Didn’t you know you have a hole in your head? That subtitle is mostly a joke, but not entirely. In the old dualism of the yoga system, what Sahasrara represents is the connection to the Purusha, that transcendent monistic consciousness that in Tantra is called Shiva for short. The other six chakras were concerned with the other half of that dualism, Prakriti, which basically means matter, stuff, and manifest reality. Prakriti is the mind, body, dirt, animals, and everything except that mysterious and transcendent Purusha. So, calling Sahasrara a hole, an ‘empty’ space in the sense of transcending matter, isn’t such a joke after all.
I’ve been talking about God all week in class, a topic I usually avoid as the word is so loaded in our culture. It’s hard to talk about because we have all of these purile images of a bearded dude enthroned in a cloud stuck in our head. So try to keep in mind that the ideas below are just ideas, or really the mere sketch of my own ideas about God.
The joke, if there is one, is really in calling Purusha ‘God’. In classical yoga and in Vedanta, this ‘Seer’ or Purusha, is essentially considered God. God is understood in the idealistic sense, in that it is utterly pure, utterly transcendent, and utterly free and removed from the messy-ness of the world. Like many other theistic systems, God and the world are poles apart, and only one of the two is worthy of admiration, worship, and even attention. This may not always be said, but it is the subtext of most spiritual systems, including classical yoga, Vedanta, and Christianity.
In Tantra, the system from which the chakras originate, Prakriti, matter, is personified into the goddess Shakti, and it is her, rather than her removed and transcendent Shiva, that is given primary worship, although both are considered part of the same whole. The world, so the Tantras say, is a divine play between Shiva and Shakti, and we’re like actors in their love-drama. Shakti, we might say, is given her due.
The Vedantins say that the world is illusion, and certainly this is a demonstrable fact. The world is not how it appears. What it really is, physics tells us, is a sea of energy fields, or more abstract yet, a field of probability. But that’s not what the world is, that just how it appears from one point of view. Take eating a steak for example. You might say that the steak is just a collection of carbon-based molecules. That’s all the steak ‘really is’ from one point of view. From another point of view it is a delicious meal, even a celebratory treat. From yet another point of view it represents the cruel murder of a sentient life-form. Which one is the ‘real’ steak? All of them, and none of them.
So too with God. What God is can perhaps only be truly summarized by that ancient phrase from the Upanishads – ‘Neti, neti’ – ‘not-that, not-that.’ To say God is one thing is to limit the infinite, right? Well, yes, but sometimes limited is better. It is, for most of us, useless to try to see steaks as molecular constructs, and doesn’t make it more appetizing or morally acceptable. And if you’re eating the steak, thinking of it as murder tends to hurt the appetite. If you’re a vegan, thinking of it as a delicious meal creates unnecessary moral conflict. None of these are true in some sort of objective sense, and we might well imagine that we might say that the truth of that steak is ‘not that, not that’, not a meal, not a murder, not a molecular construct, but something that has its own essence or nature independent. Not only would this be philosophically suspect (do things have independent essences?), but it would create a ‘knowledge’ of the ‘truth’ of steak that is sterile, bland, and utterly useless to anyone. We might well say that ‘steak’ is thereby destroyed.
God then, is like steak. We may intellectually understand that what we call God may represent any number of experiences, ideas, and traditions none of which represents the absolute truth, but only a partial truth. God looks different to different people, and this is why an understanding of the reflexivity of all God-talk is important. Your idea of God ultimately reflects something of your personality. Why did those ideas about God stick with you, why did you resonate with that image or that prayer? Why do you look at the barbaric commandments of the Old Testament and cringe? We understand ourselves through understanding God.
The chakras represent a wonderful way of conceptualizing this. We can look at the lower six chakras as colored lenses through which we look at the world, and so too at God. Here’s my (very brief) summary of some of the ways God looks from the point of view of each dominant chakra. Keep in mind, any one organized religion will include several of these, but we all ‘cherry pick’ what we like in those religions, so that’s what we’re looking for.
- Muladhara – God is the God of the tribe, the “God of my people”, and is usually conceptualized as a parent, the Great Sky Father, or the Great Earth Mother. God may appear as animal-headed, or as an animal totem. Animism, personified nature. God, like a parent, may appear incomprehensible, moody, and an emphasis is placed on appeasing God like one would an angry father. Emphasis on Taboos, and following proscribed rules. Can manifest as adherence to the religion of one’s parents despite limited belief or interest. God of strength. Also, “God is on our side, not theirs” mentality.
- Svadhisthana – God as a human image, beautiful forms like the idealized Gods of Ancient Greece. The Gods (often plural, or an emphasis on lesser sub-gods or saints with the power to intervene), are often capricious, vain, and ambitious, meddling in human affairs, often sexually (like interfering Cupid and Aphrodite or that old rapist Zeus). Mysteries of Sex, divine dramas and pageants, colorful statues and idols. Inclusiveness of other Gods and forms as being at least potentially valid. Cult of beauty and youth, Dionysian revels, and a constant search for the new thing or inspiration. Spiritual dilettantism.
- Manipura – God as the template for the ego; God as the Sun, the center of the universe. God as King, with dominion over the world, like a worldly ruler organizing things his way. God as power. Adherence to divine order and will. God is to be honored, and feared. He (usually) arranges things in according to a divine order, and that order continues to human things. Concerns about fate, about roles in society, status, and dignity of the individual. God is not immanent, but is ‘set over’ the Earth. Just like a King isn’t the Kingdom, but rules it from above, usually through deputies. Religions with high value on organization, dogma, and officials. Catholic Church hierarchy is a good example, as well as the pre-China Tibetan Theocracy, or the Islamic world under the Caliphate.
- Anahata – God is love. This is the major view of our current age. God is all-merciful, all-forgiving, utterly benevolent, and just an all around great guy/gal. He/she is also a personal God, concerned with each of us, and one with whom we can talk like a pal. Buddy Christ, the Buddha, and Krishna are good examples. Also, the Virgin Mary in Catholicism.
- Vishuddha – God as wholeness, as all-encompassing. God is good, but also evil. God is transcendent, but immanent. God of paradoxes. God understood as reflexive. In other words, an understanding of God as filtered through (or constructed by) the human psyche. Cultural and spiritual relativism combined with an acceptance of personal karma and destiny. Recognition that there’s a difference between God and our thoughts about God, but also that the later has value. This is very much the way we’re looking at things in this blog post.
- Ajna – God understood as transcendent. The human experience of a totally transcendent, content-less God. Neti, Neti. God as void. God as the ultimate singular underlying reality. God as the abstract monad. God as light.
- Sahasrara – God outside of human conception.
As we can see, this journey up the chakras and looking at God shows the lower chakras assigning tons of human experiences and ideas (parenthood, sex, love, rulership, etc) to God. The higher chakras represent a falling away of this sort of projection of our very human psyches onto God, and an attempt to view God as it is on its own. I like to look at the Crown Chakra as our connection to that deity, or that deity as it stands without projection. Ajna is our experience of that, as described by such mystics as Patanjali.
Now, clearly, on one level, God as seen through the root chakra or 2nd chakra is ‘less true’ than God as seen from the Ajna. Certainly, the experience of God is less about God and more about our own minds, at least in theory. But is that less useful to someone whose karma it is in this life to live from that understanding? If I see God as power, is that worse than someone who sees God as love? I’m not so sure.
To me, the real problem with God from the lower chakras isn’t less in the content, and more in the fierceness in which that content is grasped and taken as literal truth. The God of my ancestors may be important to me, but as long as I don’t fall into the trap of believing that this is the One True Way for All, there’s no harm, no foul. To me, transcending the lower chakras doesn’t mean abandoning the great strengths that come from them. Yoga scriptures back me up on this, emphasizing that any form of deity that speaks to you is a highly suitable object for meditation. In doing so, we may not only get closer to God, but get closer to ourselves as well. And that, the masters of the Ajna Chakra tell us, is the real mystery; the two are not so separate.
Shakti, and her manifestation as the Kundalini serpent coiled in the lowly first chakra, is God no less than her consort Shiva. Our minds then too, are a manifestation of the divine. The mind creates our forms of God, and it teaches us about God by teaching us about itself. Our struggles, our disagreements, and our conflicts are all a part of that divine play, that love-play, happening in us, outside of us, and through us every day. To me, that is an encouraging (and thereby useful, if maybe not ‘true) thought.
So should we give up our limited forms of God? No, so long as they retain power for us, power to move us forward. That’s the key thing, I think. When we touch God, he revolutionizes our world like a lightening bolt, whatever form he takes. If our experience of God is just what we want to hear, we’re getting farther away from Truth. God is the ever-widening circle that asks us to expand our view of the world. It doesn’t ask us to forget where we come from, but it does ask us to look to where we’re going. Kundalini may start as a primitive snake, but she doesn’t stay that way. She transforms into more and more beautiful forms, and so do we as we rise with her to the crown.
There is no part of me that is not of the Gods! Jai Shakti, Jai Shiva!
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