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Three world-renowned scholars of misconception, religion and spirituality were all amazed by kundalini yoga long prior to it become commonly understood in the West. Carl Jung believed its development of chakras, or energy centers, mirrored the phases of advancement of the personality. Joseph Campbell called kundalini 'India's greatest present to us.' Unlike the various other two, though, Mircea Eliade, author of 'Yoga: Immortality and Liberty,' was likewise a kundalini practitioner.The Kundalini Serpent
Kundalini is a branch of tantra, esoteric knowledge passed down by mouth from guru to disciple but generally prohibited to the uninitiated. Date-wise, its beginnings are odd however according to Eliade, Tantra had actually become 'profoundly popular' throughout India by the sixth century. Kundalini's central symbol, a snake asleep at the base of the spinal column, represents dormant spiritual energy. When 'awakened,' she relocates up along a hierarchy of seven chakras, each standing for a progressively advanced state of consciousness. The opening of each chakra triggers a profound, sometimes shattering, psychological and individual transformation.
Carl Jung, 1875 To 1961
In 1932, Jung, a Swiss psychologist, delivered a seminar on kundalini to Zurich's Psychological Club. The Western psyche was too focused on intelligence and rationality to the exemption of instinct, sensation and spirituality, Jung believed, which had actually triggered the mindful and subconscious minds to divide on both specific and cultural levels. According to Harold Coward, author of 'Jung and Eastern Idea,' Jung felt that Eastern wisdom provided an 'encounter with another means of understanding and living life which jars the Westerner loose from his narrow-minded encapsulation' and could assist 'enlarge awareness of his own subconscious.'
Joseph Campbell, 1904 To 1987
Campbell wrote or edited of lots of books on myth and faith and in his 1974 book, 'The Mythic Image,' assessed kundalini's chakras or 'lotuses,' flowers considered sacred by Hindus and Buddhists due to the fact that their beauty goes beyond the dirt in which they're rooted. The three most affordable chakras represented spiritual energy at its dullest: 'uninspired materialism,' sexual fascination and the impulse towards physical violence. By the time the kundalini reached the 4th chakra, the heart, the professional experienced 'the noise of the imaginative energy of deep space' and at the 5th, God-consciousness. Achievement of the sixth level is accompanied by 'divine revelations day and night' and when the snake reached 'the thousand-petaled lotus' at the crown of the head, the yogi attained union with the 'Unqualified Absolute.'
Mircea Eliade, 1907 To 1986
Romanian-born Eliade, editor-in-chief of Macmillan's 'History of Religions' and director of the College of Chicago's history of faiths division for three years, was acknowledged as a worldwide authority on yoga prior to he was 30. 'Yoga: Immortality and Liberty' was released in 1958 and re-released in 2009, although much of the research was finished the 1930s throughout his time in India. After three years researching at the University of Calcutta, Eliade stayed in an ashram in the Himalayan foothills, where he was initiated into the practice of kundalini, although he refused to discuss his 'keys' on the grounds that such knowledge have to only be passed from master to pupil. Yoga made it possible for Indians to go beyond the human condition, he composed, and offered Westerners a brand-new model for discovering the mind.
