I first visited Kashmir in 1978 as an aspiring young yogi and adventurer. As I stepped onto the airport tarmac, I vividly recall being struck by the energy and extraordinary clarity of the mountain air. I filled my lungs and breathed deeply, with the strange feeling that in some sense I was breathing for the first time. The air felt supercharged, alive, and suddenly I recognised something of why prāṇa — the vital force carried on the breath — is so central to life and to yoga.
And then the children, dressed in embroidered clothing and little Kashmiri caps, their cheeks reddened by the cold, and the joy and vitality in their faces. Everything looked and felt so healthy there.
Making my way into Srinagar, there were market barrows overladen with fruits and dried fruits and nuts, bazaars crowded with shops selling great piles of spices, polished brassware, religious icons, household goods and fabrics, all the colour and abundance that so captivated me in the East. Small food stalls offered delicious Kashmiri cuisine, fragrant rice flavoured with spices and saffron, scattered with ruby-like pomegranate seeds, nuts and dried fruits. Vendors tended enormous wok-like cauldrons of buffalo milk, steam rising from them into the crisp cool air.
And the carpet shops, opulent and irresistible, their vendors urging me to come inside, to sit, to take chai, while they hauled one massive and exquisite rug after another from towering piles and unfurled them before me. And there was I, a student on such a limited budget that I had no hope of acquiring any of these treasures, eventually finding the most modest but beautiful hand-knotted rug that I could afford, and making it my meditation mat.
Then to my first accommodation, a houseboat on the fabled Dal Lake, and astonishment at the affordable opulence of it: intricately hand-carved wooden screens, lacquerware, indoor palms in brass pots, Persian rugs scattered over creaking wooden floorboards. It felt like a miniature floating palace, something left over from another age.
Life took on the rhythm of the lake. Hot spiced chai, delicious meals and fruits piled high in brass bowls, the wafts of fragrant woodsmoke from the boat kitchen fires, the water moving gently beneath the floorboards.
And throughout the day came the calls of the merchants and refreshment vendors paddling from houseboat to houseboat in their slim shikaras, resplendent with goods. One carried fruits and vegetables, another fabrics and household wares, another ice creams and cold drinks packed into ice chests and, this being Kashmir in 1978, others great blocks of gold-stamped Afghan hashish openly displayed among their wares. Several times a day, sunbathing or reading on the deck, I would be interrupted by a call from the water and lean over to discover what this or that floating providore was offering.
And to take one of the luxurious passenger shikaras out across the lake, gliding into the floating gardens among the lotus flowers, reaching from the boat to touch those iconic blossoms opening to the light.
Even then the lotus spoke to me as a metaphor for life — its roots in the mud, its stem rising through the water and its petals opening towards the sun — as though we too live rooted in the density and demands of the world while something within us is forever opening towards the transcendent, towards the Divine.
Only later would I come to understand something subtler: that the mud itself need not be left behind. The mud and the water, the stem and the flower, the sunlight and the one who beholds them are not ultimately separate. The Divine is not elsewhere, attainable only by escaping the world. It is both transcendent and wholly immanent within it, the sacred art being to live fully amid the relative while recognising the Absolute shining through it.
The great gardens seemed to express this same abundance, with fountains and terraced watercourses where cascading water broke into rippling patterns, and roses and tulips and rhododendrons, everywhere colour and fragrance. And beyond them the deodar forests, walking beneath those immense trees with pine needles carpeting the earth and the smell of resin in the cool air, birds calling through the branches and nightingales sounding into the night.
Everywhere too was the business and vibrancy of daily life, ancient customs existing alongside all this beauty. I remember women moving through the streets in black purdah, some with mesh before their faces through which they could see and breathe.
All these things mingled together: the fragrances of spices and woodsmoke, flowers and pine resin, the calls from the bazaars and across the water, the taste of chai and saffron and fruits, the coolness of the mountain air, the movement of water and everywhere an extraordinary vitality.
There is a celebrated Persian line long associated with Kashmir: If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.
And it felt so.
Then out into the wildness of the Lidder Valley and Pahalgam, to the sprawling hill-station-style Windrush Lodge above the boisterous icy river rushing past at the foot of the hills, and days spent on the verandah drinking hot chocolatey Bournvita and reading The Lord of the Rings from cover to cover, Tolkien's ancient landscapes somehow merging with the country surrounding me until it seemed less that I was reading an epic than inhabiting one.
And higher still, into the mountains and the snow, travelling alone and taking refuge in an old shepherd's turf-roofed hut, half dug into the earth, massive logs supporting perhaps a foot of soil and turf above, the weight of the mountain itself almost forming the roof, yet wonderfully cosy inside with a small fire.
Venturing from there to a distant hut and procuring a little pail of fresh sheep's milk, carrying it back and drinking that extraordinary warm richness, leaving what remained overnight and waking to discover that by morning it had become the creamiest yoghurt I had ever tasted.
And waking that same morning high in the mountains to find snow blanketing everything in every direction, the world transformed, and outside the low roof of the hut six-inch icicles that had formed overnight, catching the morning light as I lay there wrapped in the warmth of my down bedding.
So very happy.
So very free.
Later, riding a mountain pony along impossibly high, narrow tracks cut into precipitous slopes, the pony master urging the animals onwards with his cry of "Hoosh! Hoosh!", and the little horses responding, placing their hooves with an assurance and dexterity that made it apparent they understood those mountains considerably better than I did.
The richness of it all, the breathtaking beauty and the Śakti of this isolated and extraordinarily precious piece of God's earth — the air, the mountains, the forests, the water, the food, the flowers, the people, the snow and the sheer vitality of life.
And all the while, living there on Dal Lake, I had no idea that in the foothills above that very lake Swami Lakshman Joo was still living and teaching at his ashram near Nishat, carrying forward the living tradition of the nondual Śaivism of Kashmir.
I was perhaps only a few miles away.
Yet I knew nothing of him.
I had not encountered the Vijñāna Bhairava. I had not been initiated into the teachings of Kashmir Śaivism. I did not know that the landscape through which I was wandering had been home to a tradition that would become so important in my life.
And there is something wonderful to me now in remembering that I had first encountered Kashmir simply and directly — through breath, beauty, sound, taste, touch, fragrance, wonder, solitude, danger, joy — before knowing that its great spiritual tradition would teach me that these very experiences could themselves become doorways.
I did not have long to wait.
Returning to Australia later that year, I found myself hitchhiking from Perth to Melbourne with nine dollars in my pocket, carried across the continent in a three-day epic flow that somehow brought me to the feet of the Indian guru of the Siddha lineage who became my teacher.
And there, in 1978, came śaktipāt, bestowed in a dream that wasn't a dream, opening something that could never quite be closed again, bringing with it a recognition of my own true nature and beginning an immersion in the Tantras and in the teachings of Kashmir Śaivism that gave language and form to what had been opened directly.
The cosmic play of Consciousness, its descent through the thirty-six tattvas from the unmanifest into the apparently solid material world and everything in between. Śiva and Śakti. Spanda, the subtle living pulse of Consciousness, the ceaseless dynamism through which the stillness of the Absolute manifests as experience without ever ceasing to be itself. Surrender and grace. Mantra and Mātṛkā Śakti, the creative power inherent in sound itself, through which Consciousness articulates manifestation; mantra not merely as a name for that which it invokes but, at its deepest level, as its embodiment in sound.
And the revelation that the Divine need not be sought by turning away from life.
The senses need not be denied. The world need not be rejected. Breath, sound, silence, touch, beauty, space, movement, stillness, love, intensity, wonder — any and all experience may become a doorway back to Source.
And among these teachings, the sacred yet intensely practical Vijñāna Bhairava, with its 112 dhāraṇās, its 112 invitations to enter through the immediacy of experience and recognise what is already here.
I was trained in these practices by learned teachers from 1978 through the years that followed, and in 1985 began myself to teach meditation to anyone who was open, conveying what limited understanding I had acquired. The dhāraṇās became part of my practice and part of my teaching and through all the changing circumstances of life they remained with me.
They remain with me still.
And so now, almost forty-eight years after first stepping into that astonishing mountain air, I find myself returning to them again.
This time through a technology that would have been unimaginable to the young traveller lying on the deck of a houseboat on Dal Lake, reading in the sun until the call of another shikara merchant drew him back to the water.
And perhaps there is something fitting in that too.
Ancient practices, passed from teacher to student and preserved through centuries, can now cross oceans almost without effort and come to rest in the palm of your hand.
And so this is why I offer 112 Doorways to you.
Not as a new translation or a substitute for the original text and its traditional commentaries, but as a practical companion to them — an invitation to explore these remarkable dhāraṇās through direct experience, and perhaps to make their wisdom more accessible to those who might otherwise never encounter them.
What is offered here is not something that is mine, but something received, practised and now passed on.
If somewhere among these 112 doorways there is one that causes you to stop, to become completely still, to enter the breath or the silence or the space between two thoughts, to become absorbed in beauty or wonder or the simple immediacy of being — and for an instant the distance between yourself and what you have been seeking disappears — then this offering has served its purpose.
And perhaps I understand the lotus on Dal Lake differently now.
Not as something struggling upwards from an imperfect world towards a distant Divine, but as the whole movement — mud, root, water, stem, flower, sunlight — already sacred, already Śakti, already the play of Consciousness appearing as this.
And so I lay this offering at your feet, dear reader, honouring the Divine in you as none other than the Divine in this one, and in all things.
— Peter Coroneos
Hari Om Tat Sat
August 2026
