It’s 5:15 in the afternoon. I’m on the top of the world, 10,000 feet in Hawaii, on top of the Haleakala volcano.
The clouds have filled in all around it. I’m just above the cloud line, somewhere near the House of the Sun. Strange and unusual rocks are all around me—lava rocks, filled with power and energy.
The shadows are forming. The sun is dropping quickly over the horizon. As far as I can see are seas and oceans of cloud shapes and forms. Most of the island is obscured today, the lower island, by the clouds.
It’s the first day of August in 1985, and I’m somewhere here in the middle of eternity.
I’d like to talk to you today about kundalini yoga, the yoga of power and energy.
The volcano is the symbol of power. This particular volcano is dormant at the moment—it’s still. But within its depths the lava sits waiting, the power of the Earth.
And in a moment, lava will shoot forward, rise up through the lava tubes to the top of the volcano and erupt—the power within us that’s dormant and the power of the universe that sits there waiting. Something happens—something triggers it—it goes off.
And it rises—it rises up the shushumna, the spinal astral tube. It gradually moves up through the chakras, and it reaches the thousand-petaled lotus of light at the top—enlightenment, satori, states of attention, perfection.
We are beautiful. We are beauty itself. We are visions of light, snapshots of eternity. Yet so few people in any given lifetime climb to the highest heights, experience the totality.
The path of kundalini yoga is the path of eruption, sudden spurts of energy—as you can hear in the background, the wind is blowing up here at 10,000 feet. And there’s a wind that flows in and through your life, changing you.
The wind of time ages us. The wind of life changes its direction constantly.
But there is one constant in life, and that is the energy within your being.
How do you tap into it? How do you reach it? What will it do to you? How will it change you?
Is it dangerous? Can it be controlled? Or like these great volcanoes, is it something beyond our control and we can only watch with awe when the Earth displays itself?
It’s funny how human beings tend to think that they’re the masters of the Earth because they’ve put in a lot of shopping malls and painted little white lines on blacktop, never realizing that the Earth for a time simply tolerates its tenants and then, when the mood strikes, that it changes. It shifts its continents around. Mountains rise and fall.
We take so much for granted.
Kundalini yoga is the yoga of transmutation. The principles are simple.
At the base of the spine there’s an access point that leads into another world, another plane of attention, another dimension.
It’s possible to access the energy through that secret doorway, that lowest chakra, and bring that energy and power up through yourself into your being. And as you bring it into your being, it will spread and radiate throughout your entire body.
There is a particular path that the kundalini follows—the shushumna. The shushumna, as I mentioned before, is an astral nerve tube. It’s the central nerve tube. There are two others, the ida and the pingala, on either side of it.
In most persons, the shushumna is closed. It’s a highway that’s been shut down. The continuous energy flow that gives us life, that sustains the subtle physical body, takes place in the ida and the pingala.
Just as the blood is constantly flowing through your veins through capillaries—bringing oxygen to the cells, moving nutrients and wastes around—so the kundalini energy is constantly flowing through our subtle physical body, our etheric body.
It sustains it, heals it. Without that energy, the subtle body grows ill, gets injured or it dies. And when it dies, the physical body dies.
We are completely dependent upon the subtle physical body in this world.
The more energy that we have in the subtle physical body, the higher our psychic receptivity is.
So kundalini yoga is, in many ways, the study of energy—its management, its flow, its highs and its lows. But specifically, kundalini is a flow of power.
And when we diagram it, we say that it runs from the base of the spine up to the top of the head.
Now, it isn’t exactly running in the physical body, of course. Kundalini is running through the subtle physical. The subtle physical looks approximately like the physical body, only it’s composed of thousands of layers of light, light fibers.
It is knowledge itself.
The subtle physical body conducts light the same way that a piece of wire conducts electricity. But it also reflects light the way a mirror reflects a visage, a scene.
There are seven chakras, gateways to the kundalini.
The lower six chakras are connected by the shushumna, the ida and the pingala. The crown chakra is not connected to the other six—it’s separate.
Each of the chakras, of course, has been described in yogic literature as being formed of lotuses or petals. A different number of petals have been assigned to each of the chakras and a different symbolic color, and so on.
What really concerns the student is not so much the number of petals or the colors or the plane of attention that a certain chakra is associated with, but rather, it’s the simple shifting of energy—how to pull and move the kundalini up the shushumna through each chakra and eventually how to make that jump, from the third eye to the thousand-petaled lotus, to the crown chakra on the top of the head.
A cautionary note—kundalini yoga, unlike some types of yoga, tends to be a little more dangerous—dangerous if it is not practiced correctly. When practiced correctly, there’s no danger at all.
But to prematurely push the kundalini energy through the chakras can cause a variety of ailments, the most common of which is insanity.
What is insanity?
So for example, when a person is practicing kundalini yoga, if they were to push their attention too far too fast, they can gain visions of other worlds. These visions can be enlightening, beautific, or terribly frightening, depending upon the nature of the vision, and, of course, the individual’s own reactions to it. I mean, nothing is really beautiful or fearful until we decide that it is.
Also, there are various beings that live in other planes of attention that one will see and encounter in alternate realities.
Needless to say, if a person is properly prepared, it’s simply like journeying to a foreign land. In the foreign land, we will experience another culture, another language, different social customs, religions, different types of people. And we’re not particularly thrown if we’ve been a little oriented to what we’re going to experience. It can be exciting. We can learn a lot.
How much are you learning lately? Are you learning enough?
Have you learned that you’re not a body composed of cells and tissues?
Have you learned that this world, as you know it, doesn’t even exist? Do you know that there is not a beginning or an ending? That there is no today or tomorrow?
That all of the relative appearances that you see don’t really exist as you think they do?
The kundalini gives this knowledge and awareness. It frees you. It frees you from duality, the sense of right and wrong, good and bad, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, winning and losing.
Everything depends upon perception. We are perception.
Kundalini is an alteration of perception.
I try to describe kundalini in a schematic sense, saying that there are chakras and that there is an energy flow, and so on. And it’s true, it’s true, it’s true, it’s true, it’s true, it’s true, it’s sort of—it’s not completely true.
Nothing is completely true. Nothing that can be expressed is completely true because anything that can be expressed is a partiality, and yet, something can be transmitted—awareness—awareness of eternity. That’s all there is.
I’m here at 10,000 feet on the island of Maui. The clouds are moving and shifting beneath me—huge billowy clouds. And so our lives shift. The characters in our lives come and go. Our emotions—fleeting, beautiful, agonizing.
Kundalini is control. Perfect control. Control of everything, from within.
Most individuals try to control their lives from outside of themselves. They seek to influence and affect their environment. So human beings have shaped the world to fit their own image.
Yoga, kundalini yoga, is the science of shaping attention, awareness. We are not so concerned about the world around us, as we are the world within us because we realize that the world within us is the world around us.
Every perception we have, everything we see, feel and experience is dependent upon our state of mind. Mind is relative. It changes constantly.
Control of mind is control of destiny, control of life, control of awareness.
Control of mind is not gained simply by battling desires, but rather it’s gained through energy.
Energy is awareness. Awareness is attention. Attention is purpose. Purpose is … endless.
Let’s get practical. You are in a certain state of consciousness right now.
The state of consciousness that you’re in causes you to enjoy your life or to not enjoy your life—to see the beauty in things and people or not to see that beauty, to succeed in work or not to succeed in work, to be loved and to love, to be hated, to be feared, to be fearful—everything is dependent upon your state of awareness. It colors the universe.
Your state of awareness is dependent upon the kundalini flow within yourself.
Most individuals, in order to become happy, feel that they can fulfill desires. That will make them happy. So you’ll get the car, the person, the experience, the money, the vacation, whatever it might be, and that’s going to make you happy.
But if you’re not in the right state of consciousness, you won’t be happy.
Remember—wherever you go, there you are. You take yourself with you when you travel.
And if your state of attention is not very high, then whatever you see, whatever you experience, whatever wonders are presented to your eyes, you will experience those things only to the extent that your attention—your level of awareness—allows.
If you have infinite, endless awareness, then the most miserable conditions as defined by others can be the most wonderful.
Poverty is not poverty, wealth is not wealth, illness is not illness and health is not health. No longer are you subject to the relative conditions of the world.
In other words, the interpretations that most people place upon things—this makes you happy, this makes you unhappy—no longer applies to you.
Because your apprehension of the cosmos is completely changed—it’s shifted—not just once to another vantage point, but it becomes a mirror image of the cosmos itself. It constantly shifts and changes.
There is no such thing as reality. There is no singular defining code. Access to the kundalini changes attention, changes awareness.
Beyond happiness and unhappiness is truth. Truth is not affected by anything in the relative world.
Truth is the unifying aspect of existence. Truth is not a truth, meaning that there is one thing that can be said that will give us an answer or the answer.
Rather, truth is the very substance of life itself.
But very few people perceive or feel that substance. We don’t know what it is. Or perhaps we’ve had a glimpse of it—the most wonderful thing—but we don’t know how to reach it, not realizing that there’s nothing to reach.
That it is our very self, our very awareness, that is the window upon which reality … presents … itself.
We are our awareness—a seemingly simple statement.
Meditation—stopping thought for protracted periods of time—shifts our awareness.
When there’s no thought, the kundalini rises. When there’s thought, the kundalini is inactive. When you create a vacuum, something will be drawn into it. When you stop thought, the kundalini is drawn into your attention field. The less thought you have, the more the kundalini will flow through the chakras, through the shushumna.
To reduce thought is not simply a process of learning a technique, repeating a mantram, eating the right kind of breakfast cereal, crossing at the green and not in between. Stopping thought isn’t simply a disciplined practice.
Stopping thought also involves shifting your values.
You see, thought is stimulated by ideas that we have about life in the world. These ideas were given to us by our culture, our society. We were imprinted with a value system as young children, and simply the sensory experiences of life can trigger and stimulate a variety of associative thoughts and ideas.
In order to lessen our thoughts and therefore to increase the flow of kundalini—which will alter our perception and give us a larger view or vision of life itself, and freedom and happiness in the face of any circumstances—it’s necessary to clarify the purpose of our being.
This is to come to understand dharma.
Dharma is a Sanskrit word. It simply means that which is right, that which is correct, that which is the divine law.
It is necessary first, in the practice of kundalini yoga, to determine what the dharma is.
There is a dharma for yourself, for someone else, for a family, for a nation, for a planet, for a universe. There are collective dharmas and individual dharmas.
Your dharma is what kind of work you should be doing, what kind of people you should associate with, whether you should be practicing meditation or not. If so, what type? Whether you should have a teacher or not. If so, what type?
How you should see the world, how much you should give selflessly, how much of your money you should donate to spiritual activities, how much of your time you should donate to selfless giving and aiding others, how much of your time you should spend by yourself and alone and in a reclusive mode, how much of your time you should just have a tremendous amount of fun and just be frivolous and silly, whether you should be reverential and follow the path of the heart.
Dharma encompasses all things.
And it’s specific to the individual.
So the first task is to discover the dharma, and this is done through introspection, by continually questioning yourself and asking yourself, “What is the right thing for me to do? Not simply the thing I want. Not simply avoiding the thing I don’t want. What is right?”
Because to not follow dharma leads to disaster. Life will be unhappy.
Following dharma puts you in a proper field of attention, and in a proper field of attention; regardless of what your outer circumstances are, happiness will flow.
To not follow the dharma—either intentionally or through lack of awareness—creates a very low level of attention, and in this low level of attention, we make all kinds of mistakes and we’re unhappy, no matter what good fortune apparently befalls us.
You will be unhappy if you do not follow the dharma.
Happiness does not come from external objects. It comes from peace of mind.
You can have one hundred Rolls Royces, you can have everyone devoted to you, you can have people who love you, you can be famous, you can be a king, a queen, anything. But it does not necessarily bring happiness or peace of mind.
Happiness and peace of mind is a very, very beautiful and simple thing. And it comes about through following dharma.
Naturally, to follow dharma, we have to first find out what it is. So you ask yourself continually, in every situation and also in the larger context of life, “What is the right thing for me to do?”
And you have to struggle with it. You have to fight with it to find out. The answer will not come easily. You will be swayed by your desires, by your conditioning, the things that you’ve been taught to do or to avoid. You will be swayed by those around you who have ideas about what you should do, what is proper, what is improper.
All of these thoughts and feelings will affect you.
But if you’re determined, if you won’t give in, if you’re joyous, if you truly want to celebrate life, then you will persist in discovering dharma. No matter what apparent obstacles appear before you, you’ll laugh your way through them, or you’ll work your way through them, or you’ll glide through them. Whatever is necessary, you will do.
The answer then, is love. Love is the bridge that joins all of the worlds together. Love permits us to see who and what we are.
The only thing that will truly inspire us to find the dharma—to find the wonderful path that leads us to awareness—is love.
Only love will give us that strength. Love is something that comes to us in life. Quietly, it overwhelms us. It is something that you cultivate. You make it happen.
The kundalini flows upward. It also flows downward in different ways. It is quite complex, actually. What is most important, though, is to have your life properly aligned with dharma. The technicalities of the movement of the kundalini are easy to master.
Dharma is much more complex, and if the kundalini is flowing through you at a very rapid rate when you practice kundalini yoga, if you are not in harmony with the dharma, then you will have great problems with the study.
This is the principle thing that I have seen.
And that’s that people want power … but not wisdom. Power without wisdom is a very dangerous thing. Better to find wisdom first. Certainly, a certain amount of power is required to live, to exist in the world.
But without wisdom, power tends to destroy the one who wields it.
Kundalini yoga is the yoga of power.
Wisdom comes from introspection. It comes from caring, it comes from sharing. And with wisdom, the powerful person will become more powerful. There is no end to power. There is no end to love or knowledge.
Without wisdom—without a sense of place in the universe, of that which is apropos and that which is not—then a powerful person does not become more powerful. Their power will turn back on them and eventually destroy them.
So those who are truly wise become most powerful.
Those who are not wise squander their power on useless and trivial things—they waste it. And very often they injure others or themselves.
So from my point of view, kundalini yoga then depends upon a sense of dharma, a sense of that which is right.
That which is right is different for each one of us in each situation. There isn’t a moral code that I or anyone else can lay down that will tell you what your dharma is.
But there is a simple way to know when you are following it.
When you are following dharma … you’ll be happy, at peace, still inside. There will be a sense of purpose in your life. Your life will go well. Difficulties will not seem unconquerable.
When you’re not following dharma, then you will not be at peace. You will not be happy. The simplest things will seem to be endless obstacles.
It is not what we do, it’s who we are. And who we are varies according to our awareness. When you’re more aware, you’re someone else than when you’re less aware.
Right now I’m above the clouds at 10,000 feet, and I can see the blue sky, and I can see for miles and miles.
Down underneath those clouds the people of Maui live, and today they are not having a sunny day. The clouds have rolled in. There is not too much light down there, and I’m up here on top of the mountain and there’s nothing but light and blue sky. The clouds are desires. The clouds are our loves, our fears, our world, our ideas, ideals. These are the clouds.
You can climb above the clouds to freedom, or you can stay beneath them in darkness. It’s up to you.
The kundalini will take you up above the clouds. It will give you a quick vision of your own immortality, the most wondrous and perfect thing there is.
But to stay here, to live in this condition of eternality endlessly, which is what, of course, we call enlightenment, is the goal of kundalini yoga—or any yoga, or any path that leads to self-knowledge.
The glimpse tells us that it’s possible that there is such a world. And I believe that in each one of our lives there are days like that. There are days when life is clear and simple, when we feel the intimations of immortality.
It has been my experience as a teacher over the years and incarnations, let alone as a student, that what really counts are not techniques.
What really counts is spirit—love. What really counts is a sense of propriety and dedication. These are the qualities that manifest in self-realization.
The kundalini varies, not simply through breathing techniques or by meditating on chakras, but by stopping thought.
To stop thought it’s necessary to put your life into a state of balance. Otherwise you can sit and meditate for hours and hours and all kinds of conscious and subconscious thoughts will flow through you.
It is possible with pure willpower to force the kundalini up the shushumna, through the chakras. Then, as I indicated before, you will develop visions of other worlds, but these visions will not necessarily stop or go away when you want them to.
This is a condition that we call insanity, when you cannot clear perceptual fields. It’s like watching 20 stations on television at once, and after a while, you can’t tell which is the right one. This is what happens to individuals who force—who push—the kundalini out too far without having the balance.
When you have the balance, it’s not a problem—it’s a snap. Then you can easily segment the realities, when your attention field is fluid.
But to develop that fluidity, it’s necessary to follow the dharma.
So my recommendation is—if you seek to practice kundalini yoga—to meditate, of course, and you can meditate on the different chakras and feel what that’s like.
But what will really release the kundalini is something much simpler and more effective—in addition to meditation techniques, breathing techniques, and so on.
And that’s by creating a stillness in your life. This stillness will come about through deep caring and introspection. It will come about slowly, and then quickly. It builds in momentum.
Begin with your daily life.
Take your life as a challenge and try to bring yourself into harmony with each thing in your life—with your occupation, with your relationship with nature and the Earth. Bring yourself into harmony with your friends, your family, your country.
Harmony sometimes means withdrawal. Sometimes it means leaving those you love for something that you love more. Sometimes it means duty. It means so many different things.
You’ll have to go through a trial-and-error process, but you will always know when there’s a deeper stillness in your daily meditation, a deeper stillness in your life. That means that what you’re doing is working.
And if you’re not finding that—if you’re exhausted all the time and hassled and you just can’t meditate well at all, it means that your priorities are all fouled up … and you need to shift them around.
So sit down and get out a piece of paper and start making lists. Make lists of everyone who’s important to you, everything that’s important to you, everything that you desire, everything that you fear.
Flowchart your life. Go through it. It is good to do this every few months.
And ask yourself, are you in harmony with the things in your life? Or are you adopting superficial values which really are not the real you? Are you giving your being enough room? Are you doing enough new and creative and exciting things?
Dharma doesn’t necessarily mean following a mundane and boring life. It means a life of high adventure. It means a life of newness, not a life of endless, boring repetition.
So doing the dharma may be doing very new things, meeting new people, going on new adventures, meditating in new ways.
The sign that the kundalini is releasing is not the development of miraculous powers, but it’s the fact that your mind is becoming quieter, that there’s an interior stillness.
Very often, strangely enough, in order to bring about the interior stillness we have to be tirelessly active in the outer world. We’ve got to go out and go on a quest, go on a journey, accomplish things, do things.
Now, normally you might suppose that this would agitate the mind and create a lack of stillness. But it will not, if it’s the dharma. What we do outwardly will only interrupt the flow of our perfect attention if it’s not in harmony with the dharma.
So if it’s right for you to travel across the world to go on a great journey, if that’s what the dharma is, if you’ve correctly perceived it, then those actions will actually bring a stillness into your life. Whereas, if you try to start a giant corporation, and if that’s not the dharma, then it will only bring agitation in your life.
On the other hand, for you to work in or start a corporation—instead of taking that wonderful, happy journey that might seem more attractive—might be the dharma. If you go on that journey, then you’ll just become more and more miserable, whereas every day you go to work and do nine to five, that may bring about a stillness in your life.
It’s specific to the individual and it can change for you.
What can be the dharma at one point in your life can totally reverse itself, and suddenly you might be doing the opposite or something very new, something you never considered.
You find out by meditating, by stilling your thoughts, by bringing about a balance in your life, by feeling deeply, by asking questions constantly. What is right? What does the universe want me to do?
And then, once you determine that and you’re sure, you need to go about it with style, with a little bit of excitement, with bravado, with adventure, with stoicism.
All adventures in life will bring about a mixture of pleasure and pain and loss and gain.
But these things don’t matter because when you’re following the dharma, you’re operating on an entirely different reference frame.
Success is not success in an individual endeavor. Success is simply to practice the dharma impeccably. Then the kundalini will flow. Then your awareness will shift. Then your meditation will be wonderful.
If your meditation is frustrating, if it’s not happening, and it was at one time good and exciting in your life and you’re putting in the same number of minutes, then that was because during that time in your life you were following the dharma more.
You had felt it, and you were following it in your daily life, in your daily thoughts.
If that’s not happening now, then it means you’ve got to shift what you’re doing. You’ve got to get creative with your lifestyle.
Change your job, change your friends, change the place you live. Change your goals, change your attitudes. Work harder, work less. Travel. Don’t travel. You’ve got to mix it up.
And if you keep trying with that intent, then eventually you will stumble upon—or be guided to—that which will bring about the highest good, the highest stillness.
Then the kundalini in your daily meditations will release. This is my experience. Don’t worry about techniques. Don’t worry about chakras. Instead, concern yourself with finding the dharma and meditate.
Then the kundalini will release.
This is real kundalini yoga, not simply a series of repetitive exercises and movements that you could practice for hundreds of years and never substantially open up the fields of kundalini energy and have them release into your being.
The release comes about through a balanced life, and, of course, through periods of formal and informal meditation.
Through association with other higher beings, with a teacher, with people along the path, with nonphysical beings—whatever works, do it.
That’s what makes it exciting and fun.
And then life is wonderful. It’s terrific. It’s jazzy.
And still, there will be obstacles, of course. Still there will be adventure, of course. Your life is your life, and each thing will be a challenge. But the movement of life will be flowing with you. You will be in harmony with the Tao, with the basic principles of creation.
To not be in harmony with that flow, no matter how hard you meditate, no matter how hard you strive to attain liberation, you will not be happy, and you won’t be liberated.
Because you did everything but the most important thing—bring about stillness in your life.
Have some fun with it. Be creative with consciousness. Be sensitive to what’s above the clouds and below them and to the clouds themselves.
Maui is a beautiful island.
It’s really the site of an ancient civilization that we’ve forgotten about, a civilization that existed millions of years ago. There was a continent here then, and a group of highly developed psychic beings lived here, and they brought about a terrific harmony in their lives. They followed dharma.
And then, when their time came, they left this world and another race was born, the race of human beings.
Human beings are not so in harmony with the dharma. That’s why they suffer so much.
But you as an individual can reach a higher plane of attention, can become attention itself.
So start simply every day by asking yourself, “What is the dharma today? What should I do? What is right? What does the universe want from me?” Find a beauty in that, a balance. Then look at your whole life, and say, “Is this what I should be doing now? It was fine before, is it still fine?”
Do a systems analysis of your life. Balance it.
And meditate for about two hours a day—an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. If you’re new, perhaps a half an hour twice a day. Enter into that stillness.
Try and stop your thoughts. Be patient. And then the kundalini will flow through you and bring about substantial changes in your awareness.
The future is certain for those who follow dharma. The future is endless existence.
Those who don’t follow dharma are pushed back again and again into the net of rebirth. They are drawn back to the same planes of attention, or lower. It could happen to you!
So look for the still point between the worlds. Find it in your own smile. Look in your eyes in a mirror. And ask yourself, “What is the dharma? What is it that I should be doing?” And don’t be afraid to do it.
Death teaches us not to be afraid because we know it will come to us, and we’ll deal with it effectively. We have for thousands of times, so what is there to fear?
We are immortal life. Instead, think of the opportunity of self-realization. What a gas!
From Haleakala at 10,000 feet, I wish you and your kundalini well.
Later.