S. (10 page)

The fifth chakra is located at the base of the skull and is very complicated. The lotus here is a smoky purple, like perhaps the fuzz of grapes, and has sixteen petals, holding the sixteen vowels a, ā, i, ī, u, ū,
,
,
,
, e, ai, o, au, am, and a
. There is a white triangle and the sound is nothing but Om, Om, the sound of the cosmos. The god here is of two halves, Shiva and Shakti, the two gods male and female combining into Ardhanarishvara, the right half Shiva and glorious white, the left half Shakti and lovely golden. A god of both sexes. No man is just man. No woman is just woman. Men hold the seeds of womanhood within themselves and women hold the seeds of manhood within themselves. Ardhanarishvara represents this. He—let us say he-she—he-she has five faces and three eyes and ten arms. In his-her ten hands he-she holds nine things: a trident, an axe, a sword, a thunderbolt called in Sanskrit “vajra,” an endless serpent with uncountable heads called Ananta and upon whom sleeps the great god Vishnu, a bell, a pointed stick with which to urge on a beast, fire (ouch! that must be hot to hold!), and a noose. With the tenth hand Ardhanarishvara makes abhayamudra, the gesture dispelling fear, which our dear friend Kundalini surely needs when she looks at those other terrible things being held up [
polite laughter
]. Ardhanarishvara has his-her hands most full [
again, the polite response muted by a certain impatience in the audience, a desire to get on with the ascent
]. The element of this chakra is ether, the element that is to the subtle body as air is to the material body. Its animal is Airavata, the white elephant with six trunks. He is a funny-looking fellow. The heavy, heavy
earthy elephant of Muladhara has become etherealized. And that is Vishuddha.

The sixth chakra is located between the eyebrows. It is called Ajna. It has only two petals. They say ha and k
a. They are white. Everything is moon-white. There is an inverted triangle and it is moon-white. Inside there is the linga. Linga means “phallus” and also the subtle space, the ether. “Li” means to dissolve and “gam” to go out. There is the mantra Om.
Om
. OM. OM. It is the vibration from which all things emerge and into which all things are absorbed at the end of the cosmic cycle. There is a bindu—that is a very tiny point where everything is concentrated. The god is Paramashiva, which means Shiva and Shakti come together in a wonderful fucking. That makes the Mahabindu. Also the energy now is Hakini; he is moon-white and holds a book, a skull, a drum, and other such stuff. Here at Ajna the ida and pingala nadis meet the sushumna nadi and then separate again, running into the right and left nostrils. It tickles the yogi’s nose. He has to sneeze:
achoo!
Ajna is a very high-up chakra. Kundalini must be very tired when she gets there. She is tired of bells ringing. She is tired of burning sensation. She is tired of sound of waterfall, of being lost in an ocean of light. But she must go on, go on ascending.

The seventh chakra is Sahasrara. It is located four fingerbreadths above the top of the head. To get to it Kundalini must jump [
laughter, as if at a sudden gesture
]. Now, where is she? All colors are merged into one. All sounds into one. All senses into one. The lotus is now of a thousand petals holding the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet many times. Little Kundalini, she is now Shakti. She is now also Shiva. She knows everything and that everything is nothing. She is very happy and yet feels nothing. There is nothing but Brahman. From the inverted lotus cosmic radiations fall upon the subtle
body. Kundalini is possessed with glorious insights into the indefinable depth-dimension of existence. She becomes Kula, the all-transcending light of consciousness. She inhabits Mahabindu, the metacosmic Void.

Then she must descend. She comes down. Like an elevator, she comes down. She goes back between the eyes. Sixth floor, wisdom center. Next floor, throat chakra. Then still lower to the heart chakra, and to Manipura, that is called the power center. As she slithers down she sheds wisdom, speech, love, and power. She sheds them one by one. She arrives at the level of the genitals, where libido lives, and sheds that too, coiling around Muladhara again, three and one half times. Muladhara is earth, it is childhood. We all come from earth, from childhood. So does Kundalini.

She is the female energy in things. In some biological women she is very weak. In some biological men she is very strong. The burning sensation we feel as she ascends, the blinking lights and roaring like a waterfall which many sages have seen and heard, this is the male garbage being burned from the system. It is obstruction. This obstruction comes at knots, called “granthis.” It is especially thick at the Muladhara chakra, and Anahata, and Ajna, called the Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra knots. These places are clogged with ego and conscious thought and obstruct Kundalini from finding realization of oneness with totality, of transcending samsara and entering samadhi. She burns them through. She burns away garbage. We all come burdened with much garbage and it must be burned away. Our minds must become pure like fine ash, or like the sand of the seashore in the dawn when the tide has erased all the footprints and carried away all the Coca-Cola cans, all the candy wrappers. Kundalini herself, she is a candy wrapper. Did you believe the story of her journey?
[
Sounds of assent
.] If you believe her journey, you will believe any foolishness. Modern science shows her journey cannot exist; Einstein showed there is no ether, medicine shows there are no nadis. All a lie. [
Silence
.] The story of her journey is a very detailed lie, like the horrible cosmology of the Jains or the Heaven and Hell of Dante, but so many endless details do not make such stories true. The more details they hold, the more lies they hold. They are like old newspapers. They are garbage. They are like organized religion, like the Holy Bible and Talmud and Koran. They are old newspapers. They are like the bound collected works of Sigismund Fried and Carlos Marx; they are garbage, full of details that are lies. Details obstruct us from enlightenment, from samadhi, from surrender of ego. We must forget. We must drive out foolishness from our systems. We must use foolishness to drive out foolishness. If you were not foolish, you would not have come across the sea to India. You would be in Germany drinking beer [
startled laughter
]. You would be in America eating steak and whiskey [
more of same; an undertone of relief
]. That is why I have told you the fairy story of Kundalini, the little snake that lives at the bottom of our spine. While you were hearing it, no other garbage was in your hearts or heads or stomachs; little Kundalini burned it all away.

[
end of tape
]

June 7

Dearest Pearl—

How I
loved
receiving your letter!—though it
could
have been longer. The courses you are completing are still vague
in my mind. What exactly
are
Deconstructional Dynamics, and how can they be applied to Paradise Lost and the Faerie Queene? As you remember, Granddaddy Price had
lovely
editions of both classics—much too expensive, though, to be deconstructed. And you say the man teaching it is a Communist! I’m sure it doesn’t mean in England quite what it does here—something much more woolly and amusing, like George Bernard Shaw—but still I do wonder why Mrs. Thatcher and the Queen would give such a man control of young minds when there are so many honest and intelligent loyal Britons out of work.

I am
pleased
you are not coming home for the summer. I think it’s a very mature decision. You would find the house very gloomy with just your father in it showing up now and then to change his shirt, and of course Europe has
so
many delights and you are
so
close to it, just a Channel away! And you
are
a bit old to go beach bumming and wind-surfing all day the way you could with perfect propriety when you were seventeen (not to mention the hideous damage you can do your lovely fair skin) and, though it makes me sad to think it, I do agree that your old job as lifeguard at the club pool (such a
vision
you were in that high chair, in your bikini and sombrero, with that cord of braided gimp holding the whistle around your neck) should go to someone younger. So Europe is fine, darling. But—
Holland?
Isn’t it just the dullest country on the Continent? Or at least the flattest. Surely once you’ve seen one little genre painting and one windmill you’ve seen them all. Your friend promises all this boating in the canals but it sounds very buggy to me, like bumping about in the Ipswich marshes. And I can’t believe the beaches there aren’t just
coated
with oil from all the tankers going by in the Channel. And when I try to picture these lumpy Dutch women in bathing suits I
shudder
.