Water Consciousness and the Forbidden Realm
Anais Nin - The House of Incest
Svadhisthana chakra governs the water element, which means it governs the realm where boundaries dissolve. Nin’s entire passage is written from svadhisthana consciousness: “My first vision of earth was water veiled… my eyes are the color of water.” This is not poetic metaphor. This is a precise description of perceiving reality through the second chakra’s operating frequency.
Water has no fixed form. It takes the shape of whatever contains it. When consciousness operates at the svadhisthana level, identity becomes fluid in exactly this way: “I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self.” The self is uncompleted because it has not yet solidified into the rigid structures that conventional society demands.
The “house of incest” is the house of undifferentiated desire. Incest is forbidden precisely because it represents the collapse of the fundamental boundaries that organize social reality: parent/child, brother/sister, the distinctions that allow families to function as stable structures. Nin locates this house underwater, in Atlantis, in the dream realm, because this is where it actually exists: in the fluid, pre-rational consciousness that precedes and underlies all social conditioning.
The Submerged Civilization
Atlantis functions in Nin’s text as the drowned world of unstructured consciousness. “This Atlantide could be found again only at night, by the route of the dream. As soon as sleep covered the rigid new city, the rigidity of the new world, the heaviest portals slid open.” The contrast is explicit: waking consciousness is rigid, structured, organized by prohibitions and boundaries. Sleep returns you to the fluid realm where those structures dissolve.
This is precisely what svadhisthana sadhana accomplishes when done correctly. The practices do not strengthen boundaries or channel sexual energy into higher chakras, as sanitized yoga teaches. They dissolve the artificial structures that prevent direct experience of desire as it actually exists before social conditioning shapes it into acceptable forms.
Forbidden Yoga works specifically with this dissolution. The practices that involve genuine power dynamics, that engage sexual energy directly rather than sublimating it, that work with the actual content of the unconscious rather than its spiritualized abstractions - these practices require the practitioner to enter the underwater realm, to breathe in the fluid medium where normal rules do not apply.
Beyond Human Perception
“I sway and float, stand on boneless toes listening for distant sounds, sounds beyond the reach of human ears, see things beyond the reach of human eyes.” This is not mystical exaggeration. Svadhisthana consciousness operates below the threshold of verbal-conceptual awareness. It perceives through rasa, the tanmatra of taste/flavor, which is direct knowing without the mediation of thought.
When the text describes “fishes made of velvet, of organdie with lace fangs, made of spangled taffeta,” it is describing synesthetic perception, the mixing of sensory modalities that occurs when consciousness operates from svadhisthana rather than from the more differentiated upper chakras. Touch becomes visible, sight becomes tactile, boundaries between sense modalities dissolve just as boundaries between self and other dissolve.
Most people experience their sexuality through rigid categories and well-worn grooves of arousal. Svadhisthana work returns you to the undifferentiated erotic field that exists before these patterns crystallize. This is why the passage emphasizes “colors running into one another without frontiers” and creatures without fixed form. Desire at this level has not yet been organized into acceptable targets and forbidden zones.
The Stifled Voice
“The blanket of water lying over all things stifling the voice. Only a monster brought me up on the surface by accident.” Voice belongs to vishuddha chakra, the throat center, which governs articulation and the organization of experience into language. Water consciousness cannot speak because speech requires boundaries, categories, the separation of this from that.
The “monster” that brings consciousness to the surface is the intrusion of social reality, the demand that you articulate and justify what you want, that you explain yourself in terms the surface world can accept. This is experienced as violence, as ejection from paradise: “Ejected from a paradise of soundlessness.”
Forbidden Yoga requires the capacity to descend below speech, below justification, below the need to make your desires acceptable to others. The practices work because they take you into territory where conventional moral reasoning does not penetrate. Not because the practices are immoral, but because they operate at a level where morality has not yet formed. You return to the amniotic realm, to “the bells of the Atlantide,” to the consciousness you had before you learned what you were supposed to want.
The Practical Link
When you work with svadhisthana through actual left-hand methods rather than sanitized chakra meditation, you discover that sexual energy is not a force that needs to be controlled or sublimated. It is the direct expression of the creative power of prakṛti operating in your specific embodiment. The work is to remove the structures that prevent this force from flowing freely, to dissolve the dams and channels that conventional conditioning has built.
Nin understood this instinctively. The “house of incest” is not a literal house where literal incest occurs. It is the psychological space where the boundaries that organize acceptable desire do not exist. To enter this house, you must be willing to see what you actually want before you edit it into socially acceptable form. Most people cannot tolerate this vision. They need the rigidity of the new city, the clear categories that tell them what to feel and when.
Forbidden Yoga is forbidden precisely because it refuses this rigidity. The practices return you to water consciousness, to the realm where you breathe in the fluid medium, where your bones are made of rubber, where you move “with a swimming stride” through wall-less rooms. This is not metaphor. This is what it feels like when the rigid structures of conditioned identity begin to dissolve and you recognize that consciousness is fundamentally fluid, fundamentally without fixed form, fundamentally capable of taking any shape that circumstance and desire create together.
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My first vision of earth was water veiled. I am of the race of men and women who see all things through this curtain of sea, and my eyes are the color of water.
I looked with chameleon eyes upon the changing face of the world, looked with anonymous vision upon my uncompleted self.
I remember my first birth in water. All round me a sulphurous transparency and my bones move as if made of rubber. I sway and float, stand on boneless toes listening for distant sounds, sounds beyond the reach of human ears, see things beyond the reach of human eyes. Born full of memories of the bells of the Atlantide.
Always listening for lost sounds and searching for lost colors, standing forever on the threshold like one troubled with memories, and walking with a swimming stride. I cut the air with wide-slicing fins, and swim through wall-less rooms.
Ejected from a paradise of soundlessness, cathedrals wavering at the passage of a body, like soundless music.
This Atlantide could be found again only at night, by the route of the dream. As soon as sleep covered the rigid new city, the rigidity of the new world, the heaviest portals slid open on smooth-oiled gongs and one entered the voicelessness of the dream. The terror and joy of murders accomplished in silence, in the silence of slidings and brushings. The blanket of water lying over all things stifling the voice. Only a monster brought me up on the surface by accident.
Lost in the colors of the Atlantide, the colors running into one another without frontiers. Fishes made of velvet, of organdie with lace fangs, made of spangled taffeta, of silks and feathers and whiskers, with lacquered flanks and rock crystal eyes, fishes of withered leather with gooseberry eyes, eyes like the white of egg. Flowers palpitating on stalks like sea-hearts. None of them feeling their own weight, the sea-horse moving like a feather...