The Sublimation of Love

By George A. Boyd ©2023

Q: Why do some people equate love with sex? Isn’t real love spiritual?

A: Many people start out in their experience of love viewing it as Eros, or sexual passion. However, love sublimates through seven levels:

  1. Sexual desire and romance (Eros)
  2. Infatuation, romantic fantasy
  3. Idealization, making your object of love larger than life
  4. Caring and compassion for others (Agape)
  5. Spiritual love and devotion (Bhakti)
  6. Unconditional love of the Soul (Karuna)
  7. The fiery, healing, Divine Love (Shakti)

These seven levels of love express in distinct ways:

In sexual and romantic love, there is primarily a desire for conjugal relations to release and satisfy libidinous passions.

In infatuation, you look to your partner as someone who will fulfill your dreams and complete your life. The popularity of romance novels testifies to the fascination with the dream of finding their ideal partner.

In idealization, you cast the object of your love as a perfect, godlike being. Here you see your partner as an ethereal or spiritual being; someone who is flawless and radiantly beautiful. Those who idealize their partners—but who live with him or her for any period of time—realize their idealization of their partner was a delusion.

In caring and compassion, you respond to another’s needs. This may take the form of parenting, caring for the sick or infirm, or doing volunteer service to assist the needy. This is love in action that seeks to help others and assuage their pain and misery.

Spiritual love and devotion comes from your spiritual heart. To experience this type of love, you need to contemplate your spirit and enter into union with it. Many people are cut off from their spirit, so they never experience this level of love.

Unconditional love streams forth from your Soul. When you are able to tap into this inner fountainhead of love and compassion, it becomes a powerful force for healing and releasing your emotional pain.

The fire of Divine Love—some call it the Holy Spirit, Shakti, or Grace—you send as an attunement to the Soul or spirit in others, and to connect them with the Divine Will, the Illumined Mind, the Loving Heart of God, the healing force within, and to bring remembrance and to reawaken their connection with the Soul. To access this level of love, your attentional principle receives a beam of the Light from an Initiate or Master; you, in turn, send this Light to others through an attunement.

The spiritual love of which you speak requires sublimation of love to levels five through seven:

  • To sublimate your love to level five, you need to tune into the experience of your spirit and regard others from its perspective.
  • Sublimation to level six requires that you gain union with the Soul and allow the Soul’s unconditional love to pour forth through you to others.
  • In order to sublimate love to level seven, you need to function as your attentional principle and be able to receive the Light from your Supervising Initiate.

We teach you how to activate the spirit, Soul, and attentional principle in our intermediate mediation classes, the in-person Mudrashram® Master Course in Meditation and the by-mail and online Accelerated Meditation Program. This enables you to experience and express these deepest wellsprings of spiritual love within you. Without being able to contact these three immortal principles, you never experience these three highest aspects of love.

We encourage you to study these levels of love within yourself and what evokes that aspect of love in you. You might like to regard another person through these different frames of love and see how you perceive them and relate to them in each perspective.

Ways Kundalini Can Be Fixed in Cosmic Consciousness

By George A. Boyd © 2021

Q: How does Kundalini get raised and fixed in cosmic consciousness? How is it lowered to terminate Kundalini syndromes?

A: There are four factors that can play a role in fixing the Kundalini in cosmic consciousness:

  1. Presence of the Shakti within cosmic consciousness – Shakti comes to dwell in this center and activates this nucleus of identity and its vehicle of consciousness
  2. Form of the Goddess behind cosmic consciousness – This archetype appears in some Yogi Preceptor traditions—particularly in Kundalini groups. This archetypal, intelligent form has been described as a creative intelligence that can be programmed or directed to carry out the Yogi Preceptor’s commands.
  3. Attunement from a Yogi Preceptor – When this “wheel attunement” is established, the Yogi Preceptor, in effect, claims those individuals, who receive this attunement in their cosmic consciousness, as his or her disciple.
  4. Rising Kundalini energy becomes fixed in cosmic consciousness – this can occur actively through using selected meditation practices that awaken Kundalini to this level. It can occur passively through generating a energetic short circuit when cosmic consciousness is moved off of the axis of being and creates a severe imbalance.

These four factors can generate Kundalini syndromes individually, or in combination with other factors. There appear to be seven major types of Kundalini syndrome scenarios in which these factors play a role:

Type One – Cosmic consciousness is moved out of alignment with the axis of being and creates an energetic short circuit. Kundalini becomes fixed in cosmic consciousness. This primarily results from the passive form of factor four.

Grounding can sometimes bring this energy down; dynamic rebalancing can rectify the imbalance.

Type Two – Shakti is anchored in cosmic consciousness, and it draws up the Kundalini. This is an example of factor one.

When the Shakti withdraws, it is sometimes possible to use grounding to lower the energy.

Type Three – The individual receives an attunement from a Yogi Preceptor, which lifts Kundalini into union with cosmic consciousness. This derives from factor three.

We call this type an induced type of Kundalini awakening. Since this type of attunement, establishes a disciplic relationship with the Yogi Preceptor, the individual must break the relationship with the Yogi Preceptor to release this energy.

In this scenario, we cannot assist until the individual is freed from the Yogi Preceptor’s supervision and control.

Type Four – The aspirant fixes attention upon cosmic consciousness and identifies with it. The aspirant typically attempts to enhance and maintain this union through Pranayama, Yoga Bandhas, and repetition of mantras, which serve to actively fix Kundalini in cosmic consciousness. This is the active type of factor four.

Sometimes returning attention to the waking state of consciousness and disidentifying with cosmic consciousness can help bring the Kundalini back down in this type—but the individual must stay away from meditation practices that associate attention with cosmic consciousness again to avoid triggering a reoccurrence of the Kundalini syndrome.

Type Five – In this type, the Yogi Preceptor anchors suggestion in the form of the goddess that Kundalini will remain fixed in cosmic consciousness. When this is operating, we typically see the Kundalini will lower in response to grounding, but it will rise back up. This employs factor two.

A Power beyond and greater than the Yogi Preceptor—like a Cosmic Master, a Supracosmic Guru, or a Transcendental Sat Guru—can sometimes overrule this suggestion and allow the Kundalini energy to be released. The Yogi Preceptor can also cancel his or her suggestion to the goddess, which will also allow this energy to return to the grounded state.

Type Six – Here, the aspirant uses mantras or other types of invocation of to ask for Light and Grace from gods, goddesses, or Yogi Preceptors. This can sometimes raise the Kundalini into cosmic consciousness during the time of invocation, but usually, the Kundalini will go back down when the ceremony is completed. This is an alternate presentation of type three.

This type can become complicated if the aspirant uses mantras that open conduits to a god or goddess. In this type, the god or goddess can keep the Kundalini raised in an alternate form of factor two. In some individuals, this can result in a possession-like state where they become the involuntary channel of the god or goddess.

Type Seven – In this scenario, the Yogi Preceptor awakens Kundalini through Shaktipat. This is another form of factor three.

Certain Yogi Preceptors have the ability to awaken the Kundalini through touching the aspirant on a particular center on the body [e.g., the top of the head, the point between the eyebrows, on the “chakra points” along the spine, or on the right side of the chest (Hridaya)]. They can also do this through steady gaze (Tratakam), a spoken mantra, or through a charged object [e.g., a piece of fruit or a picture].

In this type, aspirants can sometimes lower the Kundalini energy, if this Shaktipat does not permanently fix the energy in cosmic consciousness, and this does not result in any permanent attunement, like type three.

In our Kundalini consultations, we can sometimes assist others to bring down the Kundalini permanently; in other cases, the Kundalini syndrome seems immovable.

  • Type one and type four appear to be the most amenable to our intervention.
  • Types three and five are particularly resistant to change, as the aspirant must break the connection and the spell of the Yogi Preceptor.
  • If types two, six and seven are temporary in nature, the Kundalini experience may be self-delimiting—when the Divine Shakti or attunement is withdrawn, the Kundalini would normally go back to ground.

In a Kundalini Syndrome Reading, we can assess which types of Kundalini awakening is operating in you, and we can identify options to work with it. While this might not work for everyone, sometimes just clearly knowing what is at work can allay some of your anxiety about the Kundalini syndrome.

Grounding does seem to help many people. With this simple technique, the Kundalini feels more manageable. We typically train those who are in the midst of a Kundalini awakening experience in this technique in our follow-up consultation.

If you or one of your loved ones has what you believe is a Kundalini awakening and it is causing you problems, please contact us to obtain a Kundalini reading—and if warranted—a follow-up Kundalini consultation.

This is a service to the meditation community. Those wishing to make a donation for these readings may do so on our donations page.