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Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen, "The Serpent’s Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience" (Columbia UP, 2025)
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
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Welcome to the New Book Books Network.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Hello and welcome back to the New Books and Indian Religions podcast, a podcast channel here on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balkaran. More importantly, I have the double delight today of welcoming to the podcast doctors Shravana Borkotaki Varma, who is Assistant professor of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston, as well as Dr. Anya Foxen, who's an Associate professor of Religious Studies at California Polytechnic State State University. We are talking about their fascinating co authored work, the Serpent's Kundalini, Yoga and the History of an Experience. Welcome both to the podcast.
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Thank you, Raj.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Thank you, Ramana.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Now we need to hear the tale behind the tale.
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How did this come into being?
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Dr. Anya Foxen
This one, Shabna, I feel like you.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Should take that one right? The tale behind the tail, let's say tails behind the tails. It has to be plural in as many forms as it comes. So I looked at when I was doing my PhD dissertation, that was my Dissertation which was looking at Kundalini rising in women's bodies. My great frustration as a practitioner scholar, coming from Shakta Tantra, was one Kundalini was not to be really disfound or people didn't talk about Kundalini in the practice. But more importantly, when I started looking at these texts, these were texts written by men, for men, talking about male anatomy. And women were missing. The third gender was just missing. They were either mentioned as a tool for male practitioners. It all kind of starts there, which is now about 12, 13 years back. I do my PhD, I submit my dissertation, and somehow this kind of project continues. And I, you know, I did not really know how to now frame this Kundalini conversation by myself. I was really at that point where I was struggling. And this was ar the American Academy of Religion, much as we are not very fond of it with, given the size and everything. But then magic happens there too. Over a glass of wine, Anya and I, we started talking. And this book was originally thought of being an article to be published in some academic journal. And I think within a few months of talking, we did not know how we can write an article. And before we knew it, it became a book. And so that's kind of the tales behind the tales.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, that sounds brilliant. You know, clearly there was more than just one glass of wine involved. That's how it became a book. But that's good. Anya, do you want to contribute to your involvement in this Genesis?
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Yeah, sure. I mean, I think I've said this a number of times now. I, in a way, I think, have been writing this book for the last decade and a half, maybe because so much of it. Right. For me, already felt very familiar. Most of my scholarship up until now has been on modern yoga. And so it's not as though the history is necessarily something wildly different from what I had already been unpacking for a very long time now. But, yeah, kind of talking with Sravana over all these years, as the article morphed into a book, it sort of occurred to me that Kundalini really was something that had been at the center of it, maybe in a lot of ways, but that I had never really sort of put at the center within the narrative as I'd been seeing it, as I'd been telling it, you know, because modern postural yoga, you don't necessarily talk about Kundalini all that much when you just go into a yoga studio or something like that. And I think there's a lot of reasons for why that might be some of which are in the book. But it really, I think as Shravana and I started unpacking all this stuff and especially kind of the experiential stuff behind it, it really occurred to me that this transmission that I'd been starting to sort of untangle, you know, through all these other things that I've written so far, was kind of wrapped around Kundalini in a really, really important way. And so, yeah, it was just kind of so wild to come back around to it after all these years.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, that's super fascinating that this thread, this sort of serpentine thread to so much of what you're studying.
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Is Kundalini. So I'm going to ask a question now that I typically ask a little later in the podcast, but I think it's important to set the stage. Would you say this is a book for practitioners, for scholars, for both? To whom would you say this work is pitched?
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Let's talk of another tale behind the tale. I think this is how we are going to start.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Actually, this is a good. You are speaking to a lover and scholar of Puranas. I mean, you have me right where you want me. Tell me all the uphach you'd like on here.
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Again, I think.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
A lot of our colleagues who are in academia who've put in enormous, sometimes life's worth of respect, search into the books. It is absolutely heart wrenching to see how many people actually read these books, how many people actually sit with them for a variety of reasons. You are an exception. Right. So you became our target, a goal in many ways. So I'll come to that very quickly. You are part of this tale. So I think when we started this article became a book, I think for both Anya and me, what was very important is that we have the academic rigor. We stay with the research, but we write it in a fashion that many people can understand, that many people have access to. Second was pricing. We all know some of our books were priced at God knows what price and how many people can afford it. So even when it came to finding a publisher, I think that was a very important criteria. And then came you. Every so often you put an update on Facebook or some social media. I have sold, what is it, 34,000 copies now. So I. Yeah, what is it?
- [08:36]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Okay, twice a year. Twice a year I get a statement from my publisher for this book. Who was that has been out for two years, so maybe three or four times now. And it's more like rubbing my eyes. I'm like, according to the publisher, this book is sold 15,000 copies. My scholarly books have probably sold 15 copies each at this point. I think it's. I don't know, I'd have to check Facebook, but It's at least 30,000.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Yeah. And in my mind, it's 24 updates that I've received. Okay, that's how I see it. And I.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
That's because you looked them over 24 times.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Extremely possible. And I still remember Anya and I sitting in Esalen and we had just finished a conference, a private, small conference on the subtle bodies. And I remember Anya telling me, okay, so all these numbers, you keep talking, what is the target? So I was like, okay, let me look at what is Raj's target? Today we are going to put that target. Okay, so that's the tale. So you are in the tale. A wider audience of academics and practitioners, Scholars and practitioners are in the tail. Pricing was in the tail, the book cover was in the tail, and here we are. It's just that we still have to meet. 34,000 that you put as an update.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Well, I love that. Let's bracket out the megalomaniac. I love, I love that for so many sober reasons in that, to my mind, that is the essence of the podcast of all of the public scholarship. I do, I think that not every scholar needs to be a public scholar, but every scholar, especially an employed academic at a university, needs to value public scholarship as a vital function and means of.
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Disciplinary upkeep, shall we say, you know, gloss at how are you like listeners? But the academy is in trouble. Religious studies is no exception. And so, so public scholarship isn't new Age flake. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's. Look, it's all of the rigor and thought, the heavy lifting of machinations, of how the iPhone works within the iPhone, but then it's having a user friendly interface for the apps so people can make use of the power of circuitry. So I think it's brilliant and I think that is the gold standard of scholarship these days. To have something brilliant, sophisticated, novel, but presented in such a way that anyone, anyone who is interested in ideas, probably with some kind of college education, can follow along, make sense of it, critique it or not, whatever they think of it, but they can understand it because it really shows and helps people understand what it is we do as academics. Without the conversations, right, without public buy in, I'm not sure that the future is particularly bright. So I think I really value that. I would muse about how many copies this boys behind the poses this because I'm like, never in 10,000 years, this is an academic did I think, A, I would write a book that had illustrations in it, or B, that more than, like, a hundred people in a good year would ever read it. So it's sort of. It's kind of, you know, I'm inadvertently innovating myself and sort of discovering possibilities. So I'm glad that it's. That it's been of use to your process.
- [12:08]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
No, it really was. And Anya will also attest to this, because you are absolutely right. It does not make us any less of a scholar because we are using simple language. It doesn't make us any. In fact, I would say it's even more challenging sometimes to find a sentence. And this is where Anya, you know, and I. It really works. Well.
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It'S sometimes so much harder to find a paragraph, write a paragraph explaining something that is easy to hide behind big terms. Right. And use these complicated sentences. But when it comes down to really looking and putting it in simple terms, it requires a lot of work. And I would say it's very important. So thank you for leading us on the way.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, well, hopefully I'm not leading you over a cliff, but whatever works. I mean, we got to see whatever works.
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But tell me more about the. How do I. What would you say that the book is more about the history or the experience or both?
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Well, I think it's called the History of an Experience sort of for a reason. Right. We've been pitching this book as a transmission history. I think, ultimately, like, the transmission is the thing that ties it all together, insofar as we're really kind of overviewing like. Like a broad stretch of history here. I mean, if you really count the whole thing, we're covering, what, 2,000 years at least. I mean, there's. There is this sort of historical backbone to it, but on the other hand, it's like there's. There's so many sources that we could have looked at. Right. That the thing that we ultimately chose to focus on was this sort of braiding of threads that kind of comes out through the sources that pop up the most, the sources that kind of build into what Kundalini experience is conceived of as being today. And so in that sense, we almost worked backwards is maybe a good way of looking at it, because our starting point really was kind of Kundalini in the 20th century. Century. This sort of standard model of this experience. Right. It's the serpent power. It's fiery. It rises right from the bottom of the spine. To the crown of the head, through the seven chakras, and maybe there's rainbow colors and all the stuff that you would immediately see if you just logged into TikTok or whatever these days. And so for us, kind of where we sort of started was trying to figure out, okay, how did we arrive at this being what everybody thinks Kundalini is, and what kinds of threads maybe got snipped off along the way, and what kind of diversity of experience was maybe kind of normalized into what the standard model ultimately became. And so in that sense, I think you really can't separate the history bit from the experience bit. Experience only makes sense to a certain extent as an outcome, as a result of all these various kind of historical trends that had to come together to produce what it is that we see today. But at the same time, insofar as experience is really, really diverse, ultimately we do try to really pay attention to that. And rather than kind of discarding all the experiential bits that maybe got, you know, glazed over, that didn't make sense, we do point out those instances where that stuff happens. So I think thinking of it as the history of an experience kind of allowed us to maybe hold on to that diversity more than we would have if we were just telling, you know, kind of a linear narrative, if it was just the history that we were focused on.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, I think our audience would very much be interested to know you sort of, because in the. In the first chapter, the tougher one for those listening, called South Asian Roots, Serpents, Fires and the Ascent of Kundalini. And very quick footnote, I found it. It was a month ago, and apparently as of a month ago, it was 37,000 copies. But go. But go ahead.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
I think another thing that, you know, thinking about history and experience is to also talk about. And this comes more from talking about Kundalini in public spaces or meeting experiencers. One of the things that I noticed very quickly was this kind of a power move of sorts where somebody would say, oh, that is not Kundalini, or saying, oh, that is Kundalini. Right. And what is Kundalini? Who gets to decide if this falls in this Kundalini category or not? And so that was another very important factor for us is to bring in voices. And intentionally, like we. This is by design. We design the chapters in such a way that the reader is going to go through that confusion, say, what is Kundalini? Because there is not one single Kundalini experience. So that is one very important factor for us. The second one was this, and I think I feel more strongly about it as a brown woman. And I think I can also speak about it in a little more of a loud way, if I may say so, is there's always been this thing about orientalism, colonialism, or even this Western borrowing. And in all this, what a lot of people forget is there was an equal, if not a pretty loud, so called East, west, east response too. And so it's not appropriation. We can't, when we look at Kundalini history, I think it is unlike modern postural yoga history.
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Dr. Anya Foxen
It's.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
It's very inaccurate to just say theosophist or the Westerners in this case, quote, unquote, borrowed it and ran with it. That is not how the experience is to be seen. And that's nowhere the players in the history that we talk about in this book.
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Great.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
So tell us a bit more about specifically the Genesis that you trace. What are some of the antecedents that you talk about in your first chapter?
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Dr. Anya Foxen
I think even just off the bat, it's important to note that to balance out chapter one, there is chapter two. Right. So there's the South Asian roots, but there are also the Western roots. And I think that sort of speaks to Sravana's point about how maybe we don't even want to call it appropriation to begin with, but the instances that might qualify as that even in themselves are very complicated. Right. It really is a fusion, it really is a synthesis by the time that we get to the 20th century. On the other hand, kundalini obviously is a Sanskrit term that pops up in this body of texts that we can trace to roughly the 7th 8th century or so CE. And so we can kind of look for these instances where the term first begins to pop up in the Tantric corpus. But that itself is a little bit deceptive, I think. Right. So kind of to press on this idea of the transmission history, I think an important aspect of what we're looking at is it's never just the term, even though the term is kind of one binding thing that brings all this stuff together. So if we really wanted to look at some of the earliest antecedents of Kundalini or kundalini experience, or even just this concept. Right. The way that it materializes, we might want to look at things that aren't even labeled Kundalini. So we might want to talk about the Upanishadic body, we might want to talk about the way that serpents show up in South Asian culture. We might want to think about this role of kind of the microcosm as the body and the standing in relation to the macrocosm as the universe. And all those things that kind of bind the two together. Theme like fire, themes like water, themes like, you know, this kind of ascent that could be happening within the body, which is what Kundalini ultimately becomes, but could also be imagined as happening outside of the body. Could look maybe like something a lot more literal. So if we keep those things in mind, these are elements that show up way before the 7th century.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
And they.
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Show up in their particular ways within culture, but they also show up within other cultures. There's a reason that the transmission travels the way that it does, and it's through these points of resonance.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, so. So for those listening, the. There might be a lot of armchair knowledge or cultural knowledge about, you know, this term that literally means something is on the lines of the one possessing quails or the coiled one, referring to this serpentine sort of spiritual power that's. That's leveraged for all sorts of feats. And so. So what, Anya, what you're seeing, I think is may fascinate some that.
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Just because there wasn't this name for that experience prior to certain epoch doesn't necessarily mean that experience wasn't occurring. And so is it fair to say then that the premise of. The premise of that thought is that there is an experience that might be named differently at different times and in different cultures?
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
I would say yes.
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Yeah. And I. Yeah. So I think this is the difficult balancing act throughout the book.
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Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Yes. I think there are two things to it, and we talk about this in the book.
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One is just the experience. It's much later we land with this quote unquote standard model of the serpent rising from the base of the body, the muladhara going up. Right.
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Prior to that, we do have mention of kundalini rising from the heart. And so as we keep going forward with the transmission history, the kundalini rising from the heart or the kundalini being understood as a spandha, the kundalini being understood as divine energy that is within all of us that kind of somehow does not continue to have a long running. What kind of gets into the transmission history is the serpent narrative is this whole thing about serpents and raging serpents and fire and so on and so forth. And here I think, and we mentioned this, if I'm not wrong right up front in the first chapter, is the relationship of serpents when it comes to. To different parts of the world. If you come from South Asia, if you kind of condition in what I call the socio cultural DNA, there is a double relationship with the serpent. Serpent is not all that. I think there's serpent, Vishnu, the Vasuki. We have serpent with Shiva, we have serpents everywhere. Right. So that's another thing to consider. Sitter with kundalini Transmission, history. It moves away from kundalini experience, being experienced by different experiencer in different sense of the way, based on where it is rising from and it falls and kind of in a large majority gets into the serpentine understanding of kundalini, which then does get very tightly intertwined with, you know, fear and having these intense experience, which is almost for some experiences, debilitating. They're just not able to even get up from bed sometimes.
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Dr. Raj Balkaran
Fascinating. So maybe we can. Maybe a productive way forward is to look at each of the chapters and contributions. So the first one is talking about some of the ancient South Asian roots.
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And then we talk about the Western chapter. You mentioned some passing. Is there anything else that you want to say about this particular chapter and what it contributes?
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Yeah. So I think part of what's interesting about the way that this narrative kind of comes together, especially as Sravana said, with this role that the serpent comes to play, is I'm not sure the serpent as an image would have become quite as central as it does had it not been for this sort of fusion with the Western traditions. That's not to say that kundalini as the serpent is not sort of an important image in the pre modern South Asian material, but especially when it comes to.
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Certainly kundalini as something that's maybe so powerful that it might be dangerous, but also the way that the serpent becomes this kind of central, like almost the linchpin of the wisdom that's, that's to be gained from this and salvific wisdom. In fact, this is something that we really do see rising out of the Western sources where it is central, of course, within mainstream Christianity. The serpent is usually not a good thing. And certainly that kind of underpins a lot of the, again, the potential danger, the fear, the way that that narrative kind of gets constructed for modern experiencers. But on the other hand, as we go over in chapter two, there are these other traditions that are always kind of floating around on the sidelines. There's the Gnostic tradition, there's the Hermetic tradition, there's all this stuff that survives in various forms kind of through the centuries. And within Christianity itself, where the serpent actually has a much more positive, although still kind of, again, potentially dangerous. Right. In so much as it's radically transformed formative sort of function. So the serpent as not necessarily an embodiment of the devil as it might have been construed in more mainstream Christian narratives, but the serpent as an embodiment of Sophia, for instance, of God's wisdom, something that must Be sort of unlocked, something that in fact maybe holds the only promise that we have to discovering this divinity that's kind of latent within the body. And so I think if we consider those narratives, then it makes a lot more sense. Why once we get to the 19th and certainly into the 20th centuries, where you have interlocutors from both, as we might say, east and west kind of coming together and talking about this stuff, why it is that they land on the serpent as kind of the primary image that's used to carry this experience forward?
- [30:29]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Would you say that's one of the primary takeaways or thrusts of the book, then the serpent's tale, the reasons for which the serpent becomes the symbol of the embodiment of the sandhood.
- [30:43]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
I think also to be mentioned, Jnanadev's Gyaneshwari. Right. So this is now we are, if I'm not wrong, 13th century. I'll have to look at the dates again, but sometime around the 13th century. But now, for the first time, we have a Vaishnava who is integrating Shaiva and Tantra. And now for the first time, we are getting a text which is going to give us a very step by step by step practice of sorts of raising the Kundalini. Of course, at one stage, when the kundalini, Gyanadeval say, has reached the heart, he writes in Marathi, and he says now breath becomes maruti, it becomes airborne. Right? So everything from the time the kundalini energies entered the heart, the entire landscape changes from here on. For Jnanadev, the container is that of Vishnu, of the divine. It is now become. It's a very different. It's a very different topography of sorts that he's going to operate in. But keeping that aside, we now have a practice. So that is another very important.
- [32:12]
Point of transmission. History, coming from a text that was not written in English, was ancient, quote, unquote. You know, ancient is also. How do you define ancient? And then fast forward, you know, many centuries and we'll have Gopi Krishna. But between these two figures, there is a lot that happens that he takes Kundalini from being an experience of something sorts to a very fixed kind of.
- [32:49]
Raising format as well as the experiencer is almost by default reaching that space of this is Kundalini. And that is what we are trying to communicate in this book, that maybe there is more to this Kundalini than a kind of experience. It's far, wide and so much more that falls in this category.
- [33:17]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, and I'm glad you clarify that because of course, in the book, I believe in the first chapter, or fairly early, you say very clearly that this book is not about the quote, unquote, one true Delini experience. And so I think listeners will be intrigued to learn that you're talking more about a genus rather than a species or an order where there are a number of experiences that may have been called or not called Kundalini within South Asian context or beyond. And so a question that the audience might have then is, so then what is the.
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What is the umbrella under which all of these hang? So how do we, how do we approach that? Like, what is, what is the methodological approach to, to discern this section or subsection or the banyan about what you're speaking?
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Dr. Anya Foxen
Well, I think, Raj, to go back to the question that you asked Stephen a little bit earlier.
- [34:17]
Is there some genre of experience, whether it's called Kundalini or not, that we ultimately argue might fall under this label? I think that's actually something that we really resist kind of drawing a hard line around. And it's partially because the primary literature, so the sources that we're following really try to draw that line and to bring all these things under a single umbrella. The thing about human experience is it's really, really messy. And the other thing about human experience is we're constantly trying to make it less messy by sort of mapping it onto these pre existing models and by assigning terms to it. And so this is exactly what happens with Kundalini, especially once you get into the 20th century where, you know, I mean, just information transfer becomes so much more rapid and the media that people are consuming is so much more voluminous that it's, again, it's so tempting, right, to say that, oh, well, gosh, you know, look, every mystical experience ever, you might argue, is Kundalini. But on the other hand, right, if you'd say it's everything, it's. It's essentially also then kind of nothing, right? I mean, the word becomes sort of meaningless after a certain point, especially if you decide to apply it to literally every single thing that a human body might experience. And the primary literature, as I said, sort of struggles with this, right, because they're constantly running up against the fact that even when you try to quote, unquote, research, right? So we're talking about neuroscientists, we're talking about social scientists, all sorts of scholars that are trying to sort of figure out, you know, okay, is there, is there a symptom pattern as they might refer to it, that kind of defines what Kundalini ultimately is and how it's experienced. They're constantly failing to make the data kind of square with itself. Right. Every time you try to sort of say, well, okay, Kundalini is, you know, these five checkboxes, there's going to be some number of people out there that are experiencing something completely different and yet still wanting to call it Kundalini. And so it's. It's just. Yeah. It's so hard, I think, to really pin down the term that we. We've learned to be comfortable, I think Shravana and I, in the course of writing this book with just sort of letting the complexity be. Because again, the second you try to rein it in, it kind of bursts out in five other directions.
- [36:49]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah. You're tracking a moving target, and that is a feature, not a bug, what you're doing. Yeah, I just want to be. Perhaps I asked these kind of silly questions because maybe others in the audience have them. So I thought, let's draw this out.
- [37:07]
What happens when the surface slithers into the marketplace?
- [37:14]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
What happens when the serpent slithers into the marketplace? What happens is it becomes a product and it becomes. There is competition and there are players and there is market share and there is profit sharing and there are Rolex and Rolls Royce to be bought. That's what happens. There you go.
- [37:42]
I didn't know. You see, 37,000 copies gets you a Rolex.
- [37:46]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
I do not own a Rolex.
- [37:49]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
No. Now, we will go with the fast story that you have a Rolex. But no, Joe, humor aside, I think what happens is, again, that also is a complex history.
- [38:02]
There was a need. There was a point in time in history where there was a significant amount of people that were looking for.
- [38:15]
They looked towards the east, some said. And we see the tanning salons came up around the same time. People wanted a particular skin tone. There was a degree of disenchantment, enchantment with what they had access to. And so with this term to the east, with the theosophist players, with now.
- [38:41]
Mostly, I would say, male teachers that would come from South Asia, they would now start teaching Kundalini. And as that would happen, as we have, you know, quoted several teachers, they're also kind of fighting with each other, saying, my model is better. That model is not right. This is the right way to do it. That is a wrong way to do it. I have a safer way. They have a dangerous way. So it is the classic marketplace where people are offering different techniques and bolstering it with saying, this is the Right way. And that's what happens at this time. Another thing that we notice, and this is very relevant and I ask this to my students all the time, at what point in time in history, if you look at our grandparents, they collected moths. A lot of them had these.
- [39:49]
I don't know how they preserved the moths, but they had these butterflies and moths. Then came the flowers and leaves, along with coins and stamps.
- [40:01]
Our generation, when we were young, they were called as hobbies. I mean today, if I were to ask a 20 year old hobbies, they would look at you like really strange watching TikTok. Yeah, possibly. But there was a time, right? People collected coins, people collected stuff, stamps, people collected moths and butterflies. Today we collect experience.
- [40:25]
And when we collect experience, when we look at this period in history.
- [40:33]
There'S an explosion of sorts of people now who are seeking to collect experience. And in this pursuit of collecting experience, experience, Kundalini is like a perfect player in the marketplace. As is so many other experiences too. Right? We are not discounting other experiences. We are not saying there were no other experience to look, seek or to look at. But Kundalini does become a pretty, I would say flowers front leader. And we see that with the Spiritual Emergency Network, they still list Kundalini Awakening as number two, as their spiritual sos, Spiritual emergency, which then becomes spiritual emergence. So that's another thing to consider, right? Like globally. And we have another wave as we speak right now with the psychedelics, with entheogens, with other practices. There is this another like new way where people are looking for experience. And that's what we see, what we talk about in chapter eight. There's these Internet and social media. Kundalini is back again. Looks different, feels different, thoughts different, but back again because we are seeking experience.
- [42:06]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
So when she slithers into the marketplace, people sell both the snake and the snake oil then. Got it. Okay, well.
- [42:17]
Chapter eight, the Serpents in the Web. That's more. You just opened the door for that chapter. It's great timing.
- [42:23]
Dr. Anya Foxen
Well, I think that's really where we were trying to do sort of a state of the field. Right. So having gone through all these instantiations of Kundalini as it's migrated, you know, from. Yeah. The pre modern period into all these sort of waves that we see in the 20th century. Like kind of where are we today? And so I'll admit I actually joined TikTok just to write this chapter. Prior to writing this chapter, I did not have an account and I haven't really been back since. But it was definitely an interesting deep dive for a few days.
- [42:58]
I think really what we're trying to sort of demonstrate in that chapter is that all of these things that have kind of existed historically we can still find today whether that is this sort of media engagement with Kundalini, which, fine, in the 19th century they didn't have TikTok, but at the same time, a lot of the narratives that we see on social media today were already there in these, you know, first kind of mass market publications that you find on this topic. The things that the theosophists were talking about, the things that the early South Asian popularizers of yoga were talking about, whether it's Vivekananda, whether it's Kuvlayananda or Shivananda or whoever, all those themes are still there on TikTok, on Instagram and these Facebook groups. So really, it's sort of, you know, there's nothing new, in a sense, on the web. On the other hand, as much as, again, historically, there have been these sort of scientific attempts to circumscribe what is Kundalini, to figure out what's maybe going on within the body. Again, whether that's Kuvalayananda, whether that's the stuff that comes out of Gopi Krishna's global network, whether that's the spiritual emergency network, or any of the stuff that comes out of people that are affiliated maybe with the American counterculture that's still alive and well today as well. A lot of it, as far as, you know, trying to figure out, like, what happens when you do Kundalini yoga and how might it help you be a happier, healthier, holier citizen, is deeply entangled with the Yogi Bhajan legacy still. So there's quite a bit of Kundalini yoga, which is something that we haven't really talked about yet that pops up on the Internet. But also there is this sort of mini scholarly industry of people trying to figure out, you know, again, can we. Whether it's from a psychological standpoint or what have you, you know, can we put some sort of clinical box around this? And what does that look like? So that element of what has historically been called Kundalini research definitely still exists. And then people are still kind of doing what they're doing, whether that is practitioners now globally, including in the West. I mean, there's, you know, how many different workshops and things going on at any given moment or I think one of my favorite parts, in fact, really my favorite part of the book in its entirety maybe, is the ethnographic material that shravana brought to the table that was part of her dissertation work that actually is featured at the very, very end of chapter eight. That's where we finished the whole thing. Where this sort of the transmission that is, you know, maybe not living on the Internet, that's not living in these. In these global spaces is there in South Asia. Right. People are still practicing what they're practicing. And even though they're maybe not on TikTok constantly, they're also kind of not immune from the stuff that does happen globally. Right. From this imagery and the way that it's evolved. So, yeah, it's maybe in some sense the broadest chapter that we have, but that's because, you know, having. Having arrived at this moment in the modern day, we're sort of forced to grapple with all the legacies of the history. Right. All the kind of threads of the transmission that are still there, even the ones that have been snipped off tend to kind of come back in one shape or another.
- [46:28]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, I like what you say about this not being about Yogi Bhajan. I think there's an overheard section where that is the title in the prologue. This book is not about Yogi Bhajan. I think it's just above the section where it says, this book is not about sex. Just FYI.
- [46:45]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Yeah.
- [46:46]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
What would you hope? Yeah, please, go ahead.
- [46:48]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Yeah, I just want to add one more thing, you know, because we spoke about the teachers. This is now 50s, 60s, 70s, 1950s and 60s, 70s. I think the thing to consider and which makes Kundalini on the web maybe a little more alarming is fine. At that time, Yogi Bhajan and Swami Muktananda and, you know, there were people who were kind of sort of slightly butting head, but still there was a human being. There were, you know, good, bad, ugly. There was this kind of person at the center who was teaching and, you know, there was a face to the name. What happened when we jumped into Facebook and Instagram, it was so dark and so scary that both Anya and I, we had to consciously exit some of these groups because even if somebody said something remotely.
- [48:00]
Say, you know, even if they said something like, I think I may have had a Kundalini experience or something to that nature. You had suddenly people giving advice from good to very, like ultra scary advice, and you don't know who these people are anymore. You don't know if this is a bot responding. You don't know if this is a human responding. You don't know anything. So I think the web Makes the serpent possibly even more ferocious and scary and wary. And that's kind of where we are at. And we don't know 30 years from now, 40 years from now, how that would look like.
- [48:49]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, I mean, that's so interesting in so many ways. And when I talk about students with a VR undergrad class during a sessional contract, certainly adult learners at Delmend School or the Ochs. One of the fundamental distinctions between or possibilities in Internet interaction versus interactions prior to this point is the approval to the unprecedented possibility in the history of Homo sapiens, of disembodied interaction, of interacting with an individual whose face nor name do you know now, who may not even be a sentient life form. And I think that it's all the more compelling a juxtaposition when.
- [49:42]
When speaking of an experience that by and large has been considered embodied and in many ways the spiritual pinnacle of embodiment is variously construed, certainly embodied with respect to its cultivation, its transmission embedded in relationship. So I think it's all the more fascinating that all of a sudden.
- [50:05]
Dicks and the metaphor, you know, we have the disembodied, shedded skin of the serpent masquerading. Masquerading as something more, perhaps not to take away from the vital and rich engagements that people can have through online meeting. Of course, we're having one right now, But I mean to say it's the disembodiment of anonymous online. Everyone has an opinion. But I don't value my opinion or you enough to tell you my actual name, which my face that is so such a world away from spaces in which the very embodied relationship is the riverbed through which Kundabun flows.
- [50:46]
Dr. Anya Foxen
I think that's such a fascinating point, Raj. And yeah, especially kind of given this, as you put it, like the embodied nature of the experience that we're talking about. To me, you know, kind of to follow up on what Shravana was saying, that's what makes some of these groups so potentially sort of scary because, okay, I mean, having sort of gone through, you know, these volumes and volumes of historical material, like, I. I have no doubt, right, that this is an experience that can manifest in any number of ways. And it's already so difficult, even when you're sitting face to face with somebody, to really sort of get into, okay, what are they actually experiencing? What's going on within their body? You know, how do I. How do I best advise them? How do I best assist them? But when you're not even seeing that person, right, when all you have from them is this sort of Facebook post or whatever. Right. To then begin to engage in this kind of dialogue. Right. And then, of course, from the other side, you know, you're receiving advice from somebody that you have no idea what they are or who they are. You have no idea what they've experienced. And so to try to sort of communicate something that's so intimate through this medium, I just. Yeah, I don't really know what to do with that to some extent. Right. Because again, it's such a. It's such a huge rupture from anything that we've seen historically in terms of how this transmission has happened, even when, you know, I mean, we had books or whatever. It's. The interaction that you have with the book is very different from the interaction that you have with this kind of disembodied agent on the Internet. Right?
- [52:23]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah, absolutely. And over the years, I mean, I went from a real skeptic to online education. I went from a skeptic to someone who. I mean, this is what I do with my life. But really, it was my valuing of. And skilled, embodied in personal experience that I was able to translate to the online sphere, which makes it successful. And I often have to communicate to folks, whether somebody who's trying to build something or a student, that there's a difference between having and having a relationship, a human relationship, an extent, vital relationship, where the means of interaction is the Internet. That's very different, I. E. Where the Internet's the means of interaction versus where the. The Internet is the fabric of the relationship. It's very, very different. So you can have really powerful, vital, profound experiences in personal and professional life using the Internet as a medium for otherwise people that would or could meet in a room, in person at some point, even if it's colleagues. Was it Madison, Wisconsin, for the 53rd conference over the weekend, for example, you all will soon be going to the American Academy of Religion. And really, I'm sure that you and Shravana have had no shortage of important conversations about the book, whether in person or across many miles. That's different. Internet as a medium versus the Internet as the fabric of. Of the interlocutor. Right. It's murky and it's, It's. It's divorced from everything. We've been trained from an evolutionary and social perspective, trained to do in relationship and trained how to be safe and walk from relationship. It undercuts all of that. So it's. It's not a surprise that so much harm can come when you throw away all the good sense about how to relate to human being. Because someone online, you know, Kundalini Imam 23, says that I should do this or whatever.
- [54:27]
And back to, yeah, please go on.
- [54:29]
Dr. Anya Foxen
No.
- [54:29]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
And all of this is completely, completely devoid of the container. Right? I may, I may not agree with Yogi Bhajan's Kundalini Yoga doesn't matter, but people who practice for them, there is a container. Yogi Bhajan, Kundalini Yoga format is a container. Shaktipa was a container. Is a container. Right. When we look at it on the web, it's further. There is just no container. And in the absence of a container, when you have a significant profound experience.
- [55:15]
As human beings, we will look for meaning making. We will need language. We will look much as we say, let's not look for meaning or let's not put any language to this meaning, at some point we will. And that's the point. Problem with these Facebook groups and all these zillions of Kundalini groups is you are now, you know, you make, you're trying to make sense of a profound experience where you just don't know where the people giving you advice and you at that moment are accepting advice. You just don't know who they are. You don't know where they're coming from, you don't know what their container is, you don't know what they, you know, what framework they're working with. And it's so scary. It is very, very upsetting.
- [56:14]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yes, yeah, sure. It's fraught with all kinds of issues and at the end of the day, I think it's about personal responsibility for one to have the good sense to trust one sources and connect with one's sources and connect with human beings. It's not a question of necessarily elitist or any sort of factionism. But, you know, if, if I have a question about a particular niche or theosophists, I'm going to send an email to Anya and say, hey, can you know, it's, it's about she has the experience. She has knowledge and experience where she can guide me with this question.
- [56:45]
What have you. So it's, it's, it's something so simple, you know, people complicate it so much, it's that we need to know the individual with whom we're having an interaction with, lest we be duped. It's easy enough for people to fool you when they're actually in front of you, much less when they're behind Simelius online. Anyhow, I digress scraping how Useful. What do you think people should, could, would most take away from the book? What are some of the key kind of 30,000 foot view ideas, takeaways from the Serpent's Tale?
- [57:16]
Dr. Anya Foxen
Well, I think Raj, actually, to follow up on the griping, I think that was one of our hopes for the book, actually. You know, and for me, I'm sorry, still sort of a historian at heart. I think that history matters insofar as origin stories can help us make sense of our experience. Right. However complex, however relative.
- [57:40]
However fluid that may be. And so I think my hope for the book is that people can pick this up and maybe contextualize, right. Put some kind of container around what it is that they might be experiencing or seeking to experience. Right. I mean, there are people who seek this stuff out and they are sort of also adrift, I think, in this modern day kind of context, where Kundalini is everything and nothing.
- [58:08]
So I think without giving the reader a kind of definitive narrative and definitive version of what Kundalini has been or might be.
- [58:19]
What I hope, you know, coming from my perspective as a historian, but now also as a teacher, right. I mean, this is what I try to do for my college students, and maybe a slightly different form is to at least give them the tools to kind of build that meaning for themselves or at least some pointers as to where they might look for the kind of meaning that would be most helpful. Because the fact of the matter is that there is not a single model of Kundalini, right? It's always been variable, it's always been multiple. But at the same time, like, insofar as our experience is ours and not somebody else's, we're gonna settle on something at the end of the day. And so again, what I sort of hope is that this book might at least provide people with some context and some options where they can make that choice in an informed way, right? Like, what is the narrative that works for me? What is the container that works for me? While recognizing that this is, you know, still kind of one, one choice among many.
- [59:23]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
And my hope is one, as Anya said, and I think, Raj, you pointed it out already. I have a few hopes. One, you, you know, there is now a book where you can dig in and say, oh, okay, this kind of I resonate with. And if I resonate with this, this is the path.
- [59:46]
From which or through which I can go deeper. Because there are so many different paths, right? You have Jung, he has his own path. You have Swami Vivekananda, he has his own path. We have Yogi Bhajan his own path. So one is it at least gives the experiences something to. Once you resonate, you know, okay, fine, I can go on. This, my other very secret hope. And this will no more a secret because of course, we are now public.
- [60:14]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Secrets are the best secret.
- [60:15]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Public secrets are the best. Yeah. Is for more experiencers to talk about Kundalini rising from the heart. I think the more people talk about Kundalini in the larger language of what I call frame and not love. Because there are two very different categories, but this kind of boundless love that comes from almost a cellular structure of your body. Boundless compassion, boundless kindness. I really hope that Anya and I are flooded with experiences who have the courage to come and say, you know what? I experienced Kundalini. It was not a scary, fiery scene serpent who was, you know, swallowing me down, but I experienced it as an explosion. And the reason I say this is because then there will be a fair bit of balance and there will be more experiences who will allow others to say, huh, That's Kundalini, too.
- [61:27]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
The shedding of skin is only painful when you're not ready to lose it 100%.
- [61:34]
So fascinating. Is there anything else about this.
- [61:39]
Book project or a larger wolf that you'd like to touch on before closing today?
- [61:46]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
No, we've spoken about most of it. I think.
- [61:51]
What I would like to really wrap up is with meaning making.
- [61:57]
And how important important it is that when we have an experience.
- [62:04]
We will, we must, we always will continue to find meaning, give it some context. And this book shows that there is more ways to come to that point. And it doesn't have to be just one particular definition or Kundalini is just this and not that. Yeah.
- [62:31]
Dr. Anya Foxen
And I guess maybe to just follow up on that, you know, and this is maybe even where we started the conversation. So bringing things full circle.
- [62:41]
It's the serpent's tail, right? It is a story. And even though I think we've really tried to emphasize the kind of multiple nature of what this thing is and has always been, it's still just one story. It's still just one transmission history. It's still just one set of threads. And so, I mean, kind of by definition, right? There's so much that we don't cover in this book, but there's a reason for that, right? I mean, ultimately, you have to write the story the way that you write it. My story is not gonna be the same as Shravana's, is not gonna be the same as yours, Raj. It's not gonna be the same as, you know, I mean, whoever might listen to this and say, well, okay, but if only, you know, we had talked about the X, which is fine. I mean, that's kind of how stories work. And so again, to the extent that the book has a thesis, it's that, like, this is never one thing. Right. And it's always gonna differ from person to person. It's always going to differ from experience to experience. So I also, like, maybe where I want to leave it is to say that this is. It's a story, not an encyclopedia. And that's okay.
- [63:56]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
Yeah. Well, thank you very much both for appearing on the podcast today.
- [63:59]
Dr. Anya Foxen
Thank you, Raj.
- [64:01]
Dr. Shravana Borkotaki Varma
Thank you. Thank you, Raj.
- [64:04]
Dr. Raj Balkaran
There's so much fascinating material here. I'm sure there are many who will read this book who will be like, oh, I want to hear more about this, more about this, about this. And I think that the best books are in the beginnings, and this is a prime example of potentially the beginning of a certain strand of scholarship on the serpent's tail. And I think that the image of the serpent and the shedding of the skin is apropos both for the experience or experiences that are being alluded to and also the various narratives, east and west, that surround these experiences. So we have been talking about.
- [64:43]
Lots of handmaids, but the Sultan's Tale, at least a publication by Columbia University Press. I Even speaking with Dr. Shavana Boktagi Varma and Anya Fox and co authors of this fascinating work. All of the notes are in your podcast. All of the. Yeah, all of the links are in the podcast notes. Until next time, keep listening, keep reading, and keep contemplating the shedding of skin. Take care, Sam.