Quick Answer
The most complete first-person account of a kundalini awakening in modern literature: nine years of visions, convulsions, terrors and lights, recorded by a man who had a guru and a tradition to explain them. It is vivid, physical, sometimes embarrassing, and philosophically grounded in Kashmir Shaivism. It is also the founding scripture of an organisation whose founder was later accused of serious misconduct by his own disciples. Both facts are true, and a reader has to hold them together.
Key Takeaways
- Shaktipat from Nityananda starts it; nine years of upheaval follow.
- The stages are described in detail: the four bodies, the lights, the blue pearl.
- Kashmir Shaivism supplies the map: the world is real and is Shiva's play.
- The guru is everything, which is the book's teaching and its problem.
- The later allegations do not erase the testimony and cannot be set aside.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Chitshakti Vilas, published in Hindi in 1969 and in English as Play of Consciousness in 1974, is Swami Muktananda's account of his own spiritual life, written at the request of his disciples when he was sixty.
It is a spiritual autobiography of a particular kind. There is little about his childhood or his personality. The book is organised around one event, his initiation by the guru Nityananda in 1947, and the nine years of inner experience that followed, ending in what he describes as full realisation in 1956.
Those nine years are told in detail: what he saw, what his body did, what he feared, what he understood and when. The book is a record of a process, and its value lies in the record.
Around the record are chapters of teaching, on the guru, on meditation, on the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism, and on the practices of Siddha Yoga, the path he founded. The current edition from SYDA Foundation is around three hundred pages.
The genre. Readers who know Yogananda's autobiography should expect something different. Yogananda's book is a life full of saints and miracles told with charm. Muktananda's is one man's inner experience told with almost clinical attention, and the miracles, such as they are, happen inside his skull. It is the less pleasant book and the more useful one for anyone trying to understand what a kundalini process is like.
Who Muktananda Was
He was born Krishna Rai in 1908 near Mangalore in south India, left home at fifteen to become a wandering ascetic, took sannyasa and the name Muktananda, and spent the next twenty-five years travelling across India studying with various teachers and practising various disciplines.
In 1947 he came to Ganeshpuri, near Bombay, where the guru Nityananda lived, and received the initiation the book describes. After his realisation he settled near Ganeshpuri, where an ashram grew around him.
From 1970 he made three world tours, the second and third lasting years, and established Siddha Yoga as an international movement with centres across America, Europe and Australia. He initiated very large numbers of people, many of whom reported the kind of experiences the book describes.
He died in 1982, having named two successors, of whom one, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, leads the organisation now.
The Wandering Years
The early chapters are brief and matter-of-fact about a quarter century of searching.
Muktananda describes studying Vedanta, hatha yoga, the scriptures, Ayurveda and various forms of practice with a series of teachers, achieving competence in each, and finding none of them final. He was, by his account, a capable and somewhat proud young sadhu who had mastered techniques and had no direct experience of what the techniques were for.
The candour about this is characteristic. He does not present himself as a natural saint. He presents himself as a man who had done everything he could do on his own and was stuck.
Nityananda
The guru, who is the book's real subject.
Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri was, by every account including Muktananda's, a strange figure: silent for long periods, indifferent to his surroundings, speaking in fragments, apparently without any teaching in the ordinary sense, and surrounded by people who found his presence overwhelming. Nobody knew his origins. He gave no lectures and wrote nothing.
Muktananda describes meeting him, being drawn to him against his own judgment, spending years near him without receiving anything he could identify, and then, on a particular day in August 1947, receiving from him a look, a pair of sandals, and a mantra, and being changed.
The book's teaching on the guru, developed at length later, is drawn entirely from this relationship: that the guru transmits by being, that the transmission is a real energy and not a metaphor, and that the disciple's part is to receive.
The Shaktipat
The event the book turns on.
Shaktipat means the descent of power. In the Shaiva tantric traditions it is the guru's transmission of awakened energy to the disciple, which stirs the disciple's own dormant kundalini into activity. It can be given by touch, by look, by word or by thought.
Muktananda describes it as happening through Nityananda's gaze, and then through his instruction to meditate in a particular hut. What followed, within hours, was the beginning of the process: heat, involuntary movements, terror, a sense of the body being taken over, and a red light filling his vision.
The book insists that the shaktipat was the whole cause and that nothing he had done in twenty-five years of practice had brought him near it. That claim, that the guru's transmission is necessary and sufficient, is the foundation of Siddha Yoga and the point on which every reader must form a view.
The Upheaval
The central section, and the reason the book is read.
Muktananda describes, month by month, what the awakened energy did. His body performed yogic postures and breathing he had not learned, violently and without his will. He saw lights, heard sounds, smelled fragrances with no source. He was overwhelmed by fear and by a conviction that he was going mad or being possessed. He had visions of deities, of hells, of his own death. He experienced states of bliss that lasted days and states of despair that lasted longer.
He describes losing his appetite, then eating enormously; sleeping for days, then not sleeping; a period in which he could not bear to be near anyone; a period in which he thought the whole process was a demonic deception.
What makes the account valuable is that he had, through Nityananda and through the tantric texts, a framework that told him these were stages, and he records both the experience and the framework's reading of it. A reader gets the raw material and the interpretation side by side and can judge the fit.
The Four Bodies and the Lights
The map Muktananda uses to organise the experience.
He describes the awakening as proceeding through four bodies, each with its characteristic light: the physical body and the red light, the size of the body; the subtle body and the white light, the size of a thumb; the causal body and the black light, the size of a fingertip; and the supracausal body and the blue light, the size of a lentil. Each stage has its visions, its powers and its dangers, and each is entered and left in turn.
The scheme comes from the tantric literature and from his own experience arranged by it. Whether the sequence is universal or is Muktananda's, or is the tradition's expectation shaping what he saw, cannot be settled from inside the book.
What can be said is that the scheme is clear, that many later Siddha Yoga practitioners reported experiences that matched it, and that it gives a reader of kundalini literature one of the few complete stage-maps written by someone who claims to have passed through every stage.
The Sexual Crisis
A passage that must be mentioned, because of what came later.
Muktananda describes a period during the awakening in which he was overwhelmed by sexual desire, saw a naked woman in vision, and felt his celibacy collapsing. He treats it as a stage of the process, a purification of the sexual energy as it rises through the lower centres, and describes it as ending in the transformation of that energy into spiritual force.
He is frank about it and about his shame. The passage is one of the most human in the book.
It is also the passage that readers return to after learning of the allegations made against him by disciples after his death. Whether it is an account of a crisis overcome or of a pattern beginning is a question the book cannot answer and its later history reopens.
The Blue Pearl
The image at the book's centre.
In the later stages of meditation Muktananda began to see a tiny blue point of light, which he calls the blue pearl, the neela bindu. It appeared and disappeared, moved, grew, and became the constant object of his attention. He identifies it, following the tradition, as the form of the inner Self, the seed of the universe, and the vehicle in which the soul travels.
Much of the last third of the book concerns the blue pearl: its qualities, its appearances, the experience of entering it, and the final vision in which it expanded to fill everything.
The image has become the emblem of Siddha Yoga and recurs in the reports of practitioners. Readers from other traditions will recognise the bindu of tantric meditation and perhaps the light-seed of other mystical literatures. Whether one takes it as a universal or as Siddha Yoga's particular sign, the account of it here is the source.
The blue pearl passage is where the book stops being a case history and becomes a scripture, and the shift is visible on the page. Up to that point Muktananda reports and interprets. From that point he proclaims. The change is not a failure of the book; it is what he believed had happened to him. But a reader who wants the testimony should notice where the testimony ends and the teaching begins, because the tone of the second has been used, by his organisation and by his critics, to characterise the whole.
The Final Vision
The culmination, in 1956.
Muktananda describes a meditation in which the blue pearl expanded into the form of a blue person, whom he identifies with the deity and with his guru, and then dissolved, and in which he saw the whole universe as the play of a single consciousness, himself included. He describes coming out of it knowing that the process was complete, that he was what he had been seeking, and that Nityananda had made him so.
The account is brief compared to the years of upheaval that precede it. That proportion is honest. The book is far more about the road than about the arrival.
The Kashmir Shaivism Behind It
The philosophy Muktananda used to understand what had happened to him, and which he taught for the rest of his life.
Kashmir Shaivism is the non-dual tradition of the Shiva Sutras, the Spanda texts and Abhinavagupta, from the ninth to eleventh centuries. Unlike Advaita Vedanta, it holds that the world is real, that it is Shiva, that the individual is Shiva who has forgotten, and that the whole of manifestation is chit-shakti vilas, the play of the power of consciousness. The title comes from here.
Muktananda quotes the tradition's texts throughout, especially the Vijnana Bhairava and the Pratyabhijnahridayam, and his account of kundalini follows its map. He was, with Lakshman Joo, among the people most responsible for bringing Kashmir Shaivism to Western attention, and the book is a working example of it rather than an exposition.
The Guru Principle
The teaching the book most insists on, and the one that has aged worst.
Muktananda holds that the guru is not a teacher but the grace-bestowing power of God in human form; that realisation comes through the guru's transmission and not through effort; that the disciple's whole practice is devotion to and obedience toward the guru; and that to see the guru as an ordinary person is the fundamental error.
He applies this to Nityananda without reserve. His organisation applied it to him without reserve. And the structure it creates, in which the guru is beyond question by definition, is the structure within which the later allegations became possible and were, for years, dismissed.
The teaching is traditional. It is also the part of the book a reader is most entitled to hold at arm's length, and the later history is the reason.
Beside Gopi Krishna
The other great modern kundalini testimony, and an instructive comparison.
Gopi Krishna awakened kundalini in 1937 alone, in meditation, with no guru and no tradition to interpret what followed, and spent years in physical and mental torment before stabilising. His account is that of a man lost in the process.
Muktananda had Nityananda and had the tantric texts. His account is that of a man frightened by the process but never lost in it, because he had a map and a guide.
The two books together are the fullest modern record of the phenomenon, and the difference between them is the strongest argument the tradition makes for the guru: not that the guru causes the awakening, which is disputed, but that the guru makes it survivable.
Siddha Yoga in the West
The book's afterlife, which shaped how it is read.
Muktananda's world tours from 1970 made him one of the best known Indian teachers in the West. Thousands received shaktipat in intensives; many reported spontaneous movements, lights and states of the kind the book describes; ashrams were founded in California and New York; and a generation of Western seekers, including a number who later became teachers themselves, passed through.
The book was the movement's foundation text and was read as scripture. That reading, in which every line is authoritative, is not the only one available and is not the one recommended here.
The Allegations
They must be stated plainly.
After Muktananda's death, former disciples alleged that he had engaged in sexual relations with young female followers, some of them teenagers, over a period of years, while presenting himself as a celibate; that the organisation's inner circle knew; and that dissenters were intimidated. The allegations were published in 1983 and, in detail, in a 1994 New Yorker article by Lis Harris. Several senior figures left the organisation over them. The organisation has not acknowledged the allegations as true and has continued.
The allegations do not concern the book's account of the years 1947 to 1956, which nobody has contested. They concern the man's conduct in the 1970s and 1980s, after the book was written, and they bear on the book in two ways: on its teaching that the guru is beyond question, and on how a reader takes its claim that the sexual energy was transformed and the process completed.
This review's position is that the testimony stands as testimony, that the guru doctrine does not survive the history, and that the book should be read with the history in hand.
How to Read It Now
Practical guidance for a book with this much around it.
Read the central section, from the shaktipat to the blue pearl, as a case history: a detailed, unflattering, well-mapped account of what a kundalini process felt like to one person over nine years. That section is unique and its value is not touched by anything else.
Read the teaching chapters on the guru as the tradition's position, stated by a man who was later shown not to have lived up to it, and weigh them accordingly.
Read the philosophy, the Kashmir Shaivism, on its own merits, which are considerable and which do not depend on Muktananda.
The Objections
Four, of which the last is the heaviest.
The framework shapes the experience. A man who knows the tantric stage-map and expects to pass through it will tend to report passing through it. The account cannot distinguish what happened from what was expected.
The proclaiming tone. The later chapters assert rather than describe, and the assertions are those of a man who has come to see himself as a Siddha.
The guru doctrine. Already discussed. It is the book's centre and its weakest point.
The history. The allegations do not refute the book. They do make certain of its claims, about transformed energy and completed process and the guru's perfection, harder to read without a question mark.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are studying kundalini seriously and want the fullest first-person account of the process from someone who had a map.
Read it beside Gopi Krishna, for the contrast between guided and unguided awakening.
Read it if you are interested in Kashmir Shaivism as lived rather than as studied, since it is one of the few modern books in which that tradition is used to interpret a life.
Read it with the 1994 article beside it, and decide for yourself what the history does to the text.
What the book records, underneath the doctrine, is that a serious spiritual process can be terrifying, humiliating and physically violent, that it can go on for years, and that a person in the middle of it cannot tell from inside whether they are being transformed or destroyed. Muktananda had a guru and a tradition to tell him which, and the book's argument is that without them he would not have survived. That may be true. What the later history adds is that having a guru and a tradition is not the same as being safe, and that the map, however accurate, does not make the mapmaker good. The process is real. The people who describe it are people.
Nine years of kundalini, mapped by a man with a guru and a tradition, and a history a reader must carry into it.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the allegations against the author and of the guru doctrine is set out above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Play of Consciousness about?
Swami Muktananda's account of his own spiritual path: his years of wandering, his meeting with the guru Nityananda, the kundalini awakening that followed, and the nine years of visions, physical upheavals and inner experiences that led to what he describes as final realisation.
Who was Muktananda?
An Indian guru, 1908 to 1982, disciple of Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri, who founded Siddha Yoga and brought it to the West in the 1970s, initiating thousands through shaktipat, the direct transmission of spiritual energy.
What does the title mean?
Chitshakti Vilas in the original: the play or sport of the power of consciousness. The phrase comes from Kashmir Shaivism, where the universe is understood as the free play of a single divine awareness.
What is shaktipat?
The transmission of spiritual energy from guru to disciple, by touch, look, word or thought, which awakens the disciple's kundalini. The book describes Muktananda receiving it from Nityananda and later giving it to others.
What is the blue pearl?
A tiny blue light Muktananda saw in meditation, which he identified as the form of the inner Self and the goal of the path. Much of the later part of the book concerns its appearance, its expansion, and his final vision within it.
Is the kundalini account believable?
It is detailed, physical and unflattering to its author in places, which lends it credibility as a record of experience. What the experiences mean is a separate question the book answers from within Kashmir Shaivism.
What is the philosophical background?
Kashmir Shaivism, the non-dual tradition of Abhinavagupta and the Shiva Sutras, in which the world is real, is Shiva, and is the play of consciousness. Muktananda draws on it throughout and quotes its texts.
What happened to Siddha Yoga later?
After Muktananda's death, allegations of sexual misconduct against him were made by former disciples and published in 1983 and 1994. The organisation continued under Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and remains active.
Does the book address the allegations?
No. It was written in 1969, long before, and the book presents its author as a celibate renunciant. Readers must decide how the later history bears on the text; this review takes a position on that below.
Is it a practice manual?
Partly. It describes the stages of kundalini awakening in detail and gives some instruction on meditation and mantra, but its main purpose is testimony, and the practice it recommends is devotion to a guru.
How does it compare to Gopi Krishna's account?
Gopi Krishna awakened kundalini alone, without a guru, and suffered for years. Muktananda had a guru and a tradition and understood what was happening. The two books together are the fullest modern record of the phenomenon.
Who should read it?
Anyone studying kundalini who wants a complete first-person account, students of Kashmir Shaivism in its modern form, and readers interested in the guru phenomenon and its complications.
Keep the record, drop the throne
The book asks you to accept two things: that what happened to Muktananda was real, and that the man it happened to was therefore beyond question. The first is supported by the most detailed account of its kind in print. The second was refuted by the people closest to him. You can take the first without the second. That is not a compromise. It is the only way to read the testimony of any human being about anything, and the tradition that told you otherwise is the part of the book to leave behind.
Sources & References
- Muktananda, Swami. Play of Consciousness (Chitshakti Vilas), SYDA Foundation.
- Harris, Lis. "O Guru, Guru, Guru", The New Yorker, 14 November 1994.
- Rodarmor, William. "The Secret Life of Swami Muktananda", CoEvolution Quarterly, 1983.
- Gopi Krishna. Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man.
- Dyczkowski, Mark. The Doctrine of Vibration, on Kashmir Shaivism.
- Brooks, Douglas et al. Meditation Revolution: A History and Theology of the Siddha Yoga Lineage.