Kundalini:
The Buddhist Tongues Experienceby Pastor David Cox
Kundalini: Power of the Serpent Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh Control and Loss of It Carl Jung and Kundalini Laugh of a Witch Sri Ramakrishna
It is important to understand that the modern speaking in tongues event is not unique to only the Christian church. Many religious and non-religious groups have had these experiences from back to before the time of Abraham from what I can find.
Within the oriental religions, the experience of "speaking in tongues" has been around for thousands of years. Within the Hindu religion, which has a non-religious presentation of the same principles in yoga, there is a thing called kundalini. This is basically an experience which is orientated from the body and supposedly flows through the spirit. Up until the modern Pentecostal open tongues-speaking experiences, only the grand masters of yoga experienced this kundalini. Today it is more open and promoted, but in past history it was a great secret of Yoga that only the highest and most expert yoga masters even knew of, much less had the experience.
Kundalini: Power of the Serpent
Kundalini is the experience of "releasing the power of the serpent in you." Within Hinduism the obvious association we have between serpent and Satan doesn't exist, so it is not considered a "bad" thing, but we have to wonder at the connection. The actual word "Kundalini" comes from an idea of burning (like smoke spirally upward) or to twine oneself in a spiral around something. Kundalini bases itself in the idea that all "cosmic energy" is wound around the person's spinal column, and the kundalini is simply a releasing of this "cosmic energy". In Asia, this secret practice has been around for more than 4,000 years. Kundalini is referred to in the Upanishads, a Hindu holy text that dates back to 5th century before Christ, although the oral traditions probably would take it back even further. This has been around for a long time, and it is unique to Christianity.
The key concept of the kundalini experience is the loss of control of the person of his own body. Within the thinking of the Hindus, there is a serpent at the base of the spine, and the Kundalini experience is when (through techniques of Yoga for them) that this power is released, and flows up the spine and out through the head and uplifted hands, in the process causing the person's tongue to speak non-sense (ecstatic speech which Pentecostalism has defined as speaking in tongues).
Control and Loss of It
Here we see the Bible put it very clearly, "the spirit of the prophets are subject to the prophets" 1 Corinthians 14:32. Within the context of what is biblical, God clearly proclaims the principle of self-control as an absolute rule over everything that originates and has to do with God. The loss of control is clearly identified with demonic possession, the work of Satan. God works through the will and willingness of the individual, and not against his will.
In Yoga and Hinduism this power of the serpent is released by altering the state of consciousness of the person. This is a common theme among many different but similar structures. Witches, warlocks, mediums, and spiritualists all contact "spirits" by altering their conscious state and going into a trance like state, which is not sleep, but they are openly receptive to the spirit. Certain drugs provide the same effect. Even music with a heavy beat can cause the heart-mind link to go into a trancelike state. Within Yoga, breathing and meditation exercises accomplish the task. Transcendental Meditation does this also. Near death experiences seem to also be related at times in provoking the same experience or feeling.
A description of the phenomena is when the person has performed the preparatory steps (drugs, breathing exercises, etc.) then he enters into the state where he begins to speak in tongues. Many times he is violently thrown on the floor when he rolls around, and sometimes makes animal sounds (growling, barking, meowing, etc) or even laughing uncontrollably. Voodoo and Santerism which is kind of worship of pure evil also has the same thing, which is marked by the rolling around on the floor. Note that in some cases of witchcraft, there is a technique that causes uncontrollable laughing where the person laughs and laughs for hours, and he senses all his burdens and suffering has left him.
Laugh of a Witch
Throughout the mythology and traditions surrounding witches, an element has always be there, the witch's laughter. Her cackling laughter which is supposed to be a trademark.
Laugh of a Witch: "I laughed for hours and hours. All my private, personal suffering... was dissolved in the laughing... I felt transformed... I always saw this as some kind of spiritual experience... people don't think that laughter is a spiritual experience. Now I understand that laughter can be the medium of a transformation. The laughter of Gavreil, like that of Aphrodite, equipped me to put distance between the me and the pain." Carol Christ, The Laugh of Aphrodite: Reflections on the Journal of a Goddess, Harper and Row, 1987, pgs 5-6.
As a side note, this puts one to think hard and long about entertainment in general, especially why people basically like to be entertained, it is to disengaged their thought life from their problems. Some do the same with work, and I suppose we cannot brand "work" as sin, but there is a lot to be meditated on in the whole idea of why we want to be entertained (and let the morally degenerate crowd in Hollywood do that entertaining and controlling of our experiences).
Sri Ramakrishna
In India, a Yoga master who practiced Kundalini, Sri Ramakrishna (1836-1886) described this supposed god-man conscious that happens in the kundalini experience. Every day he entered into samahdi (a trance) and feel on the floor involuntarily in euphoria and happiness (ananda) where he saw beautiful visions and at times gave him out of body experiences. This parallels the Mystery Religions "Ecstasy" experience where they felt they had left their bodies. At times he experienced uncontrollable laughing and hysteria. This grand master so perfected the techniques and experience of Kundalini that he could by merely touching another person cause the other person to also have a kundalini experience. I would note that great care should be taken in touching other people, or allowing some spiritual person to lay hands on you, because the Bible does talk about a kind of transference of some kind (spiritually) that happens on at least some occasions of laying on of hands.
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
Another grand master of Yoga, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (1931-1990) who is responsible for bring Yoga to the United States and popularizing it as a non-religious thing also has written about Kundalini. He says that his interpretation of all this is that there is meditation, rhythmic dancing and chanting, naturalism (nudity), something he calls "the primordial scream", and extreme forms of exercise, and free sex. I would interject here that the key in the exercise thing is to get the body into a frenzy where you are breathing extremely hard, and then cut off air to the lungs. In my high school (1970s) there were kids who would simply breath very heavily like they were running a race, and then all of a sudden drop to your knees, push your knees and legs into your chest and compress your lungs and hold until you faint. The oxygen deprivation has something to do with this, and this explains the modern teen phenomena of hanging yourself in your closet. Teens put a rope around their necks so that they can lift their knees and be totally hanging by the rope. When they pass out, they push their knees and feet down, supposedly stand up, pull the rope off and fall over in a trance like state. Of course some pass out and suffocate instead, and die. Why would anybody want to do this? Because it produces a euphoria or out of body experience similar to the Kundalini.
In the case of Rajneesh, just his presence caused this kundalini experience in his followers. When he entered a room, those present would begin to cry or laugh uncontrollably, some would fall to the fall in the typical mark of demon possession (but they counted it a great spiritual experience), and others would say they felt like they put their finger in a light socket, electricity tingled their entire bodies. With a single touch of this grand master, he could lay out dozens of people. The powerful Pentecostal preachers do this with breathing on the crowd and dozens fall over slain in the spirit. The grand masters were doing this 6,000 years before them by demonic power. Ramakrishna used the terminology, "drunk with new wine" even though there was not necessarily any alcohol involved.
Carl Jung and Kundalini
For those who are "friendly" towards Psychology, I would inform you that all of modern psychology came from the "father of psychology", Carl Jung. Jung came from a spiritualist family, and his father was a pastor of a Spiritualist church. Spiritualism believes in the supernatural, and in spirits, although they do not really identify them as evil. They accept all spirits, something akin to seeing them as the spirits of dead human.
Ecclesiastes 9:5-6 For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. 6 Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.
The teaching of this passage is that the living have full participation in the things of this earth, but once they die, they "know nothing" or are ignorant of the things that pass on earth, and they have no part or activity in the events of the earth after their death. In the teaching of Christ about the Rich man and Lazarus, the same idea of a great abysm is placed by God between the living and the dead, and nobody can cross it or communicate from the dead (heaven or hell) back to the living except God.