Magic is real. This is the message the 2nd Chakra whispers into our soul nightly, and sometimes its moonbeams penetrate even into the safe and ordered day-lit world to challenge our preconceptions and certainties. When we see the world through the softening, enchanting world of the 2nd chakra, it becomes an enchanted world of living presences, of meaning and depth, and of an opening to possibility. This is the question, rather than the statement. The “what if” of fantasy and sci-fi, rather than the clear cut realm of fact and empirical description (which becomes less clear-cut the deeper we probe). This is the multi-pointed consciousness expressing itself creatively in an infinite number of potential ways, rather than the ‘either/or’, ‘is’ or ‘is not’, 0 or 1, light or darkness. Moonlight is neither light nor dark, but the subtle shades in between, what psychologists like James Hillman, Carl Jung, or Thomas Moore tend to call the ‘soul’ – the intermediary between spirit, the high flights of reason and religion, and earth, the hard matter and the body. Soul brings the spirit to earth by Art, and upraises the earthly to the spiritual by the same means. This is more than the aesthetic sense (although it includes it), but it is our very capacity for imagination, the very embryonic fluid of all original ideas.
Svadhisthana means “abode of the self” which we may also usefully take as “abode of the soul.” It is located in our sacral region, which corresponds to our reproductive centers, the physical location of our ability to create life. Interestingly, this important center is similarly located in Sufism (the Nafs), and Kabbalah (the Nephesh). Both refer to a kind of energy or soul which is necessarily relational and we might say interpretive. Its inestimable energy in all systems is said to be related to desire, or Eros, which, depending on its object, inclines either downwards, towards matter (usually with the standard moralisms and shame associated with sexuality), or upwards, towards spirit. It is ambiguous, religiously dangerous, and even occasionally transgressive. It is, in a word, powerful.
As the essence of our creative potential, our ability to interpret and reinterpret for ourselves, powerful is an understatement. Its not hard to see why this power, or means of accessing it are feared and often repressed, especially by religious orthodoxy (who reserves the right to interpret for its own specialists) and repressive governments (who reserve power in general for itself, preferring passive subjects to creative ones). This is not the power of order, but of the chaos from which all things spring. Imagination, the key to this power’s mysteries, is often itself attacked and ghetto-ized. In the dominant culture of the West, imagination and its associated ways of knowing (feeling, empathy, gnosis) are accepted mainly in children, women, and certain special classes like ‘artists’ which is to me merely a way of putting this way of knowing in a locked box while enjoying its fruits as entertainment. Other understandings of this power are considered ‘fringe’ and locked away in various sub-cultures. A good example is this NY Times critic’s complete misreading (and subsequent lashing of the critic) of HBO’s new fantasy series, A Game of Thrones. Sci-fi/Fantasy fans will recognize here an ongoing lack of acceptance of this sort of fiction. These things seem inexplicable to the mainstream, which sadly lacks the imagination to see even its own mental cage.
The dominant way of knowing, the only one allowed in official discourses, is of the 1st and 3rd Chakras. In the first chakra, we deal with the world concretely (earthily), and we see objects as utilitarian or useless. The world is mechanistic, and so is a human being. This is the positivist/materialist point of view, one woefully incomplete and incapable (I believe) of describing the fullness of human experience. While this point of view appears to be in decline in some parts of the academic community, it appears to be on the upswing in politics and mainstream culture. The world has been divided into the material world of science, quantitative measurements, and empiricism which we accept and trust, and as that subjective world of “whatever the hell that is,” as scholar of religion Jeffrey Kripal sarcastically puts it. As society seems to trust less and less in the vagaries of the humanities, looking instead for utilitarian “dollar values” for education programs, we are collectively disowning a massive portion of the human experience as something of no value because it is difficult to quantify a use for it. Love becomes merely a way of luring us, carrot and stick style, to reproduce. But anyone who has ever been in love will tell you (if you don’t know yourself) that is not how it is experienced. This is because love does not belong to the dominant paradigm of the 1st and 3rd chakra (except where it is mere reproduction or a disturbing power dynamic respectively), but to the 2nd and 4th. These chakras dissolve differences in their softer light, allowing for an experience of the world that is interconnected, holistic, which breaks down the fallacy that we are all separate units, island-like egos with vast spaces separating us. The 2nd Chakra does this by bridging the gap with feeling, and in doing so unites heaven (the realities of the 4th chakra and above) and earth (the world of the 1st and 3rd chakras). The feminine nature of this chakra, as opposed to the very masculine 1st and 3rd, attests to possibility of such a union in symbolism as the mystic Wedding.
Much of what I’ve been really doing with this blog is trying to come to terms with much of this. For me personally, the powers of the second chakra have in truth moved me more than any other. You can see that in this blog I’m often philosophical, and I encourage skepticism and a certain empiricism in myself and others. I respect science, especially the findings of psychology. But you may also note that I’m applying this mentality, which can be seen as relating to the 1st and 3rd chakras, to 2nd chakra ideas. What I’m interested in is the fantastical, the ambiguous, the numinous, and the spiritual. The reason for this is that my 2nd chakra, my soul, has enriched and even directed much of my life. I have had tremendous experiences of soul, as well as of spirit and earth. I have seen magic work, telepathy happen, and the world as we know it break down in the face of ways of knowing that are completely different, other, from normal daylit consciousness. But yet I am consciously masculine and a product of the culture in which I was raised. I was lucky enough to receive a first rate education. I like to think of myself as rational and intellectual. Therefore, I can’t help but try to understand these dreams in the daylight of reason, to make the fantastical and imaginal make sense. I desire to understand the nature of meaning itself.
Yet, when we turn the lights up, the magic often vanishes, like a rain puddle when the hot sun bears down on it. It’s like a candle-lit dinner where the maitre d’ brings up the house-lights unexpectedly – it ruins the mood. And the mood is where the soul is, where the power is stirred up in us. It may well be that my quest was doomed before it even began. Is it possible to build a coherent way of interpreting the world in which we can find balance between hard facts and ambiguous imaginings? My recent reading has been all over this possibility, and the diversity of exactly how such a thing could be perhaps proved James Hillman’s point – the soul is ultimately as multiple as its images, and interpretive models that aspire towards its truths must be as multiple as our souls. We have to be careful not to dry up the ocean within us with too much harsh light, to much egotic separateness, and face the music of the spheres. The title of this blog, “Slouching towards Bethlehem” hints at what is to me only yet dimly realized, a “rough beast” of a philosophy that brings my experiences, rational or otherwise, into one being – a complete idea. It is a struggle for wholeness in my own being, and has been as difficult as any other kind of birthing. This “beast” of an idea I feel growing within me, kicking and poking me from within with its horns, hoping one day to be born. Under the surface it lurks, and I cannot yet tell whether when it surfaces it will be a stillborn monstrosity, or the radiant child of my hopes.
So dim the lights, light some candles, put some music on (or better yet, create your own), and set the mood for a night of enchantment. Feed your soul with images and beauty. Dare to let yourself be inspired and revitalized. Without the magic of the soul we experience life as lifeless, dry, and disconnected from meaning. It becomes a thing to be endured stoically rather than richly experienced. Instead, enshrine the soul here, in its proper abode, on its own terms, without reduction to biological utility or mere myth. An entire ocean of possibility will open up before you.
To end, I leave you with a quote to hopefully provoke some imaginings in your own mind, from a book I’m reading right now, Jeffrey Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible. Enjoy!
“This… is why the necessarily objectifying nature of the scientific method can pick up the slightest examples of something like psi in the controlled laboratory, but must miss all the most robust paranormal ones in the real world of human experience. I have heard contemporary parapsychologists joke about what J.B. Rhine really accomplished at Duke University by operationalizing psychical research and insisting on controlled laboratory conditions and statistical approaches: he figured out how to suppress psi and finally make it go away. Bored sophomores staring at abstract shapes on playing cards is no way to elicit psychical phenomena.
“But love and trauma are. Consider what we will encounter below as the classic case of telepathic dreams announcing the death of a loved one. Such dreams are not objects behaving properly in an ordered mechanistic way for the sake of a laboratory experiment. They are communications transmitting meaning to subjects for the sake of some sort of profound emotional need. They are not about data; they are about love.” (Italics are Kripal’s), p. 24
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