< Back to Videos and Articles on Kundalini and Dr. Morris's Improved KAP
Above: Youtube video of KAP Instructor Tao Semko answering the question, “What is the association of the snake with kundalini?” in one of our free online Q&A sessions.
The discussion covers physiological phenomena and related cross-cultural symbolism in Hinduism (Sanatana Dharma), Judeo-Christianity, and more…
Video Transcription:
“What is the association of a snake with Kundalini? For instance, with Dr. Morris.”
The snake is very frequently used in multiple cultures to denote the sort of power of the earth. So you have multiple layers of symbolism here. One is: very frequently, people who begin to experience Kundalini moving through, especially, the vagus nerves of their body, the vagus nerves go up through the center of the internal organs. They don’t go through the spine.
They are cranial nerves that go from the cranium down into all of the internal organs, and into the reproductive organs. So they can actually transmit orgasm for instance, which is an important connection to all of the sexual references that are related to Kundalini as well.
Those particular cranial nerves, when you experience a lot of electrical impulses going through those nerves, starting from low down in the body, very frequently it feels like a serpent uncoiling and moving through up the body, while also feeling electrical at the same time.
Sometimes it can feel fiery if there’s a lot of hot metabolism going on in the lower regions of the body which can happen too: hot cellular metabolism. Very frequently though, a lot of the excessive heat that is associated with Kundalini is not actually Kundalini itself, it doesn’t have to be there, it’s very frequently heat that is generated by side effects. Kundalini Syndrome.
Kundalini Syndrome is not necessary to experience Kundalini. Kundalini Syndrome is all of the physiological imbalances that can be exacerbated by various practices of Kundalini, or by some of the emotional states that Kundalini brings on. And again those can be brought back into balance, they can be avoided altogether.
As far as that snake sensation goes, very frequently, people who have very visual brains, who very easily visualize things, sort of see cartoon images whenever people are talking, they put everything they hear in words into cartoon visualizations.
People who are very visual when they start to experience Kundalini, and feel those tremors and movements in the vagus nerves, and the connected tissue down there, which can be very powerful in feeling, they start to actually see that sort of as a swirling writhing mass of energy rising up through their body. They see it in the phosphenes on the back of their eyes.
So that’s another internal reference to the snake. In terms of the external references, the snake itself is associated with mother earth. Snakes crawl on the earth, and they come out of the hollows in mother earth. And so a lot of the mythology about Kundalini — the word “kunda” itself, or “kun” refers to basically the energy coming out of a pot or a hole. It is energy that is bottled up.
Kundalini is something that is a possibility, it is present in virtually everybody’s body, small amounts of it are always there, keeping you alive, and you can feel, and taste tiny little glimmers of it during powerful orgasms, or during those jolts of energy that you get going up either your spine or up your vagus nerves when you cut off the flow of urination sometimes, and the PC muscles contract and the tip of the spine, the coccyx flexes upward slightly sending a pump of cerebral spinal fluid, and jolts of nerve energy up the body — the spine.
Those are tiny little tastes of what Kundalini kriyas or the movements of Kundalini through the body feel like.
A very powerful orgasm gives you an idea of what those sensations can be like. Especially the kind of orgasm that actually moves energy up and down through the body. The difference is, Kundalini doesn’t have to have a sexual feeling, or sexual flavor to it at all.
But you can actually also get tiny little glimmers of that Kundalini sensation if you’ve been laughing a good long time with friends in a goodnatured way and it’s not so over the top that you feel, uh, like you’re giddy and having laugh attacks and you can’t control it, but rather you’ve just got that steady rumbling laughter going on in your diaphragm.
That trembling that starts to happen in your diaphragm after you’ve been laughing for a while is also the vagus nerves firing energy again, and again, firing nerve impulses up and down. And so that’s another little taste of what Kundalini can feel like on a very small scale in one part of the body.
A lot of people, because of certain texts being written without a great deal of anatomical knowledge, refer to Kundalini going up the spine. And indeed it can go up the spine, and it does go up the spine, but it is Kundalini going through the central area of the body, the vagus nerves, or in a traditional Chinese or Ayurvedic representation of the body, going through the central meridians of the body.
It is that that causes the big changes in the various chakras if you’re looking at a subtle energy model, or if you’re looking at a physiological model it causes enormous changes in both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The central nervous system.
And eventually the peripheral nervous system, while causing massive changes in how your endocrine system, the various glands of your body, can be triggered until you can almost, at will, open up and close various responses in those endocrine systems causing huge floods of endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine, all of these things to flood the body at any time either using an external stimulus, or an internal one eventually. So, there are big changes.
Eventually you can experience several emotions simultaneously without feeling any contradictions between them. You can be sad because someone close to you has passed away, and be completely blissful at the same time. You can be totally irritable and angry, and have stubbed your toe or wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and also be laughing with the cosmic joke.
So, it is possible to begin to experience life as if you are experiencing it with parallel processors running in your body instead of just shifting from one state to another, sort of getting stuck in a particular world view because you’re grumpy, or because you’re happy, or because you’re angry.
So, back to Nick’s question about the snake, you get that symbolism both from internal experiences in the body that feel like a serpent coiling, and also a lot of mythological references that come from people just watching snakes, and their actual emergence from the ground.
It feels, if you’re sitting on the ground and Kundalini begins to open in the body, as if I something is emerging from the ground itself in your own body and rising up through you.
You even have passages of course in the Christian bible talking about rising up your snakes which some of the Pentecostals have taken into a literal translation where they’re actually holding snakes in the air like the Minoan — the dancers in Crete basically. But, there’s other references of course that are taking place too.
So the Judaeo-Christian tradition where they don’t actually speak of it as Kundalini, but rather as the Holy Spirit or Shekhinah or a variation between those two. Holy Spirit is the descent of Kundalini which usually takes place after Kundalini rises.
And, again, if you look at Christian references, the apostolic flames — if you see the apostles with an image of flame coming out from their crown — represents Kundalini having already raised through the crown of the head, going through all of these states before the descent of the Holy Spirit, the dove, bliss, nectar, descending through the body.
— Transcription by Spencer Stevens
Dr. Glenn J. Morris’s Kundalini Awakening Process: Online KAP Class Schedule and Workshops
Thank you for your interest in Dr. Morris’s KAP!
