Inner Seed Of Human Evolution
"Some scholars and mystics have claimed that there is a common base to all mystical experience: ‘All mystics’, said Saint-Martin, ‘speak the same language and come from the same country.’ Throughout recorded history men and women known as mystics have experienced a certainty about the nature of reality, about the place of human beings and other sentient creatures in that reality, and a perspective on everyday mundane life, that seems to bear a remarkable similarity from culture to culture, from century to another. It is as if they experience that the soul, the Higher Self, in communion with the Absolute, God, Divinity, can be a greater, higher, more inward reality than the personality living in the living world." - Jean Hardy
(Photo taken during a puja at
Robert McNeil's home in Val David,
Quebec, Canada)
The next evening Bhupinder gave Kash specific instructions and a mantra to be recited before going into meditation. As directed, Kash put his right palm on the ground and uttered this sacred mantra four times:
"Om Twameva Sakshat Shri Ganesha Sakshat
Shri Adi Shakti Mataji Shri Nirmala Devi Namoh Namah."
The dormant Kundalini energy inside his sacrum bone sprang into life, coursed through the central nervous system, and pierced his Sahasrara.
At that very instant, for the first time ever, he felt the Mother Earth breathing. She was breathing very gently and every heave of Her breath felt on his palm, swelling slowly up, and then down again. She was a living organism just like all creatures who were nourished by Her.
As he continued repeating the Mighty Mantra of Shri Ganesha the sacred Shri Bhumidevi (Mother Earth) continued inhaling and exhaling to reveal Her true nature. Her superconscious child was sure beyond all doubts that Earth was breathing. Mother Earth is alive — This Revealed Truth is Absolute.
As he came through the celestial clouds and opened his spiritual eyes, the Great Adi Shakti was there to receive him. The sight of Her standing right in front astounded the young child. Who was this stunningly beautiful young Woman who had appeared out of nowhere in this Divine Paradise? Who was this extremely attractive Being, all enfolded in a dazzling red and white sari, who had come to greet him?
In the first place where was he?
Shri Maharajni Devi 1 smiled and held out Her Hands, with open, upturned palms. She told him to open his palms and face them downwards over Her open palms. As Kash did so he found himself being levitated a few inches off the ground. Both began traveling towards the extremely brilliant Light, quickly reaching it and slowing down to a standstill.
A short distance away was a majestic golden Throne. Kash realized it was the same place he had seen the day before, for it was still under the same Light.
The Great Sacred Mother walked to the Throne and sat on it. Kash followed and squatted before Her, the luxuriant clouds providing extreme comfort.
He did not even bow down to Her for he had no idea what to do. All he knew that he had been meditating on Earth and now he was in some strange land sitting before a very beautiful Woman on a majestic Golden Throne. He was sure that he was not dreaming, but just what was going on?
Shri Sarvaruna Devi 2 then told him that they should meditate.
This meditation was a state of mind within a state of mind. He was in deep meditation on Earth but not in the Sahasrara, where his spiritual self was wide awake. The physical eyes of his physical self were closed in meditation but the spirit eyes of his spirit self in his Sahasrara were not! (Only when requested by the Great Adi Shakti did he close the eyes of his spirit self and lose all duality — the individual spirit meditating with the Universal Spirit and merging into One.)
Both simultaneously raised their Kundalinis and Kash realized that the Great Divine Mother was repeating the same method of Kundalini awakening he had been taught by his father’s friend. She brought both Her Hands together and from the Mooladhara Chakra continuously encircled the left with the right, slowly rising all the way to the Sahasrara Chakra.
Shri Maha Avatar Shri Nirmala Devi then tied a knot just above the Brahmarandhra (top of head). This was repeated two more times. Then She opened Her left palm, resting it on the left knee, and with the right hand drew a protective arch over the entire body from left to right. This was done seven times. She then joined both palms in Namaskar and closed Her eyes. Both lapsed into meditation.
The attainment of the state of Sahaj Samadhi came instantly to Kash. The onrushing bliss was beyond description as the thoughtless state intensified the indescribable Joy. Wave upon wave of Paramchaitanya buffeted him into spiritual ecstasy. The spirit had merged into the Spirit. The human had become the Divine. The drop had become the Ocean. The individual consciousness had become the Universal Consciousness.
Time lost its essence and he could have easily remained suspended in this bliss for hours, even days. It was an awesome experience that could not be put into words, especially for a child.
After about 20 minutes the Spirit of the Living God Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi tapped him on his shoulders, and immediately he came out of Nirvana. She told him that it was time to go.
Kash did not even thank Her, so dazed was he by this spiritual experience. He just closed his spiritual eyes and descended through the thick layer of clouds, back to this planet known as Earth.
When he opened his physical eyes he was at Montreal, Canada.
Again the young child confronted his skeptical father and declared the Truth he had just witnessed. Unknown to his father the fruits of past karma and lives lived in righteousness had ripened. It was the first sign that moksa (liberation) was inevitable.
What then is this moksa or liberation or salvation that all scriptures promise?
According to Mircea Eliade, the "spiritual freedom experienced by those who are released from the fetters of desires and attachments to worldly things is called Liberation, (Skt. moksha). It is an inner experience of freedom that can be present regardless of the person's external circumstances: the saint is free even in prison, while people with all worldly opportunities and unlimited wealth may be caught in dire bondage. The Christian scriptures speak of a comparable experience of Christian liberty that gives the believer an unlimited sense of freedom to live according to the spirit of Christ independent of external custom or constraint. Naturally, people should have the opportunity to realize the fruits of their spiritual liberation in a free society; inner freedom engenders and is completed through external freedom." 3
Liberation from suffering is the goal of all Indian philosophies and techniques of meditation. No knowledge has any value if it does not pursue the salvation of man. The Svetasvatara Up. 1.12 states that except for the Eternal that resides in the Self , nothing else is worth knowing. According to Chandogya Upanishad 7.25.2 "The Self, indeed, is below. It is above. It is behind. It is before. It is to the south. It is to the north. The Self, indeed, is all this. Verily, he who sees this, reflects on this, and understands this delights in the Self, sports with the Self, rejoices in the Self, revels in the Self. Even while living in the body he becomes a self-ruler. He wields unlimited freedom in all the worlds. But those who think differently from this have others for their rulers; they live in perishable worlds. They have no freedom at all in the worlds."
"Salvation involves transcending the human condition . . . it employs images of deliverance from bonds and of tearing the veil, or of awakening, remembering, and so forth . . . only one Being — brahman — exists, and when the sage, by meditation of yogic type, experientially grasps his own atman, he awakens in the light and the bliss of an eternal present." 4
And why are many unaware of this Primordial Mother who grants final liberation from mundane earthly existence? Prof. Norman Brown of the University of Pennsylvania is of the opinion that the "reason why we do not hear of her sooner doubtless is that the Great Mother Goddess is not Aryan in origin and was late in getting Brahmanic recognition. She is quite different from any of the female deities in the Rig Veda . . . The Great Mother Goddess is widely worshipped in India today in non-Aryan circles."
In ancient Middle Eastern religions the Great Mother Goddess was "the great symbol of the earth's fertility. She was worshipped under many names and attributes. Similar figures have been known in every part of the world. Essentially she was represented as the creative force in all nature, the mother of all things, responsible particularly for the periodic renewal of life. . . . Although the Great Mother was the dominant figure in ancient Middle Eastern religions, she was also worshiped in Greece, Rome, and W Asia. In Phrygia and Lydia she was known as Cybele; among the Babylonians and Assyrians she was identified as Ishtar; in Syria and Palestine she appeared as Astarte; among the Egyptians she was called Isis; in Greece she was variously worshiped as Gaea, Hera, Rhea, Aphrodite, and Demeter; and in Rome she was identified as Maia, Ops, Tellus, and Ceres. Even this listing, however, is by no means complete. Many attributes of the Virgin Mary make her the Christian equivalent of the Great Mother, particularly in her great beneficence, in her double image as mother and virgin, and in her son, who is God and who dies and is resurrected." 5
The Great Mother Goddess human and maternal qualities continue to define Her for most of her devotees to this day. In human relationships, the love between mother and child is usually considered the purest and strongest. In the same way, the love between the Mother Goddess and her human children is considered the closest and most tender of relationships.
The Great Primordial Mother teaches us that pain, sorrow, decay, death, and destruction are not overcome by denying them or explaining them away. Pain and sorrow are woven into the texture of our lives and to deny them is futile. For us to realize the fullness of our being, we must accept this dimension of existence. Her gift is freedom, the freedom of a child to revel in this moment. The Adi Shakti is worshipped not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the blinding, binding web of maya (illusion) that keep humanity in endless cycles of death, decay and delusion.
But before we proceed further, a question: What is Kundalini? "Long rumored to be among the most rare of human experiences, in the past several decades, the incidence of reported Kundalini awakening has been on the increase worldwide. Kundalini awakening manifests on multiple levels. "Brought up through the body, this power promotes healing and longevity," writes transpersonal psychologist Ralph Metzner; "raised to the throat and head, it stimulates creativity and intuition." . . . The radical restructuring of the psyche catalyzed by Kundalini leads to a state which Metzner says "has been variously referred to as mystical experience, ecstasy, cosmic consciousness, oceanic feeling, oneness, transcendence, union with God, nirvana, satori, liberation, peak experience, and by other names." . . .
In his book The Soul's Journey, Lawrence Edwards, Ph.D. -- a transpersonal psychologist who has experienced Kundalini -- writes: "Even within the most bound forms of the physical realm the full power and presence of God, of Divine Consciousness, are present. The release of that bound energy is like the release of the potential energy bound in matter that suddenly results in the extraordinary power and light of nuclear reactions. The awakening of the Kundalini is the release of the bound Power and Light of God present within the human form."
Particularly in New Age circles, Kundalini proponents hold out promises of bliss, inner peace, mystical odysseys, psychic power and self-transcendence. While this is true, the journey also entails what transpersonal psychologist Bonnie Greenwell, Ph.D., describes as " . . . elements of human transformation that uproot us to the core, and cause us to 'know' that we have been touched by powers greater than ourselves." 6
Daniel Coleman in The Meditative Mind states that Kundalini "is a huge reserve of spiritual energy located at the base of the spine. When aroused, Kundalini travels up the spine through six centers, or "chakras," reaching the seventh at the top of the head . . . Most people much of the time are motivated by mental states in which these first three chakras are active. Kundalini yoga aims to bring this energy up to the higher chakras, just as Kabbalah seeks to raise consciousness to higher planes . . . When it reaches his seventh chakra and stabilizes there, he feels a state of intense ecstasy and union with God. He is considered liberated, free of bondage to those habits and acts stemming from the lower chakras by which most men are bound.” 7
According to J. G. Beltzer, kundalini is "a concentrated field of intelligent, cosmic invisible energy absolutely vital to life; beginning in the base of the spine as a man or woman begins to evolve in their first incarnation; fed by the chakras along the spine and by the cosmic energy entering through the feet from the Earth; as wisdom is earned in each incarnation, this electromagnetic, ultrapotent energy moves slowly upward through the spine; it is directed by the speed of the soul mind as the soul-mind meets the requirements of each chakra, according to the needs and thinking of the individual; eventually this energy is unspiralled through the medulla oblongata, pituitary gland, pineal gland and through the crown chakra to unite with the silver cord; one will ascend to the higher realms to finish evolutionary cycle; kundalini is feminine polarity in nature.” 8
QUOTES OF SHRI MATAJI
"The Kundalini, the residual Divine Power, resides in the triangular bone in the base of the spine. It is the germinating Power of the seed of your being. This seed sprouts through Sahaja Yoga. I am like the Gardener who pours some water on the seeds, which He had planted in His garden. At first, only a few flowers come up, but at the time of the blossoming the phenomenon of en masse Self-Realization is manifested. This Divine Love that I pour is your own right for this is the culminating point of the human evolution which has been promised in the scriptures."
Shri Mata Devi
(Mata [1 st]: ‘Sacred Mother’—She is a Mother who not only gives every good thing that a loving mother gives to her child but also the Highest Knowledge, the Brahma Vidya to Her devotees.)
"All religions have promised Inner Silence when you reach the state of Self-Realization, the inner miracle of the subtle awareness and not gross jugglery. The Gita says that you become the witness of the Play of Divine. Many modern thinkers are also talking about the new awareness. We hear of many prophecies made by ancient and modern writers about the evolution of a new race of super human beings of unique awareness.
These are no more empty words. Through the discovery of Sahaja Yoga it is possible to achieve the transformation of the human consciousness to higher planes promised by the various seers."
Sri Janma-mrtyu-jara-tapta-jana-visranti-dayani Devi
(Janma-mrtyu-jara-tapta-jana-visranti-dayani (851st): To those devotees who are consumed by the evils of life, death, and old age, She is the harbinger of peace and solace by endowing them with true knowledge of their selves.)
ADDITIONAL QUOTES
"If doctrine is not related to human experience it will inevitably become marginal in the lives of believers. Further, doctrine must be able to evoke religious experience in a way that opens up the individual to the ever present gracious mystery of God. A sign of sound doctrine is its ability to communicate some aspect of the inexhaustible reality of God. A close interplay should obtain between theological doctrine and religious experience. . . .
There can be no divine revelation without the response of faith which receives it, and there can be no faith without the grace of God's revelation which draws forth faith in us. . . . revelation, if it is to be genuine, involves a process of conversion for the recipient. Contact with God changes the individual. . .
The revelation of God to us is always addressed to human self-consciousness and as such draws human self-consciousness out of its lonely estrangement into a new liberating communion with God. . . . It is only in and through the revelation of God that we become truly conscious of ourselves, our origin and our destiny."
Lane, The Experience of God, p. 21-34
"We find ourselves, I believe, in the midst of the most massive shift of perspective that humankind has ever known. We are living in a time — and I see this all over the world — in which our very nature is in transition. The scope of change is calling for patterns and potentials in the human brain that, as far as I know, were never needed before. Knowings that were relegated to the unconscious are becoming conscious, and experiences that belonged to extraordinary reality are becoming ordinary.
Our potentials are no longer limited by place and culture. In this developing hybrid world, capacities and perspectives that were once nurtured in separate societies are now available to the entire human family. To me this is a stupendous happening as important as the discovery of new continents during the time of the great sea journeys. For the first time in human history, because of communication, the genius of the human race is available for everyone to harvest.
I think the holistic movement has become more global in its concerns. And I think the threshold of the millennium has, if anything, accelerated and intensified the need to recognize that we are stewards in this biological and evolutionary process and, by God, we’d better be up to the task."
J. Houston
Codirector of the Foundation for Mind Research in Pomona, NY,
New Age November/December 1999
"Some scholars and mystics have claimed that there is a common base to all mystical experience: ‘All mystics’, said Saint-Martin, ‘speak the same language and come from the same country.’ Throughout recorded history men and women known as mystics have experienced a certainty about the nature of reality, about the place of human beings and other sentient creatures in that reality, and a perspective on everyday mundane life, that seems to bear a remarkable similarity from culture to culture, from century to another. It is as if they experience that the soul, the Higher Self, in communion with the Absolute, God, Divinity, can be a greater, higher, more inward reality than the personality living in the living world. The greater reality suffuses the lesser and alters it beyond recognition. ‘The infinite shines through the finite and makes it more and not less real.’ This is not a doctrine, a dogma learned through a church or established religion, but a personal experience, an inner knowing, which lies at the root of all religious doctrines and is prior to them."
Jean Hardy, A Psychology with a Soul
Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1987, p. 109
" "Adi Shakti" means "The First Energy." According to the Hindu tradition, the only major religious tradition in the world in which Goddess worship has survived to the present day, Feminine Divinity is associated with creation, manifestation and power: In other words, Life itself. . . .
She manifests through the five tattvas or elements of earth, water, fire, air and space, and the seven chakras of the universal psychic body as depicted within the Hindu Tantras, which add to the five elements the qualities of space and time. This evolution culminates in a fully embodied conscious awareness which gives rise to the illusory nature of the phenomenal and dualistic world. Therefore the evolution of the Goddess depicted here represents, on another level, the ongoing physical, mental, and spiritual unfolding of consciousness within every man and woman."
Roxanne K. Gupta, Ph.D,
Adi Shakti: Dawn of the First Goddess
"Within the ancient world, the serpent (like its larger cousin, the dragon) had long been representative of the adept, of his powers of immortality and "divine" knowledge. Every culture of antiquity with the exception of the Christian revered this symbol. Christianity elected to forget the brazen serpent of Moses (Numbers 21:7-9), which God instructed the patriarch to make so that those who had been bitten by snakes might look upon the brass serpent and live. Jesus himself implied the great wisdom and prudence symbolized by the serpent when he said, "Be ye wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16.) In fact, throughout archaic literature, the usual mythological association of the serpent is not with deceit and corruption, as in Genesis, but with physical and spiritual well-being and enlightenment."
Rosalyn L. Bruyere, Wheels of Light
REFERENCES
1. Maharajni [2nd]: The Great Empress. In this name the second act of Her, ‘Sthiti’ is indicated. ‘Yena Jatani Jivanti’: By whom all creatures live — Taittiriya Upanisad 3.1. She, who rules the entire Universe and, is its law and its execution. Every law or truth that man discovers is just a glimpse of that great will or law of that Great Empress. Sri Lalita Sahasranama, C. Suryanarayana Murthy, Associated Advertisers and Printers, 1989
2. Sarvaruna [50th]: From head to foot She is faultlessly beautiful. Sri Lalita Sahasranama, C. Suryanarayana Murthy, Associated Advertisers and Printers, 1989
3. Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas 2, The University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 52.
4. World Scripture, International Religious Foundation, Paragon House Publishing, 1995, p. 377
5. Great Mother Goddess [http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia.html]
6. El Collie, http://members.aol.com
7. Daniel Coleman, The Meditative Mind, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1988, p. 77-78
8. June G. Beltzer, Ph.D., The Donning International Encyclopedic Psychic Dictionary, p. 343
