The fire once ignited must take precedence over all else.

The first mantra of the Rig Veda says: "I invoke the fire and place it in the forefront." This can be interpreted in many ways, but for someone in the throws of a kundalini awakening it is invaluable to remember this first mantra. For the fire of kundalini works for our salvation and the evolution of the species. To "go into" the fire is the moral choice, while to fight it is counter to our own true nature and Self-actualization. Thus no matter what the challenge the fire puts us through, we must walk into the flame, and let it awaken us to a reality beyond the past and the known.

There is no goal more desired and delicious than our Soul. We must distinguish this primary drive to incarnate and let go of all lesser compensations which keep us from ourSelves. On this journey of awakening it is the river of fire running through us that leads us home to the great Ocean. Pain and difficulty with metamorphosis is a factor of our fearful interpretation and our resistance to the alchemy rather than the process itself. In this sense the more we surrender into it, the faster our miasmas are cleared and the quicker we achieve our spiritualized Self. Things will proceed faster if we achieve an objective and transpersonal perspective of this intensely personal process, for then we will both relax our resistance and avoid inflation.

"While suffering cannot be avoided at times, the tendency to dramatize our own predicament and fall into self-pity only adds to our misery. On the other hand, when we can remember that pain and hardship are purposeful and archetypal features of the spiritual path, our perspective of our present difficulties widens." ~ El Collie

A schizophrenic-like self-fracturing can occur if integration is thwarted by a hostile-ignorant social environment or by an internal negative interpretation and resistance to the process. Even so an awakening can proceed even within an imperfect and negative context if one has the strength to focus on some transpersonal creative or artistic expression.

The suspension and stagnation of the kundalini cycle will occur if:

• The aspirant becomes overly preoccupied with the physical or psychic symptoms.



• The immature ego becomes inflated and assumes specialness and superiority for having "achieved" awakened kundalini symptoms and phenomena.



• The flow of energy and consciousness is blocked by excessive food and substance abuse, excessive sex, total abstinence of sex, or lack of exercise.



• The awakening is not sincerely dedicated to a higher purpose beyond the life of the individual.

Our sanity, effectiveness and development is reliant on the smooth flow of the kundalini cycle, and with a little understanding there is no reason why it should not proceed as "it" ordains. Although initially the process itself might be stressful to the neophyte, eventually we become increasingly able to transcend our stressful interpretation and our relationship to life in general is transformed. Kundalini is the main creative force in building a solid sense of deep peace, joy and equanimity. I think equanimity naturally occurs along with kundalini because of the permanent background of bliss that develops. Metamorphosis restructures us to a higher order allowing us to live a "spiritual" life in the material world.

Because kundalini is a purifying, balancing and restorative process, disturbances need to be viewed as "therapeutic" rather than "pathological." With the right kind of attitude we can work-with the process and avoid interference that only causes trouble. If however for one reason or another the pace is too fast and violent one can slow down and ease the intensity by eating a heavier diet, stopping meditation, and doing regular vigorous physical activity. The support of someone who has had some "success" with an awakening is recommended if at all possible. If fear, panic and resistance have taken a hold we can be bought back to balance by rational explanations, positive interpretation and emotional support.

AFTER KUNDALINI

The universe is a trickster. As we awaken we become more vulnerable raw and exposed; this can lead almost to paralysis. One way of staying alive and keeping the flow going is the Radical Honesty approach. For men this might be a little harder, to figure out what they are feeling. But if you consider it a practice in self-attunement, and of aligning ones being in truth with the environment, then this helps to speed our lives toward that which feeds our spirit.

We need therapy for our traumatic past to the extent that our experience of deprivations or abuse cause a spanner in the works of our spiritual development. But if we are into therapy for therapy's sake then we won't gain sovereignty and heal. Similarly if we are into spiritual practice for practice's sake, well we are never going to be enlightened are we, for we are too busy "practicing."

Sometimes after an awakening you might find you need to consciously build up some focusing and navigational muscles to recover planning, orienting, direction and decision making skills. So work out all the skills and practices you could do to work on this. Planning is a prefrontal activity, so you might need more dopamine and tone/activity in your prefrontals. I would suggest doing some genuine vision quest type things, and spending days in nature walking; I am always way more deeply focused in nature away from urban centers. Taking some nootropics might be a good idea, this will definitely help. Getting more blood flow to the brain with hanging, exercise, breathing and toning will also help. I say get your "state" in place, and life will just flow. Mending The Past And Healing The Future With Soul Retrieval by Alberto Villoldo is a fantastic shamanistic book that has plenty of exercises that might help you find your way. I tend to think that direction finding is very much a process of "higher" experience rather than endless "thinking." Joining a group focused on soul-direction might be more expedient than going it alone.

MYSTIC, KNOW THYSELF

Generations are oppositional, flipping between conservatism and liberalism...the dance of the sexes reflects this. This is one of the tensions by which we grow, seeking the solution to our pain.

"If nothing exists beyond the confines of natural processes, why does the armoring of the human species exist at all, since it contradicts nature in man at every single step and destroys his natural, rich potentialities? This does not seem to make sense. Why did nature make this "mistake" and why only in the human species?...The armor has destroyed man's natural decency and his faculties, and has thus precluded "higher" developments."

"We know it is mostly socio-economic influences that reproduce the armor in each generation of newborn infants. These infants will, as grownups, force their own children to armor, unless the chain is broke somewhere, sometime...The emergence of the mystical and mechanistic ways of life from the armoring of the human animal are too clearly expressed and too well studied to be overlooked or neglected any longer. With the breakdown of the armor, the outlook of the human being changes in such a basic and total manner, in the direction of contact and identification with his natural functioning, that there can be no longer any doubt of the relationship between armor and mysticism as well as mechanistics." 289, ~ Wilhelm Reich, Cosmic Superimposition

So we see that it is the disjointed or caged individual who is still imprisoned within his or her primary armoring that desires an infantile primary relationship. And from these unions children are born into their own acutely painful armoring. The "breakout" from this prison constitutes what Reich calls the "mystic way of life"; which is none other than the recovery of some of our innate wholeness and full human capacities. The mystic is simply experiencing a greater "depth" of his potential intelligences.

Socioeconomic conditions of pair bonding will change when humanity reaches the point where disarmored mystic couples breed nonarmored children. Then men will not be looking for their mommy anymore, nor women looking for their daddy. Then we will be addressing the spirit in each other and live to free that spirit in any way we can. Then the sociosphere could consist of Syntropic Partnership: that is the partnership of equals engaged in mutual respect, love and awe, in joint exploration of the Mystery and in dedication to the liberation of all sentient beings.

We need to start a revolution in childhood sex education. First we need to give it a name like Somo-Emotional-Relational Training (SERT); short for assert yourSelf. Start out in kindergarten and perhaps carry such education right through to university PhD level. It would need to incorporate body awareness, being-self-sensing ie: focusing, Reichian bioenergetic exercises, Tai Chi/Qi Gung, Archetypes-Voice Dialogue, Big Mind, role play and pattern analysis, boundary development and communication skills, endurance exercise, compassion-practice, breathing, meditation, dance, tantric skills (for later ages obviously), addiction-awareness, physiology of sexual alchemy, cultivation of sex as an artform etc...

We need Diane Richardson (Tantric Orgasms for Women) to write a book for sex education for children...she is from the Osho camp and her work is the most advanced take on sexuality out there. Then we should get Penguin to publish it so that it is inexpensive...and then we should try to get that book into every school, woman's refuge, reproductive clinic...and it should be mandatory for all mothers of newborns to have to get this book. If we did this, along with Primal Mothering education, within one generation we could completely transform the humanity into a species that is actually functional.

We are composed of separate intelligences built over 3.5 billion years of evolution. Our self is a surveillance manager who coordinates all these various intelligences and spins them into an autobiographical narrative. We can imagine that as consciousness in life becomes more complex it must simultaneously become more integrated. And that natural selection would ensure that "cognitive fluidity" or cooperative-integrative intelligence would be evolutionary selected, because it is more versatile, flexible, creative and complex.

We know that neurotic armoring impairs both biological regulation and integrative intelligence, and so the self in this circumstance has less cognition of its various intelligences and cannot draw from the full depth of evolutionary heritage. Thus the neurotic self lacks self-awareness and it cannot "Know Thyself." Cognitive fluidity requires a brain capable of balance, consistency, equilibrium and synchrony. Synchrony of brain function occurs when there is "engagement" or mindfulness, while armoring reflects both hypertonal sympathetic (fight-flight) and hypertonal parasympathetic (freeze-dissociation). So we see that the armored individual should be evolutionarily selected against because their brain lacks the synchrony needed for complex integration of Total Intelligence. However since almost the entire human race is armored we don't know any better and so continue to breed armored humans.

It is the way of armor to want to clamp down and to further retreat from existence. The armor only wants to get bigger and it will basically use our body, mind and soul for its own defensive campaign. Kundalini awakenings blast the "hell" out of our armor that divides our myriad intelligences. The divided self cannot Know Thyself, therefore it cannot love itself, and so it uses itself. It is love that changes things. We can imagine that love is a fundamental state of unity (Unity Consciousness) that exists prior to neurotic dissonance. And that the mystic state is the prodigal return to that state of Grace which the Universe intended for us by right of billions of years of evolution. The Kingdom Within being the perfect cognitive fluidity of synergistic intelligences.

To live as a mystic is to embrace the world and the Kingdom Within as One. Growth or evolution is state dependent, therefore we must attend to the state that our thinking ego inhabits.

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