PS Beethoven and Kundalini

 

This is a short blog post following on from the blog I wrote on 11th February about the kundalini experience I had in 1978 (see https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/02/a-kundalini-experience-while-meditating.html)

A few years later, in about 1986 or 1987, I was driving across England and listening to a cassette of music by Beethoven on the car’s audio system while I was driving. If you are under the age of 30 you may need to ask an older person what a cassette was. This cassette included the Leonore overtures from his opera, Fidelio. 

I was enjoying the music as I had several times before, but on this occasion, as the music reached part 2 of the Leonore III overture, I found myself again having a kundalini experience, only the second since the initial experience I had in 1978! It was not as intense or as long-lasting as the first two occasions, but it fitted descriptions of kundalini experiences very clearly: A feeling of intense energy gathered at the base of my spine, travelled up my spine and flowed over the top of my head. When it reached my head, the feeling was ecstatic as well as intense. On this occasion that feeling lasted for about an hour or two. 

When I reached my destination I played the Leonore III pieces again, just to see what would happen and the kundalini experience repeated itself. I then forgot about it as I had a busy life, a family to support and I didn’t attach any great importance to the experience – it was unusual, interesting and enjoyable but that was it.

However, as I was writing the blog about the first kundalini experience a couple of months ago, I remembered those experiences from back in the 1980s. I decided to donate my body and mind to science and see if the experience was repeatable after all these years. This time I sat in a comfortable chair and used a better quality recording (Herbert Von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, in their 1985 recording) and listened through good quality headphones. 

So, what happened? Well, nothing very much. There was a general feeling of being more energised than I had been before playing the piece, but there was no trace of a kundalini experience – not even a tiny one! 

Obviously there have been too many changes between the 1980s and now to be able to say why that might be, but if you twisted my arm and forced me to guess I would say that the main contender would be habituation of some kind due to my very frequent and long-lasting meditation practice over the past couple of decades.

Perhaps, for the sake of clarity, I should add that NO psychoactive drugs were involved in any of these experiences.

Sorry if the ending is a bit of an anticlimax but that’s how it was. And, by the way, if you decide to give this a try, I strongly urge you NOT to try it while driving...

PPS (added on 16th April)

I thought it was worth adding that other pieces of music can lead me to some very uplifting, transcendent inner states of the kind sometimes called altered states of consciousness. I think quite a lot of people have such experiences. For me, for example, Vaughan-Williams' 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis', 'Nimrod' from Elgar's 'Variations on an Original Theme' and the 'Ode to Joy' from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, and others, can have such an effect. But, so far, only the last couple of minutes of Leonore Overture III, part 2, have had that specific kundalini effect.

Bibliography

Some traditional ideas about kundalini can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini (no mention of Beethoven though...)