Gopi Krishna Kundalini(1)

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perspective it can be said that the religious impulse, instead of
aiding the development of reason, enveloped the mind with darkest
clouds of superstition and fear, and continues to do so even now in
the lower strata of underdeveloped societies. But at the same time
there is no denying the fact that, side by side with his reason, this
mysterious impulse of submission to unseen intelligent forces
around him, and a dim sense of the distinction between this world
and the other, between the propitious and unpropitious or the holy
and the
THE BIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF KUNDALINI 137
unholy, spontaneously took shape in his mind. This did not
disappear with the advance of the intellect, as shadows disappear at
the approach of light, but became more rational, keeping the same
hold on the seasoned intellect as it had done thousands of years
before when reason was still in its infancy.
A few words are necessary to weigh the validity of some of the
hypotheses put forward by modern scholars and men of science to
account for the phenomenon of religion. One of these, the doctrine
of the animistic origin of religion, was propounded by E. B.
Taylor, an anthropologist of the nineteenth century, and by Herbert
Spencer, a well-known writer on philosophical subjects. According
to this theory the investiture by the primitive mind of all the objects
and forces of nature with life or animation in the form of soul,
spirit, or other invisible beings provides the basis for the
appearance of the organized religions of later epochs. The idea of
aliveness or animation in nature, it is supposed, originated in the
mind of primitive man from the observation of death scenes, when
the living principle seems to depart from the body; from dreams,
hallucinations, trance conditions, or from what the savage could
only interpret as the animated activity of natural forces. This idea,
it is held, materialized first in ancestor worship and in funeral rites
and ceremonies in the belief that the departed souls or spirits led an
invisible existence of their own.
Apart from the fact that the practice of worshiping the spirits of
the departed has not been universal, the theory of the animistic
origin of religion fails to explain the various amorphous forms of
religious motivation exhibited in the still earlier ideas of primitive
man, as for instance, in totemic practices or in the notions of mana
and taboo. There might have been other variations, too, of which
we have no knowledge. So far as the animistic idea is concerned it
speaks more in favour of the hypothesis that religion is the
expression of a basic impulse of the psyche and from the very
beginning started in the human mind as a distinction between the
body and the spirit, this world and the
138 THE SECRET OF YOGA
other, death and deathlessness, the permissible and unpermissible,
the sacred and profane, as a spontaneous projection of an inner
development that slowly and painfully, but at the same time
inexorably, led evolving mankind to the lofty conceptions that now
permeate the religious literature of the world. From a rational point
of view, therefore, animism ought to be considered as an inevitable
phase in the evolution of the religious impulse, and early mode of
its expression, and not as the wellspring of religion itself.
For the hypothesis of the psychoanalytical school, founded by
Freud, it is enough to say that the Freudian concept is not now fully
accepted by some other psychologists. Another eminent
psychologist, McDougall, believes in the existence of an animating
principle or soul in the human body. The idea of a Father in
heaven, who looks benignly after the created multitudes of
humanity and provides for their needs, might well appear to casual
observation as the projection of a wish for a protective father, but a
deeper study of even such an anthropomorphic concept of God
makes this interpretation untenable for the simple reason that the
very idea of a superearthly Being, having his abode in high heaven,
with divine attributes and able to command all the forces of nature,
not being a fact of experience, must depend for its existence on a
tendency present in the human mind to draw a distinction between
the earthly and the Divine or between this world and the one above
or beyond it, and is evidence of the influence of the deep-rooted
religious feeling in man. Apart from this, if we cast a glance at the
unrefined religious ideas and practices of primitive man we find
that this was more often of a compulsive or exacting, than of a
pleasure yielding or wish-fulfilling nature, a driving pressure
reaching up from the depths of the primitive mind.
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