Three world-renowned scholars of myth, religion and spirituality were all fascinated by kundalini yoga long before it become widely known in the West. Carl Jung believed its progression of chakras, or energy centers, mirrored the stages of development of the personality. Joseph Campbell called kundalini "India's greatest gift to us." Unlike the other two, though, Mircea Eliade, author of "Yoga: Immortality and Freedom," was also a kundalini practitioner.
The Kundalini Serpent
Kundalini is a branch of tantra, esoteric wisdom passed down orally from guru to disciple but traditionally forbidden to the uninitiated. Date-wise, its origins are obscure but according to Eliade, Tantra had become "immensely popular" throughout India by the sixth century. Kundalini's central symbol, a snake asleep at the base of the spine, represents dormant spiritual energy. When "awakened," she moves upward along a hierarchy of seven chakras, each symbolizing a progressively more advanced state of consciousness. The opening of each chakra triggers a profound, sometimes shattering, psychological and personal 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 intellect and rationality to the exclusion of intuition, feeling and spirituality, Jung believed, which had caused the conscious and unconscious minds to split on both individual and cultural levels. According to Harold Coward, author of "Jung and Eastern Thought," Jung felt that Eastern wisdom offered an "encounter with another way of understanding and living life which jars the Westerner loose from his narrow-minded encapsulation" and could help "enlarge awareness of his own unconscious."
Joseph Campbell, 1904 to 1987
Campbell wrote or edited of dozens of books on myth and religion and in his 1974 book, "The Mythic Image," analyzed kundalini's chakras or "lotuses," flowers considered sacred by Hindus and Buddhists because their beauty transcends the muck in which they are rooted. The three lowest chakras represented spiritual energy at its dullest: "uninspired materialism," sexual obsession and the impulse towards violence. By the time the kundalini reached the fourth chakra, the heart, the practitioner experienced "the sound of the creative energy of the universe" and at the fifth, God-consciousness. Attainment 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 achieved 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 University of Chicago's history of religions department for three decades, was recognized as an international authority on yoga before he was 30. "Yoga: Immortality and Freedom" was published in 1958 and re-released in 2009, although much of the research was done in the 1930s during his time in India. After three years studying at the University of Calcutta, Eliade lived in an ashram in the Himalayan foothills, where he was initiated into the practice of kundalini, although he refused to discuss his "secrets" on the grounds that such knowledge must only be passed from master to student. Yoga enabled Indians to transcend the human condition, he wrote, and offered Westerners a new model for exploring the psyche.
References
- Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center: "6 Masks of Oriental Gods: Symbolism of Kundalini Yoga;" Joseph Campbell, 1974
- Joseph Campbell Foundation Website
- Westminster College: Mircea Eliade Biography
- Carl Jung Resources: Biography
- Khandro: "Tantric" Means
- "Jung and Eastern Thought"; Harold Coward, 1985
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