Chapter 30 Kundalini and God

"They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed every selfish desire and sense-craving tormenting the heart. Not agitated by grief nor hankering after pleasure, they live free from lust and fear and anger. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, they are not elated by good fortune nor depressed by bad." 
Bhagavad Gita

It seems such a high ideal to aspire too, and to live by. Yet, most religious traditions, through their sacred scriptures, advocate that spiritual wholeness (holiness) has to do with moving away from selfishness, self-centeredness, isolation, and alienation and moving towards selflessness, other-centeredness, unity and community. This is the royal path to wholeness, the path to “being saved”. 

People put different meanings on “being saved”. In

the mind of the conservative Christian, "being saved" is connected primarily with an event occurring after death. The linear mind of a conservative Christian thinks of “life after death” as a continuation of one's existing life, except in a newly transformed state, for eternity. This, of course, would be conditional on how well we have performed in the life we were leaving behind.

I prefer to think of “being saved” as something we encounter now. “Being saved” has to do with wholeness; becoming all that God intends us to be, an encounter with the God who creates us and provides us with the Grace that leads to wholeness (holiness). So our journey towards wholeness begins now and continues into death. It is not a linear form of existence leading to a new place called heaven after death. It is a way of living in a completely transformed "state of being" that leads to fullness and wholeness, now.    

The opening scripture reading from the Bhagavad Gita speaks of this transformed state of "being" which allows one to see and experience life in this new way.

“They live in wisdom who see themselves in all and all in them, whose love for the Lord of Love has consumed every selfish desire and sense-craving tormenting the heart."  

This transformation of heart cannot be accomplished on our

own. It is born from our gentle and persistent surrender to Grace which permeates all things and is accessible at all times to those who are willing to die to “the ego self”, for it is the "ego self" that causes us to cling to sense objects and perceptions. 

From the Bhagavad Gita:

"When you keep thinking about sense-objects, attachment comes. Attachment breeds desire, the lust of possession which, when thwarted, burns to anger. Anger clouds the judgment and robs you of the power to learn from past mistakes. Lost is the discriminative faculty, and your life is utter waste.

But when you move amidst the world of sense from both attachment and aversion freed, there comes the peace in which all sorrows end, and you live in the wisdom of the Inner Self."

The ego-self causes us to see only in terms of “separateness”. It impairs our vision, so to speak, blinding us to who we really are before God.  The inner self allows us to see ourselves in all, and all in ourselves, in union to our source of Grace. 

Christian scripture speaks of this as well. In the Gospel of Luke chapter 12, Jesus speaks to the multitudes:

“Do not worry about your life, and what you are to eat, or your body, and how you are to cloth it; for your life is more than food, and your body more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air ......

This indifference to all created and limited things is what leads us to seeing ourselves in all and all in ourselves. We discover that "the Kingdom of God is at hand".

An illustration of this comes from the writings of Thomas Merton, a trappist monk from Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky during an eventful visit to Louisville.

“On March 18, 1958, in Louisville, at the corner of Fourth

and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. I suddenly realized that holiness (wholeness) did not require silence, isolation and renunciation of the world.”