The Seba library treats Susumna in 6 passages, across 2 authors (including Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Campbell, Joseph).
It is not important, where the susumna is localized, because it is there where we direct the main current of psychic force, after having made conscious the currents of the polar nadis.
Govinda argues that the susumna is not a fixed anatomical structure but is constituted phenomenologically wherever the practitioner directs the central current of psychic force after awakening the polar channels.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis
By awakening the Kundalini’s dormant forces, which otherwise are absorbed in subconscious and purely bodily functions, and by directing them to the higher centres, the energies thus released are transformed and sublimated until their perfect unfoldment and conscious realization is achieved in the highest centre.
Govinda presents the susumna as the channel through which Kundalini ascends from subconscious somatic functions to the highest centres of conscious realization, explicitly framing the process in terms of sublimation.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis
nadi into out, the middle nadi susumna), strikes the hair-like short ‘A’ and fills it until it assumes its full form.
This passage locates the susumna as the middle nadi through which the inner fire, driven by breath, ascends progressively through the cakra centres in the Tibetan gTummo practice.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
This can only be achieved through a relaxed, serene, and blissful state of body and soul, but not through self-mortification, asceticism or artificial methods.
Govinda contextualizes the activation of the susumna within a broader argument that genuine sublimation of psychic energy requires serenity rather than ascetic suppression, distinguishing authentic yogic transformation from violent repression.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting
blood-circulation and the metabolic functions of transformation… Apana-vayu, which in the Tibetan definition is regarded as the cause of various secretions.
Govinda details the five vayus as the energic substrates whose directional regulation within the subtle body creates the conditions for susumna activation.
, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960aside
the left nerve, known as ida (refreshment, poured libation, revivifying draft’), is pale yellowish or white… and the breath that it carries from the left nostril down to the muladhara is of lunar energy.
Campbell delineates the polar nadis ida and pingala as the complementary channels whose reconciliation opens the central susumna, framing the triad in terms of solar-lunar symbolism and the meeting of temporal and eternal life.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986aside