Eliade says on page 291 of Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, that both yoga and
alchemy are an experiment of “soul;” of austerely using the body as a laboratory
for purification toward the final transmutation or perfection. Perfection being to
“decondition life, attain freedom, bliss, the deliverance from the laws of time or
immortality—ie: enlightenment. Ego death refers to the death of our resistance
to enlightenment. To have mastered life is to realize—Life as Ego Death—is the
glorification of the Ego not the degradation of it.
The dissolution of kundalini lifts the repressive hold of the ego allowing us
to embrace a much wider sense of ourselves. Kundalini awakenings provide the
potential to get real beyond our conditioning and the social models within which
we have been sleeping. The dominant rule of the ego over the body, mind and
soul is the main problem we face individually and collectively. In alchemical
terms the red King must be boiled down and dissolved in the great womb-vessel
(regressed as the neurons dissolve themselves) in order for the “wounded King”
to be transformed into the Universal or Sacred King. This is the basic principle
of alchemical treatises referring to human transmutation. The greater the ego the
harder the fall because of the substantially stronger sense of self, so there is a need
for a greater force to “perturb” that stability in order for the ego-death and rebirth
to occur. A lesser man would not have to go through such an ordeal because it
doesn’t take such force to reduce his brain to zero point. That is to dissolve it down
in the great vessel-womb of the void in order to be reshaped.
“Ego-death does not mean the disintegration of the healthy ego, the ego we need in
order to function in daily life. What dies in this process is the part of us that holds on
to the illusion of control, the part of us that thinks we are running the show, that we
are in charge. What disintegrates is the false identity that operates as though we are
the center of the universe.” Christina Grof
The fear of death arises because we have been programmed to believe we are an
object rather than a process. Then we have to invent mythologies like reincarnation,
heaven-hell and punishment-reward in order to reinforce our belief in continuation
of the “object.” However once we truly Grok that we are a “process” and death
is a continuation of the life process, then we no longer feel like it lies as a final
humiliation in a long gauntlet of humiliations to our rigid self-sense of being an
object. It then becomes a welcome reward for a life truly lived, rather than a death
we must constantly avoid. Perhaps the only struggle there is, is in giving up our
survivalist personality, and allowing this meltdown to occur, trusting that there is
a new world on the other side of the known.
One of the safety valves to ensure that only the truly awakened get the full
Siddha power, is that Awakening is an inexorable process of death. Without the
sadness and humility of having to “edit out” ones former self...the new cannot be
born. True power therefore, is in the death of the former self, thus the first stages
of awakening correspond to the Kübler-ross stages of grieving:
- Denial: “This can’t be happening!”
- Anger: “Why me, why do I have to do all the work?
- Bargaining: “Just let me keep my pointless job, my car and a beer or two.”