Vishuddha Chakra – Raise your Voice!

"I come from the imagination
And I’m here strictly by your invocation.
So what do you say—
Why don’t we dance a while?
I’m the how to swing.
I’m the twist and shout.
When you gotta sing,
When you gotta let it out.
You call me and I come a-runnin’.
I turn the music on, I bring the fun in.
Now we’re partyin’, that’s what it’s all about."

                                                     - Once More with Feeling, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

         The throat chakra, called the “Vishuddha” or “pure” chakra, is connected to the notion of our individual voice.  This is the place where we confront, silence, or speak our truth.  But what is our truth?

            When we start dealing with the 5^th chakra and above, the air starts to get a little thin, literally.  We’ve cycled through the 4 elements, and with Vishuddha, the ‘element’ associated is Akasha, the element which contains all the others, which is most adequately translated as ‘space’.  All physical matter is contained in space, and there is always more space than there are ‘things’ in space.  When we leave the air of the heart chakra behind, we also leave behind us the last chakra that our modern society has integrated.  The throat chakra is on the cutting edge of our cultural evolution, and therefore there are fewer myths, signposts, and symbols that describe it.  Traditional teachings on the chakras say that the throat chakra is only accessed by spiritual teachers, who have gained the ability to interpret the scriptures without error.  It is accessed by the purifying practice of non-attachment which I discussed in relation to the heart chakra, and is therefore ‘vishuddha’, purified of material attachments.  

            The above give us few clues, but I think they’re enough to get deeply into what the throat chakra symbolizes.  To me, the primary clue is the connection of this chakra to spiritual teachers and their fabled ability to ‘correctly’ interpret scripture.  I view this as a natural development of the multi-pointed perspective of the heart chakra, and its healthy non-attachment.  As I discussed in my last post, part of the problem with egalitarianism, openness, and lack of hierarchy is death by committee – a lack of direction or singular will.  If all values are essentially equal, choice becomes flattened and no real decision is possible.  Essentially, power (personal or collective) is stronger when concentrated, and the 4^th chakra spreads power equally everywhere. The throat chakra offers an elegant solution to this problem on a personal level, but I’m unable to see its application for society as a whole at this point.  I imagine we’re a long way off from that.

            As we pass through the heart, we begin to understand the world as metaphor, to realize our understanding is one of many, conditioned by experience and our particular time and place.  We learn to try to be objective, to not favor even our own opinions and prejudices as we now recognize them as anything but universal.  We try to be cosmopolitan (literally: a citizen of the cosmos), respectful of difference, and open to all ideas and possibility.  But eventually, we have to realize that to live in such a state is difficult if not untenable.  We cannot act.  Our interpretations are tentative, self-conscious as we have become of our own presuppositions and prejudices.  We loose ourselves in the multitude of equals.  When we step into the 5^th chakra we find ourselves again, but without losing the lessons of the heart and its transcendence over the shallow and petty ego (3^rd chakra).  If the heart chakra is about realizing that each of us is but one wave in a vast ocean, destined to soon enough rejoin that which we never left, then the throat chakra is about reveling in that truth, that for a few moments we a wave cresting in the ocean, with no other wave quite like us; beautiful, transient, and perfect. 

            We all know the expression “you are what you eat” to be literally true.  The physical matter you take in is digested and assimilated.  We break the food down into its component parts, rearrange them to grow or sustain our own physical form.  However, it is true on another level that we are what we hear, read, or experience.  As foods are the building blocks of our body, experiences are the building blocks of our personality.  We are what we read, the lectures and conversations we hear, and yes, even what we watch on TV (certainly a sobering thought).  We take these experiences in, relate them back to the ego, or if we’re unable to ‘stomach them’ we repress them, and finally we integrate the experience into our sense of identity and personality.  Just as no two bodies are exactly alike (even twins eat different molecules), no one has a personality quite like yours.  We are each completely unique, and this does mean that we are also unequal in many respects.  Beauty comes from difference, and uniqueness comes from necessary difference.  The heart chakra teaches us that we are all equal in value, in essence, but the 5^th chakra reminds us of the lessons of the 1^st and 3^rd – equal doesn’t mean the same. 

            In Shankya philosophy (which the yoga tradition is partially based on), there is a basic dualism, but it is unlike the dualism we’re familiar with in the West.  The division is not Mind/Body, as it was with Descartes, but Purusha/Prakriti.  Purusha is the spirit, the eternal essence of each us, manifesting in an individual as (unembodied) consciousness.  Prakriti is absolutely everything else, and can be loosely translated as ‘matter’.  This ‘matter’ also includes the whole mind, which is considered to be a more subtle form of body.  We might say that the dualism is mind-body/consciousness, rather than body/mind.  Consciousness is that which gives light to mind, is the origin of the sense of self, of life – the animating force.  But the mind, thoughts, personality; these are all organizations of matter as unique, concrete, and transient as the body.  The Purusha (consciousness) is the immortal part, but it isn’t individual in any real way.  ‘My’ purusha isn’t different in any way from ‘your’ purusha (we might even question whether there is more than one purusha to begin with).  Our differences are essentially in Prakriti. 

            The throat chakra then symbolizes an awareness of our own unique truth, the authentic representation of our completely individual and unique point of view based on our experience – our Voice.  It is the voice that speaks to the experience of a single wave in the ocean, rather than the ocean itself.  It is, in its essence, a matter of interpretation. 

            Hearing (the sense associated with the chakra) and speaking are both creative acts.  Ultimately, we’re shouting across a vast distance whenever we try to communicate with another.  I know that when I give a talk, every student is probably hearing something different, interpreting what I say creatively through the filter of their own experience.  What they walk away with is a combination of what I said and what they heard, and never purely one or the other.  What I say is the product of what I have heard (experienced) in the past, digested, and made my own.   I’m interpreting before (and often as) I speak, you’re interpreting as (and after) you hear.  Often times, this is unconscious, especially below the 5^th chakra – we assume we heard what was said in the same way that we assume what we see is blue or green or whatever.  We learn to become aware that blueness isn’t in an object, but in our brains, and we can also learn that what we hear isn’t in the words we hear (or read) but in our brains.  Each brain interprets in its own way, based on prior experience.  When this knowledge flattens choice and devalues the self, we lose ourselves in the sea of humanity (heart chakra).  When this knowledge liberates us, allowing us to revel in the beauty of a singular wave in the sea of humanity, we have entered into the 5^th chakra. 

            This new sense of self, ultimately a shift in interpretation, is not like what came below it.  The 5^th chakra is related to the 3^rd and 1^st, much like the 4^th was related to the 2^nd (and 6^th), but it transcends them.  There is beauty in the 5^th chakra, in the individual voice, but it is a voice without ego, beauty without narcissism.  The wave never again is deluded into thinking that it is separate, removed from the other waves,  but it is still in no hurry to rejoin the ocean.  When we live through the 5^th chakra, we recognize the accidents of our lives as forming our personality, and we also recognize that if different things had happened we ourselves would be very different.  I recognize that I could have been female, Chinese, even you.  At the level of the 5^th chakra, we also recognize that we are not those others, could not now be those others. We learn to value our own authentic point of view, but without attachment.  That last is clearly the catch.  We might say its like realizing (in my case) that as broad as my mind becomes, I’ll always be a man, white, and American.  Even with a sex-change, skin pigmentation therapy, and renunciation of citizenship, my perspective would be that of a white American male who changed his gender, skin, and citizenship.  Acceptance of this role is the easy part – after all, we accept these roles in the 1^st chakra – the hard part is understanding that there’s nothing privileged, special, or superior about any of them.  With non-attachment, we recognize the accidental, essentially constructed nature of our entire personality.  Further, we recognize that this includes the vast underside of the mind, the unconscious.  It is a whole, complete understanding of the self, far above the level of the conscious ego.  We begin to see ourselves as Purusha, consciousness shining through one particular constructed mind, with one particular voice, one unique truth, one mission, one point of view;  not superior to any other, but itself part of a necessary whole.

            There’s more, much more, but I’m only going to touch on it here.  Communication, as I mentioned, is across a vast gulf.  Considering how creative we are at (mis)interpreting each other, it’s a wonder that we can ever communicate effectively at all.  This omnipresent miracle of human communication requires one thing to make it effective – recognition.  You recognize what I’m saying as words that have certain meanings which strike a chord in your mind, like a guitar string vibrating when a tuning fork of the same pitch is struck nearby.  If there was no similar idea in your mind, communication would not be happening.  Each of us may be a unique arrangement of experience, but we share many of the same experiential building blocks and that makes communication possible.  The more we have in common, the more easily we can communicate (language is a good place to start, but culture, values, etc, enter into it).  When we consciously access the 5^th chakra, we see these building blocks more clearly, and we can make great use of them.  We learn to recognize and call upon these essential constructs in others as well as artfully arranging them in ourselves.  We can become teachers and interpreters ourselves. 

            I think we as a culture are rapidly moving into this chakra.  This sort of consciousness and the freedom of interpretation it offers are no longer the purview only of gurus and mahatmas.  We’re claiming the responsibility for our own personality, for our own interpretations of reality.  We’re claiming the authority of our individuality.  Clearly, this is no small responsibility.  It is no easy task to claim our self-hood while remaining “pure” of egoism.  We doubt, second-guess, and hold back our voices.  We worry about what other people will think of what we say.  Society, it would seem, would prefer us to remain quiet.  Most of us do.  And then occasionally, there comes along a voice – a teacher’s voice, but not always belonging to a ‘teacher’ – which strikes a chord of deep recognition within us.  These are those people we call a ‘voice of a generation’ or a ‘manifestation of the zeitgeist’.  They call us to transcend ourselves, to learn to interpret for ourselves, to accept and recognize our own authentic vision of the world.  They ask only that we join our voices to theirs in a great chorus of humanity, that we learn to sing.  For me, so much of what this blog has been about has been just that – learning to sing my own song.  I hope you’re enjoying the ride.

            I’ll leave you with a brief exercise to help you think in the 5^th chakra.  Assume for a moment (putting truth-claims aside), that not only are you reincarnated, but you literally chose your birth circumstances.  Just pretend.  Assuming you intended to be the person you are today, ask yourself the following questions:

1)      Why did you choose your parents?

2)      Why did you choose your country?

3)      Why did you choose your gender?

4)      Why did you choose your race/ethnicity?

5)      Why did you choose your talents?

6)      Why did you choose your weaknesses/flaws?

Anahata - Compassion and Mathematics

            Today we step out of the egotic 3^rd chakra, full of fire and will and drive, into the clear open air of the heart.  With this transition we move from a place of difference (I vs. everything else being the primordial instance of difference) into a place where boundaries dissolve and difference vanishes before sameness.  Here we learn humility in the face of the powerful realization of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of man.  We let go of our ego and open ourselves to the Other in an inclusive embrace. 

            Of all the chakras, the heart chakra is perhaps the most intuitive localization of an experience.  We intuitively connect the heart to love, and when we speak of someone being “open-hearted” the meaning is understood.  But the love of the heart chakra isn’t what we think.  It is not romantic love at all, but equanimity and compassion.  It is the love of the brotherhood of man, first and foremost.  The 4^th chakra is a bit aloof like that, all airy contemplation and high minded (one might say head-in the clouds or pie in the sky) ideals.  Compared to the down to earth 1^st chakra, the watery depths of infatuation in the 2^nd, and the fiery passions of the 3^rd, the Anahata chakra is in the cold, bright, open air of the stratosphere.

            Love is a convenient starting point for understanding this aloofness. Love exists in all 4 lower chakras in some way.  1^st chakra love is love for the family, tribe, of a parent for his child and the child for his parent.  It is conditional in that we love our own children first, and our own family more than other people’s families.  It’s easy to confuse this “selfless” love of the mother for the child with the general compassion of the 4^th (and I do think they’re related), as both put others ahead of the self, but they are very different.  If the mother loved everyone the same way they love their child, only then would it be 4^th chakra love.  We find romantic love in the 2^nd chakra, which is conditional in that the object of our affections must be lovable, which is a matter of personal preference (attractiveness, preferred gender, age, etc). We might easily forget to keep up other relationships when we’re captured by the jaws of the 2^nd chakra’s crocodile.  We are enchanted, and the moonlight of this chakra tends to hide all the faults of the person in question.  This is the love of the “honeymoon phase”, and in reality we find ourselves usually in love with the image of the person, only getting to know them on a deeper level when the initial burst of infatuation wears off.  3^rd Chakra love is love as status – trophy wives, gold-diggers, successful businessmen and politicians who might feel that they’re status is incomplete without a spouse and children.  Love as a vehicle for desire. All three types of love pretty much capture what we mean when we typically talk of love in a non-religious sense.  In that later sense, the Anahata reigns supreme.  4^th chakra love is impersonal, and without attachment to any particular object.  Here we find Christ’s injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself”, Buddhist compassion, Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga, and other “higher” forms of love. 

            I feel like I’ve been talking love to death this week because it is an easy example of what is really going on here in the Anahata chakra.  But the 4^th chakra goes well beyond love.  I think in its essence the Anahata chakra is about abstraction and a sensitivity to inner states.  What I mean by this is that we’ve now stepped out of the physical chakras (lower 3) and into a place where experience becomes independent of physical objects.  Love then, in the Anahata chakra, is not about the person.  Love is not in that person, but in us, and we extend it to others.  Realizing that love is within, rather than in the object of desire, is what allows for real interpersonal love.  When we live in the heart, we experience everyone as essentially equal in value and worth, and therefore equally deserving of our love.  This kind of love is an abstract kind, rather than concrete. 

            We don’t usually think of math in connection with this chakra, but it’s a good metaphor, especially as reason itself is connected to the anahata.  In math, we start by counting concrete objects, but this is not how it is necessarily used in science.  Science uses math to create an abstract representation of nature’s laws, representing relationships between forces and objects.  Such abstractions may require learning certain symbol sets, like numbers and math, to be learned “by heart”.  That last expression is a survival of an age-long association of the heart with the mind and memory. Science in particular is all about transcending the ego - a good scientist ideally removes himself, even his desires, from his experiment, trying to rise above the subjective, even above his attachment to the outcome of his experiment.

            Similarly, thought itself is crucial to understanding this chakra, and higher thought, specifically.  It is easy to describe the heart as “emotional power” as Mia Tuwari does in her books, but I think that this is incorrect.  It seems to me that emotion is largely a 2^nd chakra concern.  What we “feel” with our heart, that lump in the chest, the pitter patter, etc, is the feeling of obstruction, and pressure.  In yoga, we might say that this is attachment, and attachment is ultimately favoring one thing over another, for instance a person we love more than others.  When there is separation, or uncertainty about keeping hold of what we’re attached to (either in the early part of the romance, or at its end), we feel it in the heart as excitement or pain.  My experience is that the physical sensation is actually the same in either case, but the interpretation and emotional coloring is different.  In other words, the emotional difference is not in the heart chakra itself, just the attachment. 

            Difference, an “I” mentality, attachment, these things cause the heart to protect itself, to clench down, as it is a sensitive thing.  As we open the heart more and more in our practice, non-attachment becomes essential.  Non-attachment is a way of insulating ourselves from inevitable pain, a way of keeping equinamity, an even, steady keel in the waters of life.  Without this, an open heart would be in constant pain, as empathy without some distance turns into sympathy pains.  Most yogic practices aim at this distance (we may also say ‘renunciation’), and the yamas in particular are all calculated towards this end.  I’d go one step further and say that most spiritual systems concern themselves foremost with the heart. 

            Most modern religions tend to emphasize the ideas summed up by the anahata chakra, although these ideas may be filtered through the lower chakras in actual practice.  When we read the Gospels, for instance, we find Christ ministering to all people, almost seeming to prefer the prostitutes, poor, and tax collectors over the rich (who, after all, are as likely to get into heaven as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle).  He is criticized for this and willingly pays the ultimate price, crucified with common thieves.  This is a far cry from the triumphant King Christ who makes a later appearance, ruling, judging, and casting down to hell.  The latter is clearly a 3^rd chakra image, one which has been tenaciously keeping its grasp on the Christian imagination.  I think the reason for this is that it is only recently that the 4^th chakra has become anything close to being dominant in our culture.  The symbols have been there for 2000 years, but only with the Enlightenment, with its universal rights of man, scientific method, and penchant for democracy, has it really flowered.  The irony is not lost on me. 

            I think for the most part, the world needs more, not less, “heart”.  Humanity as a whole still displays a despicable barbarism, and much of the non-Western world is still firmly entrenched in the lower chakras.  But as the heart chakra becomes more and more pervasive in culture (and I’d say most of us reading this are extremely familiar with it), its flaws begin to creep into view.  One look at the gridlock in Congress and we can see the problems with democracy.  When everyone has an equal voice, the bigots, fanatics, and just plain stupid have an opportunity to shout down progress and spread hate.  I’m not advocating a retreat from freedom of speech, nor suggesting that we should have a strongman or 3^rd chakra king.  Far from it.  But there is something that happens when everything and everybody is equal – the world becomes flat, and ultimately the same.  We learn that we need some of those boundaries, even if we begin to suspect that they are illusory.

            The 4^th chakra in public policy simultaneously celebrates and annihilates difference.  It demands a level playing field, social justice, fairness, equality, and freedom from physical intimidation. It also seeks to uplift the downtrodden, the oppressed, and may appear to be more concerned with the Other than the Self, and this is both its strength and weakness.  When we educate ourselves into the 4^th chakra we recognize ourselves in all others.  Education is an important part of this development, as that is how we begin to place our own ego, our tribe, our concrete ways of viewing a non-concrete reality, in a greater context.  Learning another language helps us to realize just how limiting all language must be.  Learning history places us in context, and we stop seeing Armageddon hiding around every corner.  Comparing religious beliefs makes those exclusionary beliefs seem ridiculous and shallow.  But at the same time, these realizations may leave us hanging “in mid-air.”  We may learn to respect other cultures, humbly recognizing that our own judgments are constructed from our own cultural experience, and not “true” in any objective sense.  We become careful to avoid forcing our views onto other cultures, now sensitized to the bigger picture.  We see the world as a beautiful plurality of points of view, but at the same time removing the value judgments that help us to orient ourselves in the extreme multiplicity of points of view.  We see more options, more possibilities, and more choice.  We may even reject the ego itself. 

            Where does this lead us?  It can lead us to justice and fairness and essential equality.  It definitely brings greater freedom.  But it can also make choice impossible, because choice ultimately is favoritism, a discrimination (a word reviled by the 4^th chakra), and emphasizes difference.  The chaste 4^th chakra yogi cannot allow himself to be in a sexual relationship because it disturbs the equanimity of the heart – when we love one person more than another, we cannot love all equally.  Democracies become deadlocked, or worse, subject to the mob.  When the latter happens, it means that 4^th chakra equality is hijacked by those ruled by the lower chakras, leading to a degrading of culture to that level. This is the battle we’re fighting right now against the Tea Party, and the anti-intellectual and anti-secular factions.  In foreign policy, when we are trained to look at all cultures as equally valuable, it becomes harder to criticize barbaric practices such as genital mutilation and other human rights violations.  Essentially, when we’re unbalanced towards this chakra, life becomes ‘rule by committee’.  We may even, in the process of concern for others, lose sight of ourselves, and our own needs.  We may give too much, devalue ourselves too much, and in nourishing others, fail to nourish ourselves.

            Ultimately, balance in the heart chakra is what is important, as it is in all the others.  This chakra becomes a problem only when it becomes the only way we view the world.  The problem isn’t in what it represents on its own, but its lack of completeness.  Without a strong ego, our 4^th chakra will give until there is nothing left of us.  Without romance, life can feel lonely, no matter how many ‘spiritual brothers and sisters’ we may have.  Without the hard reality of the concrete earth, i.e. without application in the physical, science and religion both become mere airy phantasms.  But the solution isn’t just about looking back and down to the lower chakras (although that is also important).  The final solution to the problem of the 4^th chakra are found in the 5^th chakra, where out of the selfless service and humble recognition of the equality of all beings comes the Voice of salvation – our own Voice.