Kundalini

These techniques focus on the female energy or force within the body, Shakti, also called kundalini or serpent power. Kundalini is encouraged to rise through a series of centres in the body, known as chakras, the aim being to activate its energy by various yoga techniques

Clarke provides a concise technical definition of kundalini as Shakti — the feminine serpent power that ascends through the chakra system toward union with the male principle Shiva — while noting Jung’s selective engagement with this Tantric framework.

Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the only systematically developed psychological formulation of the grades of this realization is that of the Indian yoga of the ‘Serpent Power’ — the Kundalini — which is basic to all the religious arts of both the Hindu and the Buddhist East.

Campbell elevates Kundalini Yoga above all Western psychological systems as the uniquely comprehensive map of psycho-spiritual transformation, making it the organizing framework for his comparative mythological analysis.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Kuṇḍalinī śakti is the revealing and the concealing energy of Lord Śiva. On the one hand, it is the revealing energy and on the other hand, it is the concealing energy. It reveals and it conceals.

Singh, drawing on Kashmir Shaivism, defines kundalini as ontologically identical with Shiva’s own existence — simultaneously the power that veils and discloses ultimate reality — a position that transcends purely psychological readings.

Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

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 articulates the classical Tantric telos of Kundalini yoga: the sublimation of subconscious somatic energies through the chakra hierarchy constitutes the very aim of all yogic and meditative discipline.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

energy of this centre is depicted as the dormant force of the goddess Kundalini - who as the Sakti of Brahma embodies the potentiality of nature, whose effects may be either divine or demoniacal. The wise, who control these forces, may reach through them the highest spiritual power and perfection, while those who ignorantly release them, will be destroyed by them.

Govinda emphasizes the ambivalent, potentially destructive character of kundalini energy, insisting that only initiates with a qualified guru may safely awaken it — a caution that resonates with depth-psychological warnings about unconscious inflation.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

A man’s spiritual consciousness is not awakened unless his Kundalini is aroused… Just before my attaining this state of mind, it had been revealed to me how the Kundalini is aroused, how the lotuses of the different centers blossom forth, and how all this culminates in samadhi.

Campbell preserves Ramakrishna’s first-person testimony to map the phenomenology of kundalini arousal — the sequential blossoming of chakra-lotuses culminating in samadhi — as primary experiential evidence for the system’s psychological validity.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

A man’s spiritual consciousness is not awakened unless his Kuṇḍalinī is aroused. The Kuṇḍalinī dwells in the Mūlādhāra. When it is aroused, it passes along the Suṣumṇa nerve, goes through the centers of Svādiṣṭhāna, Maṇipūra, and so on, and at last reaches the head. This is called the movement of the Mahāvāyu, the Spiritual Current.

Zimmer transmits Ramakrishna’s anatomical-spiritual account of kundalini’s ascent through the sushumna, anchoring the system’s geography in a named sequence of centers and culminating in samadhi as the threshold of realized consciousness.

Zimmer, Heinrich, Philosophies of India, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Yoga, especially Kundalini Yoga, functioned as Campbell’s key to understanding the myths of transformation he found in other traditions. In Kundalini Yoga Campbell found a pictographic lexicon of the stages of transformation of one’s vital energy and consciousness.

Noel identifies Kundalini Yoga as the master hermeneutic through which Campbell decoded cross-cultural transformation myths, distinguishing Campbell’s literal Tantric reading from Jung’s psychologizing appropriation.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Yoga, especially Kundalini Yoga, functioned as Campbell’s key to understanding the myths of transformation he found in other traditions. In Kundalini Yoga Campbell found a pictographic lexicon of the stages of transformation of one’s vital energy and consciousness.

This parallel passage reaffirms the centrality of Kundalini Yoga as Campbell’s comparative mythological instrument, noting his divergence from Jung’s psychological reductionism of the same system.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Miguel Serrano… gave us a moving and profoundly Gnostic image of the Kundalini-Anthropos in his splendid poetic account of the spiritual world of India… the Serpent stretched itself up to the upper branches, where its pale, cold skin could be warmed by the sun.

Hoeller reads kundalini through a Gnostic-Jungian lens by linking it to the Anthropos myth, in which the serpent’s ascent from dark liquid depths toward solar warmth enacts the recovery of the Primordial Man from material bondage.

Hoeller, Stephan A., The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 1982supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

after many years of sincere sadhana, the great day comes when you become aware that kundalini is uncoiling. This awareness usually comes in sleep — not really in the dreaming state… but in what the Upanishads call dreamless sleep — the deepest state of ordinary consciousness

Easwaran situates kundalini awakening within a disciplined devotional life, locating its first perceptible stirring in the state of dreamless sleep and warning that the release of its evolutionary power demands proportionate vigilance and selfless application.

Easwaran, Eknath, The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: A Verse-by-Verse Commentary, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The snake is coiled round the four-rayed middle point. It is trying to get out: it is the awakening of Kundalini, meaning that the patient’s chthonic nature is becoming active.

Campbell cites a Jungian clinical case in which a patient’s spontaneous mandala image of a coiled serpent is interpreted as the activation of kundalini — demonstrating how the Eastern symbol surfaced independently in Western unconscious material.

Campbell, Joseph, The Mythic Image, 1974supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

books on the Hindu Kundalini Yoga. Kundalini Yoga is a system of integration of coll[ective and individual energies through the spinal centers].

Rudhyar briefly invokes Kundalini Yoga alongside the Secret of the Golden Flower as esoteric systems addressing the integrative processes occurring in the higher brain centers, linking Eastern yogic physiology to his astrological psychology of individuation.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

You experience the rising flow of cit kuṇḍalinī as filling the whole channel from mūlādhāra to brahmarandhra… each time it occurs, it is filled with more and more ecstasy. This process is called krama mudrā.

Singh documents the phenomenological alternation between inner absorption in the rising cit-kundalini and outer world-perception flooded with ecstasy, describing krama mudra as the ritual enactment of this oscillating process.

Singh, Jaideva, Vijnana Bhairava: The Manual for Self-Realization, 1979supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Sannella, L. (1987). The Kundalini Experience: Psychosis or Transcendence… Jung, C. G. (1996). The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Levine’s bibliographic citations place kundalini within a somatic-therapeutic literature cluster — invoking Sannella, Gopi Krishna, and Jung’s seminar — suggesting its relevance to the clinical differentiation between transcendent and psychotic interpretations of overwhelming bodily energy.

Levine, Peter A., In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Ineluctably, the image of any god beheld — whether interpreted as beheld in heaven or as beheld at Chakra 6 — will be of a local ethnic idea historically conditioned, a metaphor, therefore, and thus to be recognized as transparent to transcendence.

Noel applies Campbell’s relativizing hermeneutic to the visionary content of the sixth chakra, arguing that every deity-vision at this level of kundalini ascent remains culturally conditioned and must be read as metaphor pointing beyond itself.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →