When we explored verses 24-27, we decided that those four verses were describing the same practice (yukti). Therefore, verse 28 constitutes Yukti #2, and verse 29 is Yukti #3. Here it is:
उद्गच्छन्तीं तडित्रूपाम् प्रतिचक्रं क्रमात् क्रमम् |
ऊर्ध्वं मुष्टित्रयं यावत् तावद् अन्ते महोदयः || २९ ||
udgacchantīṃ taḍit-rūpām prati-cakraṃ kramātkramam |
ūrdhvaṃ muṣṭi-trayaṃ yāvat tāvad ante mahodayaḥ || 29 ||
[Imagine the śakti] rising like a streak of lightning from one subtle center (cakra) to the next in succession. When She reaches the upper[most] center, twelve finger-widths above the crown, there comes the Great Dawn [of liberation]. || 29 ||
Word-by-word breakdown: udgacchantī = rising up (f.); taḍit-rūpā = having the form or appearance of lightning (f.); prati-cakra = from one center to the next, each center; kramātkramam = in succession, in sequence, one after the other; ūrdhva = upward, uppermost; muṣṭi-traya = the length of three fists, i.e. twelve finger-widths; yāvat tāvat = insofar as, to the extent that, if (translated here as ‘when’); ante = in the end, at the culmination; mahā-udaya = the great dawn, that which confers great fortune or prosperity, liberation, awakening.
[Edited transcript of a live teaching session on this verse:] This is an interesting verse because it’s one of the earliest suggestions of what would come to be called kuṇḍalinī. This notion of an energy rising from the base to the crown (or above) was still very new at the time of the composition of the Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra. It would later become central in both Tantrik Yoga and Haṭha-yoga.
Immediately upon reading this verse a question arises: which cakras are we talking about? As you may know, the original tradition had not one but many cakra systems: five-cakra systems, seven-cakra systems, nine-cakra systems and so on. Interestingly, the Vijñāna-bhairava-tantra has a twelve-cakra system, as revealed by the next verse (30) and its commentary, for which see below. Verse 29 simply says that this śakti rises from one cakra to the next like a bolt of lightning. This can simply be a description of an experience one can have, or it can be taken as a prescription, that is to say as a particular practice. Since you can’t do this practice using the twelve-cakra system unless you are intimately familiar with the locations of those cakras, I recommend that you do it with the seven-cakra system popular in the West: mūlādhāra, svādhiṣṭhāna, maṇipūra, anāhata, and so on.
Let’s look at the verse word-by-word. We don’t actually have a grammatical subject here, but the subject śakti is very much implied. The way Sanskrit works is that if a main subject noun is missing, then you assume whichever was the previous subject from the previous sentence or verse. Grammatically speaking, we haven’t had a subject for several verses now, but what we do get is a repeated series of adjectives and nominal forms in the feminine. If we look back, the last subject noun we had in the feminine was prāṇa-śakti. Since no other subject has appeared since then, we can assume that this is still the correct subject noun for this verse. Also, we don’t have a verb in this verse, so we have to assume the most recent verb, which is found in the previous verse: cintayet, which means “one should imagine or contemplate.” So now we have the basic context: imagine the śakti. Doing what? Udgacchantī, rising. Like what? Taḍit-rūpā, like a streak of lightning; having the form or appearance of lightning. Does this śakti rise all at once? No, we’re told it actually rises praticakram, from one cakra to the next in sequence, kramātkramam. So, the śakti is said to be rising, in sequence, from one cakra to the next. Then the verse says, “when She reaches the uppermost center”, meaning the highest center in this system, called the dvādaśānta, which is above the head by a measure of twelve finger-widths (the literal meaning of the word dvādaśānta) or three fists. When śakti reaches this uppermost center above the head, the upper limit of the energy-body, there comes the mahodaya, the Great Dawning or Great Arising. Mahodaya is a term that’s used for spiritual liberation or full awakeness.
Have you ever seen one of those electrified crystal balls where when you touch the outside of the crystal ball, electricity jumps from the center to where your finger makes contact with the sphere? That’s sort of like what is described in this practice. We are instructed to imagine (or feel) the śakti like a streak of lightning suddenly bridging the distance from one cakra to another.
I do think this practice presupposes the practices we’ve had so far. if you’ve been working with the visarga practice (aka breath:pause) of verses 24-27, and you’ve been working with verse 28, radiant light shining up through the central channel, then this one might work for you, it might click.
You can imagine the cakras in this practice simply as pulsing disks of light or as spheres of light. Don’t try to imagine each cakra differently. Each one is like a gently pulsing sphere of golden light, about an inch across, 3 or 4 cm.
PRACTICE: Make sure your jaw is relaxed, as always. keep your eyes closed and your attention interiorized. Put your attention at the mūlādhāra, the pelvic floor, doing a gentle mūla-bandha if that helps you feel it. Then, if possible, letting it happen rather than deciding when it’s going to happen, with no forethought, let the subtle energy in the mūlādhāra jump upward like an electrical arc three inches or so to the next center, the svādhiṣṭhāna cakra. Feel it rather than visualize it. A couple of inches above the svādhiṣṭhāna cakra is the kanda center, the so-called secret cakra, midway between the genitals and the navel. At a certain moment you let the energy arc upward like lightning into the kanda center. Then there’s another cakra behind the navel, the maṇipūra, and you let the energy arc upward (of its own accord) to that sphere of life-force. Then there’s another cakra in the heart (the energetic heart, not the physical heart, directly behind the lower part of the sternum), the anāhata cakra. At a certain moment, allow the energy to arc upward from the navel center to the heart center. (It’s okay if you don’t feel anything as of yet and you’re just imagining this. If you continue doing the practice, you’ll feel it.) And so on. At the end of the practice, let yourself feel all the cakras simultaneously pulsing with renewed life, vigor, energy, radiance. Feel they’re all connected by this power, this electrical life-force.
Now, how do we understand this practice? It’s a matter of entraining the power of imagination to focus consciousness in such a way as to reify what is imagined until it becomes non-conceptual direct experience. In other words, when you’re imagining the śakti arcing from one cakra to the next, you are, as it were, drawing the map that the energy will follow when the practice comes alive. Once the map is super clear, the experience can happen spontaneously. You will know when this occurs because it’s extremely palpable; the energy takes on a life of its own. You feel it palpably jumping from one center to the next in an undeniable fashion.
QUESTIONS on Verse 29
A student asked, “Does [the energy] need to move slowly from one to the next, or can it move swiftly? Is there value in slowing the process down?” Well, it doesn’t need to move slowly, and it doesn’t need to move swiftly. I would invite you not to be too directive in the practice, and just let the energy jump to the next cakra whenever it wants to—whether it takes five minutes or three seconds to do that. Usually, the energy builds up before it jumps. Another student mentions that for her the energy is sometimes skipping over cakras and jumping straight to the crown. That’s okay, but just keep coming back down again and inviting it to bridge each gap. We want it to bridge each gap between any two set of cakras.
Another student said, “It felt more like a dolphin spout than an electricity arc.” It doesn’t necessarily need to feel like an electricity arc. It’s important to be organic with these practices. You start from where the text directs you, then let it have its own life, its own character. If it feels like a dolphin spout from one cakra to the next, that’s great, that’s what the śakti wants to do.
Another student asked, “Are these practices not meant to be willed into happening but more of a surrender?” Well, some of these practices, including this one, are kind of on a fine line in between, where there’s a gentle will, an intention, but you’re also letting it be organic and intuitive—and that’s this aspect called pratibhā, the intuitive faculty. So icchā and pratibhā can go together, which may seem counterintuitive for some people; you’re exerting a certain amount of will, but you’re also open to the organic unfolding of that process.
Another student said, “I’m more of a kinesthetic person and felt the energy moving slowly, but then faster from the heart and the throat. I felt discomfort when I got to the crown. Any suggestions on how to deal with this?” Well, that’s the wrong question, “How to deal with this?” You don’t need to “deal” with it, you just need to be with it. If it gets very uncomfortable then you might need a practice where you can redirect the energy. If the energy is too intense in the crown for example, then you might imagine it dissipating, escaping like steam from the top of your head. It’s important also to learn the microcosmic orbit to regulate your energy. You can learn this from a Daoist website like Damo Mitchell’s. The microcosmic orbit involves circulating energy around. If you have too much energy in the head, you touch the tip of the tongue to the roof of your mouth, at the front of the hard palate, and you imagine all that energy in your head spilling like waterfall down the front of your body, down the front central channel, and then pooling in the lower abdomen where you can hold more energy more comfortably. So that’s a quick answer. In general, sometimes if it’s very uncomfortable you want to do something about it, and that’s totally fine, but in most cases when people say “How do I deal with this? What do I do about this?” the answer is, just be with it. Just be with your process. But yes, there are antidotes for more extreme situations.
Verse 30, yukti #4 explicitly utilizes the 12-cakra system pictured above:
क्रमद्वादशकं सम्यग् द्वादशाक्षरभेदितम् |
स्थूलसूक्ष्मपरस्थित्या मुक्त्वा मुक्त्वान्ततः शिवः || ३० ||
krama-dvādaśakaṃ samyag dvādaśākṣara-bheditam |
sthūla-sūkṣma-para-sthityā muktvā muktvāntataḥ śivaḥ || 30 ||
There are twelve [such centers] in sequence; properly associated with twelve vowels. By fixing awareness on each one, in successively coarse, subtle, and supreme forms, and then abandoning each, in the end, [one becomes] Shiva. ||
Word by word translation: krama = in sequence; dvādaśaka = a set of twelve; samyag = properly, correctly, in proper alignment; dvādaśa = twelve; akṣara = phoneme, letter; bhedita = divided into, pierced by; sthūla = coarse, outer, surface-level, physical; sūkṣma = subtle, almost imperceptible, non-physical, energetic; para = supreme, highest; sthiti = fixing, stabilizing, maintaining; muktvā = abandoning, leaving behind, moving on from; antataḥ = in the end; śivaḥ = God, Divine Consciousness
We’re now at the fourth technique, the fourth yukti, of the text. Verse 30 presents a distinct practice from the previous verse, yet it relies on the practice of the previous verse(s) for comprehension.
In the previous verse, verse 29, we learned how the energy jumps from one cakra to the next, like a bolt of lightning—whether this is understoond as a spontaneous experience or a practice that one does, that one visualizes or imagines. In this verse (and its commentary in the original Sanskrit, not reproduced here) we get a description of the twelve-cakra system, which is unique to the VBT but has very strong overlap with many other cakra systems. Above you see a diagram that shows these twelve cakras and their positions and also the vowel sounds associated with them. That is the practice we’re looking at here. The practice of installing the Sanskrit vowels in the twelve cakras in order to activate, purify, and recalibrate them.
The verse says, “There are twelve such centers in sequence, properly associated with twelve vowels. By fixing awareness on each one, in successively coarse, subtle, and supreme forms, and then abandoning each, in the end—Śiva.” I originally translated it as “in the end, one knows God”, but it’s probably more accurate to say, “One becomes Śiva.” Śiva in this context means the divine Absolute.
So, what’s the practice here? You’re starting from the base and going up to the cakra above the crown, using the Sanskrit vowels. Why would you use the Sanskrit vowels by themselves? Because the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet are considered to be mantras. The Sanskrit alphabet is called mātṛkā, the Matrix, but also the divine Mother (mātṛkā means both). It’s also called śabdarāśi, the mass of sounds. The very phonemes of Sanskrit are considered to be sacred pulsations, vibrations, mantric units, if you will.
Where exactly are these twelve cakras? We have a Sanskrit commentary on the text by Śivopādhyāya, who lived in the 18th century. This is about 850 years after the composition of the original source text. So, is the commentary reliable? Yes and no. He was clearly an initiate into multiple Tantrik lineages, but on the other hand his commentary comes only after a significant attenuation of the tradition under Muslim persecution. He does his best, but clearly sometimes he’s not sure what’s going on in the original text, and this may be one of those times. He’s not totally sure, it seems, about what the text means when it says to do the practice in “coarse, subtle, and supreme” forms. A Sanskrit commentary is not always authoritative, given the context and time in which it was written, but it is always good to consult the commentary, which most of the published translations of the VBT do not do.
Let’s get to the actual practice. As before, you’re going to try to feel the twelve cakras, one at a time, as spheres of golden light. (This is a default, you can experiment and do it different ways, but I’d invite you to start with the default setting, as it were. If the practice changes over time organically, of its own accord, let it do that, because that’s said to be kuṇḍalinī-śakti itself guiding the process.)
PRACTICE: Close your eyes, adopt a steady upright stable posture. Let the body be as still as possible. Spine straight. You will put your attention on each of these twelve cakras one at a time, and sound the Sanskrit vowel associated with that cakra. Absorb your attention in that cakra as much as you possibly can, while feeling, if possible, that the vowel is actually resonating there. First feel or imagine, the mūlādhāra-cakra as a small pulsing sphere of light at the pelvic floor. If it helps, do a gentle mūla-bandha to activate the pelvic floor, then just focus on that gently subtly pulsating energy at the pelvic floor. The vowel for the mūlādhāra-cakra is अ a (pronounced ‘uh’). The first vowel of the Sanskrit alphabet and the simplest sound in any language is this ‘a’. If you want you can repeat it several times. Try to feel it in the mūlādhāra-cakra and imagine the cakra becoming brighter, more radiant, cleared of anything that might have gotten in there that impedes its light. Any ‘blockages’ are cleared from the cakra as you repeat its vowel and feel it grower brighter and stronger.
Repeat this process for each cakra, following the diagram. Note that the kanda in the low belly is not part of the popularly known seven-cakra system, nor is the palate cakra (just above the roof of the mouth), nor is the lalāta-cakra, behind the middle of the forehead, nor are the two cakras above the head (śakti and vyāpinī).
The twelve vowels relevant here are: अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ अं अः a, ā, i, ī, u, ū, ē, ai, ō, au, aṃ, aḥ. These are traditionally called the ‘fertile’ vowels (leaving aside the ‘infertile’ vowels ṛ, ṝ, and ḷ). If you want to know exactly how to pronounce the Sanskrit vowels, please watch the video below.
At the end of the practice, feel or imagine all twelve cakras, brighter, more radiant, cleared of any blockages, shining brilliantly, sending light rays in all directions. All twelve cakras from the base to above the crown. You must be able to hold them in awareness simultaneously, without looking at the diagram, or you’re not doing the practice yet, you’re still rehearsing.
Then, having done the practice sonically, you go through and do it again, but this time not out loud. On the second iteration, try to feel the resonance of the twelve vowels as a subtle pulsation. Feel the quality of the relevant vowel in each cakra. (You need to have these sounds very well memorized or it’s not going to work.)
If you’ve mastered the practice, on the third iteration the practice becomes synesthetic. Light and sound fused as one reality. The commentator, Śivopādhyāya, calls that jyoti-rūpatā, when the vibration takes on the form of light or pure energy. You can’t make that happen, of course—it’s something you experience. But you can at least do the first two iterations, the sonic one (called the sthūla or coarse iteration), and the subtle pulsation (called the sūkṣma or subtle iteration).
QUESTIONS.
A student asked, “Is there a guideline in terms of time to spend on each cakra or is it more of an intuitive practice?” It’s intuitive, meaning you could do as little as one utterance of the vowel and then move on—so that would be like 2-4 seconds per cakra—or you can spend more time on each cakra and then move on, repeating the 12 over and over again.
Another student asked, “Why are there not cakras below the root as there are above the head?” Well, there are, it’s just that those are subsidiary cakras in the legs and hips, and they’re considered to be much less powerful in most cases. But we do have subsidiary cakras in the soles of the feet, the ankles, the mid-calf, the knee, the mid-thigh, and in the hip crease. But they’re not used in this practice, as the central channel doesn’t extend below the pelvic floor. (Of course, you can draw earth energy up into the central channel and it might feel like it extends below the pelvic floor, but as a normal person walking around, your central channel doesn’t extend beyond the pelvic floor.)
Other translations and renderings of verse 29:
Meditate on that very lightning-like śakti (i.e. Kuṇḍalinī). moving upwards successively from one centre of energy (cakra) to another up to three fists i.e. dvādaśānta. At the end, one can experience the magnificent rise of Bhairava. (Singh)
(Contemplate Kuṇḍalinī, the power of the vital breath) in the form of lightning, ascending through each Wheel (one after the other) in due order up to the upper End of the Twelve until, in the end, the Great Awakening! (Dyczkowski)
(Meditate on that shakti) moving upwards like lightning through all the chakras one by one to the dwadashanta. Then at last the glorious form of Bhairava dawns. (Satsangi)
From center to center, Kundalini rushes up like lightning. Then Bhairava’s glory is manifested. (Odier)
in the spaces between, feel this as lightning. (Reps)
[Semenov describes letting tension build in each cakra and then letting it discharge upwards.]
Other translations and renderings of verse 30:
Twelve successively higher centres of energy associated with twelve successive letters should be properly meditated on. Each of them should at first be meditated on in a gross phase, then leaving that in a subtle phase and then leaving that also in the supreme phase till finally the meditator becomes identified with Śiva. (Singh)
The sequence of twelve (centres within the body) is rightly linked to the twelve vowels. Abandoning (their) gross, subtle and supreme states (one after another), in the end (the yogi attains) Śiva. (Dyczkowski)
The twelve (centres) should be pierced successively through proper understanding of their (associated) twelve letters. Thus becoming liberated from the gross then the subtle, one by one, at the end (of its journey) the kundalini becomes Shiva. (Satsangi)
Meditate on the twelve energy centers, the twelve related letters, and free yourself from materiality to reach the supreme subtlety of Shiva. (Odier)
Devi, imagine the Sanskrit letters in these honey-filled foci of awareness, first as letters, then more subtly as sounds, then as most subtle feeling. Then, leaving them aside, be free. (Reps)