Saṁskāras can be understood as symbolic markings impressed upon a human being through consciously designed spiritual ceremonies. These are not casual social events; they are grand, emotionally charged occasions in which relatives, friends, elders, and the wider community gather with a single individual as the focal point. The person receiving the saṁskāra becomes the center of collective attention, intention, and emotion. This focused convergence is not accidental—it is deliberately structured to imprint deep emotional and psychological tendencies that shape the individual for life.
Such ceremonies generate powerful emotions within the recipient because humans are uniquely responsive to meaning, symbolism, and shared attention. When hundreds of minds momentarily align around one person with reverence, expectation, and intention, the effect is far stronger than ordinary cooperation or social interaction. Worldly cooperation is usually task-oriented and fragmented; saṁskāras, by contrast, are designed exclusively for emotional and inner imprinting. One individual becomes the sole beneficiary of the collective emotional field, making the imprint unusually strong and persistent.
Metaphorically, this process resembles quantum entanglement—not as a literal physical mechanism, but as a structural analogy. In quantum systems, particles that interact within a coherent environment exhibit correlated behavior even after separation. Similarly, during a saṁskāra, many minds temporarily converge within a highly focused symbolic space. The emotions, values, and intentions do not merely add up linearly; they become coherent. Once imprinted, these emotional correlations persist long after the ceremony ends, influencing the individual’s inner responses independent of physical proximity. This comparison does not claim scientific equivalence; it simply highlights a parallel principle: intense interaction under conditions of focus, coherence, and meaning creates unusually stable imprints.
Across a human lifetime, there are traditionally sixteen saṁskāras, each corresponding to key transitions—birth, learning, maturity, responsibility, and death. Together, they refine emotional depth, psychological structure, and spiritual receptivity. These imprints form a subtle emotional architecture within which higher processes, including Kundalini awakening, can later unfold. Saṁskāras are not merely cultural customs; they are intentional emotional technologies.
Not every individual absorbs these imprints equally. Certain emotionally receptive people resonate more deeply than others. Their sensitivity allows emotions to adhere more strongly, creating bonds that often appear as love or devotion. This love is not merely relational or outward-facing; when it matures and turns inward, it becomes transformative. In yogic and tantric understanding, this inward-turning love can later express itself as Kundalini movement. What begins as emotional bonding gradually converts into inner energy. In this way, bhāva (emotion) evolves into bhakti (love or devotion), and bhakti further condenses into śakti (inner power).
This progression is logical within its own framework. Focused collective attention produces strong emotional imprinting; individual sensitivity determines depth of absorption; deep emotional imprinting gives rise to love; and inward-directed love becomes spiritual energy. Psychology explains the imprinting, neuroplasticity explains the durability, and spiritual traditions describe the energetic flowering.
Animals, however, do not participate in this process in the same way. They do not receive saṁskāras—not because life or awareness is absent in them, but because the necessary emotional and neurological infrastructure is undeveloped. Animals do have emotions, but these are largely immediate, survival-oriented, and unlayered. They lack the capacity to absorb, integrate, and symbolize the collective emotions of many minds simultaneously. Their brains are not designed to hold complex symbolic meaning, long-term emotional imprinting, or ritualized identity formation.
Moreover, animals are not placed at the center of intentional emotional convergence. No ceremony is designed to imprint values, identity, or transcendental orientation upon them. Without repeated, structured emotional imprinting across life stages, there is no stable inner architecture for love to refine itself inwardly and no latent reservoir from which Kundalini can later rise.
Thus, Kundalini and saṁskāras are not absent in animals due to inferiority, but due to difference in design. Human life is uniquely structured for emotional accumulation, symbolic meaning, and inward transformation. Saṁskāras provide the emotional soil, love becomes the living current, and Kundalini is the flowering that appears when conditions mature. Animals live in harmony with nature, but humans alone are given the tools to consciously transcend it.
Demystifying Kundalini 