“Words from the Soul” 

by Stuart Sovatksy, Ph.D.

Maturation of the Ensouled Body 

RECOVERING THE DIONYSIAN-ENDOGENOUS YOGA

In order to view yoga and meditation as just as endogenous to our development ­(and as awesome) as gestation once was, as taking one’s first postumbilical breath, as adolescent puberty, we must deconstruct the normalized pedagogical edifices that have grown around it. Both indigenously over the ages, and in their translation and importation into the West, the “innately arising” (sahaja), panentheistic, dionysian origins of yoga and meditation have been shaped and overshaped into apollonian, ­pedagogical constructs, cosmeticized or leveled for mass appeal, sterilized for upper-class gentilities, or otherwise tamed and overtamed to avoid real or imagined dangers.²

The soteriological sentiments (yamas and niyamas) and their mer­cies became mere rules of the rigid-mandatory, or lip-service varieties. The grace of sequence and consequence of karma was mechanicalized into an arch law, in contrast to the dionysian teachings that the sotenio­logical power is independent of “karmic laws.” The mysterious flow of lineage stiffened into the rigidities of caste, also in contrast to the dionysian rejection of caste prejudice and the “crazy wisdoms” that ridicule it.³

The reverentially ecstatic “Dance of Siva, Lord of Yogis,” became stylized in public rituals, “classical” music and dance, and in the yogic asanas themselves, or withered in the severe asceticisms of the fakir. By the second century A.D., Patanjali’s dualistic, “classical” Yoga-Sutra had formalized an overseparation between Nature (prakriti) and Ultimate Subjectivity (purusha), thus “rejecting the idea that the world is an aspect of the Divine” (Feuerstein 1989, p. 412).

Thus the shamanic or dionysian yoga and its bond with mystical phenomenology maintained in the living moment through oral trans­mission in the hoary past (and still, with all manner of attendant diffi­culties), arose and then fell into evermore secularized, scriptural funda­mentalisms.

The sequence of dionysian yoga’s “fall” from dionysian-soteriological t,t,t,t, time and in-the-moment narrative utterances into the apollonian mundane time and its “formalized narratives and “histories of events” is as follows:

1.  the spirit-in-time revealed as a superlative, private bodily experience (ecstasy or enstasy),

2.    emergent publicly as presemantic ecstatic-catalytic utterances and dancing-swaying movements, [spontaneous kriyas, charisms, speaking in tongues, trance states], then

3.    languaged orally as sheer descriptions of the experience, then

4.    memorized and scriptured into an orthodox text or externalized liturgical commemoration (yoga and meditation as teachings; the movements classicalized as ritual forms),

5.  its lessons fableized for charm (the ancient myths), then

6.  in search of a genteel purity, its sparkling and sensual phenomenol­ogy put into disembodied descriptions of “heaven realms” or sheer “higher states of consciousnesses,” and

7.  as texts and practices exported into the West, formulized for mass pedagogical ease (the contemporary yoga books and aerobics-like classes, stress-reduction courses, and other holistic applications or new-age appropriations),

8.  made abstract or “symbolic” of something else, or “primitivized” by scholars for learned discourse (the transpersonalist’s synthesizing schemas),⁴ and, at all junctures,

9.    suppressed or championed by religio-political forces; eroded by sec­tarian rivalries and scandals; desiccated as the legalistic, purely aca­demic word, or scorned as mere superstition.

Thus the yogic textual metaphors that paint accurate pictures of various phases of the inner experience of certain neuroendocrinal matu­rations – of, for example, “fluids raining down from the heavens” and “sacrifices made into further sacrifices,” referring to the transmutation of subtle melatonin-like pineal secretions as they appear (to the rishika, “the one who sees the described referent actually happening”) with the eyes closed in ecstatic witness to their flickering precipitations as cast ever higher [“sacrificed and further sacrificed”] into the ever-spiraling-higher center of the cathedral-domed cranium’s “Krishna-dark space” – were transposed to the externalized space of the firmament and, ironi­cally, buried within the homologous brahmanic sacrificial rituals (or myths) which were meant to be subservient pointers to the inner hor­monal developmental experiences. The “higher and higher heavens” became abstractions, instead of aesthetic descriptions of how it floatingly actuually feels when the cerebral puberty unfolds meditative glimpses of the infinity of love-space-time.

Via further translations into the modern pragmatic-scientific vernacular, instead of an inner awe of wonder and delight, we now speak of “spiritual practices,” “visualization techniques,” yogic “states of consciousness” and quasi-Newtonian “spiritual energies.” Instead of a well-mapped but dynamic, esoteric phenomenology of marvelous fluttering, whorling, meditative experiences of cerebral-hormonal flowing juices or externalized teachings; the (soma) and brilliant sunlight (savitri, a Vedic term for kundalini illumi­nating the mind and for which Elizarenkova counts more than fifteen verbs denoting its brilliance in the Rig Veda) we have the dry brahmanic (Indian or Western) abstractions or translations depicting only exoteric “ spritual libations, transrational evolutionary schemas, tantric visualization practices, and theonyms for sun worship.⁶  The Burning Bush, whether Western or Eastern, as aptly describing the overwhelming, experienced glow of kundalini in the cerebrum, is lost in its own metaphor. But sometimes not, as Allama Prabhu, the tenth-century dionysian bhakti yogi sang:

Looking for your light                 [of hope],

I went out                                        [into meditation]:

it was like a sudden dawn          [of eternal ttt]

of a million million suns,

a ganglion of lightnings              [the cerebral puberty] 

for my wonder                               [soteriological awe]

O Lord of Caves                           [hearted flesh bodies],

if you are light,

there can be no metaphor         [narrative equivalent].

                        (Ramanujan, 1973 p. 168)

And why kundalini is called serpentine should not rest upon its coiled shape or as a symbol of the infinite, but to convey the charm of its mercurial irridescence when it is actually seen or felt: the inexplicable itations as cast glimmer of human developmental detail, down to each glittering bone ever-spiraling- cell or mitochrondrial fibril thrill as the incessant t,t,t, resurgence of cre­ation t,t,t. To hear a lifelong yogi choked up, unable to speak in daunted admiration of his predecessors while describing their inner maturations: Perhaps this memory of one of my interviewees conveys my point. the inner hor- For kundalini names those degrees of our own potential that, like igher heavens” conception and birth, the shimmerings of the surf, or the unpredictiblity of Brownian movements, exceed the leveling grasp of too-formulaic developmental models, narratives, or measurings. Thus, the complexity of Indian classical music and the greater complexities beneath it: the dhun (chant) and din resolving to Aauummmm and returning to Maaaaaaa. What else could enrapture us to the point of climax for eter­nity but the marvel of the never-before, forever? What else could wean us of every selfishness, vengefulness, and even the fear of death? Such is the next puberties: the rebirth into soul Time that all religions point to.

Yes, by imitating others’ endogenously originated movements, heartfelt utterances, righteous actions, or rapt concentrations, we can go through the back door (literally via a ventral [front door] or Eastern bodily channel) into the same depths of wonder, wisdom, and delight. And by motionless meditation, too, one can enter. Thus, we have numerous helpful yogic texts, new and ancient, and a proliferation of yoga and still-meditation classes. But when kundalini is reintroduced (via the Westernly and more body-involving spinal channel) to our understanding of yoga and meditation, something deep and primordial ripples through the viscera, and yoga or meditation “practices” can no more be considered mere teachable techniques than gestation or puberty can be. For kundalini yoga surfaces from the same bodily depths as ges­tation, the first breath, adolescent puberty, and now, beyond.

KUNDALINI YOGA: 

A DEVELOPMENTAL ANATOMY OF ULTIMATE HOPE

However compelling our sufferings might be and however coherent our etiological mappings of their engendered effects, without the irony of a nearby blessedness, we will fail to grasp the spiritual poignancy of the human condition. Such is the soteriological challenge of faith and promise of eventual deliverance of any religion. Spiritual maturation is thus often defined as the ever-strengthening of faith in the availability of some nonomnipotent, but temporally inexhaustive succor amid the melee of confusions and adversities of worldly life.

Kundalini yoga not only asserts that such blessedness is our endless soul condition, it goes on to trace its exact anatomical structure and maturational epigenesis: This ultimate hope and beneficence glows radi­antly from the base of the spine, the armature of all vertebrate evolution and embryological embodiment from which all bodies emerge. This root location suggests a singular developmental trajectory begun in utero with the body-shaping, early formation of the neural groove (the proto­spine) initiated from this inceptive point, with all major developments thereafter originating as pulses from this premonitory source. Hope and human development converge as the scent, sound, feel, or taste of future possibilities fructifying in their own radiant juices and humming in the  quivering tissues of the body and in the dazzling eternality of consciousness.