Moving into the 3rd Eye, or Ajna Chakra, we leave a lot of what we discussed in the lower chakras behind. In a way, we can look at working with the 6th chakra as a separate task entirely, although it is deeply related to what has come before. When we worked with any of the first five chakras, we were concerned primarily with personality and our individual psychology. This is a process the tantric mystics called “tattva shuddhi” or the purification of the elements. These are the elements of the personality, which we call (for convenience) earth, water, fire and air. Space, the element of the 5th Chakra, is that which contains the rest and represents an individuated or whole personality.
For most of us, this is the goal: reconciliation with ourselves, healing, and even the development of a new point of view independent of the ego and yet individual. Psychology, especially Depth Psychology, has this as its main concern, and it the Jungians who go the furthest with it, describing the strange and wonderful individuation process. But for the Jungians, this is pretty much the end of it. Most of the rest of psychology stops much lower down the chakra tree.
The yogis and saints of all ages tell us about states and stages well beyond this, and that’s what we’re talking about when we get to the Ajna chakra. These, described in books like the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, are states that require incredible non-attachment and perfect concentration to master. The sutras tell us that yoga is “the cessation of the fluctuating states of the mind” and that when we manage to stop the mind’s constant chatter “then the Self dwells in its own nature.” Essentially, the Sutras make a claim that there is a Self beyond the mind, but which, when the mind is active, appears to be those very fluctuations. We believe we are what we think, feel, or do, but according to the yogic classics, as well as most religions, we’re far more than that.
In classical yogic metaphysics, there are two fundamental substances. First there is Purusha, sometimes symbolized by Shiva, which is pure consciousness. Not thought, but the pure awareness which has no content, no aim, and no reflection. According to the scriptures of yoga, this Self is eternal, independent of time (our time-sense being a product of mind), and forever unaffected by actions or karma. This Self is utterly without content or mind, as I said, so it is also without personality, or even individuality. Ultimately, this Self is considered non-different with any other Self. My Purusha is not different from your Purusha, and in fact can be considered exactly the same thing. Imagine, for instance, a paper globe with a candle inside. If you prick holes in the paper, small beams of light will shine out in a different direction. If you imagine that you in the small sense, your personality is one of those beams, we understand that Purusha is the candle flame, the source of the light for every beam of light, simultaneously. As one of my earliest teachers once said, one candle flame loses nothing by lighting another. You may have heard the very common platitude “we’re all already enlightened”. What truth is in this phrase comes from the doctrine that indeed this Purusha is always free, and never in bondage, although it appears to be when it takes on the qualities of the mind. It is the mind that is in bondage, or is liberated, never the Purusha.
The second substance is Prakriti, which is sometimes symbolized by Shakti, and it includes literally everything that is not Purusha. The keyboard I’m typing on, the electricity in the computer, the light from your monitor, your eyes, face, brain, feelings, thoughts, memories, and mind. It is, we might say, the world. Purusha is consciousness, and Prakriti is what we are conscious of, and the means by which we know. This Prakriti, while fundamentally one substance, which we call primordial Prakriti, is said to change and evolve into the varied forms that we see. While there are 24 of these evolutes, I’m going to simplify the system for our purposes and talk about only a few. We can begin with the five elements which make up the lower chakras – everything we’ve been working on up to this point. You, the little self, are entirely made of Prakriti.
As we’ve moved up the spine, the elements have gotten subtler, especially when we got into the akasha or space of the 5th Chakra. In order to conceive of the space of the mind, or chidakasha, a level of non-attachment is necessary. If we identify ourself with the ego, or with our desires, the non-ego and our aversions will seem to not be included in the space. Only if we stop being so attached to the specifics of our personality can we begin to work with the psyche as a whole. But the psyche is still individual, and in order to get at the 6th chakra, the ‘third eye’, we must let even that go.
Last week when teaching about the Vishuddha chakra, I likened its inclusiveness to a phrase from the Chandogya Upanishad, but which has correlates in the West as well – satya brahmapuram, or the “true city of God.” We imagine the psyche as a city, God’s city, not ‘ours’, and recognize that the city has good parts and bad, mansions and slums, and recognize that all of this is part of the city, even a necessary part. In order to really look at the psyche like this, nonattachment is necessary. Now, a mandala is the perfect illustration of this idea, and in fact mandalas are often intended to be read a sort of 2 dimensional city. So imagine that you were looking down at a mandala, like a plan of your psyche. If the psyche is the object, then what is the subject? What sees? Ultimately the Seer, but to the Seer no differences exist, no boundaries, no neighborhoods. No, the Seer sees through something else, a subtle, content-less part of the mind.
There is an ‘element’ of a sorts for the ajna chakra, and it is called ‘mahatattva’ or ‘mahat’ which means the ‘great element’. It is a stand-in for the mind, and specifically one subsection of mind which we call the buddhi, (not to be confused with the Buddha) or ‘discriminative intelligence’. Its job is to choose, to make differences between things. We should try to understand this as the very root of the mind itself, its impersonal substructure common to all human beings. In yogic metaphysics, buddhi or mahat is the very first evolute of the primordial prakriti. First there is just stuff, a sort of primordial soup. Nothing is different. Then a mind comes along and starts to find differences, like, this is ‘me’ and that is ‘not me’, and then ‘that not-me is a rock’ and ‘that not-me is a person’ and so on. The first basic division is the me/not-me, which creates the illusion of an individual self. I say illusion because this philosophy considers the self like a wave in the ocean – it’s there as long as the mahat is making it different, but soon enough the mahat desolves and now the wave is again non-different with the ocean. It is this mahat or buddhi which can dispassionately observe the ‘city’ of the psyche.
The buddhi is considered extremely pure, and when we remember that the previous chakra, the 5th, was called Vishuddha or “most pure”. This refers to the perfection of non-attachment that must happen in that chakra before we can really enter into the Ajna. This goes back to what the sutras said about what yoga is really about – quieting the mind so that the Seer, or Purusha, can ‘dwell in its own nature’. When we have all sorts of psychological twists and issues and complexes, the mind is tense and restless. The buddhi, let alone the Purusha, is invisible. It’s like trying to focus on hearing a pin-drop at the Superbowl – it isn’t going to happen.
The solution to this problem is to quiet the mind, to do yoga in its fullest sense. The eight-limbs of yoga (ethical restraint, observances, postures, pranayama, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and Samadhi) are a direct method towards this goal of stopping the mind, which we call Samadhi. But this is a gradual process, and as we progress in slowing the mind down (which happens for a long time before ‘cessation’ occurs), we can begin to focus not on the content of the thoughts, nor the affect, but on the sub-structure of thought itself. We begin to see the buddhi at work, labeling, separating one thought from the next. We notice that we can witness, judge, and even control our thoughts from some removed place prior to the day-to-day thoughts that make up the rest of the mind. The buddhi is the part of the mind that has the most control over the rest, and can begin to do the work of cessation, preventing thoughts from arising so that the true self, the Purusha, becomes manifest.
The Ajna stands in a special place in the chakra system. The rising Kundalini, that earthy energy, is called Shakti in Tantra, literally the Goddess of Power, or Goddess of the World. She begins the process coiled at the base of the spine in the Root Chakra. As we move up, it is really her (as our mind) which moves up the spine to higher levels of understanding. Shiva is pure consciousness, sitting remote and unmoving, as if in perfect meditation, unattached and uninvolved. He is said to sit at the Ajna Chakra, and that chakra thus represents an exact counterpoint to the Root chakra and its Shakti snake coiled there. Shakti rises because she desires Shiva, and when they meet in the Ajna chakra, Liberation is said to occur. We must remember however what is Liberated: the mind. We may say that Purusha comes through the Crown Chakra (although this is a bit literalistic and simple) to meet Shakti (and animating the mind) at the 3rd Eye. You may also be familiar with the idea that there are two nadis or subtle channels going along either side of the spine, and a third at the center. These represent male and female, hot and cold, etc – the duality of nature. Of course, it isn’t a duality of nature at all, it’s the mind which makes things seem dual; the buddhi separating and comparing always. These two side nadis are said to stop just below the Ajna chakra, and this represents a cessation of the functioning of the buddhi, which is indeed the goal of yoga.
What happens then? Imagine a wind rushing over a mountain lake, which makes the surface appear grey with white caps. Imagine the same lake, with no wind, totally still. Which reflects the viewer? Clearly, the still lake will do a better job. When the mind is still, we may say that it perfectly reflects the luminance of Purusha, of the Self. It is no accident that the lunar crescent is often used to symbolize the Ajna chakra. Its two petals represent that duality (also the two eyes) which is overcome by the chakra (and the third eye). It is said that the mystic who masters the Vishuddha chakra gains the ability to instantly understand scripture and to interpret it for others. Mastery of the Ajna chakra is said to give the mystic the ability to create scripture.
What must this be like? Well, if we understand that time, space, and all of prakriti are detected (even created) by the mind, then such concepts will be meaningless when the mind is stopped. No space means reality is the monad – truly one. This is symbolized by the bindu or monad point, which Hindus often wear as a saffron or sandal-paste dot on the ajna center. No time means that that one is eternal. No content means we only end up trying to describe it after the fact. We might say with the Vedantins ‘neti, neti’ no, its not that, not that, because if it’s that, it can’t be this. The famous phrase sat, chit, ananda, or ‘being, consciousness, and bliss’ is used to describe the feeling that lingers when the mind starts back up again to perceive it, but can’t be said to be attributed to the purusha itself, which remains fundamentally mysterious.
If this sounds really heavy, well it is. We’re talking about stuff that is well past what words can really get at anyway (being rather limited products of human minds). For most of us, the practice will not be to try to perfectly stop the mind right now, but to slow it down as much as possible in meditation and try to see how it works, so that maybe down the line we can make a stab at stopping it.
But as with the rest of the chakras, the Ajna is indeed working in us even if we haven’t fully evolved into it. It comes across in intuition – a decision seemingly made before thought, an insight that comes from underneath the surface of the mind. It also represents our ability to concentrate and to think with clarity.
Overall, the Ajna is the contact point between our mind and our spirit, and represents a tremendous mystery that is still beyond the grasp (or even the vision) of science and everyday life. It is the entry point for the gifts of the spirit, a place of openness which transcends all of the particulars of individual life. At the level of the Ajna, “all is one” is not an equalizing platitude of the heart, but a physical, literal fact which can be experienced only by the exceptionally disciplined and self-controlled. It is where apparent difference is dissolved into perfect light.
