state of grace? Heaven? God? What about God? Surely the nagual is God, who is everything. No again. Don Juan is amused to say that God is the tablecloth. Nearing his wit's end, Castaneda demands to know: where, then, is the nagual? 'Don Juan made a sweeping gesture and pointed to the area beyond the boundaries of the table.' "The nagual is there, surrounding the island... where power hovers."

The most magnificent section of all, in my view, is reserved for the end of the book. It is the moment for great farewells, sorcerer-style, and Don Genaro expresses his love for the Earth. Whenever I return to these paragraphs, their effect is invariably profound. ".... the earth knows that Genaro loves it" explains Don Juan "and it bestows on him its care ....... Genaro roams on the paths of his love and, wherever it is, he is complete." And so it goes on.

My recent revisit of this outstanding piece of writing  has led me to realise yet another aspect to the power of these tales. It is one part of how, I suppose, over forty years ago, I became a Buddhist rather than heading off to the desert in search of a Mexican shaman.

Much of my own experience of multidimensional realities, let us call them, could be couched in terms of 'consciousness'. Pale Green Vortex is full of references to 'consciousness'; less so to 'mind' which is a more problematic word, more prone to being identified with 'brain' and with 'thoughts'. A major personal gateway in the early 1970s was LSD.  And, in my experience, LSD was all mind, all consciousness. I have since then had the privilege to sample the blessings conferred by other 'psychedelic type plants and substances', such as cactus and ayahuasca. But none, in my view, approach old-fashioned LSD in terms of pure consciousness.

The emphasis has remained. A common thread weaving its way through many of the topics turning up on this blog is that 'c' word.

Read Castaneda, though, and it's very different. Much of the experience described in the books is somatic. It happens in the physical, in the body. Just open any of Castaneda's books at random and it will stare you in the face. I let my copy of 'Tales of Power' fall open in the chapter entitled 'Shrinking the Tonal'. See what happens to poor little Carlos here as he goes through typically strange experiences under the tutelage of Don Juan. "There was a pressure in my head, a tickling feeling, as if carbonated soda were going through my nose. I was speechless. I tried to say something without success." A couple of pages on: "We walked in silence for a moment. My body was feverish. I noticed that the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were burning hot. The same unusual heat also seemed to be localized in my nostrils and eyelids." And another from near the end of the chapter: "I shivered. My body felt it was at the edge of an abyss........ The struggle made me numb by degrees, until I could not feel my body. My mouth was open and my eyes were half closed....."

This is what you get for involving in 'the evil world of sorcery', as Don Juan terms it. Pressure in the head, fevers, burning hands and feet, shivers and numbness. And it's a far cry from consciousness, at least as commonly understood. Not only is it physical rather than mental, a lot of it doesn't seem very nice at all, a million miles away from the calming mindfulness that some meditation promises. Not the sort of thing that any right-minded person would sign up to at all. In truth, Castaneda's experience bears more resemblance to some full-on kundalini event than it does to a public meditation class. Which is where things all begin to tie up, I suppose.....

The fairly unconscious urge to revisit this book of Castaneda's has opened this up for me. My own 'spiritual life', if we can call it that, has recently become filled with physical, bodily events. It is energetic and physical, radically different to what I have been accustomed to in the past. But the world of sorcery, as described in 'Tales of Power' and elsewhere, resonates with the weird happenings within my own body. I 'feel' Castaneda more fully than in the past.  

Images: Sonoran Desert
             Mexico City  

Uncoiling Aboard the Magic Bus

I have done very well, I think to myself. A good long walk alongside the river under a cold, low winter sun; visits to plumber, bank, outdoor shop, and supermarket all successfully accomplished. It is only when, with the sun almost gone, I step onto the bus home that I realise I'm whacked out.

I am third onto the bus, and spread myself and accompanying bags out spaciously over the seats. Yes, whacked out. I shall return home, to.... what? I could go to rest, a late afternoon siesta. Only it will be useless. I'll lie down for about two minutes, and it'll all start up. The whirring, chugging, rotating, deep down inside a part of the body that most people choose to ignore. It will build, and build, going ever deeper, over ten minutes or two hours. Finally, warm ripples of energy will take me over as they rise wave upon wave to the top of my head; or a silvery liquid will slowly make its way up the length of my spine. Or there will be an outburst, a spasm of energy, which will pull me half way down the bed.

It is good that I have the house all to myself at the moment! Even loved ones might find it all a touch disconcerting.

I take a look at my companions on the bus. All dressed up in their own particular ways for the cold outside. I am past comment, opinion, judgement: we are who we are, and that's it. My brain seems full of soft warm bliss, refusing to take part in such ways of thinking.

A woman gets on the bus with her daughter and younger son. The boy is in a wheelchair, physically and mentally impaired. The woman's purse snaps open, spilling coins all over the floor; the girl hurries to pick them all up. As we travel further, I notice the girl gazing out the bus window, alone in her thoughts and her world, while mother occupies herself with the boy. I wonder whether she gets enough attention from her parents, or whether she is unwitting victim of her little brother's all-consuming problems. CEN, it's called: childhood emotional neglect. Check it out.

There was a time when our bus route was proudly run on smooth-running, swanky electric buses. In recent times, though, they have been replaced by old, beaten-up boneshakers. Some double-deckers, even, looking as if they've been bought at bargain basement price in a London transport sale of goods from the 1950s. Today, we are rattling along, juddering and shaking as we go. The vibrations get things going: other than jumping off at the next stop, I have no option but to submit. I am taken over by a now-familiar feeling, a mix of unspeakable sweetness and near-despair. I can manage despair, and have come to respect it. Far better than feelings like certainty, which leave no room for growth.

As we continue to get tossed about on the pothole-ridden road, the sensations only intensify. I recall years gone past, when a great fascination was aroused by tales of teenage girls having orgasms while riding their horse. I'm sorry, girls, I take back my lustful delight. It's not always such great fun after all.

It's almost dark now, and we are nearing my stop. The afternoon's events flash through my mind as we turn the corner at the hotel into the final stretch of road. It's the thing to do, isn't it? The question. It happened twice during my little afternoon today, at the bank and at the outdoor shop. "Have you got anything else planned for the rest of the day?" seems the required question nowadays if a shop worker wants to keep their job. I sometimes mumble something about the day not taking up a lot of space in my future memoirs, while I stuff eggs and bananas into my shopping bag. Maybe one day I'll actually tell them. "Have you got anything much on for the rest of the day?" "I am going home, where Princess Kundalini may rise up in splendour. The lovely divine Shakti will meet in tender embrace the mighty Lord Shiva, and they will dance in tenderness and joy at the centre of my heart." One day, one day......

Photo: Andrea Davies

Serpent Rising

For a while, I had intended writing nothing about it. Keeping quiet, aside from in communication with a few empathic intimates. It is, after all, rather specific, personal, to be handled carefully. But it seems that it will be around for a while - maybe for ever. So, unless 'hibernation' on this blog is going to turn into rigor mortis, I have decided that a few words, at least, shall be forthcoming....

Over the past several months, things have got turned upside down and inside out a bit. Everything has changed. I feel simultaneously in a state of near-constant bliss, and as if I have been chucked out of a spin drier at high speed. During this short period, the energy we may call Kundalini has been in process of activation and awakening in this ancient and battered temple I call my physical body. It has become a full-on immersion, shaping everything I do - or, more frequently, don't do.

Needless to say, this is not something I have consciously intended. At the same time, in retrospect, there might be some rhyme and reason to matters after all. What I have been getting up to in recent times is precisely the kind of thing to catch the attention of Kundalini.

Take these subjects. 'Sacred duality, the divinity of polarity'; the four elements in Tarot, and the corresponding four psychic functions in Jung; the sacred feminine, whatever that is, and the dark moon goddesses: blog posts over the past two years have been littered with references to these and similar themes.

Looked at from one angle, all of this seems a bit fancy. However, it has not - I repeat, not - been intended as philosophical and metaphysical speculation; neither has it been a playing with ideas and concepts. It has been my own attempt, the best I could do, to map out the inner processes taking place within my life, inside my own direct experience. Mysticism, not philosophy. One theme to emerge has been my reservations (which turned into a despising, really) about a life shaped and led by concept and thought. 'Mind', as commonly understood. Now these reservations have born fruit. I am immersed in Kundalini process, which is all energy, feeling, sensation: about as thought-and-concept free as you can get.

I have no intention of sharing the details of the unfoldment which has led to this point. However, the sacred aspect to duality has been a key for me. This is well communicated through the upper section of the Kabbalist Tree of Life, along with its corresponding expression in Tarot. Kether is top of the Tree, parallel with the aces in Tarot. It is Oneness, non-duality, Source. Then comes Chokmah, two on the Tree and in Tarot: Wisdom, the initial division of the hitherto undivided. Basic dualities: light, dark; masculine, feminine. And then Binah, the three: Understanding. The reflexive consciousness which sees the 'One as Two' and 'Two as One'. It cognises the sacred process.

It was an enormous transformation of consciousness for me to see this. Most of my adult life had been led with an assumption (conscious or not is irrelevant) of basic oppositionalism: non-dual = good, dual = bad. Escape this rotten world of dualistic sorrows, the samsara, into nirvana, the pure bliss of the undivided. This was the name of the game.

Kabbala and Tarot see things differently. Duality is just one tiny step from the top of the Tree. It manifests the attributes of the Godhead, if you will. Instead of being opposed to one another, the dual and non-dual are mutual reflections. To see this brings the divine into everything; it is everywhere. We could even venture that Oneness without duality remains a bit dumb. It possesses no means of seeing itself, of self reflection. It cannot be creative. The One needs the Two, just as the Two need the One.

So, once more, just in case any reader still hasn't quite got it. This is not philosophical speculation. I have no time for such things, really. It is an attempt, imperfect no doubt, to communicate my own felt experience through the limited medium of words. The point is that Kundalini appears to take a vivid interest in 'sacred duality', the union of opposites. This is actually formulated better in the western mystical tradition of alchemy than elsewhere, in my view. This esoteric tradition is replete with references to the two-in-one, the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine, the twin flames, the rising serpent, and the like. It all comes clothed in obscurity, tricky imagery, partly because it is by nature esoteric, but partly also because its physical, body-based mysticism would have been met with hostility, to put it mildly, by western Christianity, were it to present in more simple formats.

Much of my life has been spent with a penchant for the weird, unorthodox, the offtrack, along with a corresponding aversion to much that is considered conventional, mainstream. It is as if someone or something in the Universe has finally called my bluff. "Oh you, with a fatal fascination with the bizarre and inexplicable: get a load of this."

Yes. Living inside this Kundalini process - I shall call it thus - is probably the strangest thing to have happened in my life to date. And it is not something that can be turned off. The alchemical process is a highly autonomous one, it seems: it 'decocts and putrefies by itself'. 'You' don't do Kundalini: it does you. Surrender, give yourself up, shape yourself as best you can to be a receptacle fit to receive: this is the only way to go. Not hugely easy for a little smart-arse like me....

A few notes for anybody wishing to find out more. Some of the more traditional Hindu-based literature on Kundalini I find, well, not exactly dishonest, but partial, one-sided. All those neat and tidy diagrams of chakras, nadis, third eyes, and the rest. While experience has demonstrated to me that these phenomena do exist, it's not in the orderly fashion often depicted. The unfolding is not, to our normal way of thinking, linear or rational at all. Not in my case, at least. Dionysus, not Apollo, rules the house of Kundalini. She - for Kundalini is a 'she' - is Shakti, the goddess, the deep feminine fully embodied.

Though obscure, some of the alchemical stuff is more real. The paintings and engravings. The best sources, though, to my mind, are often the first-hand accounts by 'modern western people', folk who have actually travelled the journey. Look for the taste of honesty and authenticity.

Twitches, jerkings, stretchings, spasms; spontaneous mudras; internal rerouting of sexual energy. All the strange symptoms of Kundalini awakening that you read about I have found myself reliving. Kundalini is not something for the mind; it is energy. I am aware of it reconfiguring my physical body, quite literally. Which is a  bit disconcerting, but comes laced with a heavy helping of bliss.

Living inside the Kundalini process feels a bit like living inside an unscripted miracle. Here on Pale Green Vortex we are in, not so much 'hibernation', as in 'Kundalini quiet time.' I shall leave it there for now.....

My Companions

Part One

During the early autumn of faraway 1976 I went on a three-week retreat organised by some Tibetan Buddhists. It was in Conishead Priory, then an enormous and rather dilapidated building in the south of the English Lake District. It had been recently purchased by the then Manjusri Institute, and the retreat was a kid-of inaugural event. For a variety of reasons, it didn't really work out for me. There was, however, one undoubted highlight of the retreat: the teachers.

The teachers - the gurus, as we are talking Tibetan Buddhism - were the sadly long deceased Lama Thubten Yeshe and the still-happily-with-us Lama Zopa Rinpoche. Together, they formed a brilliant double act.

The majority of the teaching was done by Zopa. He was, then, a slight and tiny young lama. His English wasn't too good, and he would do a lot of murmuring and muttering of the type that, I believe, only Tibetans can do. So 'receiving the teachings' was a bit of an effort in the first place. And once you had managed to receive them, the teachings did not exactly fill you with joy. Zopa majored on 'the vicious state of samsara'. Old age, impermanence, sickness and death. Death is certain while the time of death is uncertain. The nasty side of karmic consequence. The hot hells and the cold hells. You get the picture.

We young impressionable western students would all be on the verge of buying a one-way ticket into the mountains and jumping off the top of Scafell Pike when Lama Yeshe would breeze in. His grin stretched from one side of the spacious room to the other, while he laughed and joked: don't take it all too seriously, it's all a bit of a blast, really. We would all feel that life was worth living after all, in readiness for another stark dose of reality from Lama Zopa.

There was one time during those three weeks, and one time only, when I recall the normally deadpan Zopa having a really good laugh. He was talking about the need to remain mindful and aware at all times, and the perils of getting carried away, that sort of thing. To illustrate his point, he told a story. It concerned a poor, hard-working Tibetan peasant farmer. He toiled long, long hours in the fields beneath the harsh Tibetan weather in order to feed his family. It really was a tough life, and however much he strived, it was a constant struggle to keep his family fed and warm. Then, one day, his luck turned. He won a lot of money. The struggles were behind him. He was so happy, so excited, that he started to jump up and down with delight. He hit his head on a rafter and dropped down dead.

Zopa found this story hilarious. He couldn't stop laughing. Meanwhile, all we young, modern, nice, western Buddhists, looked at each other in disquiet and consternation. We felt distinctly uncomfortable at the great lama finding humour in such a horrible story. It was at that moment, I now realise forty years after the event, that Lama Zopa Rinpoche showed his true colours: he was a man of the serpent....

Part Two

I have two companions. They follow me almost everywhere I go. One is just behind me to the left, the other to the right. I sometimes consult them when there are things to do, decisions to be made, or when I'm not sure about the 'rightness' of an attitude I may have. I call these two companions Jesus Christ and the Serpent.

The image which has taken on the name of Jesus Christ may or may not correspond very closely to the figure who walks the pages of the Christian New Testament. I am not overly concerned with that; if you find that interesting, check it out yourself. To me, there is an image, a figure of imagination, who in my imaginal world goes by the name of Jesus Christ. That's all.

He exudes a softly radiant golden-yellow light. I notice that he is always smiling, though I sometimes suspect the expression is hiding a rancour or deep resentment. If I engage him in conversation, he speaks always of pity, love, forgiveness. He is indeed Love. He is the Light of the World. He feels sorry for other people; he seems not to feel comfortable with pain, sickness, death, the inevitables of life. Rather, he wishes to remove them, to erase them; to save us from our sorrows, our sufferings, our pains and lamentations.

He wishes to take away that which is part of us, our needles of pain, just as he cried out in felt betrayal to his father when he was in trouble himself. He has a keen sense of guilt, a feeling which he has passed on to many in the modern western world. His guilt and the ensuing feeling of charity is the inner emotional attitude which drives, for example, the readiness to allow all manner of human being into ones place of living, regardless of their true need, suitability, or worthiness. We feel pity, we feel sorry, we feel the great love of the Light of the World. We feel responsible for everything and everybody.

This imaginal Jesus figure comes with his own formula for living. It consists largely of a sense of guilt, sin, and salvation of the world. This inner emotional attitude gets easily transferred onto matters of our darling Mother Earth, where we all feel guilty for the mess around us, and so are easily duped into all manner of foolish acts and attitudes of 'salvation'. The guilt of this Jesus Christ makes us easy prey for manipulation.

He would also have me turn the other cheek, as the highest form of morality. Turn the other cheek, so that the dark forms that stalk the face of our lovely Earth can get away with blue murder without so much as a harsh word being said against them. Turn the other cheek, he says, and let the wicked go free.....

My other companion is the Serpent. Or he could be a dragon, like a Naga from Buddhist and Hindu mythology. Gold and black, tactile, sensuous, rippling with serpentine energy. He has huge bulging eyes.

Should I seek his advice, it often seems harsh, scary, unforgiving. He looks impassively, sees life as it is, and utters accordingly. He emanates a fierce love, shuddering and without compromise. A love which includes pain, the needles, suffering, death. He may even talk of the beauty of suffering, of its necessity. His presence evokes a mixture of awe, fear, and love in my own soul and heart.     

There is no place in my Serpent world for the Christ-like attitudes of guilt, sin, and salvation. She - I have used 'he' thus far, but surely the Serpent could be an underworld queen - finds these feelings tepid, signs of weakness; giveaways of personal power and energy. Instead, she embodies a certain kind of justice which is a reflection of the natural order of things. Punishment and revenge descend upon life when it strays too far from a certain sense of 'rightness'. Crowley's card of 'Adjustment' to replace the normal 'Justice' card in his Thoth Tarot is one which resonates deeply with our lovely Serpent.

There is no place for sentiment in the world of the Serpent. Emotion is rather impersonal, or transpersonal. Fiercely objective, unwavering. If the human species were to be totally destroyed because of its general foolishness, the Serpent would not shed a big tear, or lose too much sleep over it. 'Damaged goods is not worth bothering with' shall be her attitude.

In my own conversations, the Light of the World is first to jump to my aid with kindness and sympathy. But on closer inspection, I invariably find myself following the wise way of the Serpent.......

Images: Lama Zopa nowadays
             A Serpent, of course