Kundalini and the Occult, by John White (Edited by Kristof Gabriel van Hooymissen)

To the higher humanity, Homo noeticus

And to those sages and seers, ancient and modern, whose selfless service has prepared the birthplace.

KUNDALINI AND THE OCCULT

(The following article was typed from the book edited by John White with the title Kundalini, Evolution and Enlightenment. It gives us the importance for Kundalini research in order to prevent the development of future Hitlers. It is an important study for understanding the occult background of what went wrong in world war two – and how to correct such events – and it rejects hatred against Jewish and or other people whatsoever). We are one human family, growing together, learning from one another.)

The following articles deal with various aspects of kundalii as expressed in occult forms. The word occult is not a pejorative term, although certain degenerate occult practices warrant condemnation. Here we are simply observing a relationship between little-understood phenomena and the dynamics of the kundalini concept.
In its most general sense, occult means secret, hidden, beyond the bounds of ordinary knowledge, unknown to the general public. At the center of all occultism is the attempt to gain higher knowledge and control the forces of nature, especially the life energy that is the basis of true magic and paranormal phenomena. In its highest form, occult science merges indistinguishably with true mysticism.
This is illustrated by a passage from Robert Anton Wilson’s recent book Cosmic Trigger, which is an account of his investigations int occult pathways in search of “the final secret of the illuminati.” In discussing Aleister Crowley, an occultist par excellence who evolved from a magical-meditative system called Scientific Illuminism, Wilson writes:

I remembered Crowley’s discussion of Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, St. Paul, and Moses in Book One of Magick. Jesus, Crowley points out, says nothing about the source of his Illumination; Buddha speaks of being tempted by various demons and then seeing the Clear Light; St. Paul tells us he had been “caught up into Heaven and seen and heard things of which it is not lawful to speak”; Mohammed claims he was visited by the Archangel Gabriel; and Moses simply says he “beheld God”. Crowley comments: “Diverse as these statements are at first sight, all agree in announcing an experience of the class which fifty years ago would have been called supernatural, today may be called spiritual, and fifty years hence will have a proper name based on an understanding of the phenomenon which occured.”

Crowley’s statement shows that mysticism and genuine occultism are closely allied. It also shows Crowley’s belief, paralleling Gopi Krishna’s view of kundalini, that courageous, clearminded research and the systematization of knowledge will yield understanding of the basic laws governing “supernatural” phenomena and higher consciousness. Might the “proper name” Crowley expected be kundalini research? I suggest that it is.
Not all mystics and occultists are on a par, of course, or motivated by the same values and purposes. Clearly, there a negative side to occultism. But the heart of genuine occult practices appears to be synonymous with aspects of the kundalini concept. In my bok Everything you want to know about TM, I provide an example of the profound importance that kundalini-based studies of the occult can have I offer the example here, beginning with this identification test :

“Who is this man? He was a vegetarian who studied yoga, freethought, and various occult arts. He contemplated entering the priesthood. He consulted astrologers, used psychedelic drugs, and read widely the wisdom literature of the Near East and Orient, including Tibetan Buddhism, Gnosticism, and various mystics. He believed in reincarnation of souls into animal bodies, and wept when his canaries died. He excercised every day in front of an open window. He attended sceances and was himself mediumistic. He loved playing with children.”

This apperently gentle soul, this Flower Child, this Friend of the New Age was none other than – Adolf Hitler. Several recent studies of Hitler have given us this new and radically revised portrait. They show that Hitler was an occultist of a high order, with distinct mystical traits. (They also make clear the difference between a mystic and a saint.) In the Occult Reich, the Occult and the Third Reich and, most important of all, The Spear of Destiny, clsear, strong foundations of the Nazi movement is presented. These books convincicly propose that Hitler was  a mystic of sort whose inner circle of supporters were occultists practicing black magic who had considerable knowledge about altered states of consciousness. Hitler’s high native intelligence and active kundalini were raised to near-genius level through personal experience of transcendent consciousness, gained primarily through use of psychedelic drugs such as peyote and through initiation into occult practices for expanding awareness.

The mind-expanding experiences Hitler had as a young man gave him sporadic access to an illumined state that later led him to say to one of his generals, “The purpose of human life is to gain a mystic view of the universe.” This is a suprising statement, far out of keeping with the stereotyped, one-dimensional image of Hitler that historians have thus far given us. It shows his deep affinity with the though of evolutionists such as Gopi Krishna, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, R.M. Bucke, and others.
Hitler’s evolutionary notion of a super race was formed not so much through reading philosophers such as Nietzsche as it was from direct experience of higher consciousness. But if der Führer had a significant degree of mystical understanding, he failed woefully to develop it in a balanced, integrated way, and thus  - quite obviously! – failed to develop saintly character traits necessary for the full awakening of the kundalini. Lacking the guidance of spiritual values and ethical restrictions, his inner vision and high intelligence became distorted by malignant internal and external influences. Psychopathology developed, leading to the holocaust of World War II. If further Hitlers are to be avoided, kundalini research appears to be essential.
Alchemy provides another useful example of the links between kundalini and the occult. Alchemy’s true purpose is not the chemical manipulation of gross matter, as is commonly thought, but rather te transmutation f unrefined elements of the human psyche. These elements are symbolized by various substances that have a precise meaning assigned to them. In the “laboratory” of the alchemist’s own body, the “lead” of ordinary awareness becomes the “gold” of higher consciousness, just as the yogi seeks to transform his being through specific practices. The term kundalini does not occur in the alchemical tradition, but the alchemical processes, encoded in cryptic language, have been decoded by modern commentators such as Dr. Israel Regardie in The Philosophers’ Stone and shown to be at least, tantric practices. As mentioned earlier, tantra’s aim is to awaken the kundalini energy and bring about a state of heightened awareness.

Studies in occult subjects provide uncounted instances of kundalini’s generaly unrecognised centrality to even the most respected fields of orthodox thought. Medicine, for example, is symbolised by the caduceus, the staff of Hermes*[1] around which are entwined two serpents. The serpents can be equated with ida and pingala coiling around the central channel of life, the spinal sushumna. Health, therefore, from the original hermetic perspective, is symbolised by properly balanced physiological activity that harmonizes the life force throughout the body, and the medical practitioner is one who has intimate knowledge of how to modify and correct the imbalances.

The serpent, as an occult symbol of higher knowledge, immortality, and the human potential to become godlike, permetates ancient cultures around the world and survives into the modern age in many forms. Most obvious is the Genesis myth, where the serpent, “more subtle than any other wild creature”, leads Adam and Eve to understand that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil can enable them to “be as gods.” If we put aside the philosophical question of why the Lord originally forbade such knowledge to humans, it is clear that the serpent is kundalini and that Genesis is a myth concerning states of consciousness. By eating the fruit of our own tree-shaped cerebrospinal system – the spinal trunk and its exfoliation into the many-leaved (or thousand-petaled) brain – man can gain knowledge that may indeed kill him. “For in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die,”, the Lord tells Adam. There are two senses in which a person can die – figuratively and literally. Regarding literal or biological death, we haven seen indications that kundalini, improperly raised, can cause it. When properly raised, however, kundalini can result in figurative death, an ego-death, involving transformation of the nervous system and the experience of divinity. In this experience, the “old Adam”, dies, to use St. Paul’s phrase, and a new person is born, reborn, as a child of the cosmos, no longer self-centered and cosmically conscious. This, I suggest, is the meaning of the Star Child floating in space at the end of that occult cinematic experience, 2001, a saga of the evolution of the human race from a apelike condition to a beckoning new stage of transhuman development.

Professor Weston La Baree, in his book, They Shall Take Up Serpents, demonstrates that the phallus and the serpent were symbolically identical in the higher thought of the ancient Mediterranean world of Africa and Asia Minor, centering in Egypt. The serpent, for example, appears on the Pharao’s diadem at the site of the mystical “third eye”, indicating the relationship between sexual and supersensory experience. Gopi Krishna supplements this by pointing out that the kundalini concept is the only sensible explanation of an otherwise mysterious piece of Egyptology: paintings and statuary depicting men – even a Pharao and a male god – in meditation with an erect phallus. This is not meant by the artist to be erotic at all, Gopi Krishna says, but rahter is a frank and literal depiction of a biological fact about kundalini. Swami Muktananda’s story in Part II is a modern confirmation of this.

Going beyond La Barre’s research, Gopi Krishna has found evidence for kundalini experience in the ancient records of Tibet, Sumer, the Indus Valley civilization, China (where the serpent appears as a dragon), Greece (for example, the phyton-oracle at Delphi), and in the feathered serpent of Mexico and South America.
The functional relation among the phallus, the serpent, and higher states of consciousness is demonstrated well in Gopi Krishna’s description of his own kundalini experience. A few pages after the excerpt from his autobiography presened here, he describes an orgasmic-like kundalini experience he had: “There was a sund line a nerve thread snapping and instantaneously a silvery streak passed through the spinal cord, exactly like the sinuous movement of a white serpent in rapid flight, pouring an effulgent, cascading shower of brilliant vital energy into my brain, filling my head with a blissful luster ...”

The relation between sexual climax and spiritual ecstacy so often encountered in occultism and mysticism suggests the general outline of a still-further stage of evolution toward which the human race is slowly tending. The details of this biological advance are dim-occulted, if you will. Nevertheless, I offer the following in a speculative way.
In sexual climax, the pranic life energy rushes upward through the spinal cord into the brain (Ejaculation of semen in males is not the primary characteristic of climax. Rather, it is the brain stimulation through the nervous system that is sought through sexual activity – a characteristic that applies equally to females.) The kundalini concept postulates that life life energy can be focused and directed in such a way that the bliss of orgasm is heightened manyfold and made permanent as ananda. Gene Kieffer, president of the Kundalini Research Foundation (see appendix[2]), elaborates on this aspect:

The most powerful motivating force of life, as Freud has shown, is sex and the pleasure drawn from the sexual act. Simularly, the most powerful motivating force to draw man to the evolutionary path, according to the traditional concept of kundalini, is ananda. This highly extended state f consciousness, permeated with a extreme form of rapture, is said to be possible only when the consumption of prana is greatly enhanced.      

The new state of consciousness – characterized by ananda, heightened mental faculties, and the development of new supersensory channels of perception – begins to impse itself upon the exterior world through loving and wise action in society, thereby helping to bring about a transformation of the human condition. And it is noteworthy that the word climax comes from the Greek klimax, meaning ladder (to heaven that is, to a paradisal state.)        

Recent data from parapsychology and thanatology give us new insight into the condition of a person in higher consciousness at the end of physical life. The yogic tradition, which designates the death process as mahasamadhi (“casting off the body” or the ultimate enlightenment), apperently named it so for an important reason. The yogi brings to bear all his yogic training and power by choosing the time of his death and exiting consciously from the body in nonphysical form through the fontanelle at the top of the skull, just as, phenomenologically speaking, semen is ejaculated through the penis and just as kundalini energy passes rapidly up the spinal column. Interestingly a French term for orgams is petit mort, little death – the momentary extinction of ego consciousness.)

The yogic death-experience is literally ecstatic. The word ecstacy is derived from the root ex, out of, and stasis, a fixed or static condition. Ecstacy is the ancient term for out-of-the-body experience into astral projection, the “flight of the soul”, It is the experience in which one finds his consciousness, his center of self-awareness, floating in space exterior to the physical body.
This experience is the objective of many occult paths and mystery school initiations. It is part of their training to remove fear of death and the limitations of a physical body. In the past few years, a number of investigators have given accounts and analyses of this experience in books such as Life After Life, The Astral Journey, Ekstasy, and At The Hour of Death. The interesting point here is that those who have udergone the experiece almost uniformly reported lss of fear of death, while a sense of blissful, serene well-beig flooded their awareness. Death, they said, is seen to be simply a change of state. From a condition of being fixed in a body of gross, static substance, one is freed into a realm where consciousness is contained in a body of much finer substance, mre subtle and rarefied, and capable of much greater mobility and freedom.
Yogic training, therefre, is in a part a systematic process in which one deliberately conquers fear of death and learns to exit consciously and painlessly from the body at the end of a life of service to humanity. This is stated explicitely in some of the ancient yogic texts, and more recently by Swami Rama in Living with the Himalayan Masters. In a chapter on techniques of casting of the body, he writes: “It is not like committing suicide, but is an exact process or way of leaving that body which is no longer an instrument for enlightenment. Such a body is considered to be a burden – an obstacle which might obstruct the journey of a dying man....”
A journey to where? From the yogic perspective, the goal is to explore the nature of nonphysical postmortem condition, recognizing that consciousness is ultimate reality and that it tends to be structured in levels of existence traditionally called the astral plane, the etheric plane, the causal plane, etc. These other space-time frameworks have entities indigenous to them, among which are the beings “of the light” described by so many people who have voluntarily or spontaniously experienced the ecsomatic condition. These beings are probably an evolutionary advanced form toward which human life is tending, and psychological enlightenment is therefor a prefiguration of that distant condition in which the entire body is enlightened or of luminous substance. The beings of light, it is said in many occult and spiritual traditions, are in turn assisting the birth process by which Homo Sapiens is emerging into the new world of higher consciousness. I propose that the higher humanity is name Homo noeticus.

Knowledge of the higher worlds : This is the thrust of all spiritual disciplines, ceremonial magic, occult practices, shamanic training, and religious ritual – to employ it with precision for the evolution of the race t a greater state of existence, eventually freed from the bonds of the flesh.
It was precisely this condition that Hitler, via the Third Reich, was seeking. His understanding was woefully incomplete, however. The purpose of life, the greatest sages say, is not simply to gain a mystic view of the universe; rather it is to gain that view and the lovingly share it with others. Hitler’s violent, coercive tactics resulted in a horrible caricature of the evolutionary process.

Aleister Crowley’s occultism was fundamentally an attempt to control and direct evolution. D. Brian Hanlon states in Gnostica magazine (October-November 1977) review of Israel Regardie’s biography of Crowley, The Eye in the Triangle, that Scientific Illuminism was aimed at producing Adepts, evolutionary mutants – fully enlightened individuals who had attained realization of their own divine genius. Crowley came to believe that this was the “next step” in human evolution, “an awakening to the meaning of the man of the future,” as Regardie describes it.

In the following selections (see book), we examine a wide variety of possible relationships between occult phenomena and kundalini. The brief excerpt from Kenneth Grant’s Cults of the shadow shows the widespread influence of kundalini in cults in Africa and Asia. It also gives evidence of the evolutionary impulse taking focus in practices designed to develop the body of light, the subtle vehicle for consciousness that is deathless and refined of gross matter. Grant notes that this is the mystery motivating the cults.
By far the most difficult and controversial article is the excerpt from J.M. Pryse’s The Restored Testament. Pryse maintains that the Book of Revelation is a coded text detailing the awakening of kundalini through occult practices and that the core truth of the Christian tradition is development of the solar body of light, the immortal vehicle for consciousness that Jesus demonstrated throught the crucifixion[3] and ressurection. Such a message will not be welcomed in certain quarters of Christendom. It is included here, however, because Pryse’s argument is logically tenable and because it is an elaboration on the preceding article by Mineda J. McCleave, “Christian Mysticism and Kundalini”.
In an article in Atrologia (Vol. 1, No. 2) in 1974, Dr Charles Musès discusses “The Mst Ancient Resurrection Doctrine of Egypt Recontructed” – a subject that relates directly to the cultic mysteries. Musès writes that the central purpose of ancient Egyptian methaphysics was to gain the “hatching” of the higher energy-substance body, able to function with greatly enhanced senses in a higher objective world. I will quote the article at length because of its importance for this section.

Without that higher body in such released form, the transition of death would find that person still imprisoned in the cocoon or egg protecting the as yet ng fully developed higher body. Hence in such cases all that death can bring by way of new experiences is veridical-seeming, very vivid dreams, pleasant, unpleasant, or mixed according to the degree of development of love and release from fears that prior earth-body experience had afforded the particular person. It is important to note, however, that the highest use of the bardo (to use the convenient Tibetan term) state is continued development of the higher body, leading to increased powers in the next incarnation, and in some cases proceeding to such a degree that the necessity for future earth-lives is greatly curtailed or even, in exceptional cases, wholly eliminated. In these last cases there is a direct entrance into the immortal state of higher objectivity from the anti-wrld or bardo-plane.

With the “hatching” or birth of the higher body, however, there is no longer any necessity to return to an earth-type existence in a carbon-based, fragile and comparatively imprisoning body or vehicle of entity-expression. The most ancient Egyptian teachings were concerned with an occult science – now lost and as yet far beyond the reach of our technology  whereby while still in this life, the carbon-based body, by suitable extradimensional radiation, could be transformed into the new type if energy-substance and form fhe imperishable, radiant body. In this manner, the initate so treated could enter into a higher dimensional objective world, without the necessity of the bardo states and without the trauma of physical death.

The cosmic beings, more advanced than the human stage, that could admininister such a process were symbolized primarily by the great Hawk Deity Horus, flanked by Isis, the Goddess of Immortal Life, and Nephtys, the ladoy of the Palace of Ressurection of House of Horus. The person undergoing the transformation was assimilated to Osiris, the god-who-died, overcome by Set, the ruler of the inevitable morality f earth-life conditions. Set’s pwer, however, is the inverse of Horus’. By proper administrations and techniques one can be transformed into the other, thus substituting unalloyed, felicitous immortality as an ongoing, ever-developing individuality rather than the traumatic, constantly death-interrupted immortality, with its disruptions of memory and personality that attent the ordinary experience of earth-life.

If we accept this assertion, it gives us still greater insight into the “mystery” that unites kundalini and Christianity. It implies that the process by which the yogi transmutes his psychophysical being is the same as that by which Jesus the man, presumably trained in one or more occult traditions originating in Egypt or the East, developed the higher transfigured body that allwed him to undergo physical death and yet “rise again” as proof that he was truly Christed, begotten of the immortal Creative Force – as an example for others to follow on the evolutionary path to eternal life.

The grand theme of human history is the evolution of consciousness and growth to a godlike condition. This theme has taken a varity of spiritual, occult, and scientific forms. Occult studies, this section will demonstrate, can contribute much to elucidating the underlying unity of science, occultism and religion. An open-minded approach to the occult will undoubtly bright to light important new data for kundalini research – data that bear on the human growth to higher states of being, including the possibility of controlling and accelerating that growht. It is an awesome prospect.

Copyright © 1979, 1990 by John White.

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[1] The staff of Aesculapius, entwined by a single serpent, is also often used as a symbol of medicine.

[2] Kundalini Research Foundation, Ltd. 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016, Gene Kieffer, President. Dedicated to the dissemination of information on kundalini, based on a documentary and scientific research. Affiliated with the Central Institute for Kundalini Research, The Foundation coöperates with the similar organizations and individuals to support research and publish findings. Offers literature, books, and tapes (audio and video cassettes) of Gopi Krishna’s discourses, as well as the quarterly magazine, Spiritual India and Kundalini  Truth journal. Has mre than one hundred centers and ashrams affiliated with it throughout the United States.
Central Institute for Kundalini Research, 14 Karan Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, Gopi Krishna, Director. Sponsors kundalini research, both scientific and scholarly, which it disseminates through books, tapes, conference proceedings and a journal, Spiritual India and Kundalini. North American Affiliates : Bio-Energy Research Foundation, Kundalini Research Foundation Ltd, and Kundalini Research Institute of Canada.
Bio-Energy Research Foundation, P.O. Bx 1846, Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. 92067, George Tompkins, Director. Supports the work of Gopi Krishna and promotes the concept of kundalini research. Offers books and tapes (audio ad video cassettes) of Gopi Krishna’s discourse for sale. Organizes discussion groups in Southern California on the scientific and spiritual implications of kundalini research. Distributes Spiritual India and Kundalini magazine.
Kundalini Research Institute of Cananda, 9 Richmnt Street, East, Suite 403, Toronto, Ont. M5C 1NE, Canada, Joseph Dippong, President. Support the work of Gopi Krishna and promotes the concept of kundalini research. Offers literaturee, books and tapes (audio and video cassettes) of Gopi Krishna’s discourse for sale. Distributes Spiritual India and Kundalini magazine.

[3] Note from the the one who types this for the reader : The Crucifixion can be regarded as a transformational mystery, not necessarily  as something to be taken literally but rather allegorical in these times.

Note :

* It is said that Hitler and the most important Nazis used black art in implementing the policies of the Third Reich; the Chinese communists did something similar. Hypnotic brainwashing is a common practice.

"How will it protect people against hypnotism?"


"By purifying the hearts of the people who would misuse it. And universal brotherhood rests on the common soul. Because there is one soul, common to all people, brotherhood or even mutual understanding is possible. Get the people to put their trust in that, and they will be safe."

From the biography of Helena Blavatsky.