Richard Rolle, Kundalini Master

People constantly fall into the misconception that their religion is the ONLY one offering salvation, a way to God, liberation. Well if you replace the word "God" with original nature, or fundamental essence, you'll quickly realize they ALL have to do with realizing the same Tao.

The problem, then, comes down to dogma.

As to spiritual stages of attainment, all the saints and sages of religion cultivate the same stages of samadhi, and then enlightenment. Prior to the samadhi attainments, they all go through the same stages of jing, chi and shen transformations mentioned by Taoism. They all go through he chakra openings mentioned by the esoteric schools. They all go through kundalini awakenings, such as mentioned in Hinduism. They all go through the purification of the body's elements mentioned by Taoism.

If you cultivate, this MUST HAPPEN. There is no way to avoid it. If it doesn't happen, you haven't reached any stage of achievement. At best, just intellectual realizations, which are nothing at all.

Anyway, it comes as no surprise that Christian saints experience kundalini just as do sages and saints in the East... or North ... or South. It all has to do with the practice of quieting the mind. Quiet your mind, your chi starts to move, your chi starts to move, your real chi awakens, your real chi awakens, that's a kundalini arising.

Richard Rolle is an example.

Richard Rolle, the fourteenth century English “Hermit of Hampole,” is the Christian contemplative most often associated with the kundalini phenomenon, which he personally termed the “fire of love” and associated with excess religious coloring.

This fixation on a religious interpretation along with excessive emotions is the problem which has plagued Christian cultivation just as an over-emphasis on cultivating the physical form has plagued the form-based cultivation schools of yoga, Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism. Nevertheless, Rolle correctly noted that kundalini cultivation was involved with cultivating mental emptiness, for he wrote “I have found that to love Christ above all else will involve three things: warmth and song and sweetness. And these three, as I know from personal experience, cannot exist for long without there being great quiet.”

Rolle reported of his own kundalini experiences saying,

It was real warmth, too, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it! But once I realized that it came entirely from within, that this fire of love had no cause, material or sinful, but was the gift of my Maker, I was absolutely delighted, and wanted my love to be even greater. … If we put our finger near a fire we feel the heat; in much the same way a soul on fire with love feels, I say, a genuine warmth.

[ The Fire of Love, Richard Rolle, trans. by Clifton Wolters, (Penguin, Baltimore, 1972), pp. 88-89.]

Rolle said that this fire of love comes at the height of contemplation. Right there! Rolle also mentioned the three years of transformation I mention as the time required to transform chi to shen. See? Same thing again and again and again.

Now just so you don't think he's the only Christian contemplative to achieve this, Paschal speaks of the attainment of ecstasy characterizing it as rapture and sweetness and heat related. John Cassian speaks of the same thing.

Once you KNOW the stages of the path and principle s of cultivation, then you can go back and differentiate the TRUE adepts in Christianity, the true saints from just the intellectuals. Intellectuals invent all sorts of strange notions and dogmas, such as the Rapture, which lack any cultivation truth to them at all. Better to be guided by a sage.

How to tel the difference? See if they achieved any of the stages of the path for starters.