I don't know if my question is naive.

Mi~Beloved’s Reply:

Our idea behind this site is that any question should be asked. Any question has value for the person inquiring and for anyone who may be in a situation where that question would arise for that other person.

I read somewhere that kundalini can be manipulated. Can we control kundalini or does it control us?

Mi~Beloved’s Reply:

Normally we are controlled by kundalini but the word we is misleading because it implies that the body, and the psychology which is the subtle counterpart to the body, is a person. In fact that is not true. If we accept reincarnation, then the physical body is not the person even though for convention sake, we do pretend that the physical system is the person.

Kundalini is the major controller of the physical system and the psychological system with the observing self taking control every so often. The regular functions like breathing are for the most part conducted by the kundalini with the observing self being like an accessory which provides some of the power required for the operations within the physical and psychological systems.

We can manipulate kundalini but to do so for yogic purposes we need some training from a teacher who is a master of that. Otherwise we can also manipulate the kundalini to extract pleasures from the body and the subtle body. We do this by doing things which give us more pleasure than we would normally get. For instance eating many sweet things, seeing many colorful things, have lots of sexual interactions. These are all manipulative attempts in the effort to use the kundalini to get more satisfaction out of life.

For yoga there has to be manipulation of kundalini as described in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika but that is special and one needs training to do that unless one can pioneer a method like some great people did before.

 According to Christians and Muslims I am demon possessed and I too feel that. And I have found that breathing meditation helps in fighting the demon and troubling it. But k people say it is k not demons according to my symptoms. One major symptom is that I cannot do any kind of meditation properly as the demon interferes continuously.

Mi~Beloved’s Reply:

I am not sure that I am getting the idea of you being demon possessed. Look at it in this way: Who is not possessed in some way or the other? Considering that there are so many dead people, as we usually say, then if those persons are still existing on the subtle planes, then we can guess that we are all demon possessed or spirit possessed. But if you mean that in your case you are possessed and influenced by a bad or hostile spirit, then even that is not such a big deal because most human beings before death are off-key in some way, crazy or mad in some way. So that is not such an unusual thing.

Now if you say that some spirit or ghost or subtle body of some dead person is bothering your meditation, then we have a problem here and we should find a solution to it. However to help with this I need more information such as what kind of meditation are you doing and how exactly is this ghost interfering with it. If you give me details I may be of assistance.

Like if I have to focus on the nostrils, the focus will move somewhere in the head. Or I want to do metta (universal friendliness) meditation, then my mind would become sluggish as if I am trying to run in waist deep water. Is there a way to control this demon or if it is Kundalini?

Mi~Beloved’s Reply:

So I asked for details and that is give everyone the idea that to get assistance details must be shared with the teacher.

Your details were given so here is the advice:

This appears to be the kundalini, where it operates in a certain way and you as the observing self want to do something else. So how does this work. It is like a spring loaded system. If a system has a spring which relaxes in a certain way, we can force the system to do something else but only if we can hold that force or pressure will the system remain as we desire. As soon as we relax the pressure, the spring will relax itself in its own way and will assume a default situation.

It is like those big glass doors of a bank. The way the hinges are set, is that the door will always go back to a closed position unless you stand there and hold it all day. So in meditation as soon as you are unable to maintain a certain subtle action, the mind will resume what it normally wants to do because it refuses to do what the observing self prefers to do. This is the preset condition of mind which the kundalini supports and it will not just do what you want it to do.

The fact that you expect it to do your bidding means that you are being unrealistic or that you are just plain naïve about the way the system operates. Now there is a way out of it which is the way of cultivating a new habit. There are some processes whereby you can repeatedly do that for so many times, say for a thousand or a hundred thousand times, and then the kundalini might agree to change so that it no longer resumes what was natural to it before.

In the example of the bank door let us say that the spring in the hinge is such that if you repeatedly open the door for one million times, then the spring will break because the metal will become stressed. And then when you open it for one million and one times, the door will remain open because there was a click sound and the spring broke so that it no longer expressed that unwanted influence.

It is true also as you said that the mind becomes sluggish when it is confronted with something which is not natural to it, especially when the observing self wants to force the mind to do something which the mind thinks is unnatural.

I see this with children. Better, I did this when I used a childhood body, where when my mother asked me to run an errand, I was reluctant to do it. I went as slow as I could. But when she asked me to get dressed to go to the birthday party, I did that quickly and was gone in no time. This means that enthusiasm acts as a lubricant for sensually-appealing actions but it converts into an obstructive energy for actions which the senses are prejudiced against.