You-as-witness feel like you-as-prisoner when you are forced to take a backseat in experiencing. In an altered, expansive state of mind, the core element of the alteration is lack of control. Your voice is but an echo in the background and this creates fear if you don’t go with it. Fear that you are losing yourself to madness or annihilation, when what you are experiencing is either another state of mind or nonduality.
One surprisingly great thing about being kundalini alive is that it helps ease you into the backseat so that it isn’t terrifying. It’s like medicine flavored for kids: Who can argue with artificial cherry?
For example, while you may initially mistake kundalini aliveness for spirit possession, that fear will eventually show itself to be baseless—especially when you realize that you haven’t vomited green and you can turn the energy on and off. Yes, you must take a backseat to it when it’s on, but you’re in control of it being on in the first place. (For the most part. There are times when it will activate on its own. At all times, though, you can call it off and you still won’t vomit green.)
So then, what is this fear? This fear of the natural? This fear of expansive being? What, did you forget the first paragraph already?—It is the fear of death. Again and again, the fear of death. Death of self as you know you to be is mistranslated into complete ending. You’re like a seed hoping you will remain a seed forever. Because you’re afraid to not be a seed, you strive to acquire the traits of a plant in full bloom. You want the maturity, the fullness of you to be an aspect of your seed-self because you’re so very terrified of losing yourself in the next stage. Once you’re the plant, however, you’ll immediately see the folly of that fear. Perhaps you’ll have a good flowery laugh.
Listen, life and death are inseparable through and through, and yet when we see them unfolding as instances in time they become a mystery. That mystery is usually treated as doubt, which is perfumed with fear, because this ultimate uncertainty always contains imagined possibilities of our irrelevance, our torture, and our annihilation.
We cannot know that life and death are one from our perspective in time. We can only make an intellectual game of it or a lazy belief from things blabbermouths like me say. Revealing and living that oneness is death of the self that experiences selfhood exclusively in-and-as-time. It’s healthy. It’s necessary. And it can be terrifying if you don’t trust it, which is likely, and aren’t in control of it, which is an impenetrable fact. Being able to alter our state of mind with meditations, hallucinogens, and other legitimate spiritual experiences strengthens our conviction that we can flower while remaining seeds. But visiting an altered state of mind is not living on its stage.
And taking a look at the state of Western society, I’d say visiting hours are over.