Evolution
Sannella observed: "Today kundalini awakenings occur more frequently, with and without training." He suggested a significant cause. "People experience kundalini phenomena more frequently because they are actually more involved in disciplines and lifestyles conducive to psychospiritual transformation." Sannella contrasted this situation with Carl Jung's observation in 1932 during a seminar on the kundalini that the awakening of this force had rarely, if ever, been witnessed in the West. Stanislav Grof considers Jung's view that the awakening of Kundalini was exclusively an Eastern phenomenon and that it would take at least a thousand years before this energy could be set in motion as "probably the most remarkable error of his entire career."
Bentov and Sovatsky both compared the awakening of Kundalini with the onset of puberty in the sense that the nervous system can start functioning on ever higher levels of consciousness. Sovatsky describes it as a "post-genital puberty" as spiritually matured identities become embodied and empowered.
Kason called for research to validate what she called "the kundalini model" to prove a biological basis for Spiritually Transformative Experiences. A few years later Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia set out to provide the beginnings of such evidence.
In 2000, the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology published Greyson's paper titled "The Neuropsychological Correlates of the Physio-Kundalini Syndrome" about a study in which he invited a group of 321 volunteers from the International Association for Near-Death Studies to fill out a dichotomous questionnaire indicative of degrees of presence of five neuropsychological traits associated with kundalini arousal. These traits were: cerebral dominance, temporal-limbic hyperconnection, a construct known as "fantasy proneness," another called "absorption," and a tendency toward disassociation. As a result of his study, Greyson was able to conclude that kundalini arousal is accompanied by a distinctive neuropsychological profile, as his subjects who reported physio-kundalini symptoms also tended to score themselves highly on measures of fantasy-proneness, disassociation, absorption, and temporal-limbic hyperconnection.
Greyson admitted it was impossible to say whether kundalini experiences cause or facilitate these neuropsychological traits or whether persons with this distinct neuropsychological profile are more vulnerable to kundalini arousal. Nonetheless, he concluded that his findings supported Gopi Krishna's claim that kundalini is the force behind biological and spiritual evolution since kundalini arousal appears to be accompanied by specific neurobiological distinctions, as must any engine of biological evolution.
Read more about this topic: Kundalini Syndrome, Kundalini Awakening
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)
“Like Freud, Jung believes that the human mind contains archaic remnants, residues of the long history and evolution of mankind. In the unconscious, primordial “universally human images” lie dormant. Those primordial images are the most ancient, universal and “deep” thoughts of mankind. Since they embody feelings as much as thought, they are properly “thought feelings.” Where Freud postulates a mass psyche, Jung postulates a collective psyche.”
—Patrick Mullahy (b. 1912)
“Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes midway in the cultural evolution of the race.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)