The Current and the Ladder: Kaplan, Brill, and the Language of Kundalini Rising

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan set out to translate that current into modern speech without abandoning Jewish aims. In the introduction to his Sefer Yetzirah edition, he famously sketches three kinds of Kabbalah and says that meditative practice, with names and permutations, seeks “higher states of consciousness, and as such, comprises a kind of yoga.”

It is a telling sentence: not an equation, but a bridge. The goal is not to swap maps; it’s to help contemporary readers recognize the terrain.

Alan Brill—who has sifted Kaplan’s archive and classroom tapes—describes the method behind that bridge. Kaplan didn’t treat Kabbalah as museum symbolism; he treated it as a discipline of consciousness, reconstructed through what Brill calls Kaplan’s “verbal archaeology,” digging ancient phrases out of their strata and resetting them to work for live practice.

Brill shows how, when Kaplan explained altered states, he freely ranged across models—4-D space, focused imagery, even the question of psychedelics—always to illuminate technique rather than to collapse doctrines.

Because his aim was operational, Kaplan sometimes chose language that modern seekers already knew. Brill notes that he was hunting for “spiritual energy” in the sources the way mid-century American books on Indian thought “picked out the passages on kundalini and chakras.”

That is, Kaplan used a comparative spotlight—to show readers where the Jewish texts speak of flow, charge, ascent—while insisting the Jewish cadence remains its own: not dissolution into light but ascent that returns as service.

Kaplan’s Sefer Yetzirah introduction makes this concrete. He reads the book less as metaphysics and more as a manual—letters and breath shaping attention, images steadied until they become “solid, substantial, and real” (he uses this language elsewhere), all in the service of reliable, trainable states. He argues that Yetzirah is best read as instruction (“combine… form”), that its exercises strengthen concentration, and that the lore about golem-making reflects a tradition which expected practice to do something, not merely describe it.

Brill’s portrait adds texture: Kaplan taught with a working group of psychologists; he explored how posture, breath, and visualization modulate awareness; he even asks at the start of Meditation and the Bible whether prophetic states might be catalyzed by hallucinogens—not to reduce prophecy to chemistry, but to mark that certain intensities can be induced and must be contained.

The container, for Kaplan, is halakhic life: technique braided back into mitzvot so that the current irrigates character.

This is where the comparison to kundalini helps and must stop. The feeling of a rising heat or a spinal wind—many contemplatives across cultures know it. Kaplan therefore allowed readers to hear echoes, even in gestures as homey as uplifted hands. Brill points out Kaplan’s reading of the priestly blessing in Bahir: ten spread fingers as ten sefirot, “drawing spiritual energy,” which Kaplan glosses in modern terms and links to Abulafia’s practices. (Brill condenses Kaplan’s line as “raised hands to focus spiritual energy.”)

The analogy can get a reader nodding—ah, energy flows, channels, ascent—but the Jewish end remains distinct: not union without return, but elevation that re-enters the day as gentleness and duty.

Kaplan’s own sentence—“meditative Kabbalah… comprises a kind of yoga”—deserves to be read with its implied footnote. It is a pedagogic as-if, not a merger. The map is borrowed to point; the journey stays local. In Brill’s framing, Kaplan’s comparative asides are teaching tools: they meet seekers where they are, then bring them back to the Hebrew workshop where letters are carved in the mind, breath is counted into prayer, and the peak experience is judged by how faithfully it comes home.

If one wants a single distilled picture: Kaplan takes the sensation many call kundalini—the felt ascent, the sharpening of awareness—and reminds the reader that Israel’s path counts a second motion as higher than the first. The surge must be answered by return; the inner flame must learn the shape of a lamp. In Brill’s language, Kaplan the translator of states is not a syncretist but a craftsman of comparisons, using just enough foreign light to help us see our own tools on the bench.

Pocket citations:

Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, Introduction—on “meditative Kabbalah” seeking higher states and “compris[ing] a kind of yoga.”

Alan Brill, “Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan on Experience, Consciousness, and Method” (blog essay)—on “spiritual energy,” kundalini/chakra analogies as heuristic, raised-hands/Bahir passage, and Kaplan’s techniques.

Alan Brill, “Aryeh Kaplan’s Quest for the Lost Jewish Traditions of Science, Psychology and Prophecy” (Brill, 2020)—Kaplan’s program of “verbal archaeology,” altered states, and operational Kabbalah.

On Kaplan openly posing the hallucinogen question in Meditation and the Bible and his altered-states frame, see Brill’s chapter summary.

~ YCM Gray, 20 Av 5785, my 68th birthday.