Osho + Kundalini

Many people start their journey towards God, truth, samadhi, because they have had a certain glimpse somewhere. Maybe through drugs, maybe through sexual orgasm, maybe through music, or sometimes accidentally. Sometimes a person falls from a train, is hit on the head and he has a glimpse. I'm not saying make a method of that! But I know this has happened. A certain centre in the head is hit by accident and the person has a glimpse, an explosion of light. Never again will he be the same; now he will start searching for it. This is possible. The probable is no longer probable, it has become possible. Now he has some inkling, some contact. He cannot rest now.

-Osho


My story is a little different. Religion didn't bore me, it confused me because as far back as I could remember I always had an inner sense of something I knew wasn't Wonder Bread and I became increasingly troubled by religion asking me to be something I was not. To violate that undeveloped but strong sense of the connection to God. By the time I was 16 I was old enough to have the courage of my convictions and quit the church. I got a fair amount of opposition but I knew my own mind and wouldn't budge. In university I minored in comparative religion and experimented with drugs in a group of students in NY that were pretty much on the same track as Leary and Alpert at Harvard. We all had discovered Huxley's Doors of Perception and were trying to take exactly the kind of short cut that Osho is talking about in the passage quoted above. We obtained peyote and later the more technically inclined in our group cooked up LSD. I realize now that my young ego was mostly scared of losing control or getting hooked. I had absolutely no understanding of spiritual practice. The first time I took LSD it was with a guy who was published poet but who was a shadow of his former self through taking speed. What I did learn from my early encounter with drugs was that the perceptions we have when sober are not the only way to experience the world. By my 30s my interest in drugs had lessened and I came to despise the sense of having something in my system driving my experience. In my early 40s I had a spontaneous satori experience lasting about half an hour after a session with a Jungian therapist that undeniably confirmed for me that such experiences were possible without drugs - they could just arise. Much later in my 40s I did Grof's holotropic breathing which is in a way similar to drugs like LSD because it uses a non drug technique to overwhelm the everyday mind. I had much more powerful experiences than I ever had on any drug. But it wasn't a satori experience - more being plunged directly into the world of dreams. Naturally, I kept searching for a way to make the experience of satori obtainable at will or permanent. I worked with my dreams, I tried all sorts of meditation, studied and practiced bodywork. In my 50s my eldest son died of an overdose of heroin. Spiritual practice was suddenly a more serious matter. Some years later I developed heart arrhythmia and began to take better care of my health. I walked daily and worked with saying malas as I walked through the bush with a friend's dog. I didn't know it but I was developing self discipline for the first time in my life. Something quite different than taking a pill and expecting enlightenment. My son's death created a certain inner ruthlessness that made self discipline possible. All these things changed me incrementally - but I got only glimpses of the 'mini satori' experience I had had years earlier. Then in early 2009 I got interested in rereading Wilhelm's The Secret of the Golden Flower. I noticed the reviews of JJ Semple's GFM books on Amazon and ordered both of JJ's books and the original. I began to do GFM and after about 6 months I went on a long plane journey. I got dehydrated and was sitting in a transit lounge in a daze sipping liquid when I noticed that my consciousness had changed. Creativity was flowing steadily up through the diaphragm area. I was functioning in a new way. This time it lasted. It isn't the same as that mini satori, but it is similar and more reliable. I recently encountered some old meditation friends who have pretty will stopped meditating but are still using drugs and - as far as I can tell from the outside - haven't changed a lot. When they offer me wine or smoke I just decline but it made me realize that I will occasionally drink wine with food and friends I feel comfortable relaxing with. What I do every day is a series of Tia Chi exercises, and Tai Chi itself followed by GFM. I don't know where it is leading but I can say this. It is getting easier and easier to make myself do it every morning because of the way it makes me feel inside. A bit like an addiction but with an important difference. It keeps me changing and developing. I can work through painful personal problems more easily than I could in the past. Even solutions to simple physical problems like how to organize my kitchen come to me more easily. And the frequency with which I can breathe into my lower abdomen as I go about the day is increasing. Right now as I sit at the computer I can connect my breath right down to my lower abdomen more easily and fully than I could a month ago. That's good enough for me!


-Lorenz Gude

http://www.goldenflowermeditation.com/golden_flower_blog/drugs-kundalini.html

For more on this topic, visit the Kundalini & Drugs thread on the Golden Flower Forum.