Robert Svoboda Interview

Summary

The discussion explores kundalini, Tantra, spiritual crisis, and the possible roles and risks of alcohol or other substances in spiritual practice. It also examines possession, inherited patterns, emotional influence, and the challenge of distinguishing genuine transformation from indulgence or mental disturbance.

Questions This Interview Explores

• Can alcohol or other substances ever have a spiritual use?
• How can authentic Tantra be distinguished from spiritualized hedonism?
• What does possession mean in spiritual and psychological terms?
• How can sudden kundalini awakening be mistaken for mental illness?
• How can spiritual opening leave a person vulnerable to harmful influences?

Key takeaways

• A substance that opens awareness for one person may dull or damage another.
• Tantric practices require discernment and discipline, not just ritualized indulgence.
• Possession can involve emotions, ideologies, ancestors, or disembodied influences.
• Spiritual openness may expose a person to both beneficial and harmful forces.
• Inherited biological and psychological patterns can shape behavior across generations.
• Sudden kundalini awakening may disrupt the nervous system and resemble mental illness.
• Awareness of mortality can bring seriousness and clarity to spiritual practice.

Transcript

❤️ Meeting Vimalananda

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer, and my guest today is Robert Svoboda. Robert is the first white member of Kenya’s Pokot tribe, and the first non-Indian ever to graduate from a college of Ayurveda and be licensed to practice Ayurveda in India, where he lived for more than a decade. During and after his formal Ayurvedic training, he was tutored in Ayurveda, Yoga, Jyotish, Tantra, and other forms of classical Indian lore by his mentor, the Aghori Vimalananda. For a decade, he was involved with thoroughbred horses as Vimalananda’s authorized racing agent. The author of more than a dozen books, since 1985 he has divided his time between India and other lands. I’ll be listing his books on my website. But welcome, Robert. Thanks.

Robert: Good morning.

Rick: Good morning. Robert was out— is out— in L.A. and just experienced an earthquake last night, so his world got rocked a bit. We were just talking about that. We’re going to be talking mostly about kundalini today, but there are a couple of points in your introduction here that people might have questions about. Firstly, the point about racehorses. What was that all about?

Robert: Well, Vimalananda, my mentor, was a native of Bombay, Mumbai, and his family had been there for fifteen generations. They were quite prominent until the generation immediately preceding his. But he was a very versatile man. He had studied many things, Eastern and Western alike, and he was very familiar with animals as well as plants and minerals, and so on.

He was very fond of horses. He enjoyed betting on his horses, but even more than that, he enjoyed looking at the possibilities in a colt or a filly and seeing how he could, with appropriate training, bring out those possibilities.

He was not a trainer himself; he had to work with other trainers, but he exerted a strong influence on how they worked with a horse. We would use Ayurvedic or homeopathic medicines to assist in getting the horses and the mares into shape so that they could do what they were supposed to do at the racetrack, which is run and win.

Rick:(Laughs.) Huh, interesting.

Robert: I value that time tremendously, not because I made a lot of money. I never bet. I have never bet on a horse race. Even if I am in Las Vegas, I will put one dollar into a slot machine, just symbolically. But just learning about horses, I learned a tremendous amount. I love horses and have fortunately been around them a lot, and I still get a chance to ride periodically. I was out galloping in Costa Rica just last month.

But even more, learning about the racecourse was, for me at least, and for him as well, I think, a microcosm of the entire gamut of human culture. You have virtuous people and non-virtuous people, people who are interested in horses not only for winning but interested in horses as horses and wanting to treat them properly, and the ones who didn’t care about that at all and treated them very cruelly.

You had the ones who made money and held onto it, who were almost nobody, and the ones who made money and lost it, who were sizable in number. And the ones who lost it only—that was the largest number, of course. It was a valuable part of my education.

🕊️ Alcohol, soma, and spiritual perspective

Rick: Interesting. My wife’s father was a gambler, and she spent a lot of time at the racetrack when she was young and also loves horses. Anyway, that is kind of incidental. But you mentioned in one of your YouTube videos I listened to that your mentor was a connoisseur of whiskey; he enjoyed drinking whiskey somewhat.

As the son of an alcoholic and someone who’s been on the spiritual path for forty-five years, it’s a little hard for me to wrap my head around that. I don’t reject it, but it’s hard for me to understand why someone who is, quote-unquote, enlightened, or in a higher state or something, would find that whiskey could in any way enhance his experience. I should think it would almost invariably dull the mind. It’s considered tamasic and so on, so maybe you could riff on that just a little bit before we get into kundalini.

Robert: I’m speaking here about his opinion. His opinion was that many of the things that are written in the Vedas are true, but they are not necessarily true in exactly the way that they are written there. Because, of course, writing about something that is not directly a part of the physical world and trying to use ordinary human language is not an easy thing to do.

So, when, for example, the Vedas would talk about soma, the uplifting effect of soma, and how it could take you into the astral world and put you into a place where you would be able to commune with reality much more directly, he was very much of the opinion that the soma that the Vedic rishis were taking was something that we would never be able to replicate ourselves, as far as that substance is concerned.

But as far as the effect is concerned, that is something that it is possible to replicate, provided you, as an individual, understand how your organism works, how your physiology works, and find what soma works for you: the thing that uplifts you, the thing that sends you into the astral world, the thing that allows you to communicate not only with gods and goddesses and so on, but with the supreme reality more easily.

Rick: And whiskey did that for him? (Laughs.)

Robert: Whiskey did that for him. It doesn’t do that for me, but other things work better for me. For him, it worked very well. On dozens of occasions, I would be sitting there pouring him whiskey. Not a lot at a time, just a little bit. He would be sipping on it. As he sipped, his awareness would become more open, his communication would become more refined and sophisticated, and the expanse, breadth, and depth of his vision would become perceptibly augmented.

Of course, one of the reasons why, for him and for many people, one might choose to employ a substance for facilitating this is that, suppose you were living, as he did, in Bombay. Bombay is a very difficult place to live. He used to call it moha mayi nagari, the city that is completely filled with delusion.

A big part of his philosophy was the concept of the big Sanskrit word rnanubandhana. Rna means debt, and in this context, karmic debt: things that you owe to yourself, to other people, to other animals, to places, to your family, and to your teachers.

Bandha means a thing that binds you down. So, you’re bound down by these karmic obligations, these karmic accounts that have to be settled. And of course, things can only be settled at certain times, so sometimes you have to bide quite a bit of time waiting for the opportunity to settle a certain debt.

Rick: So, anyway, rnanubandhana, you were saying.

Robert: Because he had to interact with people in Bombay, and he had to interact with them in a way that was meaningful—and because interacting with people in Bombay is such a complicated thing—it was very useful for him to be able to do that and then employ a substance that could send him back into the place where he normally existed and where he preferred to exist.

That allowed him to attain the perspective that he required in order to be able to continue living in a place where he felt like he needed to live in order to deal with those karmic obligations.

Possession and Tantra

Rick: In a piece that you sent me about kundalini, you talked about the tendency to individuate, for ahamkara to become more calcified egoism, and you referred to that as maya shakti. Then you said that the flip side of that, the reverse, is chit shakti, where the force turns toward the spiritual.

I wonder if, somewhat possibly, the appeal of alcohol is that it relaxes the rigidity of the ego and, in some cases, allows people to taste a more ego-free, unrestricted space. Which is obviously, in the long run, for most people, counterproductive because it damages the brain and results in greater and greater bondage. But maybe that’s why people find it alluring. In more homeopathic doses, maybe it has that effect without deleterious influence.

Robert: Yes, I certainly think that’s part of it. And in his case, another reason why he employed alcohol as a substance is because he was a longtime worshiper of Tara, who is one of the ten Mahavidyas, one of the ten great embodiments of wisdom, shaktis, from which the universe is generated, by which the universe remains, and into which the universe will be resolved.

Like Tara—or Smashan Tara, the Tara of the cremation ground—she is very similar to Kali, both iconographically and in the sense that she is fond of blood and alcohol. By drinking, he was also, in addition to drinking himself in the context of his own personality, making that drinking an offering directly to that goddess.

I’m deliberately not using the word Hindu because, as Vimalananda pointed out, the word Hindu is not an Indian word; it is a Persian word. The ancient Persians didn’t use S; they used H. So it’s a corruption of the word Sindu, which is the original name, or the Sanskrit name, for the River Indus. Anybody who lived in the place where the Indus flowed, which they called Hindustan, they called Hindus. We could just as easily have been called Sindus if they had been able to use S.

So I don’t use the word Hindu because, as he pointed out, Hindu is not even an Indian word. It’s a word employed by the Persians, who sent a bunch of conquerors over here. Why employ a word that was imposed upon you by your previous master?

Rick: Right.

Robert: A large part of Indian religion has always involved being possessed. That means allowing personalities other than your personality to enter you and take you over temporarily. There are many different forms, and as Fred Smith has found during the extensive research he did for his book The Self-Possessed, you can find mentions of possession everywhere, including in the Vedas.

Often, Vimalananda would permit himself to be taken over by a goddess or a deity, a dead saint, or a force of nature. Then he would be in a position to directly offer something through his own body to the personality that had taken him over.

Of course, if you go to India, you will see this. You have to look, but you can see that in the Himalayas, Garhwal, and Himachal, there are still oracles. Suppose you need advice about something. You go to the temple, where there is the deity, and the deity has an oracle. You request the oracle to give you some advice.

In Kerala, for example, they have something called theyyam, which consists of specific rituals in which low-caste people become possessed at the behest of high-caste people. While they are possessed, however, the low-caste people are embodied as gods and goddesses, and they are worshiped by the high-caste people.

Rick: Interesting.

Robert: In any state of India, you can find this sort of possession ritual and worship. It is very much part of what a large plurality of the population normally does and normally believes. But you don’t hear about it because nowadays it is regarded as being—not very Vedantic.

Rick: What you’ve just said raises a number of interesting points. I have heard instances of people consuming various substances and doing various things in the name of Tantra, which kind of bastardizes the whole thing and cheapens it. It becomes a form of hedonism without any real spiritual significance.

Then, just to bring up the other point, about possession: this is something found in most ancient cultures and even in modern ones. We have all kinds of channelers these days, and there was Edgar Cayce, and there are the ayahuasca people. There are all sorts of instances where people are connecting with, and perhaps allowing, some entity of some sort to come through them and provide wisdom.

Of course, there’s the dark side of that, too, where a lot of times you don’t know whom you’re inviting. Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you’re smart. (Laughs.) There has been all kinds of devil worship and all kinds of strange stuff that muddies the reputation of this sort of thing.

Robert: Well, absolutely. I have spent quite a bit of time in Kashi, or Benares, or Varanasi, and you see all kinds of people coming there claiming they are this wonderful sadhu or that wonderful person, and so on. They are smoking chillums left and right.

As Vimalananda pointed out, give somebody a chillum or a bottle of whiskey or something, and within a few minutes you will find out exactly what is really going on with them. I remember visiting Tarapith, which is in West Bengal and is the chief center of Tara worship in India.

There were three, four, or five so-called Tantrics doing nothing but drinking cheap alcohol and wandering around, doing what people normally do when they drink alcohol: talking loudly, arguing, thinking about getting into a fight, becoming really effusive, and finally lying down, snoring, and trying to sleep it all off.

That was extremely annoying. I got over being disappointed by things like that a long time ago because there are so many charlatans in India, and I have met so many of them.

But just the very fact that here you are in a fine place where you could sit down and actually spend some time, and be aware of the fact that whether you like it or not, there is a possibility that an earthquake, a tornado, a lightning bolt, an eagle carrying a turtle, or something else might fall on your head and that would be the end of you.

So here is your opportunity to remind yourself that in the world in which you and I are living, mortality is everywhere. Mortality, in fact, can creep up on you and take you away at any moment.

But instead of that, you get into a pattern, as these guys did. The pattern is that you get up and convince yourself, Yes, I am a big Tantric. I’m going to do this, I do that, and I’m now going to do this. All you have done is create a pattern that is not a very efficient, effective, or harmonious pattern. Then you are just reinforcing that pattern.

Especially in the case of alcohol, it’s very easy—and I think it happens the vast majority of the time—for people to attract certain things to themselves. There is a good reason why alcohol used to be called spirits. You are attracting disembodied things to yourself that very much like alcohol.

It’s not very long before those things are taking you over. It doesn’t take that long before your own personality has lost a large amount of what would permit it to exist independently on its own. Now it’s dependent on being propped up by all these other influences.

Auras, entities, and inherited patterns

Rick: You said that a sudden kundalini awakening can short out the nervous system and blow a hole in the person’s aura, and that the aura’s job is to insulate us psychically from one another and from disembodied influences. What is the actual function of the aura?

This whole notion of disembodied entities might seem esoteric to some people, fanciful, mythological, or whatever. But, in my opinion, these entities very much do exist. I’ve had a few little experiences of them myself, but it’s natural to have a shield. Like in Star Wars, there needs to be some sort of protective shield. Perhaps many people who are mentally disturbed, or even criminally insane, have lost that shield and are just tools of some darker forces.

Robert: That happens quite often, and of course sometimes it’s even more complicated than that. Sometimes they become tools of forces that are not so dark, but at the same time they are also tools of forces that are dark. Sometimes those things are part of the same situation. Occasionally, they may actually be channeling something positive and beneficial, and sometimes they are channeling something that is not positive at all but is pretending to be something positive.

Rick: Like the good angel, bad angel thing on the shoulder.

Robert: Exactly. There’s no reason why, simply because you’re open to one, you’re not going to be open to the other. You are going to be open to both of them.

Usually, when people think about possession, they’re thinking about disembodied human beings or demons. But you can also get possessed by anger. You can get possessed by lust. You can get possessed by any emotion. You can get possessed by ancestors.

You don’t have to think of your ancestors as still existing to realize that if you are getting genes from your ancestors—and nowadays, thank God, people have finally discovered epigenetics—it’s not just the genes. It’s the pattern of which genes are going to turn off and turn on that can be passed down sometimes three or four generations.

So if you have someone who is an alcoholic, it’s very common—we know that there is a type of alcoholism that is often passed down from father to son. It’s not so much the genes themselves, probably, as it is the pattern of which genes are turned on and which genes are turned off, and the circumstances under which a gene might be turned on or turned off.

You can be influenced by mind viruses. Communism is something that took over the minds of large numbers of people. Fascism took over the minds of large numbers of people. Capitalism has taken over the minds of tens of millions of people. Consumerism has taken over the minds of hundreds of millions of people.

Rick: Nazism.

Robert: Capitalism. Nazism. Exactly. And I found something interesting. I like to keep up with everything because I have to deal with all kinds of different people.

I went to my great guru, my maha-guru, which is Google. It even starts with a G. I looked up Billiken. The Billiken was an image that came in a dream to a woman in 1908 in the United States. In 1908, somebody in Japan got very interested in this Billiken and installed an image of it in a temple in Yokohama. So it went from being a dream in the mind of a woman in the United States to becoming a deity in Japan within the space of just a few months. And now it is the mascot, which is almost kind of like a deity, of a Jesuit university in the United States.

Rick: Funny. How do you spell it if someone wants to look it up?

Robert: B-I-L-L-I-K-E-N.

Inheritance and reincarnation

Rick: It’s interesting what you are saying about forces taking over collective mentality, collective consciousness: consumerism, Nazism, all those different things. And also, there’s something in the Bible about the sins of the father being visited upon the sons.

Robert: Up to the seventh generation.

Rick: Yeah.

Robert: That seventh-generation part is interesting to me because of the racecourse. When you are at the racecourse, you spend a lot of time looking at the Stud Book. All the racehorses are derived from three foundation sires: the Darley Arabian, the Byerly Turk, and the Godolphin Arabian. Ninety percent of all racehorses today are descended from Eclipse, a horse who was foaled during an eclipse and never lost a race.

Suppose you have a thoroughbred and you mate it with a non-thoroughbred. Then you have to ask yourselves how long it is going to be before it becomes a thoroughbred. It turns out that it will be the eighth generation, because by the eighth generation, you now have less than one percent of the blood of the non-thoroughbred that you mated with in the first place.

So when they were talking about the seventh generation, it was not just symbolic. If you really wanted to get rid of that genetic influence, it is going to take you seven generations to do it, just from the perspective of getting that genetic material diluted sufficiently.

Rick: We think of genetic material, of course, as being physical, but perhaps genetics are just a physical representation of an even subtler realm. For instance, in terms of reincarnation, if you reincarnate and bring in certain qualities from a previous life, obviously there’s no way that, physically, your DNA could be carried from one life to the next. But there’s some subtler vehicle that carries it along and then manifests a physical structure, physical DNA appropriate to its tendencies.

Robert: Or as appropriate to its tendencies as can be the case in the context of the genetic material of the father and mother.

That is one of the places where complications start for human beings. You have these tendencies that are part of you, that you want to continue to express in your next lifetime. You have this momentum buildup, and this momentum has built up from your expressing certain tendencies, whatever they might be, as a musician or whatever. You are looking for a womb that will provide an appropriate milieu in which you can continue to express yourself.

Rick: They say you can’t choose your parents, but you do choose your parents.

Robert: You do choose your parents. The usual case, however, is that just because you choose your parents in the context of one thing that is essential for your current incarnation, it doesn’t mean that everything will fit perfectly.

Sometimes you find that the fit is perfect. Sometimes, as in my case, I never felt that I fit in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. I got out of there as soon as I could. My family never understood why I was there, and I never understood why I was there. We found a way to relate to one another in a healthy way, but it took a lot more effort.

When I arrived in India, I hated it at first. Then, after a while, it was so familiar that I started wondering why I hadn’t been born there.

Rick: Speaking of perfection, wouldn’t you say that if we zoom back enough and realize that we’re swimming in an ocean of intelligence, everything happens for a reason? If you look at it deeply enough, how could there be accidents in an ocean of infinite intelligence?

Robert: I agree entirely. I do not believe that this was an accident at all. It’s just that when we are thinking about how human beings get to where they are, sometimes the result will be because there were influences that promoted what you normally were trying to do. And sometimes it will be because there were influences that tried very hard to dissuade you from what you were trying to do.

I think of there being three main levels of inheritance that everybody grows up with. One is the inheritance that you bring with you from your previous incarnations. One is the inheritance you bring with you from your mother and father, and their parents, and their parents. And one is the effect of the culture in which you live.

Language is extremely important. Human language is, to me, a fundamental and absolutely required foundational element for culture of all kinds. The languages you start out with—each language has its own flavor, its own history, and its own attitudes.

As Vimalananda used to say, English is very good for commercial things and for minutely describing very specific things in the external world; it’s not very good for bringing all of those things together. Sanskrit is much better for bringing all of those things together.

Polarization and consensus reality

Rick: I always think in terms of a sort of vertical strata of creation, and how the surface expression of things we see on the news is representative of much deeper layers of reality. It seems to me that there is a sort of epic battle taking place on subtle levels between various positive and negative forces. The gods and the demons are always battling it out.

The battle seems intense these days, as if positive and negative forces are both increasing in their strength and distinctness. Those puppeteers are polarizing humanity in a variety of ways. Do you have any comments on that line of thinking?

Robert: If we do nothing but recognize that nothing would exist without duality, and if we look at duality, we use the terms positive and negative. But looked at from another perspective, it really is nothing except electricity.

The nature of something that is dual, like a positive charge and an electron over here and no electron—a hole in a conductor—over here, is that these two will be attracted to each other, but at the same time there will be conditions under which they will repel one another.

When they repel one another, the more the repelling force is allowed to activate, the greater the polarization of charge will be on each side, until it reaches a point where either you have a lightning bolt or a spark crosses the gap, or somehow that polarization is resolved.

There is quite a bit of polarization happening. It’s quite possible that polarization will continue until there is some sort of event that causes the polarization to resolve again.

I think there is increasing polarization, and it looks as if there is something in the environment that is facilitating that. We have had the polarization of different types of totalitarian societies, and now it is very difficult to get anything done because people are so invested in their idea of how things should be.

I am reminded of a book that Ouspensky wrote about his studies with Gurdjieff back in Russia in and around the time of the Revolution and World War I. Gurdjieff said that it was extremely fortunate that they were able to meet at a time when such a great crisis was happening in Russia, because it was permitting the consensus reality that normally would make it very difficult for this kind of knowledge to appear.

All of these people were completely riveted by the war and the Revolution. That allowed them not to be influenced by the pressure of consensus reality, and it allowed them to see things more clearly, more genuinely, more uniquely.

Nowadays, of course, we have not only this polarization happening, but an even more dramatic form of consensus reality in the form of the internet. I use the internet every day, but it is its own form of externalized consensus reality that is dragging everybody into it and creating what I think has the potential to be an extremely pathological and bizarre result.

What is kundalini?

Rick: This might be a good segue into talking more explicitly about kundalini. Why don’t you start by just defining it? Most people understand kundalini as some kind of energy that resides at the base of the spine and can be awakened, and it rises up the spine, and when it rises up you get enlightenment. But I think there’s probably a lot more to it.

Robert: First of all, language is a very powerful thing. And the very word kundalini—the more people that use the word kundalini, the more they apply their own concept as to what that word means. That concept will adhere to whatever it is that kundalini really is. It will adhere to the outside, so that the more time goes on, the more people look at kundalini and see the adherence of the different concepts that people have projected in her direction, rather than seeing her.

Rick: And will you please explain why you’re using the word her?

Robert: I’m using the word her not because she should, per se, be confused with a human female, but because in our universe we employ the concept of her-ness and femininity to represent that energy and that protoplasm and those hormones and that organization of a living being that can reproduce.

Rick: Whenever I have heard anything about kundalini, it’s not presented as merely some sort of abstract energy, but as being intelligent and having a marvelously intricate way of transforming us. If it’s intelligent, then we could certainly imagine it being a her or a him, having some kind of personification.

Robert: We can, definitely. Wherever there’s a him, there will always be a her. Where there’s a her, there will always be a him. We’re living in a world of duality.

There is a lot of use in looking at it from the perspective of Shakti and Shaktiman, or

Shiva: a principle of intelligence that maintains stability of intent and position, and another principle that is more dynamic.

It’s just like what we see in the atomic world: you have the nucleus, protons, and neutrons, and you have electrons. The electrons are always moving, and that’s their job. The protons and neutrons are doing nothing but sitting there and letting the electrons move around them, and that’s their job.

Rick: The protons have a positive charge and electrons have a negative charge, and it keeps the whole show going.

Robert: Everything goes around. Relatively speaking, the nucleus is not moving, and the electrons are moving around it. Relatively speaking, the Shakti is moving, and Shiva or Shaktiman is not moving.

That’s the dynamic that has been around since the days of the Big Bang, and that’s the dynamic in which you and I are existing. That’s the dynamic that is the kundalini dynamic.

The kundalini shakti, and what you referred to earlier as ahamkara shakti. Aham means I. Ahamkara just means the thing that creates aham.

If you wanted to visualize kundalini as coming from the bottom and going up to the top, we should think of ahamkara as coming from the top and going down to the bottom. Ahamkara starts out as shakti that is completely not identified with anything limited other than itself, but that progressively becomes more and more limited as it comes down and gets individuated into, in our case, the human being.

And the reason why they talk about kundalini being asleep is that, in the average person, the vast majority of the shakti in the body is being employed to keep the organism functioning in the context in which the organism has evolved. We have evolved over many millions of years for the purpose, in my opinion, of being able to act as an environment in which consciousness can manifest itself.

The human organism is an environment in which consciousness can manifest itself.

Rick: Beautiful. Nicely put.

Robert: It has taken a long time for us to get here, going through various stages and kinds of things, and to get to a point where we can have awareness—awareness of things that we can be aware of, like the fact that there is something other than our organisms.

The human organism is made up of roughly 100 trillion cells, only 10 percent of which are actually human.

Rick: Ninety percent of them are various bacteria and other microscopic organisms that are completely nonhuman, but on whom our lives depend.

Robert: On whom our lives depend. They have awareness, although their awareness is not the same kind of awareness that we have. We do have to negotiate with them in the context of what we eat, and if they are working well, we think more clearly. If they’re not working well, we definitely do not think clearly.

So, they’re an important part of who we actually are, even though we say they are separate.

Individuation and the return to unity

Rick: If reincarnation is true, then it again goes beyond the physical level. There’s something which carries a package of information from one vehicle to the next when the first vehicle no longer functions and we need a new one. Perhaps the jiva or something is the core of what we are as an individual.

Robert: Yes, except for the fact that we can’t even think of a jiva necessarily as being individual, because sometimes you will end up having one jiva manifesting itself in more than one human being, and sometimes you’ll have more than one jiva manifesting in the same human being.

Humans like very much to hear, I am an individual. This is what ahamkara is doing. The job of ahamkara is just to find things that we believe are mine: this is mine; here’s my shirt; here are my glasses; here is my knowledge; here is my spouse; here is my house.

Rick: There’s a Talking Heads song that has lyrics like that.

Robert: This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. Same as it ever was.

The nature of this shakti is that it is attracted to the nucleus, but it can’t quite get there. The kundalini shakti is looking for the supreme reality to connect to. But it can’t find the supreme reality because it happens now to be in the body.

While it’s in the womb, it has to create all of the different limbs, all of the different connections among the cells and neurons. Its attention becomes monopolized by multiplicity and manifestation. The more that it goes into this reality, and the more that it becomes familiar with the five elements—earth, water, fire, air, and space—the less it becomes able to remember what it was like to be aware of that reality that does not have any limitations applied to it.

That’s why people suggest that kundalini is sleeping. It’s not that she’s forgotten that reality; it’s just that she’s only very slightly aware of that reality because she’s aware of so many other realities that are necessary in order for us to exist.

Rick: As I understand it, the word ahamkara means I-maker. Could we say that there are two fundamental forces in the universe? One is the I-maker force, which is responsible for individuation since the time of the Big Bang. Then a second fundamental force can begin to function in a conscious way, reversing the process. It takes a sophisticated nervous system to begin to wake up to the notion that, ultimately, I am unbounded; I am universal consciousness.

Robert: Jnaneshvar Maharaj wrote in Amritanubhava, The Nectar of Experience, that the supreme reality wanted to perceive itself, but it could not do so because there was nothing like space or time. The supreme reality therefore created the universe to act as a mirror in which it could see itself, because no human being can see itself without a mirror.

The universe acts as that mirror. According to this theory, the universe decided that, as a result of its desire to perceive itself, it had to create within itself a part of itself that believed it was different. That was the moment of the Big Bang.

As a result of that sudden expansion, there was immediately afterward an opposite return of awareness in the direction of attempting to find that unity again. But now it is attempting to find unity in the context of this giant field of apparent separation.

Ever since then, the entire universe has been trying to return to that state of unity, but unable to do so because of all the forces generated at that moment of separation so that the mirror could be created.

The human being is acting as that very mirror. Within the microcosm that is the human being, one can, under certain conditions, act as a mirror for consciousness and have one’s awareness be freed, at least temporarily, from all of those limitations that have been added in the ensuing billions of years.

So that the supreme in the external and the supreme in the internal can recognize that they are, in fact, identical.

Rick: It seems to me that what you end up with is something more than the original unity, because unity can be a living reality. The universe seems to be forming a more and more sophisticated instrument through which it can know itself, human beings being one.

Robert: Alfred Jarry defined God as the tangential point between zero and infinity, and I believe that is exactly what the universe is doing. It’s trying to employ us to facilitate an awareness of the fact that the creativity inherent in the universe can best display itself when unity and diversity meet at that boundary where both are present but neither is present also.

For some people, the right thing is to sit down, do their sadhana, awaken kundalini, send it out the top of their head, and return to wherever it is they came from. But for other people, the right thing is to have kundalini progressively identify less with their individuality and identify more with unity, and then let there be a dynamic interplay between those two forms of identification.

Integration, limitation, and humility

Rick: You said that health and longevity require that ahamkara identify strongly with the organism so that sufficient prana will enliven the body, while spiritual life requires that ahamkara relinquish most of it.

No incarnate being can be either wholly worldly or wholly spiritual. Too much spirit burns the world out of you and makes it impossible to retain your body; too much attachment drowns your consciousness in worldliness.

Robert: If you want to stay in the world, there is always going to be some grease on the palm. There is always going to be a blind spot. As my Jyotisha guru likes to say, a real guru makes one mistake every ten thousand years. But that’s still one mistake.

Vishvamitra still made mistakes. All of the rishis have made mistakes. All of the various deities have made mistakes. Jesus Christ on the cross asked why he had been forsaken. There was that tiny moment when he couldn’t see it anymore. And that was Jesus Christ—that’s not you and me.

Everybody has that. There is no use pretending that we’ve come to the end of history or the end of the Vedas, or the end of anything. As soon as you say you are enlightened, you are probably demonstrating that you are not.

Rick: Don’t you have moksha and words like that?

Robert: Moksha means you have been freed. Mukti means freedom. My mentor used to say, Moham kshayati iti mokshah: moksha means that your delusion has been dissipated.

Enlightenment means that you have worked hard and gotten the grace of your gurus and benefactors so that the weight of the karmas on you has become less. Once you become lighter, you are able to see more clearly. You are able to have your energy move more clearly. You can connect more readily. Things move more smoothly. That doesn’t mean that you’ve become supreme. It does mean you are now able to function as you should be functioning.

Rick: There is no penultimate state beyond which there is no possibility of further refinement or clarification. There’s always a next horizon.

Robert: Whatever experience or concept you might have, there is some other way in which that can be transcended. I don’t see that there is any end to that, any more than there is an end to the universe.

✨ Awakening and the chakras

Rick: For most people, kundalini is a delicate, long, drawn-out, perhaps arduous and intense process, full of potential pitfalls and sidetracks. What happens when kundalini begins to awaken?

Robert: This really is individual. It is absolutely different for each person. That is why it is unfortunate that people try to talk about an ordinary or normal kundalini experience.

When you know the word kundalini, and have some idea about the chakras, that offers your awareness and your ahamkara something to identify with. Maybe you should have awakened kundalini without bothering to awaken any of the chakras. Maybe you should have only awakened one chakra.

You don’t necessarily have to pay attention to anything other than the supreme reality. What is important is that you have to get your prana to circulate in the central channel, what they call the Sushumna.

Rick: So kundalini can awaken without you really knowing anything about kundalini, and it can progress through the various chakras without you knowing anything about chakras. You can shoot for the highest first—the supreme reality.

Robert: Yes. That may work for some people and may not work for others. The chakras are useful because they give you a framework. The chakras definitely exist as centers of energy, but the chakras as described in various texts have to be created. They don’t exist in the ordinary organism. They have to be created by the energy going to those locations and enlivening the potential chakra that exists in the subtle body.

Rick: So the average person who hasn’t enlivened any of them has them in the subtle body in a latent or dormant form?

Robert: In seed form, because they have not sprouted yet.

Suppose there is a seed at the heart chakra in the subtle part of the subtle body. Being a seed, it is very active. Even though the seed itself is not displaying what it can do, it is radiating energy in all directions. That is picked up by the rest of the subtle body, which transmits it into the pranic body.

The physical body is, in Sanskrit, the annamaya kosha. It’s made out of food, nourished by food, made sick by food, and made well by food. The pranic body is the pranamaya kosha. The manomaya kosha is made out of thoughts, emotions, concepts, memories, and all kinds of things like that.

The mind is the area in which we represent the five elements in nonphysical form. The body is where we represent the five elements in physical form, and prana communicates between the two.

Rick: Ties the whole thing together.

Robert: Now, prana is an expression of the supreme reality. It is extremely intelligent, although intelligent in a limited way from the perspective of the body. Especially for bacteria, but also for human cells, prana is God because it provides all of us with vitality.

Nature’s agenda is that species should evolve, and what evolution implies is that the species should reproduce. At puberty, the organism begins to individuate in a new way. Sexual energy is central to the continuation of life, but it is also energy that can be redirected toward spiritual transformation.

Rick: Ideally, when hormones and sexual desires begin to become strong in adolescence, one is introduced to the idea that there is a higher purpose to this energy aside from procreation.

Robert: Exactly. We humans are microcosms. Even if you did nothing but introduce the concept that you are a small unit of the big universe, you are reflecting everything that goes on in that universe.

Rick: The sexual energy is the same energy one uses to awaken the chakras and rise to higher levels of spirituality. It should be used responsibly and not just squandered.

Robert: Absolutely. Desire is desire. You can take a specific desire and, if you alter its direction slightly, you may end up in a very different place than you would have if you simply followed it according to your personal karmas, the karmas of your parents, and the karmas of your culture.

The goal is to be as transparent as possible to the supreme reality while at the same time being a functional human being.

✨ The danger of premature awakening

Rick: What advice and cautionary notes would you give people who want to awaken their kundalini?

Robert: My advice is: don’t. You absolutely do not have any clue as to what you might unlock in yourself, and you have no clue as to whether you’ll be able to put a leash on it.

My advice to people who think they would like to awaken kundalini is: don’t.

Rick: You say once awakened, kundalini cannot be put back to sleep.

Robert: Exactly. In my personal case, I had no idea at all about kundalini when, just a few weeks after I turned sixteen, I took LSD for the first time. All of a sudden I knew what prana was. I understood how prana was moving, and I understood that if I allowed myself, I could simply depart from my body.

I also understood that if I did that at this stage, there was a good chance that I wouldn’t be able to find my way back. So I spent quite a number of hours in between leaving and not leaving. That created tensions in my pranic body that took many years to work out.

I took LSD perhaps one hundred or one hundred and fifty times. It was the only thing I knew of at that time, in the ’60s in Oklahoma, that could expose me to an environment I had never known existed before.

I graduated from college after two years, went to Africa, and crossed Africa overland from the west coast to the east coast. I was invited to join the Pokot tribe, and something happened in that initiation. I can still feel Africa in my organism.

While recuperating in the Ivory Coast, I read Autobiography of a Yogi. I flew to England, crossed to India, got robbed in India, hated the place, went to Nepal, and loved the place.

Then I heard the Dalai Lama was going to give teachings in Bodhgaya. This was January 1974. His Holiness, and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche as well, made a tremendous impression on me. I saw him and thought, I don’t know what he’s got, and I don’t know how he got it, but I’ve got to have some of that myself.

I could feel it. It was not a matter of thinking. It was a matter of the prana, the kundalini in my organism, aligning with that and perceiving at an intuitive, gut level that this was the direction to go in.

I ended up in Bombay, entered the Ayurvedic College, and a year and a half later met Vimalananda. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew there was this energy in me that I had to do something good with and try to hold together while I was doing it.

It did not manifest in me as kriyas or heat. It manifested in a different way. It was completely transformative, but not transformative in a positive way until I got an idea of how to make it positive. And that took a few years.

Was that an illusion? In a sense it was an illusion. It was something I was experiencing that I could not have explained to anybody. But this energy had taken over and was moving me clearly in the direction I needed to end up, without my knowing how I was going to get there.

Rick: So you’re saying that perhaps your LSD use awakened kundalini, and that once it was awakened, that energy began to direct the course of your life in ways your peers back in Oklahoma could never have imagined.

Robert: It’s important to draw a distinction between the physical kundalini, the pranic kundalini, and the mental kundalini. You are seeing self-definition happening at all these different levels.

Ahamkara and kundalini are the same thing. The only difference is that one is directed toward greater manifestation in the externalized multiplicity of the physical world, and the other is directed in the opposite direction.

There is the pravritti marga, extending outward in all directions, and the nivritti marga, bringing back in. There is continuous expansion and contraction, externalization and internalization, and that happens at every level.

When your awareness becomes disconnected from your individuality and becomes connected to the cosmic or ultimate, to the extent that your awareness is able to connect to that reality, kundalini is awakened and connected to that reality.

Robert: The prana kundalini is the kundalini that wants to get into the central channel and move properly. My mentor used to say there are two basic ways to develop spiritually: the right nostril and the left nostril. The right nostril is the sun; the left nostril is the moon. The right nostril is jnana; the left nostril is bhakti. Eventually, you need both of them, because that is the only way you are going to get into the central channel.

If your right nostril gets activated, you are going to burn. If your left nostril gets activated, you will get cold, constricted, frightened, and terrorized. You will grab hold of some concept that you can use as a base for yourself. Maybe you’ll never let go.

I have seen many people who have had partial kundalini awakenings and get stuck there. They can still make progress, but there is something they are holding on to because that was the only thing that kept them from completely flying to pieces when they were going through the initial awakening.

If I had it all to do over again, I would start doing yoga at one month old. I would have been doing it so that I had very good control over my prana. Then, when this started, I would be able to circulate the prana, make sure I had enough apana moving downward to keep myself stable, and use the rest of it to connect to whatever I needed to connect to.

Rick: You probably would have skipped the LSD altogether.

Robert: There would have been no particular use for that.

Rick: You mentioned that kundalini must awaken in a slow and controlled way. Through practice and preparation, you have to build a foundation. Without the necessary preparation, kundalini can awaken in such a way that it inflates and empowers limitations. One may end up with an insatiable hunger for sex or food, a huge ego inflation or deflation, or half-baked aspirants inflated with the power and charisma of kundalini becoming gurus.

Robert: If the kundalini is awakening and the prana is moving, it is trying to get into very subtle spaces where it can activate the real seeds of the chakras. They claim that Sushumna has three different levels: vajrini, chitrini, and Sushumna. Getting your prana to move in Sushumna is a yogic thing, but just because it is moving in Sushumna does not mean anything other than that it is moving in Sushumna.

It has to become much more subtle before it can reach the level of the chakras. The level of the chakras is the level of the five elements, and the five elements make up the fabric of our external reality.

When you start being able to connect to those five elements directly, it’s very important that you be stable and calm, so that you don’t do damage to yourself. That’s why they are so subtle, and why it takes so much attention and subtlety of awareness to reach them.

What may happen is that kundalini is moving and wants to find her way to the supreme reality, but perhaps you have a tendency to be very fond of food. Energy flows into the solar plexus, and then externalizes itself further into the physical body. That aspect of the body receives tremendous amounts of prana, and it will do whatever it normally does, only much more so.

You think, I’m hungry; I’ve got to eat, and you eat some more. The more you eat, the more you are hungry for. It can happen anywhere, including in the talking point of view. How many so-called gurus have we seen who are able to perceive a certain degree of reality but do not remember that they have to continuously refine and dissolve their limitations?

Rick: There’s a subtle tendency to reinforce structures of individuality and prevent their dissolution. It’s so tricky. That’s what they say maya is.

Robert: Narada asked Vishnu to show him his maya. Vishnu told him to meditate, and Narada went to the river. There was a beautiful woman, and suddenly he was overtaken by her. They married and had children, and then there was a flood and everything was gone. Suddenly he saw Vishnu again, who asked, Now have you seen maya? Narada said, Seen it.

If that can happen to him, what can happen to you and me? Moses was not an ordinary person, yet just before the Israelites entered the Promised Land, God told him to speak to the rock to get water. He hit it with his staff instead, and although the water came out, he was not allowed to enter the Promised Land.

If it can happen to these people, it is happening to you and me all the time. The only answer is that you have to keep refining.

You’re not going to keep refining if you think you’re already refined.

Rick: There are spiritual circles that regard progress and levels of development as nonsense. They feel that it is merely a concession to duality and that following the carrot prevents people from realizing that they are already That.

Robert: If there is no real earthquake and everything is ultimately an illusion, I will gladly watch while you sit in the middle of the Swarovski store and pieces of crystal fall on top of your head while you maintain your awareness. Gutter water may be the same as clean water, but I need to see you living on it before I am convinced.

Vedanta is a noble concept, but nobody seems to pay attention to the fact that it is Veda plus anta. Anta means end—the end of the Vedic process.

If you wanted to study the Veda, it was not written down for thousands of years. It was oral. You had to sit for three hours a day for twelve years reciting the Veda. At the end of that time, pranayama would have become perfected in you, because you cannot recite for three hours without having the prana in your body aligned.

Only after reciting all these mantras and having all kinds of experiences would you be in a position to say, Now I can see that beyond even this there is something that cannot even be imagined, much less spoken.

Vimalananda used to say that the worst ahamkara, the worst egoism of all, is the egoism of knowledge. You have this much knowledge and you have this much knowledge.

Rick: There is nothing inherently wrong with knowledge, but don’t mistake understanding for realization, and don’t mistake realization for liberation. Many people mistake knowledge that begins to dawn for the actual experience to which sages and scriptures refer. What many consider the culmination of their practices may just be the beginning.

Robert: I do not suggest that the experience they have is not real. But it is one thing to have that experience and be in that space, and another thing to integrate it into your daily life.

The experience is an interface between you, as a manifested thing, and the unmanifest. It is a snapshot of where you are at that moment, a snapshot of a process that is ongoing. If you don’t digest it and understand what it indicates about the relationship, you are just drinking in the experience.

Everything in life is a relationship. As an individual human being, you have certain constraints. You are not going to be able to experience the reality of the supreme twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, without dissolving. So you are going to have to have some interface that permits you to remain connected to the organism. That is your Achilles’ heel.

Rick: What would be the safeguard against people feeling that they are done and becoming half-baked gurus? Would having a guru who can tell you that you are not done be one safeguard?

Robert: That is the best way. My personal opinion, and the opinion of my mentor, was that it is very desirable to have an external guide. It is the same as with a mirror. The doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient, because he does not have that perspective.

If you can find a human guru, this is a great thing, but maybe that does not happen. Lord Shiva is a handy guru. Jesus is a good guru. There are gurus out there.

Rick: But that can just be your imagination. You can delude yourself.

Robert: You can delude yourself even if you have a good guru. If you don’t have a guru, there is the famous example of Dattatreya. He said he had twenty-four gurus, and none of them were aware that they were acting as gurus to him. He saw what was going on in their lives, learned from it, and transformed himself.

Ekalavya projected the quality of guru-ness onto a statue of Dronacharya and became an excellent archer. If you are focused and are not cheating your awareness, you can project onto something that quality of guru-ness, as long as you are not using it to indulge your fantasies.

Everything in the Mahabharata is like that. The Ramayana is about Rama believing that he understood his dharma and trying to follow it. The Mahabharata is about nobody knowing what their dharma is. Everybody has an unsolvable question about which dharma to follow. That was distilled down into the Bhagavad Gita.

Arjuna’s dharma to his family and allies says he should murder his guru and grandfather, while another dharma says that murdering your guru is the absolute worst sin. Krishna had to show him his universal form before Arjuna could realize that he could keep both realities in his awareness at the same time.

Rick: Chapter Two, verse 48: Yoga-sthah kuru karmani. If you get established in yoga, in being in absolute and universal consciousness, and then perform action, you reconcile these polarities and paradoxes.

Robert: That’s what yoga really is: joining together two things that are fundamentally identical but currently, in the environment in which we live, are polar opposites. Instead of allowing them to polarize apart, bringing them to a place where they are joined.

✨ Higher consciousness and society

Rick: There are political polarities and so many issues tearing society apart. With an upwelling or infusion of divine consciousness from the most subtle level into society, perhaps solutions will be found that reconcile and harmonize these polarities.

Robert: I agree, and that is certainly my hope. That’s the way we’ve survived so far. Somehow or another, there has always been some sort of compromise that has been reached, although it has often been imperfect.

You can very easily have two different sides to one person, just as we can have two different sides to what is happening in the country. It is good to have the ability to recognize both sides.

Rick: The best way for us to do that is for higher consciousness—for enlightenment—to become more prevalent in the world. You don’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness at which it was created. You have to go to a new level of consciousness.

There is the principle of the second element. You don’t get rid of darkness by investigating it or arguing over it. You get rid of it by bringing in light. Perhaps all the difficulties we see in the world are due to an insufficient flow of divine energy.

Robert: I agree entirely. Sadly, a big reason why there is an impediment to progress is that so many scientists are dedicated materialists. Modern science believes that everything is based in matter and that consciousness arose by some process of deus ex machina. Indian science believes that consciousness is the base, and matter has emerged from consciousness progressively becoming more opaque to itself.

I don’t deny the reality of matter, but I’m amazed when well-trained scientists become vehement about the impossibility of consciousness existing outside of protoplasm. How can they possibly know? That’s so unscientific.

Rick: Is there anything you would like to say before we finish?

Robert: To anybody who is going through any kind of kundalini experience, the most important thing in life, especially nowadays, is to stay calm. When there is a crisis, you have to be calm, because that is the only way you are going to survive.

You have to know where to position yourself, when to run, when to hide, and when not to do that. You are only going to be able to do that if you maintain a certain amount of awareness of what is going on outside and an understanding of how you might interact with it. That is especially important when your organism is redefining itself.

Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t start assuming anything. Assuming is a problem because, especially when this energy is activated, what you assume has a much greater potential to manifest in some way and become concrete.

Keep coming back to whatever you have faith in. As a friend of mine in India is fond of saying:

Your real guru is the last face that you would see as you were drowning.

The last thing before you are going down for the third time—the thing that is most dear to you—is what is going to come to you at that moment.

Whatever that is, grab hold of that, because that is the thing that is going to keep all of your prana, your organism, your energy, and all the rest of you focused as you proceed through this transformational experience.

Rick: They say that the last thought at the time of death determines the next birth. Wouldn’t you say that the real anchor is the Self, the absolute? That’s why Krishna was able to smile on the battlefield: because he was that ultimate reality.

Robert: It’s true, but he was Krishna, and his ability to remain in that ultimate reality was extraordinary. Until you get to a state of similar elevation, having a form and a name that you can apply to—whether it’s Krishna or Jesus or the giant cosmic mulberry—is useful.

Kundalini has been educated to identify with the five elements that make up your body: earth, water, fire, air, and space. Those five elements in the subtle body are the sense faculties: smell, taste, touch, sight and form, and sound.

While you are still in that limitation of perception, it is often most useful to have something connected to at least one of them: a name or a form.

Rick: Like a mantra.

Robert: A mantra or something that you are visualizing. The face of God. Something you can grab hold of until your awareness is sufficiently stabilized in that expansive way that you can just focus on expansiveness.

Rick: Even then it won’t be willful focusing. You are that, and nothing can shake it.

Robert: Exactly.

Closing

Rick: Are you aware of the Kundalini Care Institute in Tennessee? A number of my friends have gone there and said they’ve had great results in terms of kundalini that was blocked or misdirected being unblocked or redirected.

Robert: I have. A friend of mine went there fifteen or twenty years ago and reported very good results. I haven’t been there myself, so it’s only hearsay, but I heard good things back then.

Rick: You’ve written about a dozen books, including

Aghora: At the Left Hand of God ,

Aghora II: Kundalini ,

Aghora III: The Law of Karma , and The Greatness of

Saturn: A Therapeutic Myth . I’ll list several on my website.

Robert: They can go to the book section on my website and find out about the other ones, too. Those probably deal most specifically with what we have been talking about.

Rick: You have expertise in Jyotish, Yoga and Tantra, Ayurveda, and all this other stuff. You are quite a Renaissance man.

Robert: The more that I learn, the more that I realize just how ignorant I really am, which is a great blessing.

Rick: That is a good thing. All right, well, thanks. I’ve been speaking with Robert Svoboda, and this interview is part of an ongoing series. They can all be found at batgap.com, where you will find an alphabetical index and a chronological index, along with discussion groups, podcasts, and information about new interviews.

Batgap is a 501(c)(3), and we appreciate your support. There is a donate button and a place to sign up to be notified of new interviews.

So that’s about it. Thank you for listening or watching. Thank you again, Robert.

Robert: Thank you.

Rick: It’s been a lot of fun. We will see you all again next week.