KAP Instructor Tao Semko answers, “Is Kundalini a Sentient Being or is it Synthesized?” in this YouTube video taken from a live Q&A…
Video Transcription:
“In your experience, do you think of Kundalini as a sentient being? Or is it a phenomenon created by the seeker over time, in a state of consciousness that has a high degree of psychological plasticity?”
Kundalini is not a thought form. It is not a mandala, or an idea that you’re creating and slowly cobbling together through time. It is, rather, a natural phenomenon that can be triggered unnaturally, or can be triggered through the application of technique. But it can also spontaneously happen.
It is an autonomic experience just like the bursts of pleasure that you can experience from tasting something wondrous like an orgasm, etc. Except it is something that can both be experienced instantaneously and can actually be running all of the time, if that makes sense.
It is not a discrete state as I stated before. It’s not a different state of consciousness. It is actually a unifying energy running through the body that carries consciousness with it, if that makes sense. It is neither a phenomenon created by the seeker over time out of a state of consciousness, nor is it a separate sentient being.
Although, very frequently it will be anthropomorphized or totemized by the person experiencing it especially in cultures that are very right brained in their experience of the world, that do not have a lot of left brained analytic value, (in terms of what they do, they tend to value right brained experience, holistic experience more) meaning that Kundalini isn’t something separate from you, but it is initially separate from your cognitive analytical mind.
The different parts of your consciousness playing through different parts of your anatomy both subtle and physical, your cognitive mind, your visual mind, your holistic mind are all acting through different parts of your subtle body, and through different parts of your brain, and central nervous system, and peripheral nervous system, through different parts of your endocrine system.
You can’t experience sadness without the endocrine hormones that have to be dumped in addition to the nervous system being active. All those systems are working together and it’s not just the endocrine and central nervous system.
To experience emotion or sensation you have to have the muscular skeletal system active, you have to have all of these different systems working together as a whole with some of them playing a larger role than others at varying times.
So you may experience initially you being the cognitive thinking mind: the mind that is constantly chattering and commenting on everything that you’re experiencing. You stick your finger in cold water and you say “Ooh that’s cold; my finger is experiencing cold.”
Well, when you start to feel tingles or a burning sensation at the base of your spine and you start to feel this wave-like energy going through your body, the cognitive thinking mind may chatter away and say “Oh! There is an entity inside of me or a sentient being that’s working it’s way through, and it’s not me because I can’t control it!”
Well, not initially but as you learn to merge all of your experiences: your breathing, and everything else; your sensory acuity; and eventually even your cognition, your rational analytical thinking, with this experience that you can call energy moving through the body, you realize that it’s just different facets of the same coherent ego personality working together.
Except, Kundalini also serves as an easy bridge to transcendent states that are beyond this little ego personality.
Kundalini isn’t itself realization, self-realization, realization of the non-self, it isn’t God-realization on its own. It just provides an easy pathway to those experiences, if that makes sense.
By completely connecting all the different parts of your subtle body, both the aspects of your subtle body, the aspects of your normal biological physiology that are plugged into grounded, normal human experience: oh I’m hungry, I need sleep, I’m tired, I want sex, whatever it might be. As well as “Ahh!” the experience of universality of things beyond you, or the expedience of transpersonal love. All of those things are experienced with the aid of different parts of your human biology as well as subtle anatomy.
— Transcription by Spencer Stevens
