My understanding of the chakra system is essentially based on the above. The chakras are fundamentally ways of localizing or projecting psychic contents onto parts of the body. This appears to be something deep in our nature as human beings. Across the world we humans feel with our ‘heart’, despite the inescapable fact that the physical heart is just a big blood-pumping muscle. We may, like George Bush, know something in our ‘gut’. When we try hard to remember something, we look ‘up’ even with out physical eyes, right to where we locate the 3rd eye chakra. In esoteric systems arising from every religious tradition there is the appearance of systems of the subtle body which link certain ideas and experiences to various ‘centers’ in the body. More surprisingly, these centers often mean similar things, like the example of the physical heart being tied not only to impersonal compassion but to attachment to those we love. We may say therefore that this facility of projection may be not learned but innate; that it archetypal.
Does all this mean that our compassion is ‘in’ the physical heart in any real way? Not necessarily, and here’s where our thinking can get bogged down. Compassion is no more located ‘in’ the heart than the above woman’s daddy issues are ‘in’ her boyfriend, and no more than my love of my wife is ‘in’ my wife. The compassion, the daddy issues, my love for my wife, these exist in the mind alone. In the latter case, its experience is provoked by my seeing her, and in the others it is externalized and projected onto an other or body part. Ultimately, our experience of the world is not objective, but is a combination; a sort of 2 part hologram made up of the sense images presented to the brain, and whatever glosses the mind overlays upon it. This is why no one will ever find the chakras in the spine or anywhere else outside of the mind. Why these areas should specifically be thus associated is a mystery, and thus far those who have tried to explain it have only ended up confusing the issue by confusing their inner visions with objective fact.
Believers in the chakra system may find themselves discomforted by my assertions, and may feel that I am trivializing an important experience or ‘reducing’ the chakras to figments of the imagination. This is not what I’m saying at all. All of our experience is ultimately ‘in the mind’, even the apparent world of sense. But the purely sensory aside, our human experience is not of a materialistic world of hard facts and matter, but of emotional shading, pet notions, intuitive meanings, and a quest for personal satisfaction and happiness. A hard-minded scientist may look at the chakras as nothing but imagination, but he could not deny that our models of atoms are but imaginings of detected forces that we create to make sense and use of them. Similarly, while he may explain love as little more than instincts and hormones, when he falls for someone those descriptions will not suffice to capture his actual experience, and he may turn instead to the vague and unscientific poem or love song. We can benefit from making a distinction between the observation of objective ‘facts’ of the sensory world (like the skeletal system) and observation of subjective experiences of our own psyche. This is not to say that these subjective experiences are not based on and contiguous to those ‘objective facts’, but our experience is often quite different than whatever is happening objectively (and in the case of the chakras, we really only have the smallest understanding of what that may be). Our experience of the relation of the sun to the earth is that the sun rises and sets, but in reality that is not what is happening. But if we were to directly experience the earth as moving rather than stationary we would quickly become too disoriented to do much of anything. This is a good example, because although we now all know that the earth is in fact moving around the sun, it doesn’t change our personal experience of it, and that experience is not fundamentally different than that of a person who lived in ancient times. Similarly, an understanding of the chakras as mental phenomena does not change our experience of the chakras as apparently localized in the body.
What I’m trying to say is that mental objects are no less real and important as physical objects, and should not be treated as such. Above the level of basic survival, mental objects are usually far more of a preoccupation in our lives than any physical object – after all, isn’t the pursuit of happiness itself a quest for a mental state? When we decide to investigate the inner world more deeply, we must first separate it into discrete forms and structures, just as the ambivalent ocean of milk must be churned to bring out the various objects of the world. Similarly, we bring out contents from the unconscious and project them out into the world – onto people, or in the case of the chakras, onto the body itself. This is because we are evolved to think most clearly about physical objects, and that is all our language is developed to handle. A chakra is so called because a wheel as a symbol can bring up associations of movement, of limited circumference and stable center, not because what is being described has anything in common with a physical wheel of any kind.
The reality of projection, combined with the impossibility of locating the chakras in an autopsy, results in what is often called the subtle body, or astral body. A way this is often arranged is the 3 body model: the gross body (the physical body), the subtle body (where the chakras are said to be located), and the causal body. The last is the deepest, and we might liken it to the Ocean of Milk itself before its separation. It is by nature undifferentiated, and from it is said to come the subtle body, which in turn is the template for the gross body. To me, the subtle body is ultimately the vast mental world, inclusive or the projections we overlay onto the physical world. It is harder to experience directly, hence subtler, and is experienced often as ‘prior’ to the gross. This is how it is also described in Neoplatonism, which is the Western version of the same idea.
This brings me full circle back to the creation myth we went into in the last post. The churning of the ocean of milk was superficially understood as the creation of the world, but esoterically understood as an undoing of the very same process. Here we have the causal body giving rise to the subtle, which in turn gives rise to the gross. Where do we get this notion, and why do we care? It comes from the experience of the mystics and seers themselves. When we shift our awareness from the hard earth of the gross body, we enter the realm of the mind and its projections. In order to deal with these mental contents meaningfully, we have to see them as outside of ourselves, as a vision within or projection without. Either way, we get a new perspective and objectivity in relation to it. Therefore, a system is developed by the unconscious (it is rarely a conscious choice) or learned from a system like Tantra, and is experienced as a ‘world’ that exists contiguous with (but distinct from) the sense world of physical objects – the ‘astral’ world. When we see the body with this lens, we see the physical body, and we also see the projections we place on it in the form of symbolic systems like the chakra. This is how the mind sees them, so we assume that such exists in the same way that a table exists. Similarly, when these contents and complexes are dissolved back into their basic ‘causal’ state, we have the experience of the causal body.
Ultimately we only find ourselves in murky water when we start to assume that our mental experiences, such as symbolic visions (of figures, elements, of heavens, etc), have a reality of the same type as the various objective objects of the earth. They are just as important as such facts, but important doesn’t mean literally true. This is what is meant by the classic mystic injunction “don’t confuse the planes.” The astral (mental) world does not follow the same rules as the physical, and what is true there may not be true here. Confusing the two is like confusing the experience of the sun apparently moving across the sky with objective fact. It appears that way, but we must always remember in the back of our mind that the actual situation is the opposite. Only the naïve take symbols literally, however helpful and significant they may be.
When I showed this post to Adrea, she asked an excellent question - what about the use of a pendulum to detect the chakras and energy centers. This is done when you hold a pendulum over a chakra 'site', and it then moves in various ways which can be interpreted by the reader. You can try this for yourself very easily and find it works. What I did in response to Adrea's question was to hang a pendulum from a fixed object (not someone's hand) and demonstrated that for both of us, the pendulum did not move when encountering a chakra. Ultimately, it is the other person that can detect the chakra, because chakras are interpersonal psychic realities, like the reality of the earth not moving and the sun traveling across the sky, rather than a reality independent of mental life, for instance the fact that the earth does in fact move. This does not discount ways of knowing other than sensory, like telepathy (which I believe in), the intuitive ability to detect tremendous amounts of information from another person, or even 'energetic healing' which certainly seems to be able to effect plants and animals alike. Using the chakra model as a structural support for intuition is a valid and useful method of holistic and intuitive healing, but the experience itself may not be, on an objective level, exactly what it seems.
When I showed this post to Adrea, she asked an excellent question - what about the use of a pendulum to detect the chakras and energy centers. This is done when you hold a pendulum over a chakra 'site', and it then moves in various ways which can be interpreted by the reader. You can try this for yourself very easily and find it works. What I did in response to Adrea's question was to hang a pendulum from a fixed object (not someone's hand) and demonstrated that for both of us, the pendulum did not move when encountering a chakra. Ultimately, it is the other person that can detect the chakra, because chakras are interpersonal psychic realities, like the reality of the earth not moving and the sun traveling across the sky, rather than a reality independent of mental life, for instance the fact that the earth does in fact move. This does not discount ways of knowing other than sensory, like telepathy (which I believe in), the intuitive ability to detect tremendous amounts of information from another person, or even 'energetic healing' which certainly seems to be able to effect plants and animals alike. Using the chakra model as a structural support for intuition is a valid and useful method of holistic and intuitive healing, but the experience itself may not be, on an objective level, exactly what it seems.
To recapitulate all this, we can say that the chakras are the localization of psychic contents in the physical form in the form of 7 (or more) archetypal divisions of human experience. What each of these divisions signify will be topics for later posts. The means of working with the chakras is to ‘open’ them – i.e., accessing the mental energy locked up in associated complexes and contents. The technique I’ll be using in my class is called “Tattva-Shuddhi” or element purification, and it is likened to dissolving each chakra, starting at the bottom, or ‘earth’, into the next until they once again become undifferentiated; i.e., resolved back into its causal state in an attempt to experience the ultimate nature, or soul, in itself. This process is sometimes called Laya Yoga. Laya means absorption or dissolution. What is being dissolved? The complexes. What is being absorbed? The newly freed mental energy. Clearly this is a process of years, not a mere 7 weeks, but we can (and do) practice this again and again with the hope that one day we can break through to the final goal. In Tantra this goal is poetically described as the union of the goddess Shakti (the manifested reality, or body-mind complex) with Shiva (the soul, or absolute consciousness). It is effected by the uplifting of the body-mind from its lowest level (the 1st or ‘root’ chakra) where Shakti is said to be at rest after the exertions of her manifestation, dissolving it into the 2nd chakra, and so on until Shakti meets her consort at the crown chakra, located at the top of our head.
For the next 7 weeks we will systematically explore each of the divisions of ideas, and if you care to meditate on the chakras to unlock your personal unconscious, to perhaps begin the process of Laya or dissolution. I hope you’ll join me in exploring this powerful system.
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