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| Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi at Lecture-demonstration, San Diego, USA, 30th May 1985 |
Dear viewer, watching this video with a relaxed, open mind can awaken the gentle power of a dormant evolutionary trigger within you called 'kundalini'
(meaning: 'coiled potential energy'). It will be felt as a cool
sensation or cool breeze at the top of the head and/or a blowing sensation on the palms of the hands. Initially, there may a sensation of tingling on one or more of the fingers.
If you get this experience, you will be joining the several hundreds of thousands of people (men, women and children), roughly 0.00003 of the current world population of 7.4 billion, spread around the globe, from Moscow to New York, from Los Angeles to Istanbul, from Madrid to Paris, from Beijing to Lagos, from Durban to Dubai, from London to Cairo and many dotted places in between, who have felt the gentle transformative power of kundalini awakening. The diagram below from October 2011, is a location tracker from google analytics of the hits to a private url sent exclusively to individuals with kundalini awakening and who had provided their email addresses. Even though this was a small subset of the total 'kundalini-awakened' population, the spread still managed to take in 993 cities around the world, including in Mongolia and Saudia Arabia.
If you get this experience, you will be joining the several hundreds of thousands of people (men, women and children), roughly 0.00003 of the current world population of 7.4 billion, spread around the globe, from Moscow to New York, from Los Angeles to Istanbul, from Madrid to Paris, from Beijing to Lagos, from Durban to Dubai, from London to Cairo and many dotted places in between, who have felt the gentle transformative power of kundalini awakening. The diagram below from October 2011, is a location tracker from google analytics of the hits to a private url sent exclusively to individuals with kundalini awakening and who had provided their email addresses. Even though this was a small subset of the total 'kundalini-awakened' population, the spread still managed to take in 993 cities around the world, including in Mongolia and Saudia Arabia.
Why might this be important?
You only have watch TV news, with daily images of extreme weather patterns, geopolitical upheaval, uncertainties about the global economy, or pay a little attention to the galloping pace of technological change and the mooted threat of rogue artificial intelligence, to get a sense that something is afoot and that we do indeed live in 'interesting times'. The risks to humanity may never have been greater than they are now.
It is hypothesised that Mother Nature may be doing a silent, unseen upgrade of human beings via the mechanism of spontaneous, en-masse awakening of the kundalini energy. In this upgrade, no paid membership or subscription to any club or group is required. The experience is freely available to everyone, everywhere.
Unfortunately, as with all upgrades, the old version gets phased out.
An example of a previous upgrade to the species, is the transition of neanderthals to homo sapiens. The neanderthals got phased out (Neanderthal extinction ).
Yes, evolution is a process happening over thousands of years, and the co-existence of neanderthals and homo sapiens may be measured in thousands of years, but the evolutionary curve is not smooth. There are inflection points, where small, imperceptible changes accumulating over a long period, suddenly result in some dramatic change. The term used to describe this in a particular field of mathematics is 'catastrophe' or 'singularity' (See: Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is near'). It has been said that we have reached such an inflection point now. The evidence is visible all around and within the study of the natural world scientists refer to this as the ' Halocene extinction'. Things are speeding up and there could be trouble ahead.
Here's what Dr. Louise Leakey, daughter of the great paleontologist, Richard Leakey, and a paleontologist in her own right has said about this: (The article appears in the Financial Times newspaper November 20 , 2015).
"We reach the Turkwel field acutely aware of the enormous technological advances our own branch of mankind has made in the past half-century, but Leakey warns against the arrogance of modern man. She reminds us that we have existed a mere 200,000 years, and that all the half-dozen other species of the genus Homo have gone extinct. Since her grandparents first started searching for man's origins 80 years ago the global population has soared from two to seven billion. She says man is rapidly destroying the environment and other species in what she calls the 'sixth Mass Extinction'. She believes Homo sapiens will itself disappear "possibly within hundreds, not thousands, of years ", adding: "The planet would be a better place without us". Even in the Turkana basin the warning signs are apparent. The wildlife has mostly been killed. Overgrazing has turned the land to desert. Overfishing has depleted the lake. Ethiopia has built a huge new dam on the Omo river which threatens to turn sublime lake Turkana into a toxic, dried-up dust bowl. "Here in the so-called 'Birthplace of Humanity'", says Leakey, "you can already see how humanity is destroying itself."
If the idea of a total annihilation seems too remote or difficult to envisage, a no less alarming scenario is painted by Stephen Emmot in his book(and movie) , 10 Billion, about how the combined effects of inexorable population growth and climate change will lead to hellish chaos around the globe as a result of food and water shortage . In a classic case of the messenger being shot, the book and the author are criticised as being unscientific and being overly pessimistic. Unlike others, Emmot, it appears, though a technologist himself, fails to be more enthusiastic about human scientific and technological ingenuity to get us out of this mess. The potential of GM crops to alleviate global food shortages for example has been cited. With regard water shortage, one only has to browse through archived TED talks to see how much intellectual capital is already being invested in this problem(see: talks by Allan Savory / Marcia Barbosa / Michael Pritchard / Stuart Orr).
Although, Emmot's is clearly not a solitary voice in the wilderness - other recent books include: 2071- The World We'll Leave Our Grandchildren, by Chris Rapley & Duncan Macmillan and End Game - Tipping Point For Planet Earth? by Anthony Barnosky & Elizabeth Hadley - one thing Emmot, was definitely wrong about, is when he suggests towards the end of his book, that there is no concerted political will to tackle the problem of climate change. The agreement reached at the COP21 in Paris in December 2015, proved that the collective mind of governments around the world has been concentrated and that there is indeed political will to deal with a situation that is generally agreed is dire.
However, there is still no guarantee that the critical 2C global temperature increase after which all the bad stuff happens will not be breached . Almost as if she had already watched this movie and knew how everything plays out, this is what Shri Mataji had to say:
" The means that are adopted are not sufficient to stop our deterioration"
This quote comes from an ecological conference in Bulgaria in 1995! (see: Ecology & Human Survival : Evolutionary Immunity .)
The evolutionary immunity, Shri Mataji refers to, is a transformation in human awareness brought about by mass kundalini awakening and the establishing of it through meditative practice.
Almost as if in a race against time, Mother Nature appears to have switched into emergency mode as far as the preservation of at least a subset of the total species is concerned (think Noah's Ark). The long, slow process of evolutionary change relying on DNA mutations has been compressed into the much more faster cycle of epigenetic change. This combined with brain neuroplasticity means that anything that has an effect on brain re-wiring, such as, meditation, can confer benefit on non-meditating off-spring ie, inter-generationally.
The idea of meditating to guarantee the continuation of the gene pool may seem an odd one.
Some of us are already practising meditation; we're covered, right?
The interest in meditation has certainly increased, if the practice of mindfulness is any indication and the whole world and her Aunty seems to be taking it up. A practice that earlier seemed to also require an adherence to vegetarianism and going about in sandals, has now gone mainstream. And exponentially. Why? To try and explain this we can use Neil Shubin's Tiktaalik to illustrate.
Neil Shubin is an acclaimed paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, who is author of the book, 'Your inner fish' which is about his expedition to find the fossilized remains of a prehistoric fish called tiktaalik.
What's special about the tiktaalik is that it is the link between prehistoric marine animals and land mammals. It was the first amphibian. By the evolutionary modification of it's pelvic fin into rudimentary legs it was able to 'walk' on to land.
Although it would be difficult to know for certain what the impetus was behind this evolutionary change: whether to escape a predator fish or as a response to a food deficiency in the local habitat and the need to forage for food on land, what is more certain is that it was for survival of the species.
As with the transmission of all mass 'social' phenomena, it could be that in the beginning only one fish swam to the shoreline in anticipation of making land. Then maybe twelve fish and then a gradually increasing shoal of fish. Over time, the water near the shoreline would have been dense with teeming fish trying to come on land. Neither the fish themselves nor a proverbial contemporary observer would understand fully what was happening. Not until the first few tiktaalik succeeded and were lying on the beach , sunbathing.
Roll forward several epochs and human beings are the new tiktaalik, straining to get to a better place (many years ago, a work colleague described the 'waking dream' she had when her kundalini was awakened, thus: "I saw fish walking triumphantly out of water wearing crowns on their heads" - the significance of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish could not be more relevant)
So instead of flapping about in shallow water, we've taken to meditation. The impetus being stress. But maybe not all forms of meditation carry the evolutionary payload. The measure being how close the practice is to natural activity or how sufficiently 'native'* it is to our makeup. [*native = innate or in-born. The sankrit equivalent is 'sahaja' which means 'with you born' , as in sahaja yoga]
It could be argued that although meditation has hundreds of years of tradition behind it, the practice itself is not actually a natural activity. Why? Because it doesn't fit into the four main divisions of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, which are: physiology, safety, love/belonging, esteem. It's only after these four needs are satisfied that, maybe, the practice of meditation gets a look in with the need at the top of the pyramid: self-actualisation(religion/spirituality). That is why, on the whole, it has been the pursuit of very few.
However, evolution, it seems, has no truck with exclusivity. She goes for mass appeal to get as many through as possible. She also follows the line of least resistance.
The line of least resistence is the point where an unnatural activity approaches as near as possible to a natural activity. So if stress didn't exist, she'd have to invent it, thus making the unnatural activity of meditation a means of satisfying the first four of Maslow's Hierarchy(not just the fifth), turning it into a more natural activity to make it attractive to the mass.
So far, so good. We're all meditating, now what?
There's still something unnatural about meditating because we have to take time out of our busy day to sit and do...nothing. So people know from the research that meditation may be good for them but still don't take it up because they can't spare the time.
Solution: turn meditation from an activity into a state which a person can be in at anytime and spontaneously.
This is where kundalini comes in: it's the state-switching mechanism.
So if the meditation is a practice rather than a state and doesn't involve the certifiably-awakened kundalini achieving said state, then, inspite of perceived benefits, it may not be the form of meditation favoured by evolution. There's the natural and then there's the man-made. Only the natural will get you there. After all, we can't evolve ourselves by thinking about it.
But isn't the kundalini dangerous? I've read stuff about it
In 1967 a book was published entitled 'Kundalini : The Evolutionary Energy in Man'. The author was Gopi Krishna(1903 - 1984) for whom the book was an autobiographical account of his experience with kundalini awakening. Part of his reported experience involved periods of personal physical trauma, such as sensations of tremendous heat, along with depression, that he associated with kundalini awakening. These seemed to punctuate the more blissful, mystic experiences.
Many subsequent and predominantly, western 'practitioners'/'investigators' of kundalini awakening or kundalini yoga have used Gopi Krishna's account as their start point. The resulting gospel that has built up around kundalini awakening therefore has the heat trauma as a key feature.
Perversely, the heat trauma experience now seems to be welcomed and even sought out as the only real indicator of kundalini activity. So, there are any number of false practices and pseudo-experiences available in the market, for which the the purveyors may merely be exploiting a commercial opportunity rather than having any interest at all in the evolutionary significance.
Without detracting from the veracity of Gopi Krishna's account of kundalini awakening, it may, after all, have been unique to him, it is useful to set his singular experience in 1937 against the experience of several hundred thousand other people today. The key feature of today's experience of kundalini awakening is not traumatic heat but a pleasant sensation of a cool breeze described earlier.
Admittedly, in further variance from Gopi Krishna's account, any reports today about anyone in the several hundreds of thousands of people mentioned, being zoned out in some involuntary mystic state are also near non-existent. The lows don't exist but the highs are not that high either.
There is one case, which is brought up only to illustrate why a 'mystic' high may not be useful in the general scheme of things. It brings to mind the 'Opium-eater'.
Years ago a sahaja yogi related to me how after he had the experience of kundalini awakening, he took up some new employment, having been invited by his friend, the employer, who had also had kundalini awakening. Things didn't go well. While the employer had successfully integrated the performance-enhancing side-effect of his kundalini meditation to benefit the running of his business, his new employee had not apparently reached this normalised state of self-awareness. He was still in a phase, they used to call 'the bliss bunny' phase, probably referring to how a bunny just sits there doing nothing, seemingly stupified by the mere blissful fact of existence. Although the employer understood where his friend was coming from, he had to let him go. There was silver lining though: the friend did go on to embark on a succesful career of his own; presumably, when he'd learnt how to straighten up and fly right.
The statistical bell curve or normal distribution may be a good model of an evolutionary truth : the extremes at one end or the other are not favoured, it's just the balanced mass in the middle that's the preferred.
An additional counter-weight to Gopi Krishna's book and a reminder that he was not the first person to write authoritively about the effects of kundalini awakening, is Dnyaneshwara, a 13th century philospher and yogi who wrote a book of commentary, entitled Dnyaneshvari.
In the famous sixth chapter of Dnyaneshvari, he writes:
This precise description is typical of the rest of Dnyaneshwara account, made more solid by the fact that Dnyaneshwara had pedigree, coming from a lineage of kundalini yogis called the 'Nath Panthis'.
Based on our own experience (see: How effects of meditation can show on the face ) it is easier to align with Dnyaneshwara's account rather than with Gopi Krishna's.
That bit about 'ageing gets reversed', that sounds interesting, what's that about?
The Guiness World Record for the largest gathering of people in one place is claimed by the Kumbh Mela festival in Allahbad,India in 2013 when between 80million to 100million attended the 55-day event.
The kumbh mela is a festival that occurs every 12 years and has been going on since time immemorial; it's not known when it started. However, it's origin is associated with a legend from the puranas, called the samudra mathana or 'the churning of the ocean of milk' for 'amrit' , the nectar of immortality.
When the amrit was eventually produced, it emerged in a pot or 'kumbh', carried by Dhanvantari, the god of medicine. In the course of the kumbh's subsequent transport, four drops of the precious nectar fell on the earth. The four places it fell are the sites where the kumbh mela is held in rotation.
Amidst the visual spectacle of the mela, a sight that most often attracts the attention of photographers is that of the semi-naked sadhus, smeared with ash. A group of these yogis are known as the Udasis, 'the detached'. The founder of this sect of yogis was Sri Chand, the eldest son of Guru Nanak, the first guru of the Sikhs.
Some time during January of 1643, in Kiratpur, India a 12 year old boy, walks to the edge of a forest and disappears, never to be seen again. This person was none other than Sri Chand, except that he was born in 1494, which would have meant that if indeed he did look like a 12-year old he was in fact almost 150 years old (Baba Sri Chand: 1494-1643). He may, it appears, have mastered the yogic practice of 'Kechari Mudra' reputed to allow the practitioner to drink the 'amrit' flowing from the crown of the head during yogic meditation( Shri Mataji demonstrating).
So contrary to the assumptions of the perennial human search for eternal youth and longevity that has exercised alchemists all the way from Pico della Mirandola in renaissance Italy to the modern day equivalents like Aubrey de Grey and David Sinclair , the philosopher's stone is within and not without.
How might something within the body or supposedly flowing down from the head halt or reverse aging?
Well, there are two measures of age: chronological age and biological age. Chronological age, as the name implies, is merely age marked by the ticking of the clock and how many birthdays you've had . Biological age on the other hand, relates to the wear and tear on your body and how this shows up at a cellular level. If, for example, you enjoy running ultra-marathons and regularly compete in Southern Morocco's annual desert run, 'Marathon des Sables' , then although your passport may claim that you're 35, in hazy light and in silhouette, you could pass for a 45-year old.
And it's not just physical stress that leads to the steady divergence between how old you are and how old you're feeling. For a lot of people stress is mental or emotional, and this also shows up at a cellular level . The body ages because the cells of the body are aging and a key marker for cellular aging is what are called telomeres.
Telomeres are the cap-ends of human chromosomes which shorten with each cell division. Telomerase is the enzyme that replenishes the telomeres. When this replenishment stops there's a critical shortening of telomeres which is linked to cell senescence. This is what the wiki article says about the discovery of telomeres:
In 1975–1977, Elizabeth Blackburn, working as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Joseph Gall, discovered the unusual nature of telomeres, with their simple repeated DNA sequences composing chromosome ends.[7] Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.[8]
Nevertheless, in the 1970s there was no recognition that the telomere-shortening mechanism normally limits cells to a fixed number of divisions, and no animal study suggesting that this could be responsible for aging on the cellular level and sets a limit on lifespans.[9][10]
It remained for a privately funded collaboration from biotechnology company Geron to isolate the genes for the RNA and protein component of human telomerase in order to establish the role of telomere shortening in cellular aging and telomerase reactivation in cell immortalization.[11]
And about telomerase:
Telomerase, thus, "replenishes" the telomere "cap" of the DNA. In most multicellular eukaryotic organisms, telomerase is active only in germ cells, some types of stem cells such as embryonic stem cells, and certain white blood cells. Telomerase can be re activated and telomeres reset back to an embryonic state by somatic cell nuclear transfer.[15] There are theories that claim that the steady shortening of telomeres with each replication in somatic (body) cells may have a role in senescence and in the prevention of cancer. This is because the telomeres act as a sort of time-delay "fuse", eventually running out after a certain number of cell divisions and resulting in the eventual loss of vital genetic information from the cell's chromosome with future divisions.
Guess what has been linked to the accelerated shortening of telomeres?
Correct! Our old friend, Stress.
Here's part of the abstract from NIH/pubmed
So, up to this point , we can at least allow that there is a scientifically validated mechanism that would lead to the divergence between chronological age and biological age. But a 150-year old looking as young as a 12-year old, as was claimed about Sri Chand, still requires some explaining.
For this we can examine the yoga explanation of 'amrita' /'elixir of youth' flowing from the crown of the head in the yogic practice of 'kechari mudra' (by the way, although this may read like a very difficult yogic practice, in evolutionary terms ie sahaja yoga, this mechanism becomes a reflex, needing as little conscious intervention as the body's digestive process).
Are you in favour of legalising Marijuana?
On 5th November 1996, California became the first state in America to legalise the use of marijuana for medical purposes. If you live in California, you may have been one of the 56% that voted for proposition 215 that put this into the statute book.
Perhaps, it's fitting that California, with it's reputation for counter-culture and experimentation should be the first state to allow 'legal highs' It's never been confirmed if the governor had a celebratory joint in hand while watching the ink dry on his signature.
Where California went , other states followed and if you're crossing state lines while smoking weed it's good to know where you stand with the law if you don't want to have to resort to the Bill Clinton excuse : 'I didn't inhale' .(see: Legality of Cannabis by U.S jurisdiction )
The recent drive for Marijuana legalisation has had a prominent champion in Dr Sanjay Gupta , CNN chief medical correspondent and one of the key benefits, it appears, of medical marijuana use is the relief it provides from chronic pain.
To cite another NIH/pubmed abstract about pain modulation :
What we can extract from this which is directly relevant to the present discussion is that in the limbic system of the brain there are opioid/cannabinoid receptors that bind with the active ingredient in marijuana for example and by doing so block pain. However, this pain modularity circuit, can self-activate without the use of drugs('endogenous').
Writing in Progress. Please return to catch up.....
You only have watch TV news, with daily images of extreme weather patterns, geopolitical upheaval, uncertainties about the global economy, or pay a little attention to the galloping pace of technological change and the mooted threat of rogue artificial intelligence, to get a sense that something is afoot and that we do indeed live in 'interesting times'. The risks to humanity may never have been greater than they are now.
It is hypothesised that Mother Nature may be doing a silent, unseen upgrade of human beings via the mechanism of spontaneous, en-masse awakening of the kundalini energy. In this upgrade, no paid membership or subscription to any club or group is required. The experience is freely available to everyone, everywhere.
Unfortunately, as with all upgrades, the old version gets phased out.
An example of a previous upgrade to the species, is the transition of neanderthals to homo sapiens. The neanderthals got phased out (Neanderthal extinction ).
Yes, evolution is a process happening over thousands of years, and the co-existence of neanderthals and homo sapiens may be measured in thousands of years, but the evolutionary curve is not smooth. There are inflection points, where small, imperceptible changes accumulating over a long period, suddenly result in some dramatic change. The term used to describe this in a particular field of mathematics is 'catastrophe' or 'singularity' (See: Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is near'). It has been said that we have reached such an inflection point now. The evidence is visible all around and within the study of the natural world scientists refer to this as the ' Halocene extinction'. Things are speeding up and there could be trouble ahead.
Here's what Dr. Louise Leakey, daughter of the great paleontologist, Richard Leakey, and a paleontologist in her own right has said about this: (The article appears in the Financial Times newspaper November 20 , 2015).
"We reach the Turkwel field acutely aware of the enormous technological advances our own branch of mankind has made in the past half-century, but Leakey warns against the arrogance of modern man. She reminds us that we have existed a mere 200,000 years, and that all the half-dozen other species of the genus Homo have gone extinct. Since her grandparents first started searching for man's origins 80 years ago the global population has soared from two to seven billion. She says man is rapidly destroying the environment and other species in what she calls the 'sixth Mass Extinction'. She believes Homo sapiens will itself disappear "possibly within hundreds, not thousands, of years ", adding: "The planet would be a better place without us". Even in the Turkana basin the warning signs are apparent. The wildlife has mostly been killed. Overgrazing has turned the land to desert. Overfishing has depleted the lake. Ethiopia has built a huge new dam on the Omo river which threatens to turn sublime lake Turkana into a toxic, dried-up dust bowl. "Here in the so-called 'Birthplace of Humanity'", says Leakey, "you can already see how humanity is destroying itself."
If the idea of a total annihilation seems too remote or difficult to envisage, a no less alarming scenario is painted by Stephen Emmot in his book(and movie) , 10 Billion, about how the combined effects of inexorable population growth and climate change will lead to hellish chaos around the globe as a result of food and water shortage . In a classic case of the messenger being shot, the book and the author are criticised as being unscientific and being overly pessimistic. Unlike others, Emmot, it appears, though a technologist himself, fails to be more enthusiastic about human scientific and technological ingenuity to get us out of this mess. The potential of GM crops to alleviate global food shortages for example has been cited. With regard water shortage, one only has to browse through archived TED talks to see how much intellectual capital is already being invested in this problem(see: talks by Allan Savory / Marcia Barbosa / Michael Pritchard / Stuart Orr).
Although, Emmot's is clearly not a solitary voice in the wilderness - other recent books include: 2071- The World We'll Leave Our Grandchildren, by Chris Rapley & Duncan Macmillan and End Game - Tipping Point For Planet Earth? by Anthony Barnosky & Elizabeth Hadley - one thing Emmot, was definitely wrong about, is when he suggests towards the end of his book, that there is no concerted political will to tackle the problem of climate change. The agreement reached at the COP21 in Paris in December 2015, proved that the collective mind of governments around the world has been concentrated and that there is indeed political will to deal with a situation that is generally agreed is dire.
However, there is still no guarantee that the critical 2C global temperature increase after which all the bad stuff happens will not be breached . Almost as if she had already watched this movie and knew how everything plays out, this is what Shri Mataji had to say:
" The means that are adopted are not sufficient to stop our deterioration"
This quote comes from an ecological conference in Bulgaria in 1995! (see: Ecology & Human Survival : Evolutionary Immunity .)
The evolutionary immunity, Shri Mataji refers to, is a transformation in human awareness brought about by mass kundalini awakening and the establishing of it through meditative practice.
Almost as if in a race against time, Mother Nature appears to have switched into emergency mode as far as the preservation of at least a subset of the total species is concerned (think Noah's Ark). The long, slow process of evolutionary change relying on DNA mutations has been compressed into the much more faster cycle of epigenetic change. This combined with brain neuroplasticity means that anything that has an effect on brain re-wiring, such as, meditation, can confer benefit on non-meditating off-spring ie, inter-generationally.
The idea of meditating to guarantee the continuation of the gene pool may seem an odd one.
Some of us are already practising meditation; we're covered, right?
The interest in meditation has certainly increased, if the practice of mindfulness is any indication and the whole world and her Aunty seems to be taking it up. A practice that earlier seemed to also require an adherence to vegetarianism and going about in sandals, has now gone mainstream. And exponentially. Why? To try and explain this we can use Neil Shubin's Tiktaalik to illustrate.
Neil Shubin is an acclaimed paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, who is author of the book, 'Your inner fish' which is about his expedition to find the fossilized remains of a prehistoric fish called tiktaalik.
What's special about the tiktaalik is that it is the link between prehistoric marine animals and land mammals. It was the first amphibian. By the evolutionary modification of it's pelvic fin into rudimentary legs it was able to 'walk' on to land.
Although it would be difficult to know for certain what the impetus was behind this evolutionary change: whether to escape a predator fish or as a response to a food deficiency in the local habitat and the need to forage for food on land, what is more certain is that it was for survival of the species.
As with the transmission of all mass 'social' phenomena, it could be that in the beginning only one fish swam to the shoreline in anticipation of making land. Then maybe twelve fish and then a gradually increasing shoal of fish. Over time, the water near the shoreline would have been dense with teeming fish trying to come on land. Neither the fish themselves nor a proverbial contemporary observer would understand fully what was happening. Not until the first few tiktaalik succeeded and were lying on the beach , sunbathing.
Roll forward several epochs and human beings are the new tiktaalik, straining to get to a better place (many years ago, a work colleague described the 'waking dream' she had when her kundalini was awakened, thus: "I saw fish walking triumphantly out of water wearing crowns on their heads" - the significance of Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish could not be more relevant)
So instead of flapping about in shallow water, we've taken to meditation. The impetus being stress. But maybe not all forms of meditation carry the evolutionary payload. The measure being how close the practice is to natural activity or how sufficiently 'native'* it is to our makeup. [*native = innate or in-born. The sankrit equivalent is 'sahaja' which means 'with you born' , as in sahaja yoga]
It could be argued that although meditation has hundreds of years of tradition behind it, the practice itself is not actually a natural activity. Why? Because it doesn't fit into the four main divisions of Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, which are: physiology, safety, love/belonging, esteem. It's only after these four needs are satisfied that, maybe, the practice of meditation gets a look in with the need at the top of the pyramid: self-actualisation(religion/spirituality). That is why, on the whole, it has been the pursuit of very few.
However, evolution, it seems, has no truck with exclusivity. She goes for mass appeal to get as many through as possible. She also follows the line of least resistance.
The line of least resistence is the point where an unnatural activity approaches as near as possible to a natural activity. So if stress didn't exist, she'd have to invent it, thus making the unnatural activity of meditation a means of satisfying the first four of Maslow's Hierarchy(not just the fifth), turning it into a more natural activity to make it attractive to the mass.
So far, so good. We're all meditating, now what?
There's still something unnatural about meditating because we have to take time out of our busy day to sit and do...nothing. So people know from the research that meditation may be good for them but still don't take it up because they can't spare the time.
Solution: turn meditation from an activity into a state which a person can be in at anytime and spontaneously.
This is where kundalini comes in: it's the state-switching mechanism.
So if the meditation is a practice rather than a state and doesn't involve the certifiably-awakened kundalini achieving said state, then, inspite of perceived benefits, it may not be the form of meditation favoured by evolution. There's the natural and then there's the man-made. Only the natural will get you there. After all, we can't evolve ourselves by thinking about it.
But isn't the kundalini dangerous? I've read stuff about it
In 1967 a book was published entitled 'Kundalini : The Evolutionary Energy in Man'. The author was Gopi Krishna(1903 - 1984) for whom the book was an autobiographical account of his experience with kundalini awakening. Part of his reported experience involved periods of personal physical trauma, such as sensations of tremendous heat, along with depression, that he associated with kundalini awakening. These seemed to punctuate the more blissful, mystic experiences.
Many subsequent and predominantly, western 'practitioners'/'investigators' of kundalini awakening or kundalini yoga have used Gopi Krishna's account as their start point. The resulting gospel that has built up around kundalini awakening therefore has the heat trauma as a key feature.
Perversely, the heat trauma experience now seems to be welcomed and even sought out as the only real indicator of kundalini activity. So, there are any number of false practices and pseudo-experiences available in the market, for which the the purveyors may merely be exploiting a commercial opportunity rather than having any interest at all in the evolutionary significance.
Without detracting from the veracity of Gopi Krishna's account of kundalini awakening, it may, after all, have been unique to him, it is useful to set his singular experience in 1937 against the experience of several hundred thousand other people today. The key feature of today's experience of kundalini awakening is not traumatic heat but a pleasant sensation of a cool breeze described earlier.
Admittedly, in further variance from Gopi Krishna's account, any reports today about anyone in the several hundreds of thousands of people mentioned, being zoned out in some involuntary mystic state are also near non-existent. The lows don't exist but the highs are not that high either.
There is one case, which is brought up only to illustrate why a 'mystic' high may not be useful in the general scheme of things. It brings to mind the 'Opium-eater'.
Years ago a sahaja yogi related to me how after he had the experience of kundalini awakening, he took up some new employment, having been invited by his friend, the employer, who had also had kundalini awakening. Things didn't go well. While the employer had successfully integrated the performance-enhancing side-effect of his kundalini meditation to benefit the running of his business, his new employee had not apparently reached this normalised state of self-awareness. He was still in a phase, they used to call 'the bliss bunny' phase, probably referring to how a bunny just sits there doing nothing, seemingly stupified by the mere blissful fact of existence. Although the employer understood where his friend was coming from, he had to let him go. There was silver lining though: the friend did go on to embark on a succesful career of his own; presumably, when he'd learnt how to straighten up and fly right.
The statistical bell curve or normal distribution may be a good model of an evolutionary truth : the extremes at one end or the other are not favoured, it's just the balanced mass in the middle that's the preferred.
An additional counter-weight to Gopi Krishna's book and a reminder that he was not the first person to write authoritively about the effects of kundalini awakening, is Dnyaneshwara, a 13th century philospher and yogi who wrote a book of commentary, entitled Dnyaneshvari.
In the famous sixth chapter of Dnyaneshvari, he writes:
"..fragrance
in the Prana
enters the central (Sushumna)
nerve along with the Kundalini. Then the spiritual nectar situated at
the crown of the head spills into the mouth of the Kundalini and then
gets absorbed throughout the body including the ten Pranas.
(6:246-248).
Body
gets rejuvenated The
skin which covers the lustre of this nectar and is brightened by it
is shed and all the organs show their bright aura. (6:250, 252-253).
Now even Death is afraid of it (the body) and the aging process gets
reversed and the yogi gets back his bygone childhood and he looks
like a boy."
This precise description is typical of the rest of Dnyaneshwara account, made more solid by the fact that Dnyaneshwara had pedigree, coming from a lineage of kundalini yogis called the 'Nath Panthis'.
Based on our own experience (see: How effects of meditation can show on the face ) it is easier to align with Dnyaneshwara's account rather than with Gopi Krishna's.
That bit about 'ageing gets reversed', that sounds interesting, what's that about?
The Guiness World Record for the largest gathering of people in one place is claimed by the Kumbh Mela festival in Allahbad,India in 2013 when between 80million to 100million attended the 55-day event.
The kumbh mela is a festival that occurs every 12 years and has been going on since time immemorial; it's not known when it started. However, it's origin is associated with a legend from the puranas, called the samudra mathana or 'the churning of the ocean of milk' for 'amrit' , the nectar of immortality.
When the amrit was eventually produced, it emerged in a pot or 'kumbh', carried by Dhanvantari, the god of medicine. In the course of the kumbh's subsequent transport, four drops of the precious nectar fell on the earth. The four places it fell are the sites where the kumbh mela is held in rotation.
Amidst the visual spectacle of the mela, a sight that most often attracts the attention of photographers is that of the semi-naked sadhus, smeared with ash. A group of these yogis are known as the Udasis, 'the detached'. The founder of this sect of yogis was Sri Chand, the eldest son of Guru Nanak, the first guru of the Sikhs.
Some time during January of 1643, in Kiratpur, India a 12 year old boy, walks to the edge of a forest and disappears, never to be seen again. This person was none other than Sri Chand, except that he was born in 1494, which would have meant that if indeed he did look like a 12-year old he was in fact almost 150 years old (Baba Sri Chand: 1494-1643). He may, it appears, have mastered the yogic practice of 'Kechari Mudra' reputed to allow the practitioner to drink the 'amrit' flowing from the crown of the head during yogic meditation( Shri Mataji demonstrating).
So contrary to the assumptions of the perennial human search for eternal youth and longevity that has exercised alchemists all the way from Pico della Mirandola in renaissance Italy to the modern day equivalents like Aubrey de Grey and David Sinclair , the philosopher's stone is within and not without.
How might something within the body or supposedly flowing down from the head halt or reverse aging?
Well, there are two measures of age: chronological age and biological age. Chronological age, as the name implies, is merely age marked by the ticking of the clock and how many birthdays you've had . Biological age on the other hand, relates to the wear and tear on your body and how this shows up at a cellular level. If, for example, you enjoy running ultra-marathons and regularly compete in Southern Morocco's annual desert run, 'Marathon des Sables' , then although your passport may claim that you're 35, in hazy light and in silhouette, you could pass for a 45-year old.
And it's not just physical stress that leads to the steady divergence between how old you are and how old you're feeling. For a lot of people stress is mental or emotional, and this also shows up at a cellular level . The body ages because the cells of the body are aging and a key marker for cellular aging is what are called telomeres.
Telomeres are the cap-ends of human chromosomes which shorten with each cell division. Telomerase is the enzyme that replenishes the telomeres. When this replenishment stops there's a critical shortening of telomeres which is linked to cell senescence. This is what the wiki article says about the discovery of telomeres:
Discovery
In the early 1970s, Russian theorist Alexei Olovnikov first recognized that chromosomes could not completely replicate their ends. Building on this, and to accommodate Leonard Hayflick's idea of limited somatic cell division, Olovnikov suggested that DNA sequences are lost every time a cell/DNA replicates until the loss reaches a critical level, at which point cell division ends.[4][5] However, Olovnikov's prediction was not widely known except by a handful of researchers studying cellular aging and immortalization.[6]In 1975–1977, Elizabeth Blackburn, working as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Joseph Gall, discovered the unusual nature of telomeres, with their simple repeated DNA sequences composing chromosome ends.[7] Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.[8]
Nevertheless, in the 1970s there was no recognition that the telomere-shortening mechanism normally limits cells to a fixed number of divisions, and no animal study suggesting that this could be responsible for aging on the cellular level and sets a limit on lifespans.[9][10]
It remained for a privately funded collaboration from biotechnology company Geron to isolate the genes for the RNA and protein component of human telomerase in order to establish the role of telomere shortening in cellular aging and telomerase reactivation in cell immortalization.[11]
And about telomerase:
Telomerase, thus, "replenishes" the telomere "cap" of the DNA. In most multicellular eukaryotic organisms, telomerase is active only in germ cells, some types of stem cells such as embryonic stem cells, and certain white blood cells. Telomerase can be re activated and telomeres reset back to an embryonic state by somatic cell nuclear transfer.[15] There are theories that claim that the steady shortening of telomeres with each replication in somatic (body) cells may have a role in senescence and in the prevention of cancer. This is because the telomeres act as a sort of time-delay "fuse", eventually running out after a certain number of cell divisions and resulting in the eventual loss of vital genetic information from the cell's chromosome with future divisions.
Guess what has been linked to the accelerated shortening of telomeres?
Correct! Our old friend, Stress.
Here's part of the abstract from NIH/pubmed
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Dec 7;101(49):17312-5. Epub 2004 Dec 1.
Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress.
Abstract
Numerous
studies demonstrate links between chronic stress and indices of poor
health, including risk factors for cardiovascular disease and poorer
immune function. Nevertheless, the exact mechanisms of how stress gets
"under the skin" remain elusive. We investigated the hypothesis that
stress impacts health by modulating the rate of cellular aging. Here we
provide evidence that psychological stress--both perceived stress and
chronicity of stress--is significantly associated with higher oxidative
stress, lower telomerase activity, and shorter telomere length, which
are known determinants of cell senescence and longevity, in peripheral
blood mononuclear cells from healthy premenopausal women. Women with the
highest levels of perceived stress have telomeres shorter on average by
the equivalent of at least one decade of additional aging compared to
low stress women. These findings have implications for understanding
how, at the cellular level, stress may promote earlier onset of
age-related diseases.
So, up to this point , we can at least allow that there is a scientifically validated mechanism that would lead to the divergence between chronological age and biological age. But a 150-year old looking as young as a 12-year old, as was claimed about Sri Chand, still requires some explaining.
For this we can examine the yoga explanation of 'amrita' /'elixir of youth' flowing from the crown of the head in the yogic practice of 'kechari mudra' (by the way, although this may read like a very difficult yogic practice, in evolutionary terms ie sahaja yoga, this mechanism becomes a reflex, needing as little conscious intervention as the body's digestive process).
Are you in favour of legalising Marijuana?
On 5th November 1996, California became the first state in America to legalise the use of marijuana for medical purposes. If you live in California, you may have been one of the 56% that voted for proposition 215 that put this into the statute book.
Perhaps, it's fitting that California, with it's reputation for counter-culture and experimentation should be the first state to allow 'legal highs' It's never been confirmed if the governor had a celebratory joint in hand while watching the ink dry on his signature.
Where California went , other states followed and if you're crossing state lines while smoking weed it's good to know where you stand with the law if you don't want to have to resort to the Bill Clinton excuse : 'I didn't inhale' .(see: Legality of Cannabis by U.S jurisdiction )
The recent drive for Marijuana legalisation has had a prominent champion in Dr Sanjay Gupta , CNN chief medical correspondent and one of the key benefits, it appears, of medical marijuana use is the relief it provides from chronic pain.
To cite another NIH/pubmed abstract about pain modulation :
Existence of an endogenous pain inhibitory system
Early
evidence for pain modulatory mechanisms came from observations of H.K.
Beecher, who noted a remarkable attenuation of pain experienced by
soldiersin combat situations (1).
Analogous observations have been seen in others, including athletes
that continue competition despite significant injuries (see ref. 2).
Beecher, a physician who served with the US Army during the Second
World War, observed that as many as three-quarters of badly wounded
soldiers reported no to moderate pain and did not want pain relief
medication (1).
This observation was striking, because the wounds were not trivial but
consisted of compound fractures of long bones or penetrating wounds of
the abdomen, thorax, or cranium. Moreover, only individuals who were
clearly alert, responsive, and not in shock were included in his report (1), leading to the conclusion that “strong emotions” block pain (1).
The existence of endogenous mechanisms that
diminish pain through net “inhibition” is now generally accepted. Pain
modulation likely exists in the form of a descending pain modulatory
circuit with inputs that arise in multiple areas, including the
hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex
(rACC), feeding to the midbrain periaqueductal gray region (PAG), and
with outputs from the PAG to the medulla. Neurons within the nucleus
raphe magnus and nucleus reticularis gigantocellularis, which are
included within the rostral ventromedial medulla (RVM), have been shown
to project to the spinal or medullary dorsal horns to directly or
indirectly enhance or diminish nociceptive traffic, changing the
experience of pain (3).
This descending modulatory circuit is an “opioid-sensitive” circuit
(see below) and relevant to human experience in many settings, including
in states of chronic pain, and in the actions of pain-relieving drugs,
including opiates, cannabinoids, NSAIDs, and serotonin/norepinephrine
reuptake blockers that mimic, in part, the actions of opiates (Figure (Figure1).1).
While the precise mechanisms by which drugs produce pain relief is not
entirely understood, strong evidence supports the actions of these drugs
through the pain modulatory circuit or by mimicking the consequence of
activation of this descending circuit at the level of the spinal cord.
What we can extract from this which is directly relevant to the present discussion is that in the limbic system of the brain there are opioid/cannabinoid receptors that bind with the active ingredient in marijuana for example and by doing so block pain. However, this pain modularity circuit, can self-activate without the use of drugs('endogenous').
Writing in Progress. Please return to catch up.....
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