Sahasrara – The Hole in the Top of your Head through which God Enters

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. 
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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. 
7. 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 2^nd 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!

Ajna Chakra - The Upper Floors of the Mind

Moving into the 3^rd 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 6^th 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 5^th 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 5^th 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 6^th 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 5^th, 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 3^rd 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. 

Chakra cycle

Its that time again.  In my Sunday 10am classes, we'll be taking a journey through the seven chakras.  Last year I wrote some thoughts on each of the chakras as we went along, and I'm going to repost them here so you can easily find them.  Last time around, I didn't write anything for the last two chakras, so I'm hoping to remedy that this time around.  Expect those posts during the 6th and 7th weeks.  In the meantime, enjoy!

What the hell are the Chakras anyway: Part I
What the hell are the Chakras anyway: Part II

1. Muladhara
2. Svadhisthana
3. Manipura
4. Anahata
5. Vishuddha

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. 

Manipura – The City of Gems

"Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun,
Shine on you crazy diamond."
                               -Pink Floyd, Shine on You Crazy Diamond

            (Nabhi) Manipura means literally “(naval) city of jems” and speaks to the tremendous wealth and power of this chakra.  It is situated in our navel center, the belly, home of the famous “core” that we always hear about in yoga and various other forms of exercise like Pilates.  The core isn’t one muscle, but rather a whole group of muscles that function as a sort of center of gravity for the rest of the body.  In hatha yoga, we tend to stretch outwards in most poses, the limbs reaching out infinitely, and the spine always lengthening.  The core provides the balancing act for this, literally and figuratively.  It pulls everything in to center, creating a sort of dynamic tension with the outward reaching limbs.  The core holds us up, orienting everything around that center of the body.  It allows for balance and movement, and is crucial for things like arm-balances and inversions.  Any fireman will tell you that carrying an unconscious person is much more difficult than a conscious person.  An unconscious person feels “heavy” because the weight is evenly distributed throughout the whole body.  A conscious person’s core is working, whether they are aware of it or not, pulling the limbs in to center, shifting their weight, etc.  It’s like the difference between trying to lift a 100 pound bag of bird seed and a 100 pound iron weight.  The weight is the same, but its concentration at a center (rather than shifting seed) makes for a very difficult experience in lifting it. 

            Just as the whole body orients itself to the core, we have a psychological factor that does the same job.  We locate this factor in the same physical area – the gut.  When we say “he’s got guts” or “she’s got a real fire in her belly”, we’re referring to this psychological quality of course, not the core.  We clearly identify the gut with courage, with fire, and with ambition, just based on those two simple images.  But what we’re really saying might be phrased as “he has a strong sense of his personal power which is able to carry him over any difficulty” (courage) and “she has a strong sense that she has the power to realize her ambitions” (fire the belly).  This is ultimately about our personal sense of self, of individual power and destiny – in a word, the ego.

            Now, in yoga the ego has a pretty bad rap.  Delve into the literature, especially the more New Agey kind, and you’ll read all about “transcending the ego” “realizing the illusion that is the ego” or the “limiting nature of the ego.”  I’m not saying that all of these are bad or wrong – I’ll say things far from it when we get into the higher chakras – but that they are incomplete.  We need the ego, just like we need the core.  The ego relates all of our experiences back to itself, organizing, translating, and importantly, assimilating.  We are constantly trying to incorporate our experiences into our sense of self, digesting them, so to speak.  When we have a regular psychological diet, we tend to have a rather stable (or even stagnant) ego; we ‘eat’ to maintain the status quo, or more negatively to expand the ego like a widening waist-line, perhaps overcompensating or protecting a ‘weak’ or ‘powerless’ core.  When we vary our diet, we may find nutrients our standard psychological diet neglected, like when we try yoga for the first time, but we may also find ourselves with a bit of spiritual indigestion.  Experiences come along that conflict with our notions of the way the world works, the projected order of our lives, and we may even find some ideas that we have a hard time “stomaching.”  We can’t figure out how to relate these things to the ego, and it gives us problems.  What happens then is psychologically called repression – if psychic fact or datum cannot be “me”, then is must be “not me”.  It then either sits below the surface, or is more often projected onto others.  

            Jung called this the “Shadow”, the bastard home of all those things that we reject (or vomit up, to continue the analogy).  I should also note that I connect the Manipura chakra to the Sun (this is not the only attribution, nor is it the traditional one), the classic Jungian symbol of the ego, our conscious identity.  The ego, relating everything to itself, creates a whole ordering scheme for the world.  The things that fit the scheme are excellent and put in their place, and the rest… well.  It becomes trivialized, or even violently rejected.  We might call experiences that don’t fit the scheme (especially those that show the ego as not the only or most important part of the whole person) are rejected as “irrational, silly, pointless, childish, pipe-dreams, dangerous, heretical, insensitive, over-sensitive, reactionary, radical,” just to list a few words commonly used to reject and ridicule.  An ex-initiate of a particularly literalist and seriously dysfunctional esoteric order called “The Hermetic Order of the Morning Star International” (or HOMSI, which may have been renamed by now – I can’t be bothered to keep track of esoteric politics) once told me that a common catch-phrase to explain away the many scandals associated with the leaders of this order was “the greater the light, the deeper the darkness.”  Clearly, this is a rather ridiculous platitude and excuse for bad behavior, but it is an excellent example of the ego in action.  Magic and mysticism can often be used for massive ego expansion, and I should note that the Golden Dawn tradition in all of its various manifestations tends towards a solar emphasis.  When we shine the bright light of the sun on the world, things are ‘illuminated’ indeed, and sight allows us to clearly distinguish objects in experience.  Bright sunlight also creates deep shadows that conceal and hide.  When we identify exclusively with the solar ego, we drive much that is important but which we have difficulty identifying with (or, ‘stomaching’) deeply into the Shadow.  Therein, we see it only in others whom we can then more easily hate, just as it seems that every magical order of the above type seems convinced that every rival order is full of black magicians (or every fundamentalist community sees ‘satanists’ or ‘witches’ under every rock).  In light of my previous post it may also be useful for me to note that HOMSI apparently (most of this is rumor, but from a few independent sources) had a universally Christian leadership, and despite their public claims, restricted the advancement of neopagans (a rather large group in the order) and Thelemites, aka, polytheists.  Christianity, ultimately a solar manifestation (despite its 4^th chakra origins – more on that later), privileges unity above multiplicity.  In Christianity, even the Trinity is really just One.  Polytheism is the way of the 2^nd chakra, the darkly lit world of many stars, and it looks like solar-Christian HOMSI just couldn’t stomach it.  Balance is crucial in dealing with the ego.  When the sun is too bright, we can’t see the stars, but when it’s just starlight all the time, we can’t see anything clearly.

           

            Manipura consciousness is greatly concerned with authority, hierarchy, and order.  A central image is that of the King and Kingdom – everything is fine when every subject does its job.  The serfs farm, the nobles fight and politic, the church ministers, and the king rules, directly and through his governors.  When some free-thinker comes along and refuses to submit, that free-thinker is soon a head shorter.  If it doesn’t fit the hierarchy, it is treason, heresy, or any other label you’d like, and must be annihilated.  Society, like our own egos, is conceived as fragile, and we must constantly be on the look out for that which threatens to send everything back into the chaos from whence it came.  Only the 4^th-chakra Enlightenment, with its notion of individual rights (where each is ultimately a King unto himself, within a society of Kings), do we have free enquiry without fear of persecution, and as recent politics has shown (stem-cell research is a good example), we’re not yet completely safe.  Why not?  Well, because our 4^th chakra democracy contains people who see the world through all of the lower chakras.  Those of the 1^st and the 3^rd warn us of dangerous ideas threatening society, of the Others, and tell us to “take it back” as local tea-party politician Greg Ball exhorts.  We may profitably ask what he wants to take back from whom. 

            This “King Consciousness” is extremely evident in religious thought, especially that which comes out of “kingly” civilizations, most especially the Roman Empire and Middle Ages.  Neoplatonism (and its close follower Hermeticism) originated at the end of the Roman Era and gave us notions like 7 heavens, choirs of angels like the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, etc, as well as an inverted hierarchy for the demonic realm.  Ultimately, I believe that most of this stuff originated with personal, one might say Gnostic, experiences.  However, in order to ‘digest’ these often strange and inexplicable experiences, people organized them in a very 3^rd chakra way.  They looked without and saw that, at the time, the best, safest and most bountiful civilizations were characterized by a strong central government by one-man and his capable governors, along with the rest of the Imperial hierarchy.  Areas where that influence was not evident, as in the history before its ascent, were dark, barbaric, chaotic and primitive.  To them, as Maximus says in Gladiator, “Rome is the light.”  Affix to this admiration for the power of the Empire a similar appreciation of Plato, and you get Neoplatonism.  Plato said that the gross things of this world are but shadows to the perfections of the Ideas on another ‘plane’ that the objects here just emulate.  The Neoplatonists saw even in the corruption of the late empire, a divine blueprint of the harmony of the universe which on another plane took the form of God’s own hierarchy.  Natural phenomena were explained by the notion that spiritual beings were everywhere, ordering creation according to divine will, like the emperor’s soldiers or tax-collectors.  Further, to get over certain logical problems with that arrangement, they postulated numerous worlds, dimensions, levels, etc, that acted as planes upon which the various levels of intermediaries could act our their duties, just like the empire had the Capitol, as well as regional seats for the Governors.  This is projected outwards into the heaven in astrology as well, where the planets are said to rule certain signs, and govern certain things about our lives. 

            Ultimately, I regard all of this as a beautiful creative act of imagining that created space for the possibility of interaction with these various things - of gnosis, in other words.  That said, I regard the experience as of something real – that there’s something there (wherever there may prove to be) that can be experienced.  When we look at the angels and spirits of neoplatonism and magic, we might be tempted to call the whole affair “silly” or “irrational” and push it into the shadows.  Ultimately, we need these imaginings, to keep a conscious idea of these events and experiences, to make some kind of personal sense out of them, however untrue the imaginings may be as accurate descriptors.  They may well even limit the collection of future data – and here is what the mystics warned us of.  If we regard angels as silly, we’ll never see them.  This is not to say that there are angels, just that we won’t see them, objectively real or not.

            The King easily becomes the Tyrant, and this is a serious problem.  The Manipura chakra is the center of order, yes, but also of witch-hunts, as I previously implied.  The first chakra tells us to trust authority, and that authority is found in the 3^rd.  We trust that someone will fix things, often the President, our own democratic King.  1^st chakra loyalty tries to get us to overlook their faults, perhaps explaining their darkness as a by-product of their incredible light.  This is certainly the logic that keeps dictators in power.  Yes, President Mubarak is terrible and violated human rights with impunity, but he keeps the terrorists (read: Shadow) out.  Yes, President Bush violated the law, international and domestic in his persecution of the Enemy, but he’s our president, and we have to stand by him. 

            I think most of the readers of this blog have a problem with authority.  Many yogis and most of my friends distrust the government almost as much as they distrust Wall St (another excellent example of the selfish part of the 3^rd chakra).  Where does this distrust come from?  Ironically, I think it is from well-balanced and strong Manipura Chakras.  If we had weak 3^rd chakras, we’d be looking for authority outside of ourselves to tell us what to do.  We see that occasionally in the yoga world as those who never get out from under the shadow of the great guru, or who idolize the celebrity yogis like Rodney Yee or Cyndi Lee, who often display merit largely physically or through a good business acumen rather than real knowledge.  The 3^rd chakra, being about status, our own place in the hierarchy, locates us above or below others.  We are submissive to our betters and dominant to our underlings. It cuts your very own place in the tribe and greater world.  We all break away from our parents at puberty, and this is necessary – how far is the question.  When we have a weak 3^rd chakra, we imagine ourselves low down in that hierarchy.  When we have a strong 3^rd chakra, we imagine ourselves quite high.  To have a problem with authority, to me, means regarding your own authority as preeminent.  

            To see the world through the 3^rd chakra as a primary lens is to see hierarchy everywhere, and to be hyper-aware of one’s place in it, ie, to be ‘status-conscious’.  Our goal in the chakra system is to progressively awaken, balance, and transcend each chakra and all that it represents.  To transcend the bottom three, the physical triad if you like (as they regard all things as objects in some sense), we need a strong impulse.  We need drive, a strong sense of self-confidence, a belief in our own ability to succeed, and the courage to accept the possibility that spiritual growth and mystic experience is not just the purview of clerics, saints, or gurus, but our own natural-born right.  We need a fire in the belly.  Only with that fire can we evaporate the moisture of our imagination, sending it upwards to the airy world of the 4^th chakra (which is quite dry without it).  Only with that fire can we burn through the 1^st ‘knot’ that is said separate the bottom 3 chakras from the 4^th, keeping us from higher truths.  When we confidently step out of the 3^rd chakra we become aware that the hierarchy is all an illusion, that we are all Kings (or have the potential to be), and that each of us has a unique authority over our own lives. 

            As an addendum, I’d like to draw your attention to an intriguing article in the NY Times by Stanley Fish.  This piece contains some really interesting stuff, but ultimately I look at it as containing interesting chakra insights (particularly of the 3^rd and 4^th).  I don’t agree with all of it, especially his conclusion, but I’ll leave it to your own ingenuity to see what I mean.

Muladhara - Drums in the Deep.

“Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -how passionately I hate them!” – Albert Einstein

            Sometimes images work better than any attempt to describe something literally.  So let your imagination make its associations as I paint some images with words:

            A child digs in the earth with a stick, molding it into houses and fortresses.  He turns over a bucket and pounds on it, amazed at its own power.  He creates, upsets, acts and does.  Sounds of strength as a man walks on the hard pavement, the footfalls of his work boots crunch and pulverize, ringing out in the slamming sound of physical force.  Heavy objects are lifted by brutal, blind force and are set down crushingly on the earth.  More men work, and the noise blends into a cacophony of effort and satisfying labor.  A voice of authority snaps with power, a call to order.  Callused hands make that order, strong hands shaping, destroying, remaking, making things of use and worth.  Men making order, creating their world, struggling to make something that lasts; the satisfaction of honest labor.  Each man is a part of this struggle, suborning his own petty concerns for the cause, for each knows the danger of going it alone, of being alone against the brutal, ugly world.  A world of wolves howling in the dark when the sun is overpowered by the cold, dark night.  Of jealous enemies lurking not far away, and only the strength of our people holding them in check.  Their fear of us, our fear of them.  This is the way of the world, the struggle to build something, to rise up out of animal need and aloneness.  The sounds of iron pounding on iron, forging tools, ways of taking charge of the wild earth.  Means of taming, subjugating, conquering.  The pounding is the sound of dominion.  The dependable heavy booted workers work, giving themselves over to each other as brothers to the powerful bellow of the father, the strongest of them all.  He who knows, who commands; the Lord over the Earth.  The protector against the terrible Other who covets the fruits of our labor.  The snapping staccato of his voice is like the snare drum, demanding instant attention.  The strong hands beat the earth mechanically at its omnipotent, thought-shattering power.  Their boots pound the earth, matching its rhythm, calling every step into conformity - each part becoming a part of something bigger.  Join us, the drums seem to say, join us and let the I become we.  We march in the parade, proud, tall, and strong. The Father leads us onwards, and his face beams with pride at our union under his dominion, and his approval is like the warm light of the sun on our faces.  We know we are doing right.  The furious beating sends us onwards in order rows and straight, perfect lines, orderly lines, lines that say discipline.  We become the lines, one body, one mind, and our strength becomes irresistible.  The drums think for us, and we lose ourselves in the bliss of the surrender to the tribe.  And fearing the Other, who in his unknowableness is just another wolf in the dark, just another animal, we march to take his land and his life.  We, who are right, who are the chosen of the Father, must have dominion over all of the works of this Other, over his tools, his fields, his livestock, his women and his other valuable objects and property.  We must add his strength to our own, lest we be conquered, for no other possibility can exist.  This is the law of the wild world, that the strong survive, and the weak are destroyed.  This is the inalterable law of our Father.

            If the above seems strange or ambivalent, then good!  It means you are a civilized being.  The Muladhara (mula – root; adhara – support) chakra symbolizes some very deep things in human experience, not all of which are particularly pleasant to behold from our modern standpoint.  On the one hand, this chakra deals with such important and healthy experiences as family and home, on the other with tribalism, mass psychology and fanaticism.  It is traditionally associated with the elemental quality we call “Earth” which is the projected mental quality of solidity, stability, and physical form.  When we think at this level, our world is that of discrete objects with definite functions, all relating to the human condition.  The Earth is for our use.  Anything without a definite function, something which is ‘useless’, is either disregarded if apparently harmless, or controlled if potentially threatening.  This is especially true for people – each person needs to ‘fit’ into the tribe, to have a role, a function.  Thoughts are also treated as concrete objects; threatening metaphors are responded to as physical threats.  An insult is no different than a blow to the head.  Think of the response to the recent Koran burning in Florida – people are killed in Afganistan, a largely tribal (1^st Chakra) society.  Ideas are things, dangerous things, even more so for the difficulty in laying one’s powerful hands on them.  Something I read in a local ‘paper’ recently also comes to mind – a complaint by the author that liberals are useless because they don’t produce anything.  Conservatives, so the author claimed, are the only ones useful to society because they make things. 

            The Muladhara chakra is said to be most active in us from the time we’re born until the age of about 7.  This is the time in our life where we ground ourselves in materiality, exploring our world, first by examining our feet (and if allowed, fecal matter), then crawling, then walking, running, and digging in the earth or making mud pies. Ask a young child why something exists and they’ll give an instrumental reason – it’s for our use; for looking at, for eating, so that we have something to stand on, etc.  There is little personal sense of self at this age, as the self is defined wholly in relationship to the immediate family, especially the god-like parents. 

            While all of the chakras are to some degree working in us at all times, we tend to view our world through one or more of them predominantly.  Clearly, I don’t view my world through the lens of the Muladhara, and most likely, neither do any of my readers.  Something like the chakras, especially taken as metaphorically and loosely as I’m taking them here, would seem largely incomprehensible to a ‘first chakra person’, or as a possible source of ‘foreign’ or dangerous to their in-group or tribe.  You may see this in fundamentalist responses to yoga – the argument is often not that yoga is evil, but that it may prove an avenue for demons and harmful ideas to enter.  Although you and I may not presumably view our world primarily though this very red lens (the color of danger, stop signs, blood, fire and anger), we all have the possibility to revert to first chakra thinking in the blink of an eye.  Why?  Because the root chakra represents the very root, the primeval basis of human experience.

            Take an enlightened, educated, and civilized person, and place them in a situation where their basic survival or that of their family is threatened, and you’ll see a civilized man become an animal again.  This is a great theme in fiction, and one of my favorite unconscious truths that pop up particularly strongly in the Zombie Apocalypse genre.  Take any zombie story and what you’ll find is a small (tribal-sized) group that has to struggle with letting go of their civilized way of thinking, their creature comforts and basic assumptions (i.e., that food is available at the supermarket), and deal with life as it comes on a fight/flight level.  Who are they fighting?  Vast, impersonal masses of figures that superficially look human but aren’t really so it’s ok to kill them – the Other.  These zombie masses want to eat them, to taste of their earthy material flesh and assimilate them; to make the individual tribesmen into one of them.  Note that usually the way it works is that the heroes don’t want to fight the zombies or give up their lives (except the ‘cowboy’ characters who enjoy it and, being 1^st chakra types themselves are often scarier than the zombies themselves), but that the masses force it upon them (by trying to eat them).  The survivors would have been happy to stay living at the 2^nd, 3^rd, or 4^th chakra, but the violent masses pull them down, pulling down civilization itself, and making them fight to even start from scratch.  So much about zombie survivor stories is about trying to bring order back into their lives, of remaking the world as best as they can.  Usually by finding a place to settle down (wandering and uprootedness are both common tropes), they try to fortify themselves, or hide, etc.  To me, a lot of the zombie genre, especially the really good stories like The Walking Dead (especially the graphic novels) and 28 Days Later, represent our cultural ambivalence about the 1^st chakra.  The masses of zombies represent the masses themselves, as there are always more ‘first chakra’ people (the ‘salt of the earth’) than others, but also the impersonal grind of a world always attempting to force conformity in the name of safety and order.  The response by the survivors is to become 1^st chakra people themselves, although unwillingly.  This is particularly well illustrated in 28 Days Later, but appears in the acceptance of the brutality of the new world of the apocalypse by those who are able to survive.  Those who can’t make the transition usually die early, doing something that seems incredibly stupid from the anxious level of the root chakra, but perfectly reasonable at another level.

            Perhaps it’s easier to simply say that when someone resorts to the root chakra, everyone involved is forced to.  Diplomacy ends when someone throws a punch.  Even the most humane and civilized society has to have weapons because the crazy dictators and tribal leaders do.  When our basic security is upset, be it by a physical threat, the loss of a job or loved one, the loss of a home, we're traumatized.  Someone who lives at that level we might label irrational and you wouldn’t be far from the truth.  The 1^st chakra is what I would call ‘pre-rational’, a way of knowing ‘with our gut’ rather than our head.  Although we are capable of reason in all the chakras, our reason is in service to the chakra in question. In the 1^st chakra, we know things ‘deep down’ without an appeal to reasons.  Things are just right and wrong, black and white, weak and strong, dominant and submissive, and reason serves to buttress these pre-existing intuitions.  Furthermore, that’s how we all behave when we’re forced to fight for our lives.  Fear contracts our consciousness until there is only us and them, victory or defeat.  And for survival purposes, you couldn’t wish for a more efficient system.  Stop and consider the bigger picture and you’re dead (or walking dead as the case may be).  When we learn to distrust authority, to abhor violence and force, we distance ourselves from this level, for good and bad.  But when we ignore it and refuse to see it in ourselves, rejecting the truth of our own capacity for absolute evil and thoughtless violence, we make a new Other in those who embrace even the most positive aspects of this power.  We cut ourselves off from a source of great strength – we cut ourselves off from our roots.

            The root chakra is security in a larger sense.  Once the zombies are no longer breaking down the doors, our feeling of security comes from the roof over our head, the physical and emotional support of our loved ones, and the certainty of food and water.  Classically, the father was the image of the provider of these things, of the protector.  While clearly this is not always the case anymore, on a psychological level I think it often still is.  Many women are not always comfortable about this idea, and for good reason.  When things break down to the root chakra level, women rarely end up in a good place.  When strength is the only virtue, women quickly become objects and resources.  I can’t help but think of the rape of the Sabine women in early Rome as a good example.  The image of the father, protector of those who are physically weaker, is tremendously primal in the human race, and therefore is usually our (perhaps immature) image of God – protector, supporter, Father, jealous, wrathful, and omnipotent.

            While there is clearly an important connection to the Mother archetype here, I can’t help but feel that the father tends to overshadow it.  Clearly there is a bias in my thoughts here, for obvious reasons.  But the idea of the Mother is usually connected to the ideas of cycles, of flow, of creativity itself, and that is definitely the domain of the 2^nd chakra (tune in next week).  On a superficial (but symbolically important) level, the male is like the sun who does not appear to change or waver, but remains steady and strong.  The woman classically waxes and wanes like the moon, in moods, in appearance (pregnancy), etc.  The Earth as Mother is either passive and dependent on active agency (molding, planting ‘seed’, harvesting, tilling), as in agricultural societies, or a moody bitch who sometimes gives, sometimes withholds, as I imagine she was thought of in pre-agricultural societies.  The earth of the root chakra is the “salt of the earth”, the stable materiality of the world which allows its forming and molding, its tilling and seeding.  It requires labor (in both senses of the word), sweat, and occasionally blood to eke a living on its surface.  In modern day goddess religions, an emphasis is placed on oneness with the Earth/Goddess, of the interconnectedness of all things.  This is an incredibly mature and intellectually advanced attitude that completely transcends the root chakra.  One does not feel ‘connected’ to the wolf that is about to eat you.  One only feels terror and the screaming blood in the heart.  The Goddess of these religions is a higher goddess, and in my opinion a genuine improvement over (but not a perfect replacement for) the patriarchal God of the root chakra (and others).  That feminine conception may include the root chakra (Kali, Innana, and the various dark, brutal goddesses are good examples), but the evolved idea of immanence is unthinkable to the primitive root chakra, with its emphasis of the earth as object to its transcendent subject.  One who is confirmed in the belief that God rules over the Earth would have a hard time accepting that God is the Earth.
            Speaking of the feminine, I should point out that many of the images and ideas here have a particularly masculine character.  I acknowledge that, especially as they are the products of my own meditations, and I myself am rumored to be male.  However as the above makes clear, I suspect (but do not assert) that at the level of the root chakra, the female mentality would relate itself dependently to a strong male as mate/husband, giving up her identity to him the same way he submits to his tribal brothers and leader.  I would suspect that as the tribe guarantees strength for the man, the man guarantees strength for the woman.  However, this is not to say she is without roles herein.  The one that springs to my mind is that of the keeper of the harvest, the preserver of the food, shelter and clothing.  We see it today when a rumor of 6 inches of snow unleashes a frenzy of (mostly) women rushing to the supermarket and cleaning out the shelves as if the apocalypse had arrived.  I have no doubt that there are many other images of the feminine 1st chakra that I'm leaving out.  I encourage any female readers to leave a comment with any ideas.

            The root chakra is not all violent and animal.  In the Tantric system, it is also said to be the home of Kundalini, the symbol not only of the immanent goddess, but of the natural omnipresent urge to evolve that is common to all living beings.  In the Tantric conception of creation, when Shakti reached the end of her potential – matter – she rested therein, and that’s where she sleeps today.  Evolution began in the muck, but has taken us to the heavens and beyond.  When we work with our Muladhara chakra, we work to find some stability in our lives – a stable home, family, etc, so that this supportive structure can form the foundation on which a great edifice can be built.  From this steady earth under our feet, we can push off it, push upwards, like the serpent whose crawls on his belly rises up, tasting the world with its darting tongue.  So much life grows upwards, rising up from the earth in increasing complexity.  Civilization cannot escape the fact that it is founded on the brutal, because human psychology is founded on the brutal.  We can transcend it, seek to understand it, prepare for it, but we can never eliminate it.  Tantra tells us that we can use it, that we can take that powerful primal energy and turn in not downwards into brutality, but upwards, like the snake lifting up her head to sniff at whole new worlds only dimly perceived.  It is in reaching these loftier visions of the world that we reach up out of brutality ( towards science, humanism, higher spirituality), and where we find the possibility (even the audacity) of hope that the blind struggle of the past was worth it.

            We must start at this primordial level because if not the earth threatens to shift underneath us and to send whatever we build screaming into the abyss.  The energy of the root chakra is that energy which makes us feel so very alive at a rock concert, a football game, or a political rally.  It is life, and the will to life, expressing itself at the primal level of man - the tribe.  It harkens back to a period of our history in which our hairless, thin-skinned bodies, lacking any natural weapons, were vulnerable when alone in the dark.  It speaks of the shared power we discovered in our strong brothers to bring order, to make the world as we will – to have "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." It is the rock of tradition, of certainty, and of order.  It is the demands of loyalty, warning us that a house divided cannot stand.  It is our sense of community, of participation in the lives of others like us.  It is the assurance that we don’t have to go it alone, that there are those we can depend on because there’s something deep down, something in our blood that tells us we’re the same.  When this power is healthy it allows us to function at higher levels, giving us a safe foundation from which we can think risky thoughts, and dare to dream of a better world.  When it is unhealthy we feel alone, threatened, and narrow-minded in our fear.  Therefore we must respect this power, harness it, and never take for granted the ground on which we stand.
            When we reject this power, which is really the power of the body itself, this material sack of goo and hormones, we push the urge to life deep into the unconscious.  It resurfaces (as things do) as the infernal region, which is always down there somewhere.  Its images are half-animal and half-human, satyrs and cloven-hoofed demons, fear and physical pain.  The body and its violent ways seem shameful to the upraised intelligence, and are rejected as sinful, corrupt, and base.  But when we can't see something, it becomes its most dangerous, and the very brutality that is transcended emerges as crusades, jihads, inquisitions and holocausts.  We can't get rid of the 1st chakra (or any of the chakras), and the harder we try, the worse it gets.  In many ways, the tantric side of yoga, especially hatha yoga, is a way to embrace, and utilize this very material and corporal body as a means, rather than an obstacle to, enlightenment.  To me, this is what the idea of Kundalini needing to be awakened from the muladhara signifies - a means of taking hold of the very well to live itself and riding it as high as we can.  The serpent in the garden has a secret if you learn to listen.

            Before I end, I want to illustrate what happens when we disassociate from this level with an example from our own times.   I think that this has somewhat happened in the conservative/liberal split in this country. This is where the notion of conservative “code-words” and “hidden racism” come in.  Or when conservatives say that we liberals “just don’t get it.”  Liberals seek to convince conservatives through rational argument, or an appeal to fairness.  Conservatives are more effective when getting people on a “gut” level.  Glenn Beck at the height of the financial crisis is a good example of this principal.  Many liberals wonder why so many poor people in this country vote Republican against what appears to be their economic (read: rational) interests, instead voting on social or moral issues.  The fact that we wonder about this, that we don’t get it seems to me to be because we have trained ourselves, or been educated to eliminate the tribal urge and to ignore the tribal feelings that it can produce.   This may not be bad, but it can force us to project this “irrationality” onto others, denying it in ourselves (despite its omnipresence), and continuously misunderstanding it in politics.  When conservatives call liberals "soft on crime" or "weak on defense", we know which chakra they experiencing life through.  But are they completely wrong?  A murderer or terrorist is more than likely operating at the root chakra level, and sometimes it seems silly to offer 2nd or 4th chakra solutions as a compassionate cure-all.  Eventually that first chakra animal kicks us in our humanitarian teeth and we're forced to fight.  When we reject the primal energy in us, when we regard ourselves as tame, we're surprised by the blow.  When we reclaim the power of survival, we can better understand those who would harm us.  We are prepared to act at any level, to communicate at any level; perhaps to redeem them, perhaps to educate them, but if all else fails, it prepares us to resist them with all our strength.

PS: I want to point you to an amazing paper by Jonathan Haight, What Makes People Vote Republican, that I find to be the most convincing answer to this question. It is far better reading than this rambling post, and I trust you’ll be able to see the connections between the 3 moral catagories that liberals ‘educate themselves out of’ and the associations of the root chakra. 

Have a wonderful week.  Join me next time for the 2^nd Chakra!