Lawrence Edwards Interview

Summary

The conversation explores Kundalini as an expression of Shakti, the universal power of consciousness, rather than merely an energy moving through the spine. It also examines mystical experiences, symbolic spiritual maps, and how consciousness is understood to manifest through increasingly subtle and concrete levels.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What is Kundalini, and how is it related to Shakti and universal consciousness?
• How can mystical experiences of the divine feminine be understood?
• What do chakras and the different bodies of manifestation represent?
• How should symbolic spiritual teachings be distinguished from literal interpretations?

Key takeaways

• Kundalini is the power of consciousness that reveals and transforms our limited identity.
• Shiva and Shakti are inseparable: consciousness and its power to manifest.
• Chakra maps symbolize stages in which consciousness becomes increasingly contracted and concrete.
• Spiritual maps point beyond themselves and should not be mistaken for literal anatomy.
• The Divine can be experienced as a living presence that guides a life of service.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. There have been over 375 of them now, and if you would like to check out previous ones, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you will see them organized in four or five different ways. This show is made possible by the support of appreciative viewers and listeners, so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it to any degree, there is a donate button on every page of the site.

So today my guest is Lawrence Edwards, PhD. I am kind of excited about this interview. I say this pretty often, but I really enjoyed preparing for this interview. Lawrence has a wealth of experience and wisdom going back many decades, and I really enjoyed listening to his other interviews and reading his books.

I am going to read a little bio here. Lawrence has a PhD and has practiced and taught meditation for over 40 years. He is the founder and director of The Anam Cara Meditation Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching meditative practices from a variety of traditions. The mission of The Anam Cara Foundation is to make meditation instruction available to everyone. Lawrence has offered thousands of free meditation programs at universities, hospitals, churches, meditation centers, yoga centers, hospice groups, prisons, and more.

Dr. Edwards maintains a clinical practice, offering optimum mind training, transpersonal psychotherapy, spiritual mentoring, biofeedback, neurofeedback, hypnosis, peak performance training, and meditation training. He also works with people interested in spiritual growth, dream work, and Kundalini processes. He has served as president of the Kundalini Research Network since 2006 and is recognized around the world for his wisdom and skill in working with Kundalini.

Dr. Edwards has studied and practiced in the Kundalini yoga tradition, Tibetan Buddhist and Huichol Indian shamanic traditions. These rich reservoirs of wisdom have expanded and deepened the transpersonal and Jungian psychological perspectives of his professional training. His mystical experiences began as a young child and have continued throughout his life. They have been the real guiding force behind his studies and training.

His profound experience of the Divine present in everyone at all times and in all places has led him to live a life of service in teaching and supporting others on their journeys into the Divine.

So, good to meet you, Lawrence.

Lawrence: Pleasure to meet you, Rick, and your audience.

Rick: Let’s see, it looks like about 50 people are online so far. Probably most of them know the drill. If they have a question during this interview, they are welcome to post it in the form at the bottom of the page on the Upcoming Interviews page on batgap.com.

So, you are one of these people—as I read your book and so on, I thought, “I would like to do a one-month interview with this guy where we just read a passage and talk about it, read a passage and talk about it.” But that will be a little difficult to do logistically, and YouTube doesn’t let you upload files that big, so we will have to squeeze it into two hours. But you do have a wealth of experience and knowledge, and I have taken a lot of notes from my reading. I think we are going to cover a lot of ground here.

Would you like to start with the experience you had during the thunderstorm when you were a child?

Lawrence: I will start anywhere you would like me to start.

Rick: Why don’t you start there? It’s a good beginning.

👁️ The Lady of Light

Lawrence: All right. So, just to help your audience, you have read that, and it’s something that I have written about in relationship to my experiences of the Divine feminine and the notion of Kundalini as one name for the Divine, and the feminine face of the Divine.

One of my early experiences of that happened when I was about three or four years old, and I was probably three because I was still in a crib. I woke up to this raging thunderstorm. The crashing thunder and lightning were flashing, and I looked up over the railing of my bed. There was what I thought was my mother standing over my bed, looking very kindly and compassionately at me.

As I looked at her, I remember my little voice saying, “Ma.” She just stood there. A few moments went by, with a few more clashes of thunder and flashes of lightning, and again I said, “Ma.” She just stood there.

It was at that point that I noticed that when the lightning flashed, she disappeared, and when it was pitch-dark, she was completely lit up. She was literally made of light—radiant, exquisite light. At that point, my little mind went, “Wait a minute, this isn’t Ma.”

I called, “Ma,” and then screamed again, “Ma!” My mother came running in from the bedroom next door, and as soon as she opened the door, this Lady of Light disappeared. I started telling her about the Lady of Light, and my mother was going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah… great imagination. It was just the storm and it was just a dream.”

I knew that was no dream, and I talked about her literally for years. My brother and sister remember me talking about her. My mother and father at that time—they both passed away.

Then, fast-forward to me getting very serious about yoga practices and meditation in my freshman year of college. One night I had gone to bed, and in the middle of the night I woke up, and there she was once again, like 15 or 16 years later, standing at the foot of my bed—just this beatific presence, the radiant Divine.

I became absorbed in that and passed into a profound state of meditation. I have had that sense of that living presence of the Divine around me in my life, fortunately, for most of my life in some way or another. I have always delighted in hearing other people talk to me. I have had people write to me saying, “Yes, they had an experience of the Lady of Light,” because that’s what I called her as a child.

Rick: I guess, from what I have read, you associated her with Kundalini later on. I was wondering: from the traditions that you and I both come from or have studied, it is understood that there is a celestial realm and that there are celestial beings who reside in that realm. It’s not often some other planet; it’s right here, just at a subtler level. So couldn’t that have been some celestial being, like maybe your guardian angel or something? Why would you necessarily associate her with Kundalini?

Lawrence: Well, yes, on one level, the question is, could that have been a celestial being? It could have been. But when she told me who she was, it was clear she was the Great Goddess.

As those experiences evolved, I came to understand that one of her forms is the form of Kundalini. That’s how she is known in the yoga tradition. This magnificent power, especially in the Shaivite tradition, is what we call Shakti—the universal power of consciousness that creates the entire universe, including the entire universe of our individuality, the entire universe of our subtle body and the chakras.

She also takes the form of Kundalini as the specific power of revelation and transformation that takes us beyond the ordinary mind and our identity with this body, the roles that it plays, and everything else.

Rick: So when did she tell you who she was, and what did she say exactly?

Lawrence: That happened right around the time that I had met Muktananda, which was in 1976. It was shortly thereafter that I wound up in the hospital, and they thought I was dying of lymphosarcoma.

In Lenox Hill Hospital, I went into a state of meditation and then experienced the Lady of Light, this Divine presence, and Muktananda simultaneously by my bedside. I had only met Muktananda once, briefly, on a darshan line—a meeting line—at a program up in Upstate New York. But it had a profound effect on me and was opening that connection between the living presence of the Divine that I had experienced and the rich language and archetype that spoke to and through the Kundalini tradition, the Shaivite tradition, and the Shakti tradition.

It was not so much that she said it in literal words. She made it known that these were one and the same.

Rick: Some years prior, you had some vision or some cognition that you were going to die at around that age, right?

Lawrence: Right. Yes. When I was 12, I used to love climbing up this big pine tree that was next to my house and going up onto the roof. I would just lie upon the roof and stare up at the sky, going into these states of meditation and reverie, watching the clouds drift by.

It really gave me the sense that the sky was like the world: clouds drifting by in the sky, thoughts drifting by in the mind. I would get into these profoundly still kinds of states. At one time, that happened, and I heard this voice. It said, very matter-of-factly, “You are going to die by the time you are 25.”

To a 12-year-old, 25 seems like a really long way off. I had a cousin who was 24, and I already thought he was an old man, so it didn’t concern me at all. But it certainly stuck in my mind.

When I was hospitalized at Lenox Hill Hospital, I was 24, and my birthday was coming up in three months. They said I might have only a couple of months to live. Then I thought of that again and went, “Oh, that’s what was being communicated.”

Rick: But it turned out these growths you had in your chest were benign. They weren’t cancerous, and you lived.

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: I wonder if there was some kind of Divine intervention, like you were given a second lease on life. Had you not been on the verge of dedicating your life to spirituality—I don’t know, this is very speculative—they might have been malignant, and you might have died. There are stories like that, where Shankara had a number of things like that in his life. He was going to die, but he made some sort of commitment or something, and it kept him alive for a number of years.

Lawrence: Well, that was my experience. When I was in Lenox Hill Hospital and they really thought I was going to die, I turned to the Lady of Light in a tenacious way, praying to her and to Muktananda, who I knew had an extraordinary power moving through him that was very reminiscent of the Lady of Light to me.

I offered a prayer. I didn’t know what was going to happen or what would come of all this, but if there was any way for their grace to carry me through it, I would dedicate my life to the Divine, to service of the Divine.

It was then that I fell into that deep meditation and had the experience of their presence. Shortly thereafter, they changed the diagnosis. It wasn’t long after I got out of the hospital that I left everything. I left my fiancée, I left my job, I left my family—I left everything to go serve.

Rick: Yes, that’s very interesting. It’s almost like an archetypal kind of thing where you are on death’s door, there is some Divine intervention, you make a promise, it saves your life, and then you go and fulfill that promise. There are a number of stories like that in different traditions.

Lawrence: Sure.

What Kundalini Means

Rick: It’s cool. So we have kind of woven the biographical stuff in and out as we go along. Feel free to bring up anything at any time that comes to your mind, even if I am not asking a question about it. But we have thrown the word Kundalini around a little bit here, and perhaps we better zero in on a better definition.

I think probably most people listening to this have some idea of Kundalini and chakras and all, and they think of Kundalini as some energy that is coiled up at the base of the spine and is ordinarily dormant. Then, in some people, it awakens and works its way up through the chakras. That is probably the extent of what the majority of people who understand anything about it understand. So how would you like to elaborate on that?

Lawrence: You got a few days…?

(Laughter)

Rick: Like I said, we could make this a one-month interview.

(Laughter)

Lawrence: Yes, a lot of my work, I think, has been trying to give voice to, or give some clarity to, the magnificence of Kundalini. A lot of, especially the Western, understanding of Kundalini is, to me, quite limited. What is often at the root of that is that much of what’s communicated and has been written about Kundalini is really encoded in the language of symbol. Symbols point beyond themselves, but unless you understand the language of symbol and what these extraordinary archetypal images and depictions are, and the ways of talking about sound and form, if you don’t have a deep appreciation for that, it becomes very concrete and very simplistic. Then a lot of the depth, beauty, meaning, and profound nature of Kundalini gets lost.

What’s being transferred into more popular literature and understanding is, as you say, the system of chakras, the Kundalini coiling at the base of the spine, and so on. All of that is this profound symbolic language. Part of my training as a Jungian, my training in symbology, and my work with Joseph Campbell really helped me to understand and unfold that. I also worked with teachers who had the wisdom to communicate it in ways that you don’t just get from a book, and to understand that even something as seemingly concrete as, “Here is the coiled form at the base of the spine,” is already so concretized. What is going on there?

Rick: Yes, a physiologist would scoff at it and say, “Nonsense. There is no coiled form. We have done detailed anatomical research. There is no such thing.”

Lawrence: Right. And it often picks up Kundalini sort of halfway through its entirety of presence. To understand Kundalini being symbolized as this coiled form in this root center, the earth center, the Muladhara chakra, you first have to start with how that even came to be. That’s why the whole nature of Kundalini can’t be understood separately from understanding Shakti.

Shakti means power: the universal power of the infinite to manifest form, and the power of consciousness to know itself, both as form and as the formless; to create all the domains and universes of form out of itself, as itself. That is the nature of Kundalini.

That is the nature of Kundalini.

So the symbol in the Sahasrara, the top chakra, represents that transcendent state of union. There, Shiva and Shakti are one, and they are inseparable. Then you get this dynamic play. We can go through the stages of that, if it is interesting, and the evolution of consciousness: how it goes from this boundless infinitude into something that is finite and measurable, and how it then goes through the successive stages of taking on a form until you get to the most concrete form, the base form of the earth element.

That is what is symbolized by the Muladhara chakra. There you have concrete form symbolizing the unity of Shiva and Shakti, so that even there they are completely present. Shiva is present in the form of a lingam, and Shakti is present in the form of this classic ancient feminine form of the snake coiled around it. In part, what it is depicting is that even at the most concrete level of reality, Shiva and Shakti are in complete union and completely present. They are present there as form, but if you can go beyond and look beyond even the form, you will see the formless.

Rick: You may have said this already, but let’s reiterate, because we are throwing around Sanskrit terms, Shiva and Shakti, and people might be having images come to mind of a guy with a snake around his shoulders, a river coming out of his hair, and a blue throat, and so on. When you go to India and go into Motilal Banarsidass and look at the posters, all this is depicted very colorfully. But what it really represents is some deep primordial reality, some force of nature that is responsible for, or kind of integral to, the functioning of the universe, and Shakti is integral to the manifestation of the universe.

So let’s just elaborate on that a little bit, so that we are not just talking Hindu mythology here, and people realize we are actually talking physics and cosmology.

Lawrence: Right. And remembering Shiva, despite the interesting forms of a deity with a trident and all those things, Shiva—the word—just means “the auspicious one.” That one is the infinite, boundless consciousness and power that isn’t intrinsic to the universe; it is the universe.

It comes from a tradition that is different from what our Western minds are very much tuned to. We are tuned to monotheism, whereas this is monism. Monotheism is one God, and then there is all of creation, and it is primarily a kind of dualistic perspective. Monism is that all there is is the one infinite, and it takes on every form. Everything that you are looking at is the infinite; it is the Divine.

You look in a mirror, and you are seeing the eyes of God, the mouth of God, and the face of God. You look at anything, and what you are seeing is that. You are functioning as the eyes of God to know the finite nature of who you are and what it is to experience the universe from that perspective.

So when we say Shiva, or Universal Consciousness, that’s what we are talking about. It’s an artificial designation to try to separate out Shiva from Shakti, the Universal Infinite from its power to manifest. That is already an operation of mind, creating differences where difference does not exist.

There is no time or place where those things are at all separate, any more than you can separate heat from fire or light from fire. You cannot separate Shiva from Shakti, the infinite from its power to know and to manifest.

From the Infinite to the Finite

Rick: I remember Muktananda’s favorite phrase was, “God dwells within you as you.” It even had it on the billboard, or the sign, at the ashram there in South Fallsburg. I used to go by there. In fact, I was a couple hundred yards away from where you were in the summer of 1976.

So let’s dig into this a little bit more. What you just said is that consciousness is the sole reality—and correct me if you didn’t just say this—but intrinsic to consciousness is its manifesting quality, which we are calling Shakti here, and that through these subtle dynamics the universe appears to take form. Right? Is that a correct way of summarizing it?

Lawrence: Yes. Right.

Rick: Okay. And in the human physiology, there was a whole step-by-step thing you went through in your book at some point about the process of manifestation and how individuality comes into form through that process. You know what I am referring to.

Lawrence: Yes, we will go into that. But part of what these traditions try to lay out is: What’s the map of how you go from the infinite to the finite?

Rick: Right, that’s what I am referring to.

Lawrence: One map would break it down into four bodies. There is the supracausal body of the infinite, which is all-encompassing, both the transcendent and the immanent in complete union. Then there is a causal body, then there is a subtle body, and then there is a physical body. That’s a way of understanding different levels of manifestation, with consciousness as a subtle energy becoming more and more concrete until you have physical form. So that’s one map.

Another map is the map of chakras. That delineates it a bit further. So instead of having sort of a three-stage process—causal, subtle, gross physical—now you have chakras, also looking at different ways consciousness becomes more and more dense, more and more contracted, more and more gross, until you get to the physical elements.

Rick: And that’s not really an alternate map; that’s just an elaboration on the first map. Right?

Lawrence: Right, and it’s important to understand: a map is never the territory. Having been a backpacker, hiker, and spelunker for a time, I know that the map is never the territory. And if you depend on the map, your life will get lost, because there are a lot of things missing from maps.

So yes, it’s a nice sketch of what that is, but it’s part of what happens when we don’t understand the symbolic nature of what that map is. This also relates to something that Piaget—I don’t know if you are familiar with the developmental psychologist Piaget and his stages of development—and the things that his work, subsequent testing, and all the research that was done to validate those stages of cognitive development have shown.

Many people get caught, and there are sort of demographic studies that talk about how much of the population progresses through those different phases. The next-to-the-last phase is concrete operational thinking. It’s concrete thinking. That is a level of thought where it is very hard for people in that mind-state—and when we are younger, particularly when it’s dominant—to see the symbolic, because we are thinking concretely.

Concrete thinking always leads to that kind of misinterpretation. It leads to fundamentalism. It’s mistaking the symbol for something that’s concrete, whereas a symbol is always pointing beyond itself. It’s the old Zen saying:

Do not confuse the finger for the moon.

Teachings and practices are pointing to where consciousness is. You can’t take that thing as the concrete form and get involved in that. And so that’s true, then, of the system of chakras, which is beautifully elegant in describing that. People can get involved in it in various ways and to various degrees, but if you look at it just in terms of each of the chakras being associated with an element, then when you start out with the Sahasrara, there is the infinite transcendent.

Then when you get down to the Ajna chakra—well, that’s not exactly an element. That’s where mind, or individualized consciousness, comes in. Now you have the infinite starting to contract and take on a finite form. I wouldn’t say mind has the same form or properties that the body has, or the computer you are looking at, or whatever. It’s not that defined, but it’s more defined than the infinite, the boundless, because now it’s bound. Now it’s contracted. Now it has limitations to it.

And then, out of that, this process of the descent of Shakti, of pure consciousness through the chakras, and the creation of each level as it goes is called involution. It’s sort of the involving of consciousness in the manifestation of a form.

So then when you go from the Ajna chakra to the Vishuddha chakra, the Vishuddha chakra is the element of space, sometimes called ether. So it’s more concrete than mind, but still pretty subtle.

When you get to the heart chakra, that’s considered the element of air. Air has more definition. You can feel the wind; you can’t feel space. So it has more definition to it, more form. It’s more contracted. Out of that, then, it descends further, and when you get to the Manipura chakra, you get to fire. That’s the element that seems to be represented by that level of manifestation.

It contracts further and becomes, in the Svadhishthana chakra, water—the element of water—until finally you get to the Muladhara chakra and the grossest form, earth.

It is important to realize you are still in the subtle body, so none of these have a physical form yet. We are still on the subtle essence of each of these planes, each of these elements that is being represented by this involution and form-assuming nature of Shakti.

Rick: Does this mean that even a disembodied soul, such as between lifetimes or something, would have all these chakras intact without a physical body?

Lawrence: Theoretically, yeah, they would still be in the subtle seed form, in the tattva form. In a sense, once you get below the causal body—and this is how the map of the causal body, the subtle body, and the physical body overlays with the chakras—it is also a way of talking about how creation happens.

One thing is important to understand: the Eastern traditions’ paradigm for looking at how creation occurs is radically different from the Western scientific materialist tradition, which forms a lot of the basis of our thoughts and ways of understanding the world.

Material philosophy looks for material causes to explain the subtle. Consciousness is an artifact of neurons firing. You have concrete brain cells firing, and consciousness is produced. Now the Eastern tradition says, “No, no, it’s the other way around.” The subtle creates the gross. It’s consciousness that creates a body and a brain in order to manifest its qualities of consciousness.

That whole process of involution, of going through the chakras and understanding how it is manifesting things at different levels, is an understanding of how the subtle—and the most radically subtle, the infinite, the Sahasrara, that boundless energy—goes into becoming something as concrete as our hand or the chair that we are sitting in.

✨ Awakening and Evolution

Rick: So you just mentioned that you went through all the chakras, and you mentioned at that stage that the physical body still hasn’t come into the picture. At what point and how does the physical body come into the picture and become associated with these different chakras?

Lawrence: Well, it has to do with what’s coming in and where our karma—the residue of our past actions—is helping to shape what body we are going to take in this lifetime and how that form is going to manifest, and so on.

At a subtler level, it is just the seeds of that which are going to produce it. If it happens to be that the seed is connected to our manifesting a human body in the next lifetime, then that seed will come and unfold as a human body. We might not come back as a human body. We might come back as a different form.

Rick: Do animal bodies have all the chakras, too?

Lawrence: You know, I have never looked into that, so I don’t know how many chakras they have or what their subtle-body physiology is.

Rick: All right. So then, at some point, the whole process begins to go in reverse, so to speak, in terms of awakening to higher and higher centers within the body and eventually back up to the Sahasrara. Is this the appropriate time to touch upon that?

Lawrence: Sure. And it’s not a mistake that Shakti has created this physical form to evolve and experience its own unfolding of creativity, and to explore the universe of limitation, the universe of form, the universe of a body, of intentions.

In the yogic tradition, this realm is called Karmabhoomi. It’s the realm of coming to know very clearly the laws of cause and effect, and how we create reality. What we are creating or putting out on more and more subtle levels comes back to us and shapes our experience.

So it is seen as, and could be experienced as, across lifetimes, our evolving and evolving to a greater consciousness. It comes to a point where there is—in a sense, metaphorically—a level of ripening, a level of readiness, where that journey, that process of evolution and exploration of what it means to be everything—you know, from the victim to the perpetrator, the lover to the beloved, the rejected, the accepted, the embraced—everything is part of that exploration of consciousness.

That’s why we can have residues of memories that can go back into past lifetimes. But there does come a point where evolution and our consciousness comes to that readiness. I remember something bigger and better, and there is something more. There begins to be this longing to know, to go beyond just the things that are offered to us by our culture, by our family, by our peers, whatever it is.

There becomes this innate longing, and in a sense, that longing is part of that initial phase of awakening. It is spurred by the realization that there is more than just this material world, more than just emotional satisfaction.

People may have intuitions. They might have peak experiences. They might have had something happen in a dream. Those initial phases of awakening to something that transcends ordinary reality—we are equipped to know that. It’s our birthright to know that. At some point, we are summoned by our own nature, by our own consciousness, to shift into knowing on that level.

All longing, all desire, at root, is the desire to know the One.

Rick: Would you agree that longing is sort of an evolved form of the basic driver of all desires? I mean, I long to have that sports car, I long to have that partner, or whatever. And you get those things, and now I long for something else because that didn’t do it for me.

But this longing you just referred to is sort of like you have tried all that stuff, so to speak, and you somehow realize that the fulfillment of all longing is to be found within and not in outer objects.

Lawrence: Right. And it’s that evolution to discover that. Also, we will have to look back and see: this is the nature of that evolution when we are entering those domains.

We begin to see that and look compassionately at all beings, because all longing, all desire, at root, is the desire to know the One. Instead of being confused by the reflection of that One in its ephemeral nature, and associating it with the possession of this object of desire, that’s when we start to look beyond.

Rick: I think the ideas you are expressing can probably be found in many traditions, but are you specifically expressing the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism here?

Lawrence: I think Kashmir Shaivism gives some of the clearest expression of that, but to me, I always look to the mystics of traditions because they were the knowers. So I looked at the mystics—the Christian mystics, the Sufi mystics, the poet-saints—because their expressions reflect that.

It is that same sense when you start to move into that: you’re going, “Wait a minute, the Divine is everywhere and it’s in everything. Everything I long for is there, and all I was doing was confusing this reflection, this momentary appearance and illusion, with the idea that it took this other form and wanting to possess that in some way.”

Rick: There was a thing you quoted from the Gnostic Jesus:

The kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.

Lawrence: Yes.

⛰️ Challenges of Kundalini

Rick: All right. So Kundalini starts awakening. For you, I guess it’s been a pretty blissful process for the most part—you know, all kinds of wonderful experiences, revelations, cognitions, openings, and awakenings. Have you ever had a rough time with it?

I mean, I am in touch with a couple of people who are basically completely incapacitated by the Kundalini awakening, to the point where they can’t even function or get out of bed or anything. It’s a pretty horrific situation, and you do hear these scare stories about Kundalini.

So has your experience always been pretty blissful, and did it reach some kind of conclusion? Do you feel like you are fully cooked in this respect?

Somebody sent me an email. They said they wanted to know whether you have gone through this whole thing yourself, and if not, how can you help anybody if you haven’t been through the whole thing from start to finish? She mentioned that Papaji once said that he would be sort of dealing with that energy. He said the Kundalini would dog him to his dying day. (Laughter.)

So it would almost seem that even if you are enlightened, there is going to be continuous dealing with this energy. So please comment on all that.

Lawrence: Okay, that’s a lot…

Rick: I was listening to Obama’s press conference yesterday, and Peter Alexander asked him this long, three- or four-part question. Obama said, “I must be getting old. I really can’t deal with these multipart questions anymore.”

(Laughter)

Lawrence: So, yes, Kundalini has unfolded and has become my living reality, and I don’t know Papaji or what his experience was. But to me, being in my beloved’s embrace and in the dance of life for as long as life unfolds in its form—that’s my experience.

My experience is of continuous becoming, continuous creativity. The Shakti of the universe unfolds, and she keeps revealing that every facet, everything that appears, is literally a face of the Divine. That’s the continued unfolding.

Have there been tough times? There have been very challenging times. There have been painful times. There has been physical pain, and there has been emotional pain. There have been times when I wondered, “How am I going to function while trying to carry these experiences?” There have been times when I have had to put experiences aside, in a sense, and create a safe container within myself so I could go on with getting absorbed in writing my PhD thesis.

One of the things I write about in the book The Soul’s Journey is that I have had experiences in which Shakti gave me the direct experience of moving through that whole evolutionary pattern. Involution is the experience of Shakti taking on form through the chakras. Evolution is the evolution of consciousness up through those symbolic stages, back to knowing the infinite as yourself, and all of the universe—all that we perceive as “the One”—as our own Self.

When I had that experience, I was in the midst of writing a dissertation. I set aside some time to create a personal retreat for myself, to dive into that level of knowing, because I didn’t want to just be writing a dissertation. My doctoral research was on Kundalini and the various dimensions of transformation that happen to people who have been engaged in Kundalini practices and awakening for ten or more years.

Having that experience was overwhelming in certain ways. Though it was probably the greatest fruit of my research, it also didn’t have any place in academic writing and wasn’t something I could put into a research paper. So, I had to find a way of trying to contain that experience and say, “No, I still have to write a dissertation in an abstract form about these things.”

There are various demands that happen for many people. How do we contain it? How do we move through it? What’s happening with the body when it’s working on an area, and it’s horrifically painful and difficult, moving through the ways that Shakti is trying to transform the physical body and transform the subtle body, so that they become instruments both of knowing and of participating in that Divine creation, and being able to experience it in their own way?

The body wants to know the bliss of the infinite in the way the body can. The mind, or consciousness, even as a limited form, wants to know the ecstasy, the rapture, and the love that come through the Divine. The energy is remaking the entire body, making the physical body an instrument of the Divine for both knowing the Divine and participating in it.

That kind of process—the yogis knew it was a ruthless process—was why Kundalini was very often sought only after many kinds of purificatory and deep practices had been done to help set the stage for a smoother awakening.

But now people are having spontaneous awakenings. It turns out that, even in the yogic literature, Kundalini awakening didn’t mean that you became enlightened and experienced the infinite Divine in one lifetime. It could take several lifetimes to evolve through. The forms that you take will evolve with that, but some of those initial phases of awakening can be quite challenging.

Our ordinary consciousness is limited to this one-lifetime perspective, but consciousness itself isn’t—not in the least. Kundalini isn’t—not in the least. She says, “I’m going to set you free.” Does that mean I’m going to obey cultural bounds? Not necessarily.

Rick: A friend of mine who asked that question that I just read—I interviewed a guy a few weeks ago, Harri Aalto. I have interviewed him a few times, and he has basically had a smooth ride: pretty awakened as a child and just cruising along ever since, for decades.

He had a brief period in his twenties when he lost pure consciousness for about fifteen seconds. He said it was the most horrible experience of his life, but he regained it. I think something was showing him the contrast. But she doubts that he could really be awake because he never went through hell, never went through the crucible that so many people go through. From what you just said about previous lifetimes and so on, maybe he did all that and just had a little remnant to deal with when he came in here.

Lawrence: Well, I don’t know him or his evolutionary process, but I think what also unfolds over lifetimes can certainly be seen in the classic example of Buddha. Buddha’s evolution, even as Buddha was trying to evolve a form that would hold Buddha-consciousness, went through lifetimes.

There may be a lifetime when we are less aware of the painful memories of having incarnated in challenging forms, but they come back in part. My belief—I mean, my experience—is that the pain we experience, as ephemeral as it is and as completely illusory as it is on one level—from the level of the Absolute, there is none—but from the level of the conventional mind, the individual, conditioned nature of being, pain is very real.

To have that direct knowing and recollection of pain, to me, is also what forms my life with compassion. I see that many times my body has gone through tremendous pain, and still does, frankly. There are many kinds of things that occur physically. They don’t define who I am, and they don’t limit my consciousness in the least, but they also keep the door open: that level of pain and suffering that all beings go through is part of what makes us aware and connects us with deep compassion.

To me, the exalted states are states of profound and boundless compassion, profound love, and profound kindness. That’s what marks the flow of the real, essential nature of Shakti as this loving presence that embraces all, sees the pain and suffering, and offers a way to be free of it.

It’s like the archetype of Tara or Kwan Yin, who hears the suffering of all beings and reaches out to draw us past it.

Rick: When you yourself go through painful and uncomfortable things, even now, do you immediately realize, “Well, the vehicle is being further purified. That’s what’s going on,” and just grin and bear it?

Lawrence: I know that this is the nature of the body. Even when Buddha talked about getting free of suffering, he didn’t mean that if you smacked your leg, it wasn’t going to hurt. That’s not the level of freedom from suffering that we’re talking about.

My body is a vehicle in this lifetime, and it came in with its karma. It has nearly died a couple of times or more. It has gone through various injuries, surgeries, and these kinds of things. With some of them, I directly felt the hand of grace reach in and carry me through. Now that is who carries me through every moment.

Devotion Rather Than Domination

Rick: There is an interesting passage in your book. You say:

There have been approaches in the yoga traditions that try to dominate Kundalini, to forcefully push Kundalini to do this or that by prescribing endless exercises of forced breathing and body postures that are meant to bind and force Kundalini to go in the direction that the yogi wants her to go. Not surprisingly, these are also traditions that often say Kundalini is dangerous and must be controlled. Devotees that approach Kundalini as the great Goddess with their loving devotion have an entirely different experience. They gain her boons, or gifts, of enlightenment without having to fear what may be provoked by some forceful, domineering practice.

Lawrence: Right. Part of what I was getting at in writing about that was—I don’t know if you and your audience are familiar with the work of Riane Eisler, but others have written about the evolution of how the Divine feminine was related to and understood, going back 30,000 years to where and how we relate to her now.

Riane Eisler does a beautiful job, and I won’t reiterate all her work, of showing how, as the masculine began to dominate more, early human culture—which was dominated by the Divine feminine, the great Goddess—changed in the way we related to the universe and to each other.

She shows how early cultures didn’t have fortifications. There was a different way of relating to each other. As the masculine began to develop—and it’s a natural development of consciousness—this way of relating to the Divine began to shift. She coined the phrase “the dominator mode,” because that was part of the kind of masculine, patriarchal development of consciousness and patriarchal religious traditions and approaches to the Divine.

That also touched, even in the East, the traditions related to Shakti and Kundalini. This way of trying to dominate the energy, diminish it, and say, “Oh, it’s just this psychophysiological energy,” or, “It’s just the energy that the yogi has to prod and force into awakening and then forcefully guide and direct,” reflects that kind of dominator mode of consciousness in relationship to the Divine feminine.

My experience was directly different, and I was delighted with Muktananda’s way of teaching it. He was really honoring her as the great Goddess. I wrote a story in The Soul’s Journey about a very famous author who came to see Muktananda. He had written about Kundalini and his experiences of her as being fairly mundane and ordinary.

He was at the ashram—this was up in South Fallsburg—and I was there at that time. Muktananda had a kind of reception called darshan. It was a reception where we met with people and talked with them more individually.

This author was sitting outside, waiting for his turn to go in and see Muktananda. As he was sitting there, he had this vision of Goddess Kundalini walking by to go in. She was resplendent. She was the great Goddess: jewels, a beautiful sari, gold, radiant beyond belief. He was bowled over.

Finally, his turn came to go inside. He went in and looked around to see if she was still there. He bowed to Muktananda and said, “You know, while I was waiting for you, I had this experience. I saw the Goddess Kundalini come in, and she was magnificent. Yet to me, she just appears sort of ordinary and mundane. It didn’t inspire anything like that. How can that be?”

Muktananda looked at him and said, “Simply because I worship her.”

Simply because I worship her.

Rick: That’s beautiful. I knew the whole story from your book, and I was enjoying hearing you tell it, which brings up an interesting point in terms of the heart, I suppose, and devotional qualities being valuable on the spiritual path. That’s not always the case. A lot of times, spiritual paths and teachers are kind of dry and don’t have much of that dimension.

From what you’ve been saying these last few minutes, we could almost roughly categorize spiritual practices or approaches in terms of the hypermasculine versus the feminine: the former being effortful, arduous, controlling, and so on, and the latter having more qualities of surrender and devotion, and cooperation with the Divine intelligence rather than trying to dominate it in some way.

Lawrence: I am sure you are familiar with this, but one of the beautiful ways that the yogic tradition has helped to delineate the different paths, the different forms of yoga, has to do with people’s temperaments. A thinking type might be more of a Jnana Yoga type, approaching the infinite through the contemplation of “not this, not this,” Neti Neti, and “Who am I?” They use the power of viveka, discrimination, to finally differentiate the nature of the infinite that is present at all times from the ephemeral, constructive nature of the ego and the personality. Whereas a bhakta approaches through feeling, emotion, and love.

Rick: But it’s interesting because whichever approach one takes, one sort of ends up with both, at least in terms of many historical examples. Guys like Shankara became great devotees, and there have been great bhaktas who have also been great jnanis, with this profound wisdom that they could articulate and so on. Trotakacharya, who was Shankara’s disciple, was basically a bhakta, but he ended up with this profound wisdom, and Shankara made him his principal disciple.

Lawrence: Shankaracharya, in writing the Soundarya Lahari, once recognized that the Kundalini was the basis of all realization, and that it was the power of the infinite—the power to know all those dimensions, all those facets. The individual mind gets, you know, sort of a page-by-page, snapshot-by-snapshot view of the infinite and can mistake the part for the whole. Whereas, when we enter into that consciousness, we see the indivisible unity of knowing, feeling, consciousness, love, and compassion, which is always completely present in its fullness all the time.

🧘 Appropriate Practices and Spiritual Maturity

Rick: With all this talk that we have been doing about practices, progress, and lifetimes, we make it sound like a fairly long-term enterprise. What do you make of these people who are kind of popular these days, some of whom say things like, “You are already enlightened. Just accept that, and you don’t need to do practices. Practices imply a practicer, and you are just reinforcing duality,” and so on? What do you make of that whole attitude?

Lawrence: There are times when cutting through duality is what is important. They may or may not be aware of how many lifetimes it took for them to get to that time, that perspective, and that understanding. That doesn’t change the fact that they still went through that process and that they are reaching out.

In the Shaivite tradition, part of the tradition is looking at what are called upayas. Upaya means “means.” When you look at the Shiva Sutras, one of the principal texts of Kashmir Shaivism—and this is true across that tradition—upaya means that, as a seeker, you want to engage in the level of means that is appropriate to your level of understanding, practice, and consciousness.

There are means that, if we are in a dualistic state, include devotional practices, much of what goes as yoga, Hatha Yoga, and even mantra yoga. These are practices aimed at a state in which there is a sense that there is a practicer, there is practice, and there is the aim of the practice. These things are all separate: a dualistic, separated consciousness. The practices are trying to help ease our way out of that illusion and enter unity consciousness, but they are engaging and helpful at that stage.

Then there is what could be called bheda upaya. Bheda means different or separate. Then there is a sort of next stage called bheda-abheda. You are in a state where you are kind of mixed. You get a sense of unity, and sometimes you get an intuition or feeling of that, but you still get caught up in duality. Your mind is sort of teetering on the edge.

There are practices—Shaktopaya—aimed at helping that movement and shift. They are not as gross as waving an arati tray and doing puja to some external form, because now you start to merge with that. You have started to reap the rewards of that outer practice of becoming united with the one you are approaching with devotion. So that is a different level of practice.

Then there is abheda upaya, where we are just about there, and Shambhava upaya, where your consciousness is right on the edge. The veil is thinner than smoke. If you did something as gross as even thinking about union, you would be back down into a different upaya.

The practices understood on that level are much more subtle and refined. When a teacher presents a practice—even if it is the practice of no practice—if you are in that state of duality, there you are. Right on that edge, it is a perfect message; you are kind of going to be there. But if you are really caught up in another level, that may be out of reach—not because it is not true, but because what you are identified with means, “I need the shoehorn to help pry me out of this.” That’s how I look at it.

Rick: That’s a really good point. There are some teachers around who are kind of one-size-fits-all, and they work for some people, while others get frustrated. But the really great ones, like Ramana Maharshi, seem to be able to tune into the level of development of whoever came and advocate or encourage them to do something appropriate for them, and it might change.

As a matter of fact, you say somewhere in your writings about having the discrimination to know when to leave a teacher. A teacher might be completely appropriate for you up to a certain point, and then, at a certain point, you have grown. It’s necessary to go from high school to college, or grammar school to high school, or something like that, in order to move on.

Shaktipat and the Descent of Grace

At one point in your book, you wrote, “The ancient text Kularnava Tantra states that without Shaktipat there is no liberation or self-realization. The descent of grace may happen spontaneously, unexpectedly, or through the power of a master of genuine attainment. In some cases, Shaktipat is received through contact with a mystic guide who appears in one’s dreams or meditation. Often it is awakened through a mantra or practices learned from an accomplished spiritual teacher. Also, it may have been awakened in a past life and is continuing to unfold in this life.”

Muktananda was famous for doing Shaktipat. He kind of popularized the term, in a way, and he did it with peacock feathers, as I recall.

Lawrence: That was one way.

Rick: That was one way. You notice the picture of Amma over my shoulder here. She hugs people, and that’s a form of Shaktipat. Let’s talk a little bit about Shaktipat. You basically said here that it is essential. There is no liberation or self-realization without it, so let’s talk about what it is.

Lawrence: Shaktipat literally means the descent of Shakti, the descent of the power of consciousness to know itself. It’s simply a way of saying that the ego-mind can’t get there on its own. There is no limit to the number of different ways Shaktipat can happen. That power of grace, that power of the infinite that bestows grace, is why it’s called Shaktipat. It was not called Muktanandapat or… (laughter) It is called Shaktipat.

Shakti is that universal power that awakens us and can take us beyond the confines of the finite. Part of the way you can understand why it is said to be absolutely necessary is through the map that identifies the causal body, subtle body, and physical body. Some people are familiar with that.

How does the causal body come to be, and why is it called causal? It is the first shift from universal, infinite consciousness, beginning to take on or set the stage for taking on form. The state of consciousness that goes with the causal body—because each of those bodies has a state of consciousness that goes with it—is what the yogis call deep sleep, which is the continuous awareness of nothingness. It’s the black void.

It’s called causal because it’s the state where Shakti, of its own free will, has negated the awareness of its infinitude and its unity with all that is. In that negation comes the black veil of the void. Shakti has created that. That sets the stage for consciousness to contract further.

Rick: Here you mean literal sleep, like we do at night? You don’t just mean this metaphorical sleep of ignorance or something, but sleep?

Lawrence: No. Well, avidya would also be a way of talking about that: primal ignorance. The primal root cause of suffering is avidya. Avidya means not knowing your unity. But that’s not an accident, as if some other force outside of the Divine imposed it. That was Shakti saying, “Well, in order for me to play in a finite domain, I have to not know. I have to occlude that.”

Rick: Hide and seek.

Lawrence: Hide that behind the curtain for a bit. So, if Shakti is the one that created that, who is going to uncreate it? Shaktipat. That’s what it is.

Shaktipat means the influx of the power to awaken, to know itself in its magnificence and infinitude again.

Shaktipat is that influx of consciousness beyond just the ordinary mind that allows us to experience what we are in our fullness, because the ordinary mind is the part, and the part cannot know the whole. The wave doesn’t know the ocean; it’s part of the ocean.

Shaktipat is just a way of talking about that influx of consciousness that can undo that primal level of ignorance—not knowing—which was part of the creation of individuality and universal form.

That’s why there is no limitation on how Shaktipat can happen. It can happen in a dream, spontaneously, in a past life, because of a practice, or connected to a being through whom Shakti flows and chooses to flow through that conduit.

To me, I am always clear about talking about it in that way: an individual can be a conduit. If you are dying of thirst and you go to the water fountain and get a drink of water, you go, “Ah, that’s so good.” You don’t kiss the fountain and stay hanging out by the fountain. It was the water that quenched your thirst.

Understanding that, there are forms through which this power flows so magnificently. We can revere and respect them, but it’s the power of consciousness, this power of grace that reveals that within ourselves, that we truly honor and revere.

Rick: Nice. A question came in from Dan in London. It is a little long, but Dan always asks good questions, so here we go.

While doing TM practice—Transcendental Meditation—and being barely aware of my body, I suddenly had a thought that I needed to let go of all the attachments I have to my family. Following this, I suddenly had an explosion of energy at the bottom of my spine. The energy rose about halfway up my spine and was very intense. It was accompanied by bits of my life flashing through my mind and somehow deciding to let go of things. Once the energy reached about halfway up my spine, it stopped and gradually subsided. Over the next couple of weeks, I had back pain, but that gradually went away. This happened about two years ago. I did have lots of other experiences of very strong energy previously while asleep, but this was the only time it happened while awake, and it was the only time it fit the traditional description of happening from the bottom of the spine and with such ferocity. These kinds of energetic experiences have not happened for a while now. Do you have any advice on this, or can you recommend a practice perhaps to supplement TM?

Lawrence: Right. So what he is talking about is the experience, in the language of the Kundalini tradition, that we would call kriyas. Kriya means “movement of.” So kriyas are movements of the energy, the Shakti, the power of consciousness.

Those kriyas can occur on the physical level. They can be a part of the physical body, and you can literally get physical movements. You can get people going into spontaneous Hatha Yoga postures. It is understood that most, or all, of the Hatha Yoga asanas, or postures, were first seen as a result of kriyas that people went into, with the Shakti bringing them into that kind of movement.

Then it was codified and systematized with the notion that if you practiced it, you would both help to purify the physical and subtle bodies and set the stage for that kind of expansion and awakening.

Kriyas can happen on a subtle-body level, where there are energetic movements, flashes of light, sounds, energy movement, and all kinds of things. Anything within the domain of the mind can be subject to, or experienced in some way as, a kriya moving through consciousness.

There are practices that you can do to help support that and work with that energetic flow. That can include practices like Hatha Yoga, Tai Chi, and many others. Chi is another word, like prana, for the manifestation of the energy of Kundalini. So there can be ways of working with that.

Another set of forms for engaging Shakti in its more and more expansive nature is mantra. The very basis of mantra is that all mantra arises out of Kundalini. Kundalini formed the basis of mantra, and so when you engage in mantra at different levels, you are engaging in Shakti.

Deepening one’s understanding of that can help. That can involve reading and studying about it. I have read a lot about it, and a couple of my books are about the nature of mantra.

There are mantras that come from traditions infused with Shakti. They are known as real vehicles for awakening Shakti, as opposed to a mantra that might be more focused on purifying a certain part of the body or performing some other kind of action.

Being engaged in mantra on different levels is a very profound and powerful set of practices. That would be congruent with TM, because essentially TM was making use of bija mantras as a way of doing that.

I have worked with a lot of TM practitioners and teachers who have come to programs. They very much understood and resonated with that, and were then able to sense the Shakti, the power, that came through mantras that were given to me to pass on as Shakti mantras. Those are the kinds of ways of exploring it and shifting that understanding.

Part of the way I read what happened was that it opened the door to letting go of things about life. That means letting go of ways in which we identify with, and in a sense bind, our energy. It does not mean literally throwing them away, because you continue to live your life and have those relationships, but it opens the door.

So, what are the ways in which, even amidst everyday practice, you let go of those things? Even as you hold the mantra, you can hold it in a limiting way, because your understanding of the mantra is limited. In a sense, you are closing the door to all the Shakti, all the power of consciousness inherent in that mantra, which can take you beyond that and open the heart to the boundless love that is present there, the consciousness that suffuses your life.

Rick: Good. Dan’s experience is kind of a nice one. I understand that at one point you were overseeing the clinic, or something, in Ganeshpuri, India, at Muktananda’s ashram there. There were freak-outs, basically—people just being blasted by the Shakti that was awakening in them.

I alluded earlier to a couple of people who have been in touch with me who are really going through a rough time. Basically, their lives are on hold while they suffer intensely. No one knows how long it is going to last or how it is going to end up.

So what measures did you use in Ganeshpuri? What have you learned since then? What would you offer people who are undergoing some kind of Kundalini process, or at least think it is a Kundalini process? That is worth touching upon too, because perhaps it could be something else and they should see a doctor.

The flip side of that is, if it is a Kundalini process and you go to see a doctor, chances are that doctor is going to completely misunderstand it and put you on Thorazine or something, which is not going to be helpful. So how do you deal with people who are having severe symptoms of Kundalini awakening? How can you help them?

Lawrence: That is a lot of what I go into in my book Awakening Kundalini: The Path to Radical Freedom—an integrative, holistic perspective on working with these things.

Fortunately, in Baba’s ashram in Ganeshpuri, there were not freak-outs every minute. There were some, but most people, even if they were having intense experiences, were held by the contacts, the practices, the discipline, and the grace of the master.

There were people here and there who needed some extraordinary measures, and we were there to help them. Part of working with that is having a context that really helps. That is part of what I write about in Awakening Kundalini.

If somebody is going through challenging processes, there can be numerous things going on. There can be genuine medical or physiological disorders that are being worked through karmically, and they cannot just be dismissed as Kundalini.

I have seen people need anything from endocrine therapies onward, and have found them to be deficient in certain hormones that were being dismissed as Kundalini. That did not mean everything got reduced to that medical issue.

Western medicine can be reductionistic, and that violates a person’s sense of the deep, meaningful nature of the spiritual process that is unfolding. The symptoms can then be looked at from a medical perspective as merely symptoms on a physiological or psychological level.

So it is very helpful to work with people who have some kind of understanding. But even if they do not, if you need medical help, you might really need to see a doctor and be able to present enough symptoms to get help without trying to get the doctor to understand Kundalini.

Rick: Do you consult with people here and there, or even over Skype for long-distance sessions, who are going through this? Do you ever like to have a three-way conversation with the person and their doctor, trying to educate the doctor a bit about what they might be going through?

Lawrence: I have never done a three-way conversation with an additional consulting physician. I have tried to help people find someone who might be able to work with them as a consultant.

There are times—and by no means every time—when somebody’s mind is really being overwhelmed by the content stirred up by Shakti, and there are instances in which people benefit from using medications prescribed within psychiatry, either short-term or even long-term.

There were individuals at the ashram in Ganeshpuri who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia earlier in life. That was part of their karma. Without medications that enabled them to live a much more normal life, they would have been psychotic.

Baba used to say very clearly, “The same Shakti that takes the form of the universe takes the form of the medication to help you through this, so take your medication.” He never saw medication as being adverse to the processes of Shakti and the unfolding of consciousness.

Rick: It could be. I mean, one could heavily dose somebody with Thorazine or something, and you are basically just suppressing that energy that needs to be worked through in a more intelligent way.

Lawrence: Right, but that would be, to me, mismanagement and not proper management.

Rick: Speaking of schizophrenics, you had a great line from Lily Tomlin. You said Lily said, “When you talk to God, it’s prayer, but when God talks back, you are labeled as schizophrenic.”

When you talk to God, it’s prayer, but when God talks back, you are labeled as schizophrenic.

Lawrence: Right. And what does that say about our relationship to God?

(Laughter)

The Three Jewels of Support

Rick: Hopefully, we have done justice to that. Maybe there will be some questions. People can read your book and look in greater detail into what you offer, but—

Lawrence: Part of what I talk about is that those are sort of the extremes. There are many people who would simply benefit from some additional support along the way. That is why Buddha characterized it very beautifully in terms of looking at the Three Jewels that help support a person doing their practices.

The Three Jewels are like the three legs of a stool. With only two, or one, you cannot stand on it, but with all three, you have them. They are a competent teacher, a set of teachings and practices, and community, or sangha, as Buddha talked about.

Having people to relate to is important. In part, that is a great thing that you do as a service: trying to help create a sangha, albeit a virtual one through technology, and offering people ways to relate to and connect with others and understand how to get support for this.

What might a massage therapist help with? What might a restorative yoga teacher help with? What might a Jungian psychologist, working with dreams and archetypes, help with? All of these can be supports in that unfolding, that unique unfolding.

This is part of what was always sought after about Kundalini. Rather than Hatha Yoga as a path, where you learn 84 asanas and do a certain kind of pranayama and other specific practices, Kundalini is a process that, when awakened, begins to unfold a very unique sadhana for you.

That changes, shifts, and demands subtlety. It demands the ability to be attuned to and dance with the energy. The diet that is right for you at one point might be different at another time. The kinds of exercises and practices that you do at one point might evolve into something else at another time, supporting the unfolding and expansiveness of consciousness so that you really get to live that extraordinary, informed life.

Rick: I think just a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. When I first started having some Kundalini symptoms, I guess they were, it was after my first one-month meditation course.

I remember sitting on a couch in a friend’s living room, and my face started going through all these involuntary contortions, grimaces, and weird things. Then my head started going like this—you know.

At that time, I was driving an ice cream truck, and it got so intense that whenever I sat still, I would start to jerk around. I came to a stop sign in my ice cream truck and started to jerk around. But I understood what was going on.

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: I thought, “Okay, something good is happening here. I am just going to ride this out.” After a while, it subsided and diminished. There have been various things over the years, but if I had not had some sense of what that was, I might have been totally freaked out and thought I was developing some kind of neurological condition or something.

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: That is why I think it is good that we are having these kinds of conversations and that knowledge of this stuff is being more widely disseminated.

Lawrence: Right.

🧘 Nadis, Mantra, and the Subtle Body

Rick: Okay, you have sort of talked about chakras. Just a quick question, a little bit out of context: You mentioned the Sushumna nadi, and then there are Ida and Pingala, which are said to go around the Sushumna nadi. Some people say that—what is it called? Caduceus?

Lawrence: Caduceus, yeah.

Rick: The symbol of AUM is actually representative of that—the snake coiling around the pillar or something. Descriptions are written here. They actually give it some physical dimension, describing how small it is, but it’s not something any physiologist has ever found. So I presume that despite the fact that it has been described as having a certain size or width, it’s subtle. It’s not some little tube going up your spine.

Lawrence: Right. Yes, it’s again part of the subtle body and the subtle physiology. It’s that channel that connects the infinite, from Sahasrara, all the way through to the finite domain of the Muladhara. It’s also a way of saying that the connection on a subtle-body level is there energetically, and that it is always resounding with the sound of Aum.

Aum resounds within that channel continuously, meaning that the universal presence of consciousness—that throbbing vibration—infuses all levels of manifestation and can be accessed through all levels of manifestation.

Rick: Here is a passage from your book I want to read related to this:

The Kundalini moves through the Sushumna nadi, erasing the impressions stored there and releasing the energy bound up in those impressions. This extraordinary purification process then releases us from the patterns in our lives created by those impressions. Secondly, she opens up states of consciousness that give us access to unbounded awareness—awareness of the transcendent self, what some call God consciousness. In order for that state of unity consciousness to become stable and fully manifest in the mind, body, and actions of the individual, the Sushumna nadi and all the lesser nadis must be purified, cleansed of impressions and blocks that contract or restrict consciousness to the confines of ordinary human experience.

These impressions, I would conjecture—and see what you think—may be gross physiological impressions, such as chemical or structural imbalances, but they correspondingly would have a subtle counterpart that isn’t gross or physical at all. You can pull the table by any one leg and the whole table will come along. So, there are gross physical practices that can help to work out those impressions, and that would probably help to work them out in the subtle. Then there are subtle practices or processes that would work them out on that level, and correspondingly they would be released or resolved on the gross level.

Lawrence: Sure. Yes. That’s why various systems have developed these ways of working with movement. Tai Chi is a system of movement, but it’s a psychophysiological exercise. Asanas are psychophysiological exercises. They are not just physical exercises; they are working on the physical and the subtle body.

Mantra as a practice goes through different levels. There is a sound when you are actually saying the mantra. If you are saying, “Om Namah Shivaya,” there is a physical sound. It impacts the physical body, and the power of mantra literally penetrates right through to the bone on that level and impacts the physical level of the body.

When you start to take that to the subtle level, you just become absorbed in the subtle awareness of the throb and the repetition of “Om Namah Shivaya” without any sound. That begins to take on a life of its own, and you begin to even hear it because it is already preexisting. You begin to hear it repeating itself, and now it’s working throughout the subtle body and purifying levels of it.

Then it sheds physical form and subtle form entirely. It’s still mantra, but now it’s just the throb of consciousness. It is the pulsation of awareness, and that is beginning to cut through the causal body. The causal body is awareness of limited being as opposed to infinite being. Consciousness of mantra can begin to be just this throb of awareness that moves through that and then brings us back to that expansion, that absolute infinitude of our being, right here, right now. That’s who we are, and that is the source of mantra.

Rick: There is a metaphor that you are familiar with that the TM movement used to use—that of an ocean. There is the surface level of the waves, which would be like the surface level of the mind. Then there are deeper levels to the ocean, and there is sort of an ocean floor.

Thoughts were represented as bubbles coming up through this ocean. Ordinarily, you don’t experience the bubbles until they pop on the surface, but the point was that, using mantra, you can sort of ride the bubble down, so to speak, to subtler and subtler levels of it—or, in the case of what we’re talking about here, subtler and subtler impulses of thought, quieter, more refined, more abstract—until eventually thought is transcended altogether and the Self is left in its pure state: pure awareness. I just thought I’d throw that in; it could help to illustrate the point you’re making.

Lawrence: Yes.

Rick: Any more comments on that point before I shift gears?

Lawrence: It’s important, I think, to understand also that viewing the unfolding of consciousness from the paradigm of Kundalini is just one paradigm for understanding. You don’t have to know that. You don’t have to know anything about chakras. You don’t have to know anything about the Sushumna nadi. You don’t have to know anything about that domain at all to know the infinite.

A map is never the territory.

This is one way of understanding. It’s one map. That’s what I was talking about before: these are maps. But there are paths that don’t use that map at all, and it’s not necessary for one to study that map and say, “Okay, I have to go through these stages. I have to have these kinds of experiences. What’s wrong with me because I get this? What’s wrong with me? I’m not having this kind of experience or that kind of experience.”

There is nothing wrong with yourself. That may not be what you need at all in the unfolding of the Divine, the unfolding of the infinite as your consciousness. When we are tuned to that, it is the motive force behind our expansion and our process of evolution—not just the mind’s desires for particular experiences or the mind’s concepts of what’s required.

Instead, it is about starting to really deeply be attuned to the movement of the Divine as your own Self: what it is summoning, what it is calling to you, how that’s going to draw you into meditation, and how it is going to open up the experiences of the heart that embrace your life and your work and these kinds of things. You may have nothing to do with chakras and nadis and all this other stuff, and they can be a real distraction, I think, for people.

Rick: Yes, but if this is a valid understanding—that we have chakras and nadis, Sushumna and Kundalini, all this stuff—then we have them whether or not we know about them. I mean, we all have a liver, even though there might have been cultures where people didn’t know they had a liver. But still, they would be dead if they didn’t have a liver. So, Zen monks, Tibetan Buddhists, Native American and South American shamans, and everybody else, regardless of the understanding of their particular tradition, must have chakras and…

Lawrence: Right. They might look at it very differently.

Rick: They might explain it differently.

Lawrence: Right. They might look at it as Saint Teresa of Avila did, with the Seven Mansions and a process of coming into the living presence of the Divine. So, the archetypes may have a different inflection to them.

Yes, it’s going to unfold. This is, to me, what’s important about understanding Kundalini as the power of revelation and transformation and how she is going to manifest in that way. For some people, they never have an experience of the Divine feminine; it’s always in the Divine masculine.

Sometimes Jung’s work helps people to understand that, because sometimes it’s women saying to me, “I don’t see the Goddess, but I see Shiva, I see Krishna, I see this.” It’s the Divine masculine that’s taken the form of revelation, and that’s their way that the unfolding of the Shakti is manifesting for them.

So, all forms—that’s the root understanding—all forms are her forms. All forms are born of a mother. All forms are that universal Shakti.

Rick: I think it’s also worth mentioning that, according to one’s physiological makeup, we have different proclivities in terms of what we experience. Some people just aren’t very visually oriented, and they’re not going to have a visual experience of Shiva, the Divine Mother, or anything else.

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: They just aren’t wired that way. So, if you’re expecting to, or thinking you should, you may end up frustrated.

Lawrence: Well, there was a very funny thing that happened when I was sitting with Muktananda at one time. It was the darshan line, when thousands of people came up to greet him. One fellow came up in the line and bowed before him and was saying, “Baba, Baba, I want to see God. I want to see that light. I want to see those lights that people talk about, that you have written about.”

Baba looked at him and said, “You want to see lights?”

He said, “Yes, yes.”

Baba pointed out and said, “There is a crystal chandelier. There, there. Look at all those lights.”

(Laughter.)

Then he said, “Now, do you want to see God as God is revealing himself to you, or do you want to see the form that you are looking for?”

📚 Teachers, Traditions, and Discrimination

Rick: There is another question that occurred to me when you were saying that previous piece, and that is: Different paths, I think, are equipped to provide different sorts of openings or different degrees of progress.

To take an analogy, we don’t blame biology for not telling us about quantum mechanics, because it’s just not biology’s role to talk about quantum mechanics. Even though quantum mechanics is, in some sense, fundamental to biology, biology doesn’t go there; it has its realm.

So, I think that there are certain spiritual disciplines and traditions that have a realm which may not encompass the entire range of possibility, but which are effective and bring about a certain quality or degree of development. What do you think about that?

Lawrence: Right. Yes, I mean, I think that’s part of what you meant also before, when you were saying that you may study with a teacher whose capacity can take you only so far. You come to the end of their paradigm or their understanding or their teachings, and still you’re feeling the call to go further than that. And so, something else happens.

Rick: Yes, and somebody else might decide to stay with that teacher, because perhaps that teacher can take that person further than he could take you. Different strokes for different folks!

So, this kind of segues into that gear shift that I wanted to make. Here is a passage. You say:

The power of Guru is universal power of God; it is the power of divine revelation. One who functions as a Guru is a channel for that power, and there are no perfect channels. It is the seeker’s responsibility to become familiar with the scriptures, the writings of other enlightened beings, and the voice of their own inner source of wisdom. These three sources of knowledge provide a way of checking the validity of the teacher. Seekers must be vigilant and make every effort to sharpen their discrimination. Spiritual teachers of any school must be vigilant if they want to serve in God’s work of bringing souls back to the recognition of their unity with the Divine. If you want to give directions about a path, then you better know that path; otherwise, you will bear the karmic burden of having misled others, a burden that could take you many lifetimes to free yourself from.

So, in your interview with Tami Simon, you talked frankly about somewhat controversial things that Muktananda was accused of toward the end of his life. You basically characterized those things—some sexual liaisons of a certain kind—as being symptomatic of some shortcoming in his personality.

To play devil’s advocate, we can talk about that and consider that possibility. I was thinking, well, maybe some of the women were unhappy about that and felt like they had been used or abused or something, although from the accounts I read, there was nothing forced or anything. Maybe he was doing some kind of tantric thing where he was enlivening his energy and it actually had an evolutionary purpose for him. I don’t mean to excuse inappropriate behavior or an imbalanced power relationship between Guru and disciple, and maybe it was just inexcusable. But anyway, let’s discuss this whole thing of teachers behaving responsibly or not, and the importance of discrimination on the part of the seeker in order not to get burned or disillusioned by such behavior.

Lawrence: Right. So, what would you like me to talk about?

Rick: Well, I gave you a big, long introduction there, but here is a question that will get you started. Once those revelations came to light, did you become cynical? Did you become disillusioned? How did you rationalize or come to terms with that information?

Lawrence: Well, I did see it as—I saw it, and I don’t remember all of how Tami and I were talking about it. Certainly, with some teachers, it can be a personality flaw. With Baba, I saw it as part of his tantric practice and his tantric tradition. Having known about that only very late, and then he died, I don’t know if he had continued to live how I might have processed that or thought about it—whether I was staying or leaving, or what was going on.

But I knew it wasn’t congruent with what one is trying to fulfill as a dharma, as a teacher. That’s a real challenge. How does a teacher fulfill that dharma of making teachings available at this time, in this place, and in this culture?

For instance, Buddha wouldn’t allow women to become initiated or become monks until near the very end of his life. Part of that was because it was such a patriarchal tradition and society, and women weren’t supposed to have any kind of role in it. Even when he allowed that to happen, he put in the caveat that forever the most senior nun would always be junior to the most junior monk. This is how it was said. He was trying to encode that ignorance that we would look at now into the tradition of that time.

Rick: I wonder if he really believed that, or if he was trying to placate his contemporaries.

Lawrence: I think he was trying to make it acceptable. That’s my conjecture, for what that’s worth.

So, to me, processing what was going on with Baba also made very clear the power of the teachings and the power of practices. I never believed in the paradigm that one is absolutely perfect, that a teacher is perfect. That was something that bothered me often about even some Siddha Yoga teachings: the perfection of the Guru. It left people with a false understanding of what a perfected man was.

When you look at it in the deeper light of understanding scriptures and texts, and then perfection in the practice of meditation and being fully accomplished in that power, that does not necessarily mean that every single thing they do is going to be absolutely perfect in itself. That’s part of the recipe for how they are related to, but there is a level of discrimination required to understand how that operates and what’s going on with it.

Rick: I was thinking, well, we might say nature’s intelligence is perfect, uninterrupted by human interference, and so on. But then look what happens in nature. Animals are getting killed, there are volcanoes and forest fires, and there are probably planets getting hit by asteroids and having all the life on them wiped out. All kinds of stuff happens in nature that may not seem very perfect.

That might just be our limited understanding of what “perfect” means, which could be an alibi for egregious behavior. We don’t want to go there, but—

Lawrence: But that’s the notion: how do we use our discrimination and say, “Okay, this is where it crosses a boundary for me”?

For instance, early on, one of my first teachers was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who was an alcoholic and was upfront about that. He never pretended not to be sexually involved with many different women. It wasn’t hidden in any way, nor was his drinking. His teachings were sublime.

I remember being at talks and programs with him and being totally impressed, and reading his works and being really informed by that kind of perspective—how much it helped me to understand things like the spiritual warrior, living in the world, spiritual materialism, meditation, and all these different things. His teachings and practices supported me.

But I couldn’t stand seeing him drink to the point where he was falling out of his chair, and I think that was intolerable to me. I couldn’t say that was the wrong thing, but it was wrong for me to try to follow a teacher who behaved that way.

Rick: I interviewed a very sweet gentleman named Sri M a few months ago. He is in India, and we discussed this point. His opinion was that these so-called “crazy wisdom teachers” who are doing reprehensible things and writing it off as crazy wisdom are, in his opinion, “works in progress.” That does not represent full enlightenment.

They had something—some awakening, some gift, some eloquence, perhaps—but they have more evolution yet to undergo, and we shouldn’t take that as an acceptable example of the full potential of the development of consciousness. I kind of resonate with that attitude, I think.

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: I guess on this point, I have friends who became totally disillusioned when they discovered their teacher, or other teachers, doing these sorts of things. I would encourage people not to become disillusioned. Again, we are all “works in progress.” As the Firesign Theatre said, “We’re all bozos on this bus,” and keep on truckin’—to coin another ’60s phrase.

Lawrence: Well, and there is that sense of developing the discrimination to be able to sort out the nature of the truth and the teachings, even the truth of what was being transmitted by that teacher, and to be able to hold on to that even if you are moving away from the teacher because they are abusive or they are this or that.

There are teachers who have a lot of Shakti, who have a lot of energy, and who are abusive. That, to me, is unacceptable. Just because they have a lot of energy doesn’t give them the right to abuse anybody or engage in sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or authoritarian abuse.

Just because they have a lot of energy doesn’t give them the right to abuse anybody.

To me, whatever those channels are, they have to be cleared so that a person is really a living presence that communicates. To me, the understanding of the boundless love, the boundless compassion, the boundless kindness, and the boundless patience that is the nature of our true self—that is the Divine within us—is essential.

As we become more and more merged in that and informed by that, the vehicle of mind and body becomes the expression of that, the flowering of that. That’s where we see, to me, the kind of presence of grace.

Too often, the ordinary mind is impressed by power and the raw use of power, rather than the humble presence of a beautifully compassionate, loving, kind being. That, to me, is much more revealing of their nature—of being one with, or in communion with, the infinite, and being able to walk around both with this body and this mind as a facet, a face, of the Divine.

The back door is open. The infinite is always pouring through. The infinite is informing our every moment, our experience, our life, how we look at the other—that there is no other. We are always looking at, “Oh! I am encountering another Divine face, another face of the infinite, of my own self standing before me or coming to me.”

Rick: One drum that I keep beating on this show is that I think it would be valuable—and I hope the show is contributing to this—for us, as a spiritual culture and as a larger culture, to gain greater and greater clarity about what enlightenment actually is and what an example of enlightenment looks like.

Firstly, it’s inspiring. It’s something to really shoot for if you realize how marvelous it can be. Secondly, it can safeguard the path and prevent one from getting hung up in trips that aren’t going to be so helpful. Obviously, we learn from everything, but if you can avoid spending twenty years being abused—Leah Remini has this whole show on A&E right now about Scientology and the horrors that she and others have gone through, how much money they have spent, and things like that—then that would be valuable.

Maybe Scientology is good for some people, but if we just had a clear understanding of what enlightenment and higher consciousness really are, it seems that it could smooth, safeguard, and accelerate the path for millions of people.

Lawrence: Well, that—and being able to reflect: What are we attracted to?

Rick: Yes, right.

Lawrence: Because there are people who think they want the trappings of power, the trappings of domination. We saw that in our presidential election. These external trappings can mean nothing and can absolutely be a red flag indicating what the abuses are and what the unseen mistake of that being might be.

We have to be self-reflective. What am I attracted to? Because I might be attracted to the very toxin, the very poison, that I need to confront. But it’s better if I confront it internally.

Rick: That’s a good point: What am I attracted to? We can’t totally blame the teacher or the organization if we are attracted to something toxic. Like attracts like. There is something in us that is causing us to be attracted to it.

It reminds me of this animated movie called A Bug’s Life. The funniest scene in the whole movie was in a restaurant. A waiter comes out with a platter of poop and says, “Who ordered the poo-poo platter?” And all these flies go, “Zooo!”

(Laughter.)

📚 The Inner Guru

Rick: Okay. Time to shift notes, I think, on that. Maybe we are getting towards the end. But there is an interesting thing that you said in your book. You said, when it comes to higher realms of consciousness—the heart chakra, the throat chakra, and I presume you would also indicate the Ajna chakra—involving the actual power of consciousness underlying the mind, the binding forces are greater.

So, it kind of reminded me of The Lord of the Rings, where the closer Frodo got to the pit of doom, or whatever it was called, the more difficult the temptation for him became. It was only through, I guess, his friend Sam that he managed to get there. Are you saying that the closer we get to the summit, so to speak, the steeper the climb and the greater the challenges, tests, and obstacles we may encounter?

Lawrence: Well, you are getting closer to the root of the mind, which means the root of bondage, because much of what we identify with is really the mind. When you are entering the levels that are representing the root nature of the mind, then it really is—like in that allegory, that vision of Shakti—having to move the mind through that.

That’s the power of the awakening of the Kundalini, the practice of awakened mantra that helps to move consciousness beyond the mind. The mind can only go so far, and then it’s just like trying to jump over your shadow: you can’t. So, it really takes this influx and support of the inner power of grace.

That’s why Kundalini Shakti is the inner Guru. It is the power of the Guru. It is the power of the one that can take you beyond duality into unity, take you beyond the mind into the infinite mind—infinite consciousness.

Rick: A lot of people these days say, “I don’t need a Guru. I don’t want a Guru. I will be my own Guru.” Do you think that’s a dicey situation, that one really does need, at least at certain critical stages of one’s process, an external Guru?

Lawrence: It’s important to reflect on who’s saying that. As we say it to ourselves, who is the one saying that? It’s usually the ego mind saying it. The ego mind always wants to make its own Guru, and for most people, that is their Guru.

Who is the one saying, “I am going to get up and do asanas in the morning, or I am going to practice meditation”? Then, “Oh, no, I don’t feel like it today. I’d better skip it. You know, I really wanted to do it.” It’s all the ego mind.

We are used to following the ego mind as the Guru. The problem with the ego mind as the Guru is that we can’t get beyond itself. That’s it—it’s trying to jump over its shadow.

At some point, there needs to be an influx of that grace, that power. Whether it’s awakening to the inner Guru, the ego mind then has to relate to that living presence of the Divine within: “That is the one whom I need to follow,” not just my ego mind.

That’s why, ultimately, all paths are paths to surrender. They are surrender to being informed, motivated, and directed by that consciousness that is beyond the ego mind. But first, the ego mind often relates to it as alien, separate, different, wary of, fearful of—all those different things.

Part of the archetype of the Guru-disciple relationship, and the aspect of it having to do with obedience, was that it was meant to be a reflection of how to get the ego mind to be completely surrendered to the living presence of the Divine within. The external Guru-disciple relationship was training for the ego mind to become completely obedient to the Divine within.

Unfortunately, the external is obviously subject to all kinds of distortions and perversions of that kind of authority, just as the inner relationship is subject to all kinds of delusions. Both of them are dangerous.

Rick: Potentially dangerous.

Lawrence: Yes.

Rick: Yes, so it’s the razor’s edge, isn’t it?

Lawrence: Yes.

Rick: Okay. This has been great. We have covered a lot of stuff. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that comes to mind, that you want to leave people with or discuss before we wrap up?

Lawrence: Yes. In the collection of poetry Kali’s Bazaar—and that’s a collection of poetry in which the infinite speaks to me in meditation and I do my best to be the scriber—one of the poems that just came to mind was:

Oh! What fun it is pretending there is we When we both know there isn’t even a me.

So, we have engaged in this convention, this pretense that there is a you and a me. We have played around with that for a couple of hours now, but the truth is—it’s just the one.

Rick: Yes. Interacting with the Self.

Lawrence: Yes.

Rick: Great! That’s a nice note to end on.

So, as usual, I will be putting up a page on BatGap with links to your websites and books. People can get in touch. Do you want to mention what kind of stuff you offer?

Lawrence: Yes. Through Anam Cara Meditation Foundation, we offer local programs—free programs—a couple of times a month. We have a retreat coming up at the Garrison Institute at the end of April, the last weekend, from April 28th through 30th.

Rick: It is in the Catskills or someplace?

Lawrence: Garrison Institute is on the Hudson River, in the beautiful Hudson Valley. The title of the retreat is Living Through Dying, and it’s going to be a retreat exploring all the ways—both literally, how do we live through dying, and the various levels at which we die.

How do we die to all the hopes and dreams? How does the ego cope with things and have to die to itself in the spiritual process? And literally, how do we prepare for death?

Much of our practices in yogic and meditative traditions were also very consciously a preparation for how consciousness moves through death to incarnate once again, and ways of understanding the teachings to support that and to open up awareness of the eternal that never dies.

So, that retreat, Living Through Dying, will be at the end of April. We also have a program titled Awakening Kundalini: The Path to Radical Freedom. It’s based on the book, and that will be a one-day program at the New York Open Center in Manhattan. That’s coming up on March 12th.

Rick: And then you are also a therapist of some sort, right?

Lawrence: Right.

Rick: So, you meet with clients, and do you do that just locally, or also over Skype?

Lawrence: Well, people come to me locally, but yes, I do a fair amount of Skype consultations, which opens things up all over the globe. I work with people from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, and Europe, as well as around the United States, who are going through various kinds of processes of spiritual transformation, awakening, and challenges.

They work with me once or twice, or they work with me regularly—whatever suits them. They contact me and set that up.

Rick: We have a page in past interviews called the Categorical Index. It attempts to categorize all the people I have interviewed, but we just created a new category called Spiritual Emergency Help because we get so many requests for that.

Lawrence: Well, there are spiritual emergence networks. People get referred to me through them, and I refer people back to those for local resources. There is a spiritual emergency network in Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia, and those kinds of resources are on my website, thesoulsjourney.com.

Rick: And then there are others who deal specifically with Kundalini, maybe not so much in terms of emergencies, but Bonnie Greenwell, Joan Harrigan, and others.

Help is out there. People need it.

Okay. Great. Thanks.

Let me just make some general wrap-up points that I always make. I have been speaking with Lawrence Edwards, and I have a page on BatGap where you can get in touch with him.

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews. We will be coming up on 400 next year, and we intend to keep doing this. So, if you would like to be notified of future ones, there is a place to sign up to be notified by email.

There is also access to an audio podcast. There is a link for that on the website if you want to subscribe to it. Check out the different menus. There are various things, and we keep adding to it, so just explore around.

So, thanks for listening or watching. We will see you for the next one, which should be in about a week. Thanks, Lawrence.

Lawrence: Thank you, Rick. Great talking with you.

Rick: I really appreciate it.