S. Read online

  I shouldn't be putting all this into a letter—Vikshipta and Alinga say that Durga and her henchpeople have the mail read, coming in and out—but I know how much you love the Arhat; it was your love that inspired mine. He is a beautiful presence in three dimensions, Irving. He is real. Not too tall and with a little gray in his beard but not too old either. He is paler than I expected but then of course Indians come in all shades; those invading people who brought the Vedas were just like Vikings. His cheeks and forehead are so free of wrinkles the gray in his beard and his eyebrows almost looks frosted on. His office had the air-conditioning turned way up, which went with the frosted look—I thought to myself I should wear a sweater next time. Anyway, after the letter and a few other, shorter ones—he has so many people after him, everybody wanting a piece—he asked me in that thrilling funny accent of his what my name was. I said Sarah Worth and that I hadn't been given my ashram name yet. He looked at me the longest time, with this little smile, and these bottomless eyes, and said, "You are Kundalini." I am? I said, blushing—I just went bot all over. "Veritably," he said. "You are she at last. You have come to burn away everything klishta, everything duhshama. You shall save us from our sorrowful impurity."

  This seemed flirtatious and almost aggressive, so I just stood there blushing. He admired my healthy tan complexion. He said I was darker than he was. I was all flustered and said it was just genes from my father, plus vitamin E and PABA and oil baths twice a week when I was at home in Massachusetts, but of course baths were more difficult here and the desert air was very drying to the epidermis. Then he said something like "You are smooth and electrical" and settled back into his silver armchair—like a Barcalounger with high squarish arms and a padded rest for. the head as on a dental chair—and I decided the time had come for me to go. I've taken dictation a number of times since then and am hardly nervous now at all. Irving, he really is all we imagined he is, and more. I mean, as well as being divine he's nice, and shy, even.

  Some years ago, while still at the Ellora ashram, he cut a tape on Kundalini, and I enclose one, free, though they go for $14.90 in our catalogue. Play it for yourself and the gang some Wednesday when you can all take an extra half-hour. Hope everything goes well with you and you're not too busy in the framing shop—you must be absolutely buried in diplomas this time of year. And graduation pictures. Soon, June weddings! Or do people just put those in albums? Or in those little store-bought frames that sit on the piano and look chintzy and somehow scary'?

  Your grateful former student,

  Kundalini!

  [tape]

  We will talk today of Kundalini. She is the female energy in things. Not just women we are speaking of; she is in all things. She sleeps coiled at the base of the spine, in the root chakra, which is called Muladhara. The lotus of this chakra has four red petals. On them are inscribed the Sanskrit letters va, sa, sa,-and sa. These letters are contained within a yellow square; this represents the earth element. An inverted triangle within the square holds Kundalini coiled three and one half times around the linga. The linga is the male organ, and also it represents the subtle space in which the universe undergoes the repeated process of formation and dissolution. Also in this chakra is Brahma, the creator-god of the gross material world. He has four arms and three eyes and four faces and holds, the sages say, a trident, a jar, a rosary, and with his remaining hand makes the mudra that dispels fear, the abhayamudra. His energy is called Dakini and is shining pink and also holds many things, such as a sword and a drinking vessel. Also in this chakra is a large elephant with a black strip around its neck. He forms the symbol of physical resistance. The principle of smell is associated with this chakra. That is all we know of Muladhara, at the base of the spine.

  You ask, how does Kundalini awaken? How does she leave off her sleeping coiled around the linga? Pranayama, proper breathing, and pratyahara, the shutting down of the senses, send willpower down the two great nadis, ida the lunar channel and pingala the solar one. You ask, what is this, these nadis? They are the nerves and veins of the subtle body, which coexists with the material body. Subtle is sukshma, the other is sthula. When enough willpower goes down these nadis, Kundalini stirs. She hearkens to the vibrations of the mind meditating upon the syllable Ram, and then alternatively upon the syllable Yam. Also the great metaphysical syllable Orri is frequently pronounced, and the sphincter muscles are contracted, sucking upwards. All these things waken Kundalini. Like a woman who is restless under the bright moon, she can no longer sleep. "When she leaves Muladhara, there is the sound of a chirping cricket.

  Kundalini uncoils and goes upward then to the chakra of Svadhisthana, which is located in the spine just above the genitals. Now there is the sound of the tinkling of an anklet. A sexy sound. She looks around. What is here, in Svadhisthana? Vishnu is here, dark blue, with four arms holding a conch, a mace, a wheel, and a lotus. His energy is Rakini and holds a trident, a ' lotus, a drum, and a chisel. Do not ask me what Rakini chisels [laughter, tentative}. Perhaps he is a chiseller [laughter, less tentative}. Perhaps with one of his arms Rakini is an illegal card-sharp dealer going to cheat Vishnu [less laughter, uneasy}. The lotus here is red and has six petals, bearing the letters ba, bha, ma, ya, ra, and la. The chakra's animal is the makara, a great monster like a giant crocodile. He is to water as the elephant is to earth. The principle associated with this Chakra is taste. Kundalini tastes many things now, many sweet things from her childhood and spicy things from her girlhood and sour things from time as a mature woman. The dominating element is water. She feels clean, so very clean, and hears everywhere this rushing sound. The breath of life, Prana, is here and her lungs are full; they expand like clouds. This is a happy chakra, but Kundalini leaves it and goes next to Manipura, at the level of the solar plexus.

  Ooh now what is here? Now there is the deep sound of a bell. The god of this chakra is Rudra, who is red and sits upon a bull. He holds in one hand a fire and his energy is called Lakini and is dark blue. Everywhere in this chakra there is fire. There is a great inverted triangle, radiant like the sun, which represents fire. Kundalini swims in this fire. As she ascends it is very common for the person to feel very hot, to feel hot flashes. The head feels giddy. The body tingles. There may be, the sages tell us, constipation or diarrhea. The anus contracts and draws up. The chin sinks down. The eyeballs roll up. There are convulsions and visions. There is an experience of being a witness within the body. Sometimes the body feels as if it is being lifted into the air, and at others as if it is being pressed into the earth. It may feel very large or very small. It may tremble and ache and the tongue may protrude from the mouth. There may be a feeling of having no head. There may be the feeling of seeing things all around even though the eyes are closed. The sexual organ may become very erect and hard and painful. All this agony and embarrassment while Kundalini ascends. The lotus of Manipura has ten blue petals and on them are written da, dha, ha, ta, tha, da, dha, na, pa, and pha. Its principle is that of sight.

  Kundalini must travel on. She must continue her ascent. She is merciless upon herself. She wishes to become perfection. She travels upward to Anahata, located at the level of our hearts. Now there is the music of a flute. The music of a single flute. Now there is a golden triangle, as bright as ten million flashes of lightning. Now there is a lotus of vermilion and of twelve petals bearing ka, kha, ga, gha, na, cha, chha, ja, jha, na, ta, and tha. Now there is the god Isha, who is brick-red, dressed in shining white. He represents the whole world system. Space and time now are revealed; they are interlocked. Two triangles represent male and female; they are united. Now purus'ha for the first time is glimpsed, the unmoving essence beyond phenomena. The principle of this chakra is air, which is invisible. Its name, Anahata, means "unstruck," which means "without sound," which is silence. The animal here is the black gazelle, symbolizing lightness, symbolizing Vayu, the god of winds. Air, wind, brightness are all around. Brightness! It is frightening, it is immensity. Kundalini 'dashes from side to side, s
he desires to ascend in a straight line but must each time untie the knot of the Chakra. Kundalini burns, she makes the yogi to feel very heavy and dizzy and hungry. The saliva pours from his mouth. His jaws, they stick together. His throat feels very dry, as dry as a dead prickly-pear cactus. Isha makes the gestures granting boons and dispelling fear. Isha's energy is called Kakini, who is bright yellow and holds a noose and a skull. These are not such pleasant things.

  Kundalini is now halfway through her voyage, in the material body up through the spine, but in the subtle body the sushumna, the central channel around which twine the pingala and the ida in that basic pattern of life called the double helix. Kundalini's voyage is half done and has reached the throat chakra, which is called Vi-shuddha, which means "pure," but resistance remains; the next step is very difficult for it means the dissolving of the apparent union of matter and psyche, the recognition that external facts have nothing to do with internal facts. The yogi, the sannyasin, feels dreadful heat and the flashing of many little lights. Also deep numbness. Also the feeling of poison having been inserted in the body: this is energy, which must burn until the channels have been cleansed and can carry the terrible energy, the terrible shakti. There are many undoubted accounts of these feelings in the writings of the sages. The fifth chakra is located at the base of the skull and is very complicated. The lotus here is a smoky purple, like perhaps the fuzz of grapes, and has sixteen petals, holding the sixteen vowels a, a, i, I, u, u, r, r, j, 1, e, ai, o, au, am, and ah. There is a white triangle and the sound is nothing but Om, Om, the sound of the cosmos. The god here is of two halves, Shiva and Shakti, the two gods male and female combining into Ardhanarishvara, the right half Shiva and glorious white, the left half Shakti and lovely golden. A god of both sexes. No man is just man. No woman is just woman. Men hold the seeds of womanhood within themselves and women hold the seeds of manhood within themselves. Ardhanarishvara represents this. He—let us say he-she—he-she has five faces and three eyes and ten arms. In his-her ten hands he-she holds nine things: a. trident, an 'axe, a sword, a thunderbolt called in Sanskrit "vajra," an endless serpent with uncountable heads called Ananta and upon whom sleeps the great god Vishnu, a bell, a pointed stick with which to urge on a beast, fire (ouch! that must be hot to hold!), and a noose. With the tenth hand Ardhanarishvara makes abhayamudra, the gesture dispelling fear, which our dear friend Kun-dalini surely needs when she looks at those other terrible things being held up [polite laughter}. Ardhanarishvara has his-her hands most full [again, the polite response muted by a certain impatience in the audience, a desire to get on with the ascent}. The element of this Chakra is ether, the element that is to the subtle body as air is to the material body. Its animal is Airavata, the white elephant with six trunks. He is a funny-looking fellow. The heavy, heavy earthy elephant of Muladhara has become etherealized. And that is Vishuddha.

  The sixth Chakra is located between the eyebrows. It is called Ajna. It has only two petals. They say ha and ksa. They are white. Everything is moon-white. There is an inverted triangle and it is moon-white. Inside there is the linga. Linga means "phallus" and also the subtle space, the ether. "Li" means to dissolve ,and "gam" to go out. There is the mantra Om. Om. OM. OM. It is the vibration from which all things emerge and into which all things are absorbed at the end of the cosmic cycle. There is a bindu—that is a very tiny point where everything is concentrated. The god is Parama-shiva, which means Shiva and Shakti come together in a wonderful fucking. That makes the Mahabindu. Also the energy now is Hakini; he is moon-white and holds a book, a skull, a drum, and other such stuff. Here at Ajna the ida and pingala nadis meet the sushumna nadi and then separate again, running into the right and left nostrils. It tickles the yogi's nose. He has to sneeze: acboo! Ajna is a very high-up Chakra. Kundalini must be very tired when she gets there. She is tired of bells ringing. She is tired of burning sensation. She is tired of sound of waterfall, of being lost in an ocean of light. But she must go on, go on ascending.

  The seventh chakra is Sahasrara. It is located four finger-breadths above the top of the head. To get to it Kundalini must jump [laughter, as if at a sudden gesture]. Now, where is she? All colors are merged into one. All sounds into one. All senses into one. The lotus is now of a thousand petals holding the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet many times. Little Kundalini, she is now Shakti. She is now also Shiva. She knows everything and that everything is nothing. She is very happy and yet feels nothing. There is nothing but Brahman. From the inverted lotus cosmic radiations fall upon the subtle body. Kundalini is possessed with glorious insights into the indefinable depth-dimension of existence. She becomes Kula, the all-transcending light of consciousness. She inhabits Mahabindu, the metacosmic Void.

  Then she must descend. She comes down. Like an elevator, she comes down. She goes back between the eyes. Sixth floor, wisdom center. Next floor, throat chakra. Then still lower to the heart chakra, and to Manipura, that is called the power center. As she slithers down she sheds wisdom, speech, love, and power. She sheds them one by one. She arrives at the level of the genitals, where libido lives, and sheds that too, coiling around Muladhara again, three and one half times. Muladhara is earth, it is childhood. We all come from earth, from childhood. So does Kundalini.

  She is the female energy in things. In some biological women she is very weak. In some biological men she is very strong. The burning sensation we feel as she ascends, the blinking lights and roaring like a waterfall which many sages have seen and heard, this is the male garbage being burned from the system. It is obstruction. This obstruction comes at knots, called "granthis." It is especially thick at the Muladhara chakra, and Anahata, and Ajna, called the Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra knots." These places are clogged with ego and conscious thought and obstruct Kundalini from finding realization of oneness with totality, of transcending samsara and entering samadhi. She burns them through. She burns away garbage. We all come burdened with much garbage and it must be burned away. Our minds must become pure like fine ash, or like the sand of the seashore in the dawn when the tide has erased all the footprints and carried away all the Coca-Cola cans, all the candy wrappers. Kundalini herself, she is a candy wrapper. Did you believe the story of her journey? [Sounds of assent.] If you believe her journey, you will believe any foolishness. Modern science shows her journey cannot exist; Einstein showed there is no ether, medicine shows there are no nadis. All a lie. [Silence.] The story of her journey is a very detailed lie, like the horrible cosmology of the Jains or the Heaven and Hell of Dante, but so many endless details do not make such stories true. The more details they hold, the more lies they hold. They are like old newspapers. They are garbage. They are like organized religion, like the Holy Bible and Talmud and Koran. They are old newspapers.They are like the bound collected works of Sigismund Fried and Carlos Marx; they are garbage, full of details that are lies. Details obstruct us from enlightenment, from samadhi, from surrender of ego. We must forget. We must drive out foolishness from our systems. We must use foolishness to drive out foolishness. If you were not foolish, you would not have come across the sea to India. You would be in Germany drinking beer [startled laughter]. You would be in America eating steak and whiskey [more of same; an undertone ofrelief. That is why I have told you the fairy story of Kundalini, the little snake that lives at the bottom of our spine. While you were hearing it, no other garbage was in your hearts or heads or stomachs; little Kundalini burned it all away.

  [end of tape]

  June 7

  Dearest Pearl—

  How I loved receiving your letter!—though it could have been longer. The courses you are completing are still vague in my mind. What exactly are Deconstruc-tional Dynamics, and how can they be applied to Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene? As you remember, Granddaddy Price had lovely editions of both classics—much too expensive, though, to be deconstructed. And you say the man teaching it is a Communist! I'm sure it doesn't mean in England quite what it does here—something much more woolly and amusi
ng, like George Bernard Shaw—Hut still I do wonder why Mrs. Thatcher and the Queen would give such a man control of young minds when there are so many honest and intelligent loyal Britons out of work.

  I am pleased you are not coming home for the summer. I think it's a very mature decision. You would find the house very gloomy with just your father in it showing up now and then to change his shirt, and of course Europe has so many delights and you are so close to it, just a Channel away! And you are a bit old to go beach bumming and wind-surfing all day the way you could with perfect propriety when you were seventeen (not to mention the hideous damage you can do your lovely fair skin) and, though it makes me sad to think it, I do agree that your old job as lifeguard at the club pool (such a vision you were in that high chair, in your bikini and sombrero, with that cord of braided gimp holding the whistle around your neck) should go to someone younger. So Europe is fine, darling. But—Holland? Isn't it just the dullest country on the Continent? Or at least the flattest. Surely once you've seen one little genre painting and one windmill you've seen them all. Your friend promises all this boating in the canals but it sounds very buggy to me, like bumping about in the Ipswich marshes. And I can't believe the beaches there aren't just coated with oil from all the tankers going by Sn the Channel. And when I try to picture these lumpy Dutch women in bathing suits I shudder.