The wild side of Advaita Vedanta

 

Jnaneshwar (or Dnyaneshwar) was a 13th century Hindu mystic who supposedly wrote an extensive commentary on the Bhagavad Gita already as a teenager. Known as the Jnanesvari (or Dnyneshwari), it´s apparently the earliest preserved text in the Marathi language. I haven´t read it (an English translation exists, my Marathi being admittedly somewhat rusty), but I´m sure it could be interesting. All-knowing Wikipedia describes Jnaneshwar´s worldview as Advaita Vedanta, but there seems to have been much more going on. Think Nath fakirs, Tantrism, Hatha Yoga, that kind of hands-on stuff, not the serene meditation exercises we Westerners (rightly or wrongly) associate with Advaita. 

The link below goes to an excerpt from the Gita commentary, dealing with kundalini. It is...wild. Even for a teenager! Assuming a yogic posture, the entire body of the practitioner begins to shake violently as the life-force cleanses it, the cleansing being very concrete in nature ("it expels the bodily secretions", "reduces the fat", and so on). In plain English, you shit, vomit and shake uncontrollably. Then, kundalini awakens: "The fire arising from it spreads upwards and downwards and begins to consume the flesh. Not only does it do this, however, but it consumes the fleshy tissue of the heart also. It attacks the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet, penetrates the upper parts and passing through them it searches out the joints of the limbs. It does not leave its place in the lower body but draws the vitality from the nails, and cleansing the skin causes it to cleave to the bones. It cleanses the hollow of the bones, scours the inner recesses of the heart and withers the hair of the body. It drains the ocean of the seven bodily humours, parches the whole of the body and brings about a state of intense heat."

The physical body is transformed and becomes golden, while the yogi gets supernatural powers. He can even read the minds of ants! Then, another stunning transformation takes place, as the body of the practitioner becomes "like air" (transparent?) and eventually disappears altogether, merging into "Shiva" or "Brahman". The text seems to be saying that it´s impossible to know what this means ontologically speaking, perhaps an attempt to compromise between non-dualism and dualism? Note also that throughout the text, it´s supposed to be Krishna himself who is speaking to Arjuna. 

Jnaneshwar passed away (or passed on) at the age of 21, after voluntarily chosing to leave his mortal body through deep meditative absorption. I suppose a skeptic might wonder whether he was a real person at all, or just the figment of a later hagiographer´s imagination...

Maybe he wanted it that way. 

Kundalini Rise