The Latin term limen means a threshold. A liminal state is a borderline state where something is about to transition into something else. That something else is just beyond or below the borderline: the subliminal, or equally so, the sublime.
From suicide as a warm and fuzzy concept to the body as a portal for unimagined and unforeseen infusions of grace - this had been quite the journey I had taken through a liminal state after my existential collapse, a state I was only vaguely aware of during its duration. Yet it proceeded, and the sublime finally broke through the borderline,, and as I transcended that state of liminal transition I found myself in a new territory, a new limen, one that I was now hyper-aware of.
For the next few months the electrical impulses stayed close and I let them flow as needed, I had no idea what the direction or purpose was, if indeed there was a direction or purpose, but I had a sense that I was being worked over, body and mind. At times the pleasure was astonishing - imagine your best ever ever orgasm, then multiply it by ten in intensity, then have it run up and down your body in waves from head to toes and back again for 15 minutes - and at times the energy seemed blocked, the sensation an excruciatingly painful electrical burn.
I felt an urgency to figure out what this process was and what I was to do with it. Reading back through the text of Redmond's book I found a passage I only vaguely remembered and which at the time of first reading I barely noted. It was a warning that one should be in good health if pursuing the release of chakra energies. I remembered thinking of "releasing energy" as something akin to having a bit more spring in your step - hardly the case, as it turned out! Associated with this energy release was the term kundalini awakening, and here I found a key to research into this strange and mystifying process.
Most traditional writings about kundalini awakening are clothed in opaque esoteric language, often translations from ancient texts that in themselves seem bent on masking the reality underlying the process. These were of absolutely no use to me, but two books I stumbled upon stood out as beneficial guides because they were contemporary accounts and presented in the form of autobiography: Gopi Krishna's Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man and Dorothy Walters' Unmasking the Rose: A Record of a Kundalini Initiation. Both of these books are compelling accounts of spontaneous kundalini awakenings far more intense than my own (indeed, Gopi Krishna claimed it almost killed him), yet their accounts reinforced the intuition that I had experienced some kind of kundalini awakening. Of course, there is no certification board for this kind of experience, though I suppose some Indian gurus may qualify as a community of the adequate for peer revue. Nonetheless, this seems to be not only what happened to me, but is continuing to happen - kind of like the Big Bang, which didn't just bang but is still bangggginggggggggggggg...
This still begs the question, what exactly is happening, what is the process doing to the mind and body, and where is it going? It has been almost 4 years since that fateful day in August and I still cannot give a clear enough accounting to clarify these questions. Both Walters and Krishna describe a period of at least 10 years in which they gradually stabilized and assimilated the energies. Their testimony, coupled with my experience over these years, suggests being thrust into a heightened liminal state, especially unusual since it begins with the body. The energies, their source mysterious and elusive, seem to have a will of their own, an entelechy that is only revealed in increments as it works through body and mind, slowly yet tangibly transforming psyche and spirit. Like the art making process, like kosmic evolution itself, always and constantly in a state of unfolding, the direction only obvious in hindsight, the goal unseeable, and with a quality that is - to borrow a phrase - ecstatically urgent. Just as importantly, it holds itself within the field of possibility, an open field that seems to hover in the very air we breath, whispering insistently "There is always, always more possible than you ever realize."
The end....for now.