Something has to explain why the twelve years after a kundalini awakening are described as a period of "trial, tribulation, mental abuse, anxiety, vexation and torture" rather than as a reward.1 The explanation given is an exchange, and it's blunt about who gets what. Beings with subtle bodies come into your brain and open your channels — work described as thankless, done by team after team, over years. And while they're in there, they're learning something on you:
Since there has to be some reward on their part for all this hard work and effort, at the same time they are working on you the devas are being taught how to alter someone's thoughts (using you as the guinea pig) since this involves entering someone's brain and activating selected neural pathways.2
That's the whole transaction. Your channels get opened. Their students get a training body. And the skill they're practising is the one that will later be used on ordinary people: "When people call on God or Buddhas for help in solving situations, this is what devas and Buddhas do to intervene."2 You are the classroom in which intercession is taught.
The curriculum has a difficulty gradient. "Giving thoughts to people is relatively easy while affecting their emotions is a bit harder."2 So the beginners work on planting ideas and the advanced ones work on moods, which quietly tells you what an unexpected surge of feeling is being read as.
There are contests, and they're named: "who can find out memories quickest in your brain, and who is strongest at giving you a thought while another tries to block it."2 Two of them, then, in your head at once — one pushing an idea in, one holding it out. The scale is stated too. "tens of thousands of heavenly devas and their teachers will be working on helping you purify your subtle body over time — one group after another while one or more voices will remain constant (giving you the impression it is always the same characters)."1
That last clause is the useful detail. The cast rotates, and a couple of steady voices make it feel like the same few people the whole way through. The brain gets called "Vimalakīrti's room," used as a training vehicle1 — a small room that turns out to hold an enormous number of visitors.
The tests are not gentle and they're not abstract:
the devas test themselves by impelling you to do negative deeds that you normally wouldn't do, while their teacher opposes them with his/her greater power.2
The question being asked is stated in one line — Can I make you do something you normally wouldn't do? — and the practitioner is "tested thousands of times like this and needs tremendous willpower to avoid doing what is wrong to avoid harm."1 Two things are worth separating there. The pressure is real and repeated, and the only defence named on the practitioner's side is willpower. But there's a supervisor: the deva's teacher is actively opposing the attempt with greater power. So the arrangement is a training exercise with an instructor in the room, and the practitioner is the equipment rather than the opponent.
The reason it goes badly anyway gets a mechanism: "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely (as the Milgram experiment and Stanford prison experiments showed), so you cannot control the devas during this process. Devas tend to excess, and in their joy at being able to cheat you and play with your thoughts they will cause all sorts of troubles."1 Students with a new capability, no consequences, and something that can't fight back.
Early on, none of this is legible as what it is. "At the earliest stages of the process, until the practitioner finally catches on, they usually think they are being attacked/possessed by devils or demons when it is really just angels and devas."2 Then a list of people who reported exactly that, and it crosses every line a list can cross: St Anthony of the Desert, Padre Pio, Jean-Marie Vianney, Seraphim of Sarov, Yeshe Tsogyel, Jesus, Socrates.1 All of them reported voices, testing, or torment by demons — read here as "heavenly devas pretending to be devils."
The pretence has a purpose and it's technical rather than moral: "They are simply devas masquerading as demons in order to arouse your Yin Qi, which strongly activates when you get frightened."3 Fear is the switch that turns on one half of the energy system, and a frightening apparition is the fastest way to throw it.
Which means the emotional weather of those years is being generated deliberately, in two directions. Pride, arrogance, bravado and anger get induced so the emotions raise Yang energy. Fear, anxiety, sadness, grief and loneliness get evoked "so that your Yin Qi arises" — and once it has, the Yin channels can be found and opened.3 The wrathful deity visualisations of Tibetan practice are described as doing the same job from the practitioner's own side.
And the pleasant visions get the same treatment. Appearances of Krishna, the Buddha or Jesus are "due to devas as well who are practicing their visualization powers in your brain," with Ramakrishna's visions named as the positive version.3 Nothing that shows up is exempt.
Buried in the middle of all this is the only actionable sentence in the chapter, and it's a preparation rather than a defence:
If you have already cultivated your Yin Qi through other methods, however, you might be able to avoid some of the normal negative emotional extremes brought on from devas during this period since it won't be necessary to put you through many Yin emotional states.1
Read it as dose reduction. The fear and grief are induced because they're the switch for one half of the energy work. If that half has already been worked by other means — the cooling visualisations, the moon practices, the Yin mantras — then the switch has already been thrown and there's less reason to throw it again.
That reframes the terror as instrumental rather than as punitive, and it makes the whole appendix on cultivating the feminine energies into advance payment on the worst years of the path.
The Milgram and Stanford prison citation is the one moment the argument leaves its own tradition to borrow a warrant, and it's worth looking at closely because of what it's being asked to do. The claim it supports is specific: the devas can't be controlled, because beings given power over somebody who can't resist will exceed what they were licensed to do. Milgram is invoked for obedience escalation and Stanford for role-driven cruelty, and together they're meant to establish that the excess is structural rather than a failure of these particular students.
Both are pre-2015 social psychology and both have taken serious damage since. 🚩 REPLICATION RISK. Stanford in particular is now widely read as a demand-characteristics study — participants performing a role they understood they were expected to perform, with documented coaching. Milgram's variants show obedience rates swinging enormously with small changes of setup, which cuts against the flat reading given here.
What is left after that is narrower. The observation being borrowed is that trainees with a new capability, no supervision they respect, and a subject who can't retaliate will push past the brief. That is an argument from incentives, and it needs neither experiment. The rest of the chapter supplies its own evidence for it — the contests, the tendency to excess, the joy at cheating you — and stands better on that than on the citation. [n=1 OBSERVED] on the borrowed warrant; the internal account is what the page rests on.
The practical content here is almost entirely preparation, and it's aimed at somebody years from needing it. Do the Yin work now, while nothing is forcing you to. Cool visualisations, water and moon practices, the Yin mantras, the deliberate cultivation of the states nobody seeks out. The whole reason the difficult years are difficult, on this account, is that one half of your energy system has never been worked and has to be reached through fear and grief. Reach it another way first.
Then hold the interpretive rule, because it's what the list of saints is for. If the thoughts get strange, if there are voices, if you find yourself pushed toward something you'd never do — the reading offered is not possession and not illness attributable to the practice. It's training, with a supervisor present. Anthony had it. Vianney had it. Seraphim had it.
⚠ And hold the obvious limit alongside it. That reading is a frame for someone deep in a practice with a teacher, and it is also exactly the frame a person in genuine psychiatric trouble would find most persuasive. Nothing here licenses declining help. The instruction that carries across both readings is the same and it's the only one that matters in the moment: do not act on it. The tests are described as attempts to get you to do something. Not doing it is the entire response.
The account's strength is that it carries a lot on its own — it explains why the post-awakening years are described as torment rather than as reward, why the emotional extremes swing in both directions, why the visions are as suspect as the voices, and why masters mostly decline to talk about this stretch at all. 🚩 [POPULAR SOURCE] — self-published, and none of this is checkable from outside. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE throughout. 🚩 REPLICATION RISK on the Milgram and Stanford prison citation, discussed above. 🚩 The saint list is read through the framework rather than as evidence for it — every one of those figures reported demonic testing, and reading all of them as devas in disguise is an interpretation with nothing that could falsify it.
Open: nothing in the range read (pr 177–184) says whether the arrangement can be declined, or whether a practitioner has any say in who is in the room. The teacher-opposing-the-student detail implies a hierarchy with rules, and none of the rules are stated.
The arrangement is described in two registers that don't reconcile. In one, it's benign and even affectionate. These are angels and devas, some of them "the masters of your tradition as well as fellow students and friends who attained the subtle body before you."4 They're doing thankless work on your behalf. The trials are a curriculum with a moral: don't do this to humans later just because you can. Somebody holding that reading endures the period as an apprenticeship among colleagues.
In the other, it's an unregulated experiment on a subject who can't consent or withdraw. Tens of thousands of them, rotating, running contests in your head, testing thousands of times whether they can make you do wrong, taking pleasure in cheating you, and unable to be controlled — and the practitioner's only asset is willpower. Somebody holding that reading is not among colleagues.
Both are on the same two pages. The moral drawn — that the trials remind you not to compel humans once you have the power — sits particularly oddly, because the reminder is delivered by beings doing that exact thing to you at scale.
How to Detect and Resist Brainwashing. Haha Lung's second detection clue for somebody whose mind has been worked on: you find yourself doing bizarre things — not good things, "bad and bizarre things" — that you'd never have done a year ago. That is word for word the phenomenon described here. Impelled toward negative deeds you normally wouldn't do, thousands of times. Same observation, two completely different accounts of who is doing it and why — a thought-reform operation with a human behind it, or a training exercise with a supervisor. And the observation is prior to both explanations, which is what makes the pair useful. Neither field can tell you from the inside which story you're in; both can tell you that the noticing is the event, and both give the same first response, which is to decline the act rather than to interrogate its source.
Lung's other two clues sharpen the contrast in a way this material doesn't supply for itself. His first is that you stop asking questions — you go silent when somebody you follow is plainly wrong. His third is that a person who half-suspects the con recruits harder rather than leaving, because every new recruit retroactively votes that his own credulity was reasonable. Set those beside a practitioner who has adopted the deva framework, and they name the specific way it can go wrong: a frame that explains every intrusive thought, every mood swing and every vision as expert supervision is a frame that has removed the reasons to ask questions. The cultivation account gives a preparation — do the Yin work early and reduce the dose. The counter-influence account gives what the cultivation account lacks entirely, which is a test you can run on your own belief rather than on your own conduct.
Sharpest implication. If the frightening years are induced deliberately, to throw a switch that fear happens to be attached to, then they are a side effect of a technique rather than a trial with meaning — and doing the cooling work years in advance is not preparation for the ordeal, it is a way of making most of it unnecessary. Generative questions. If the pleasant visions and the terrifying ones are both other people practising, what is left that a practitioner could call their own experience? And if the only defence named is willpower, what is a practitioner supposed to do on the day their willpower is the thing being worn down?