1. When Living Traditions Lose Their Vitality
Every authentic spiritual tradition begins as a direct response to a human problem: confusion, suffering, inner fragmentation, and the inability to see reality clearly. Over time, however, traditions tend to drift away from this original urgency. Practices become formalized, teachings become symbolic, and insight is replaced by interpretation. Sentimentality and scholasticism gradually drain vitality from what was once alive.
Yoga has undergone this process repeatedly. What began as a sober path of inner clarification has often been transformed into either a physical regimen or an esoteric belief system. In both cases, the central aim is obscured. Yoga ceases to be a means of awakening and becomes either a lifestyle accessory or an occult mythology.
One of the clearest examples of this degeneration is the modern elevation of kundalini to a central spiritual principle.
2. Yoga as a Path of Inner Order
At its core, yoga is not about attaining special states or activating hidden powers. It is about inner order. The classical definition of yoga is striking in its restraint: yoga is the cessation of the movements of the mind. As on our card hereunder: Yoga chitta vritti nirodha, from Patanjali’s sutra’s!
This definition contains no promise of visions, energies, or ecstatic ascent. It points instead to sobriety, discipline, and clarity.
Yoga addresses the human being as a whole. Body, breath, attention, emotion, and thought must come into alignment. When they do not, perception is distorted. When they do, awareness becomes stable and transparent. Yoga is therefore not additive but subtractive. It removes what interferes with seeing.
From this perspective, yoga is fundamentally incompatible with practices that cultivate fascination with inner phenomena. Any method that amplifies imagination, symbolism, or self-importance works against its essence.
3. The Rise of Kundalini as a Central Myth
The popular image of kundalini as a coiled serpent at the base of the spine, waiting to be awakened and driven upward through the chakras, has become deeply ingrained in modern yoga culture. It is often presented as the key to enlightenment, the hidden engine of spiritual transformation.
Yet this image is largely absent from the most authoritative yogic sources. The Yoga Sutras do not mention kundalini. The Bhagavad Gita does not rely on it. Several early yogic texts explicitly regard kundalini-related forces as obstructive rather than liberating.
This raises a critical question: if kundalini were essential to yoga, why is it marginal or absent in the texts that define yoga most clearly?
The answer lies in a shift of orientation. Kundalini-based models emphasize ascent, activation, and power. Classical yoga emphasizes receptivity, restraint, and clarity.
4. Kundalini and the Power of Imagination
One of the most incisive critiques of kundalini comes from outside the Indian tradition, yet resonates strongly with its earliest insights. Kundalini can be understood not as a sacred energy, but as the power of imagination operating within the human psyche. It provides substitute experiences that feel meaningful without producing real inner change.
When imagination replaces perception, the mind becomes satisfied with images instead of truth. Inner sensations, visions, heat, movement, or emotional surges are interpreted as spiritual progress. In reality, the underlying structure of consciousness remains untouched.
This mechanism has a hypnotic quality. It prevents human beings from seeing their actual inner condition. Were that condition to be perceived clearly, without buffers or embellishment, it would provoke an immediate and serious search for liberation. Kundalini experiences often prevent this shock by offering comfort, fascination, and a sense of advancement.
Gurdjieff was quite clear on this topic. P. D. Ouspensky quotes Gurdjieff as saying,
“In reality Kundalini is the power of imagination, the power of fantasy, which takes the place of a real function . . . Kundalini can act in all centers, and with its help, all the centers can be satisfied with the imaginary instead of the real . . . Kundalini is a force put into men in order to keep them in their present state. If men could really see their true position and could understand all the horror of it, they would be unable to remain where they are even for one second. They would begin to seek a way out and they would quickly find it, because there is a way out; but men fail to see simply because they are hypnotized. Kundalini is the force that keeps them in a hypnotic state. ‘To awaken’ for man means to be ‘dehypnotized.’”
Awakening, in this view, is not the activation of kundalini but the removal of inner hypnosis.
5. The Vertical Axis of the Human Being
Classical yoga understands the human being as situated along a vertical axis between higher and lower influences. Transformation does not occur by pushing energy upward from below, but by allowing a finer order to descend from above. This descent requires openness, stillness, and humility.
For this reason, some ancient traditions describe kundalini as a blocking force. It is associated with contraction, knotting, and resistance. Rather than facilitating the flow of prana through the central channel, it obstructs it. The more the mind is entangled in imagination and desire, the less receptive it becomes to higher clarity.
In several traditions, kundalini is equated with ignorance, not as an insult but as a precise diagnosis. Ignorance here means misalignment, confusion, and inward turning toward fantasy rather than outward toward reality.
6. Modern Yoga and the Loss of Aim
At the mass level today, yoga has largely lost its original aim. It has become either physical exercise or ritualized repetition of sacred language. Both forms can be beneficial in limited ways, but neither necessarily leads to awakening.
In this diluted environment, kundalini thrives. It offers excitement where discipline is lacking. It offers meaning where effort is avoided. It offers inner spectacle in place of inner honesty.
The result is a proliferation of so-called yogis who speak fluently about energy, chakras, and awakening, yet remain psychologically fragmented and ethically untransformed. The measure of yoga has shifted from clarity of being to intensity of experience.
7. The Eightfold Path and the Demand of Serious Practice
Authentic yoga is demanding. It requires ethical refinement, attentional training, regulation of breath, and sustained self-observation. Its eightfold path is not a ladder to mystical experience but a framework for inner integration.
Samadhi, the culmination of this path, is not an ecstatic event but a state of profound simplicity. There is no inner drama, no observer claiming attainment. There is only awareness, undistorted and present.
This state cannot be reached through stimulation. It emerges when the mind becomes quiet enough to stop interfering.
8. Returning to the Essence
To return to the essence of yoga requires courage. One must be willing to relinquish fascination with inner phenomena and abandon comforting myths. One must accept the ordinariness of the path: attention, restraint, patience, and honesty.
Yoga does not awaken something hidden. It removes what obstructs seeing. It does not elevate the practitioner above life, but places him directly within it, without distortion.
When this is understood, kundalini loses its central position. Not because it is denied, but because it is recognized as secondary, and often misleading. Liberation does not come from awakening a force. It comes from seeing clearly.
And seeing clearly requires nothing more—and nothing less—than the willingness to stop imagining.
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