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Hence the paradox here is that too much bliss creates anhedonia. anhedonia
that is the absence of pleasure or the loss of the ability to experience it. Another less
known term is acedia, which is a sense of indifference created by the loss of feeling
and a gradual closing down and withdrawal from the world. With anhedonia and
acedia we avoid risk and stimulation and cut ourselves off from anything that might
trigger or stimulate us. In time we will find the correct language and metaphors
for the subtle nuance of this post-awakening lull, to distinguish it from our normal
ideas on depression and anhedonia. The post-kundalini slump is not really clinical
anhedonia because there is still diffuse pleasure and permanent background bliss,
but there is also the inability to suffer. Life’s peaks and valleys have been bulldozed
down into the horizontal plane of endless nothingness...and where does one find
“meaning” without the value discrimination of passion and emotion?
The kundi-blues is not really depression in the normal sense, it more like a
vacuum of meaningful circumstance, a spiritual catatonia. This must be a very
common condition of the kundalini exhaustion phase. And if one “tries” to create
meaningful circumstance in the world with other human beings it often becomes
some kind of comical or traumatic farce. Without meaning of course there is no
motivation, and our sense of meaning is determined by our passion—so when
passion goes, so does meaning in any real sense of the word.
I went through years of apathy and loss of proactive-drive related to coming
down from the extremes of kundalini. As I have said before it is paradoxical that
this condition is related to an excess of endorphins and a permanent background
of bliss. It is as if it were a biochemical existential malaise that leads to this loss
of the sense of self and brings about a crisis of meaning. Since there is a loss of
meaning at this time we can assume that the brain areas and neurochemicals that
are hypofunctioning, are those that are involved in the phenomena of meaning
making. When this neurology and hormonal underfunctioning is returned to
normal our sense of meaning and self will return.
Of course a metabolic slump and loss of meaning is not a given after the
honeymoon of a kundalini peak, it just depends on things like ones emotional
constitution, how one frames the experience and the quality of ones support.
Basically to move out of this biochemical existential hole it takes a resensitizing via
whatever means that excites you...it could be a change in your environment, a new
romantic love, travel, sailing across the ocean and or fasting. To reestablish quality
of life it is essential to break out of this anhedonia for if there is little pleasure in
things, there is little drive and will to live. While in the middle of it there seems no
way out, but there is and eventually things swing around the other way to a new
zest and appreciation of life.
In Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness by Tobin
Hart, Peter L. Nelson, and Kaisa Puhakka say that much of human consciousness
is transitioning through a significant epistemic shift: that is our “knowing” is
becoming increasingly aware of its own process. Moving out of the existential
vacuum, created by the death of the ego and the extinguishing of the painbody’s
life, cannot be done using the convention means through which we have lived up