174 @ The Secret L$ fe Nature
sacrum at the base of the spine. Solar and planetary kundalini are said
to be in constant activity, there being a perpetual interplay between the
sun and all its globes. In the humanity of the preinitiation stage, kun-
dalini is described as being but partially active and in two forms: as the
creative force, the flow of which is experienced as the impelling urge
of sex, and as a nerve fluid to animate the nerves. Below these outer
levels, occultists count, in all, seven deeper layers or "coils" of the ser-
pent fire, stored and, before initiation, "sleeping" in the actual sacral
centers of the human spinal cord.
Kundalini, or kundalini shakti, meaning the power that moves in a
serpentine path, is described as a triple force: feminine, masculine, and
neuter.The central or neutral force, known as sushumna, is designed to
flow vertically along a canal in the spinal cord, while the winding fem-
inine and male forces, ida and pingala, flow together on either side of
sushumna, crossing and intertwining at certain important force ten-
ters, the chakras. Ida then goes into the pituitary body, pingala into the
pineal; sushumna travels straight up the spinal cord along the medulla
oblongata to flow out of the anterior fontanelle. "When the shaft of
Atmic fire which forms the core of the Sushumna is brought down
to the densest physical level," says Hodson, "the relatively dormant
positive-negative creative Life-force resident in the sacrum is awak-
ened into activity."
Symbolically stated, the rod becomes the serpent. In a human "the
rod" refers both to the spinal cord and to a canal or etheric and super-
physical channel in its center, passing from the root of the cord in the sac-
rum along its whole length and into the medulla oblongata of the
brain. This canal is considered the vehicle for the creative life-force, a
measure of which plays down from above in the generative act. This
current, says Hodson, is unipolar, or even of neutral polarity, since it
plays and produces its effects in both the male and female organism: by
occult means the same neutral force is made to play not downward but
upward along the spinal cord. Before the reversal of the flow of creative
energy can be achieved, the positive and negative currents must be
aroused to flow upward. Entering the brain, says Hodson, this triple
power so illumines the mind that a person becomes, as it were, a god,