Kundalini and the Art of Being ... nice campsite, parked, started setting up camp, and collected some
wood to make a fire later on. Then I hiked out into the desert as the
evening light was beginning to fade.
I found a spot on a ledge overlooking sparsely vegetated rolling
hills and sat down on the ground cross-legged with my eyes closed
for a few minutes. The moon was almost full—in fact, it was to be a
blue moon in a few days. There was almost complete silence, except
for the wind rustling through the sagebrush. I pulled my pipe out of
my shirt pocket, filled it with some pot, took two or three hits, and
then sat there on the ledge with eyes open and did my best to open
to the nothingness.
As I became more and more high, I felt my awareness begin to ex-
pand, and the presence of the desert—and thus myself—grow stron-
ger and stronger, to the point of deep uneasiness. I started to get a
little freaked out by the silence and emptiness around me. But I did
my best just to sit there and feel it, to recognize my fear for what it
was—trapped energy that merely needed to move through me and
be released.
As I concentrated on feeling the fear and letting it go, waves of
energy began flowing up my spine, one after another—engulfing me,
and then flowing out the top of my head. It was fairly subtle, noth-
ing like what I would experience later. But I was clearly releasing
some inner energy of some sort, and in so doing I began to feel more
relaxed, grounded, and attuned to the environment of the desert. My
anxiety was transformed into peaceful presence and a feeling of spiri-
tual fulfillment.
As the waves of energy slowed, I stood up and turned around. See-
ing my moon-shadow on the ground below me had the peculiar effect
of making me want to fly. I raised my arms up like wings, and closed
my eyes, pretending that I was taking off from the ground—soaring
high above the desert, over rolling hills bathed in the eerie black-and-
white moonlight. I imagined the profound freedom that I would have
felt as I looked down at everything so far below, the wind rushing by as
I soared through the air. I could almost have believed that it was real.