Recognition

Dhāraṇā 5 · Rays Growing Still

Śakti contemplated as radiance rising from the root, subtler and subtler, coming to rest at the dvādaśānta — and Bhairava dawns.

The breath dhāraṇās watched what is already happening. Here the mode changes: the verb is cintayet, one should contemplate, and what is contemplated is an image — Śakti as light, rising from the root of the body and thinning as she climbs, until at the crown's end she comes to rest.

The image, exactly

• Āmūlāt — from the root: the base of the trunk, the floor of the body. The verse does not use the word mūlādhāra, though the received translations reasonably supply it.
• Kiraṇābhāsām — shining like rays: not a serpent, not a channel — radiance. This text's kuṇḍalinī, if the word is even wanted here, is light.
• Sūkṣmāt sūkṣmatarātmikām — of a nature subtler than the subtle, and growing subtler as she rises. The coarseness is at the bottom; the ascent is a refinement.
• Dviṣaṭkānte śāmyantīm — growing still at the end-of-twelve, the upper dvādaśānta at and above the crown. The rays do not strike a target there; they settle, the way ripples settle.

Doing it

Sit, and build the contemplation from the floor of the body upward: a rising shining, felt more than pictured, becoming finer with every span of the climb — from something almost tactile at the base to something barely a thought at the crown, to something at rest just beyond it. Let the settling be the point. A practitioner who drives the light upward has made a projectile of it; the verse's participle is śāmyantīm, becoming-quiet, and the dawn it promises — bhairavodayaḥ — happens where the movement ends, not because the movement was fast.

The mechanism is bhāvanā as the parent page defines it: a deliberately built current of attention that dissolves at its own summit. The image of Śakti refines until there is nothing left of it to refine, and what is left when the image gives out is what the image was made of. She rises as light and rests as Bhairava — which is the whole doctrine of this school in one ascent.