If you look at the symbol of the Muladhara in such a way, you understand the purpose of yoga, in the awakening of Kundalini. It means to separate the gods from the world so that they become active, and with that one starts the other order of things. From the standpoint of the gods, this world is less than child’s play; it is a seed in the earth, a mere potentiality. Our whole world of consciousness is only a seed of the future. And when you succeed in the awakening of Kundalini, so that she begins to move out of her mere potentiality, you necessarily start a world which is a world of eternity, totally different from our world.

Now, if the yogin or the Western person succeeds in awakening Kundalini, what starts is not in any way a personal development, though of course, an impersonal development can influence the personal status, as it does very often and very favorably. But it is not always so. What starts are the impersonal happenings with which you should not identify. If you do, you will soon feel obnoxious consequences—you will get inflation, you will get all wrong. That is one of the great difficulties in experiencing the unconscious—that one identifies with it and becomes a fool. You must not identify with the unconscious; you must keep outside, detached, and observe objectively what happens. But you then see that all the events that happen in the impersonal, non-human order of things have the very disagreeable quality that they cling to us, or we cling to them. It is as if the Kundalini in its movement upward were pulling us up with it, as if we were part of that movement, particularly in the beginning.

It is true that we are a part, because we are then that which contains the gods; they are germs in us, germs in the Muladhara, and when they begin to move they have the effect of an earthquake which naturally shakes us, and even shakes our houses down. When that upheaval comes, we are carried with it, and naturally, we might think we were moving upward. But it makes, of course, a tremendous difference whether one flies, or whether it is a wave or a great wind that lifts one. For to fly is one’s own activity, and one can safely come down again, but when one is carried upward, it is not under one’s control, and one will be put down after a while in a most disagreeable way—then it means a catastrophe. So, you see, it is wise not to identify with these experiences but to handle them as if they were outside the human realm. That is the safest thing to do— and really absolutely necessary. Otherwise,  you get inflation, and inflation is just a minor form of lunacy, a mitigated term for it. And if you get so absolutely inflated that you burst, it is schizophrenia.

Of course the idea of an impersonal, psychical experience is very strange to us, and it is exceedingly difficult to accept such a thing because we are so imbued with the fact that our unconscious is our own— my unconscious, his unconscious, her unconscious—and our prejudice is so strong that we have the greatest trouble disidentifying. Even if we must recognize that there is a non-ego experience, it is a long way until we realize what it might be. That is the reason why these experiences are secret; they are called mystical because the ordinary world cannot understand them, and what they cannot understand they call mystical—that covers everything. But the point is that what they call mystical is simply not the obvious. Therefore the yoga way or the yoga philosophy has always been a secret, but not because people have kept it secret. For as soon as you keep a secret it is already an open secret; you know about it and other people know about it, and then it is no longer a secret. The real secrets are secrets because nobody understands them. One cannot even talk about them, and of such a kind are the experiences of the Kundalini yoga. That tendency to keep things secret is merely a natural consequence when the experience is of such a peculiar kind that you had better not talk about it, for you expose yourself to the greatest misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Even if it is a matter of dogmatized experience of things that already have a certain form, you still feel, as long as the original fresh impression of such an experience is alive, that you had better continue to cover it up. You feel that these things will not fit in, that they may have an almost destructive influence upon the convictions of the Muladhara world.