KUNDALINI AND ZEN EXPERIENCES-PART i

When I first began spiritual practice and search in 1968, I practiced stopping my mind by cutting thoughts as they first arose and also mindlessly asking "Who Am I?" and looking for the I-thought.

What happened were all kinds of Kundalini experiences, such as feeling energy arising, the Kundalini, within the right side of my spine, hitting a knot at my heart chakra, piercing it (painfully), then proceeding upwards into my brain to the tip of my skull, then passing forwards and downwards into my face and down into my heart where it disappeared.

Also, I began to experience electrical and magnetic fields including the earth's magnetic field forcing me to orient my bed into a North/South axis, as well as feeling electrical currents through wires in walls and in the springs in my mattress.

In addition, I began to be able to see in the dark, and in places, such as a darkened aquarium, while others kept bumping into each other, I could see as clearly as daylight.  The light of the moon had a very negative effect on me and for a long time, I had to stay away from it.  I never discovered what that was all about.

The world also became intensely alive with colors and immediacy of presence, as well s being able to feel the life force in plants and trees, and the actual tracking of the sun by blades of grass, as they turned in sunlight, and opened and closed depending on the light intensity.

There were other purely illusory phenomena, too embarrassing to discuss.

However, within days to going to Mt. Baldy and being taken off the Koan of "Who Am I?" by Sasaki Roshi, getting my first Koan from him, and sitting very formally and intensely in the Zendo, all energy phenomena disappeared.

Instead, after about 5-10 minutes of each 30 minute meditation period, my mind contracted, my brain felt like it was made of stone, then my awareness of body/mind/world would cease into a state of non-awareness, followed by a sudden dropping away of my center of consciousness from my brain into my heart and gut.

When this happened, I was no longer and individual centered in my body, but "I" became the totality of my consciousness with no center.  That is, my identity was with everything: The blowing wind, the sound of birds, an airplane passing overhead, as well as a total emptiness which embraced all phenomena.  This would last until the end of my meditation period, after which I returned to a "body in the world consciousness."

This happened literally thousands of times, and I often asked myself, which is real, the meditation based identity with the entirety of my manifest consciousness, or my everyday consciousness.  During this period I passed literally hundreds of Sasaki's Koans.