Muladhara - Drums in the Deep.

“Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -how passionately I hate them!” – Albert Einstein

            Sometimes images work better than any attempt to describe something literally.  So let your imagination make its associations as I paint some images with words:

            A child digs in the earth with a stick, molding it into houses and fortresses.  He turns over a bucket and pounds on it, amazed at its own power.  He creates, upsets, acts and does.  Sounds of strength as a man walks on the hard pavement, the footfalls of his work boots crunch and pulverize, ringing out in the slamming sound of physical force.  Heavy objects are lifted by brutal, blind force and are set down crushingly on the earth.  More men work, and the noise blends into a cacophony of effort and satisfying labor.  A voice of authority snaps with power, a call to order.  Callused hands make that order, strong hands shaping, destroying, remaking, making things of use and worth.  Men making order, creating their world, struggling to make something that lasts; the satisfaction of honest labor.  Each man is a part of this struggle, suborning his own petty concerns for the cause, for each knows the danger of going it alone, of being alone against the brutal, ugly world.  A world of wolves howling in the dark when the sun is overpowered by the cold, dark night.  Of jealous enemies lurking not far away, and only the strength of our people holding them in check.  Their fear of us, our fear of them.  This is the way of the world, the struggle to build something, to rise up out of animal need and aloneness.  The sounds of iron pounding on iron, forging tools, ways of taking charge of the wild earth.  Means of taming, subjugating, conquering.  The pounding is the sound of dominion.  The dependable heavy booted workers work, giving themselves over to each other as brothers to the powerful bellow of the father, the strongest of them all.  He who knows, who commands; the Lord over the Earth.  The protector against the terrible Other who covets the fruits of our labor.  The snapping staccato of his voice is like the snare drum, demanding instant attention.  The strong hands beat the earth mechanically at its omnipotent, thought-shattering power.  Their boots pound the earth, matching its rhythm, calling every step into conformity - each part becoming a part of something bigger.  Join us, the drums seem to say, join us and let the I become we.  We march in the parade, proud, tall, and strong. The Father leads us onwards, and his face beams with pride at our union under his dominion, and his approval is like the warm light of the sun on our faces.  We know we are doing right.  The furious beating sends us onwards in order rows and straight, perfect lines, orderly lines, lines that say discipline.  We become the lines, one body, one mind, and our strength becomes irresistible.  The drums think for us, and we lose ourselves in the bliss of the surrender to the tribe.  And fearing the Other, who in his unknowableness is just another wolf in the dark, just another animal, we march to take his land and his life.  We, who are right, who are the chosen of the Father, must have dominion over all of the works of this Other, over his tools, his fields, his livestock, his women and his other valuable objects and property.  We must add his strength to our own, lest we be conquered, for no other possibility can exist.  This is the law of the wild world, that the strong survive, and the weak are destroyed.  This is the inalterable law of our Father.

            If the above seems strange or ambivalent, then good!  It means you are a civilized being.  The Muladhara (mula – root; adhara – support) chakra symbolizes some very deep things in human experience, not all of which are particularly pleasant to behold from our modern standpoint.  On the one hand, this chakra deals with such important and healthy experiences as family and home, on the other with tribalism, mass psychology and fanaticism.  It is traditionally associated with the elemental quality we call “Earth” which is the projected mental quality of solidity, stability, and physical form.  When we think at this level, our world is that of discrete objects with definite functions, all relating to the human condition.  The Earth is for our use.  Anything without a definite function, something which is ‘useless’, is either disregarded if apparently harmless, or controlled if potentially threatening.  This is especially true for people – each person needs to ‘fit’ into the tribe, to have a role, a function.  Thoughts are also treated as concrete objects; threatening metaphors are responded to as physical threats.  An insult is no different than a blow to the head.  Think of the response to the recent Koran burning in Florida – people are killed in Afganistan, a largely tribal (1^st Chakra) society.  Ideas are things, dangerous things, even more so for the difficulty in laying one’s powerful hands on them.  Something I read in a local ‘paper’ recently also comes to mind – a complaint by the author that liberals are useless because they don’t produce anything.  Conservatives, so the author claimed, are the only ones useful to society because they make things. 

            The Muladhara chakra is said to be most active in us from the time we’re born until the age of about 7.  This is the time in our life where we ground ourselves in materiality, exploring our world, first by examining our feet (and if allowed, fecal matter), then crawling, then walking, running, and digging in the earth or making mud pies. Ask a young child why something exists and they’ll give an instrumental reason – it’s for our use; for looking at, for eating, so that we have something to stand on, etc.  There is little personal sense of self at this age, as the self is defined wholly in relationship to the immediate family, especially the god-like parents. 

            While all of the chakras are to some degree working in us at all times, we tend to view our world through one or more of them predominantly.  Clearly, I don’t view my world through the lens of the Muladhara, and most likely, neither do any of my readers.  Something like the chakras, especially taken as metaphorically and loosely as I’m taking them here, would seem largely incomprehensible to a ‘first chakra person’, or as a possible source of ‘foreign’ or dangerous to their in-group or tribe.  You may see this in fundamentalist responses to yoga – the argument is often not that yoga is evil, but that it may prove an avenue for demons and harmful ideas to enter.  Although you and I may not presumably view our world primarily though this very red lens (the color of danger, stop signs, blood, fire and anger), we all have the possibility to revert to first chakra thinking in the blink of an eye.  Why?  Because the root chakra represents the very root, the primeval basis of human experience.

            Take an enlightened, educated, and civilized person, and place them in a situation where their basic survival or that of their family is threatened, and you’ll see a civilized man become an animal again.  This is a great theme in fiction, and one of my favorite unconscious truths that pop up particularly strongly in the Zombie Apocalypse genre.  Take any zombie story and what you’ll find is a small (tribal-sized) group that has to struggle with letting go of their civilized way of thinking, their creature comforts and basic assumptions (i.e., that food is available at the supermarket), and deal with life as it comes on a fight/flight level.  Who are they fighting?  Vast, impersonal masses of figures that superficially look human but aren’t really so it’s ok to kill them – the Other.  These zombie masses want to eat them, to taste of their earthy material flesh and assimilate them; to make the individual tribesmen into one of them.  Note that usually the way it works is that the heroes don’t want to fight the zombies or give up their lives (except the ‘cowboy’ characters who enjoy it and, being 1^st chakra types themselves are often scarier than the zombies themselves), but that the masses force it upon them (by trying to eat them).  The survivors would have been happy to stay living at the 2^nd, 3^rd, or 4^th chakra, but the violent masses pull them down, pulling down civilization itself, and making them fight to even start from scratch.  So much about zombie survivor stories is about trying to bring order back into their lives, of remaking the world as best as they can.  Usually by finding a place to settle down (wandering and uprootedness are both common tropes), they try to fortify themselves, or hide, etc.  To me, a lot of the zombie genre, especially the really good stories like The Walking Dead (especially the graphic novels) and 28 Days Later, represent our cultural ambivalence about the 1^st chakra.  The masses of zombies represent the masses themselves, as there are always more ‘first chakra’ people (the ‘salt of the earth’) than others, but also the impersonal grind of a world always attempting to force conformity in the name of safety and order.  The response by the survivors is to become 1^st chakra people themselves, although unwillingly.  This is particularly well illustrated in 28 Days Later, but appears in the acceptance of the brutality of the new world of the apocalypse by those who are able to survive.  Those who can’t make the transition usually die early, doing something that seems incredibly stupid from the anxious level of the root chakra, but perfectly reasonable at another level.

            Perhaps it’s easier to simply say that when someone resorts to the root chakra, everyone involved is forced to.  Diplomacy ends when someone throws a punch.  Even the most humane and civilized society has to have weapons because the crazy dictators and tribal leaders do.  When our basic security is upset, be it by a physical threat, the loss of a job or loved one, the loss of a home, we're traumatized.  Someone who lives at that level we might label irrational and you wouldn’t be far from the truth.  The 1^st chakra is what I would call ‘pre-rational’, a way of knowing ‘with our gut’ rather than our head.  Although we are capable of reason in all the chakras, our reason is in service to the chakra in question. In the 1^st chakra, we know things ‘deep down’ without an appeal to reasons.  Things are just right and wrong, black and white, weak and strong, dominant and submissive, and reason serves to buttress these pre-existing intuitions.  Furthermore, that’s how we all behave when we’re forced to fight for our lives.  Fear contracts our consciousness until there is only us and them, victory or defeat.  And for survival purposes, you couldn’t wish for a more efficient system.  Stop and consider the bigger picture and you’re dead (or walking dead as the case may be).  When we learn to distrust authority, to abhor violence and force, we distance ourselves from this level, for good and bad.  But when we ignore it and refuse to see it in ourselves, rejecting the truth of our own capacity for absolute evil and thoughtless violence, we make a new Other in those who embrace even the most positive aspects of this power.  We cut ourselves off from a source of great strength – we cut ourselves off from our roots.

            The root chakra is security in a larger sense.  Once the zombies are no longer breaking down the doors, our feeling of security comes from the roof over our head, the physical and emotional support of our loved ones, and the certainty of food and water.  Classically, the father was the image of the provider of these things, of the protector.  While clearly this is not always the case anymore, on a psychological level I think it often still is.  Many women are not always comfortable about this idea, and for good reason.  When things break down to the root chakra level, women rarely end up in a good place.  When strength is the only virtue, women quickly become objects and resources.  I can’t help but think of the rape of the Sabine women in early Rome as a good example.  The image of the father, protector of those who are physically weaker, is tremendously primal in the human race, and therefore is usually our (perhaps immature) image of God – protector, supporter, Father, jealous, wrathful, and omnipotent.

            While there is clearly an important connection to the Mother archetype here, I can’t help but feel that the father tends to overshadow it.  Clearly there is a bias in my thoughts here, for obvious reasons.  But the idea of the Mother is usually connected to the ideas of cycles, of flow, of creativity itself, and that is definitely the domain of the 2^nd chakra (tune in next week).  On a superficial (but symbolically important) level, the male is like the sun who does not appear to change or waver, but remains steady and strong.  The woman classically waxes and wanes like the moon, in moods, in appearance (pregnancy), etc.  The Earth as Mother is either passive and dependent on active agency (molding, planting ‘seed’, harvesting, tilling), as in agricultural societies, or a moody bitch who sometimes gives, sometimes withholds, as I imagine she was thought of in pre-agricultural societies.  The earth of the root chakra is the “salt of the earth”, the stable materiality of the world which allows its forming and molding, its tilling and seeding.  It requires labor (in both senses of the word), sweat, and occasionally blood to eke a living on its surface.  In modern day goddess religions, an emphasis is placed on oneness with the Earth/Goddess, of the interconnectedness of all things.  This is an incredibly mature and intellectually advanced attitude that completely transcends the root chakra.  One does not feel ‘connected’ to the wolf that is about to eat you.  One only feels terror and the screaming blood in the heart.  The Goddess of these religions is a higher goddess, and in my opinion a genuine improvement over (but not a perfect replacement for) the patriarchal God of the root chakra (and others).  That feminine conception may include the root chakra (Kali, Innana, and the various dark, brutal goddesses are good examples), but the evolved idea of immanence is unthinkable to the primitive root chakra, with its emphasis of the earth as object to its transcendent subject.  One who is confirmed in the belief that God rules over the Earth would have a hard time accepting that God is the Earth.
            Speaking of the feminine, I should point out that many of the images and ideas here have a particularly masculine character.  I acknowledge that, especially as they are the products of my own meditations, and I myself am rumored to be male.  However as the above makes clear, I suspect (but do not assert) that at the level of the root chakra, the female mentality would relate itself dependently to a strong male as mate/husband, giving up her identity to him the same way he submits to his tribal brothers and leader.  I would suspect that as the tribe guarantees strength for the man, the man guarantees strength for the woman.  However, this is not to say she is without roles herein.  The one that springs to my mind is that of the keeper of the harvest, the preserver of the food, shelter and clothing.  We see it today when a rumor of 6 inches of snow unleashes a frenzy of (mostly) women rushing to the supermarket and cleaning out the shelves as if the apocalypse had arrived.  I have no doubt that there are many other images of the feminine 1st chakra that I'm leaving out.  I encourage any female readers to leave a comment with any ideas.

            The root chakra is not all violent and animal.  In the Tantric system, it is also said to be the home of Kundalini, the symbol not only of the immanent goddess, but of the natural omnipresent urge to evolve that is common to all living beings.  In the Tantric conception of creation, when Shakti reached the end of her potential – matter – she rested therein, and that’s where she sleeps today.  Evolution began in the muck, but has taken us to the heavens and beyond.  When we work with our Muladhara chakra, we work to find some stability in our lives – a stable home, family, etc, so that this supportive structure can form the foundation on which a great edifice can be built.  From this steady earth under our feet, we can push off it, push upwards, like the serpent whose crawls on his belly rises up, tasting the world with its darting tongue.  So much life grows upwards, rising up from the earth in increasing complexity.  Civilization cannot escape the fact that it is founded on the brutal, because human psychology is founded on the brutal.  We can transcend it, seek to understand it, prepare for it, but we can never eliminate it.  Tantra tells us that we can use it, that we can take that powerful primal energy and turn in not downwards into brutality, but upwards, like the snake lifting up her head to sniff at whole new worlds only dimly perceived.  It is in reaching these loftier visions of the world that we reach up out of brutality ( towards science, humanism, higher spirituality), and where we find the possibility (even the audacity) of hope that the blind struggle of the past was worth it.

            We must start at this primordial level because if not the earth threatens to shift underneath us and to send whatever we build screaming into the abyss.  The energy of the root chakra is that energy which makes us feel so very alive at a rock concert, a football game, or a political rally.  It is life, and the will to life, expressing itself at the primal level of man - the tribe.  It harkens back to a period of our history in which our hairless, thin-skinned bodies, lacking any natural weapons, were vulnerable when alone in the dark.  It speaks of the shared power we discovered in our strong brothers to bring order, to make the world as we will – to have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." It is the rock of tradition, of certainty, and of order.  It is the demands of loyalty, warning us that a house divided cannot stand.  It is our sense of community, of participation in the lives of others like us.  It is the assurance that we don’t have to go it alone, that there are those we can depend on because there’s something deep down, something in our blood that tells us we’re the same.  When this power is healthy it allows us to function at higher levels, giving us a safe foundation from which we can think risky thoughts, and dare to dream of a better world.  When it is unhealthy we feel alone, threatened, and narrow-minded in our fear.  Therefore we must respect this power, harness it, and never take for granted the ground on which we stand.
            When we reject this power, which is really the power of the body itself, this material sack of goo and hormones, we push the urge to life deep into the unconscious.  It resurfaces (as things do) as the infernal region, which is always down there somewhere.  Its images are half-animal and half-human, satyrs and cloven-hoofed demons, fear and physical pain.  The body and its violent ways seem shameful to the upraised intelligence, and are rejected as sinful, corrupt, and base.  But when we can't see something, it becomes its most dangerous, and the very brutality that is transcended emerges as crusades, jihads, inquisitions and holocausts.  We can't get rid of the 1st chakra (or any of the chakras), and the harder we try, the worse it gets.  In many ways, the tantric side of yoga, especially hatha yoga, is a way to embrace, and utilize this very material and corporal body as a means, rather than an obstacle to, enlightenment.  To me, this is what the idea of Kundalini needing to be awakened from the muladhara signifies - a means of taking hold of the very well to live itself and riding it as high as we can.  The serpent in the garden has a secret if you learn to listen.

            Before I end, I want to illustrate what happens when we disassociate from this level with an example from our own times.   I think that this has somewhat happened in the conservative/liberal split in this country. This is where the notion of conservative “code-words” and “hidden racism” come in.  Or when conservatives say that we liberals “just don’t get it.”  Liberals seek to convince conservatives through rational argument, or an appeal to fairness.  Conservatives are more effective when getting people on a “gut” level.  Glenn Beck at the height of the financial crisis is a good example of this principal.  Many liberals wonder why so many poor people in this country vote Republican against what appears to be their economic (read: rational) interests, instead voting on social or moral issues.  The fact that we wonder about this, that we don’t get it seems to me to be because we have trained ourselves, or been educated to eliminate the tribal urge and to ignore the tribal feelings that it can produce.   This may not be bad, but it can force us to project this “irrationality” onto others, denying it in ourselves (despite its omnipresence), and continuously misunderstanding it in politics.  When conservatives call liberals "soft on crime" or "weak on defense", we know which chakra they experiencing life through.  But are they completely wrong?  A murderer or terrorist is more than likely operating at the root chakra level, and sometimes it seems silly to offer 2nd or 4th chakra solutions as a compassionate cure-all.  Eventually that first chakra animal kicks us in our humanitarian teeth and we're forced to fight.  When we reject the primal energy in us, when we regard ourselves as tame, we're surprised by the blow.  When we reclaim the power of survival, we can better understand those who would harm us.  We are prepared to act at any level, to communicate at any level; perhaps to redeem them, perhaps to educate them, but if all else fails, it prepares us to resist them with all our strength.

PS: I want to point you to an amazing paper by Jonathan Haight, What Makes People Vote Republican, that I find to be the most convincing answer to this question. It is far better reading than this rambling post, and I trust you’ll be able to see the connections between the 3 moral catagories that liberals ‘educate themselves out of’ and the associations of the root chakra. 

Have a wonderful week.  Join me next time for the 2^nd Chakra!