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.

Daddy, Why do the Demons Howl?

[First, I want to say that what has happened in Egypt over the past few weeks has left me unbelievably moved.  I rarely get as emotional as I have while watching the crowds in Liberation Square, but when I heard Mubarak had finally resigned, I was on the verge of tears.  With the retreat of our own liberties over the past 10 years, the corruption of democracies like Russia's, I finally feel like the world is getting better for once.   The best part, at least to me, is that is shows the power of Ahimsa, or non-violence.  I applaud the restraint of the revolutionaries, and I must admit that after Thursday’s speech by Mubarak I really thought we’d see serious violence in the streets of Cairo yesterday.  Instead, we had fireworks.  Egypt, thank you for restoring my faith in humanity.  My heart is bursting with sympathy and pride for what you've accomplished.  Now without further ado, lets return to your regularly scheduled blog post.]

Yesterday during my Sanskrit lesson, a word came up that stirred up a whole lot of associative thought.  The word is रवणम्, ravaṇam, meaning “sound making”, or “howling”, from the root रु, ru, to howl, cry, shout, or scream.  I immediately connected this to the main villain of the Ramayana, रावण, and Swami was happy to confirm this derivation of the name.

Rāvaṇa, King of the रक्षस Rakṣasa, or “man eating demons” and part of the असुर Asura tribe or race.  Rāvaṇa is depicted in the Ramayana as utterly ruled by his passions, desires, and lower instincts, however he is extremely cunning and disciplined.  He is strong enough of will to have subjugated the Gods and the Worlds so that Viṣṇu must incarnate in the form of Rāma in order to defeat him and restore order to the Universe.  While Rāvaṇa was said to to have undergone countless austerities and vedic pūja (rituals) in order to gain the tremendous power he had, at the beginning of the Ramayana, that is all over and he has become a petty tyrant.  He is called “He who Makes the Universe Scream,” and he torments not only living beings but the elements themselves, all for his egotic pleasure.  He also screams and howls quite a bit himself at every set-back during the story. 

            A quick aside for those of you who are interested in Norse cosmology.  There’s a theory that the Asura are connected to the Aesir, one of the two tribes of the Gods, of which Odin is King.  In the Norse/Germanic tradition, there are two tribes the Aesir and the Vanir.  As it has been explained to me, the more nature-oriented Vanir were likely the gods of the native folk of Germany or Scandinavia, who were invaded by Indo-European tribes.  According to my understanding, there was a war between them, mythologized into a war between the gods, in which the Vanir were victorious.  The tribes exchanged married hostages, and there was a peace, but it seems at some point the Aesir became dominant in the beliefs of the people.  Interestingly, in India, something analagous occurred.  The Indo-Europeans invaded and subjugated the pre-Vedic people of the sub-continent, and they also brought their Gods.  I’m not familiar of there being an early war between the Asura and the native, again nature-oriented Devas (lit. “Shining Ones”), but in terms of who ended up dominant, this time it was the native dieties.  By the time of the Ramayana (roughly 200BCE), the Asura were considered materialistic, egoistic, status-conscious, and full of unseemly passion.  Although there are more noble Asura depicted in the Ramayana, Rāvaṇa becomes the model.  The Asura gods have lost their hold on the popular imagination, and the Rakṣasas take their place. 

            Regardless of the origin of his tribe, the linguistic origin of Rakṣasa is of interest when we think of a much maligned form of Western esotericism, the Goetia.  Looking into its linguisitic origins, Goetia seems to be medieval Latin derived from the Greek word for Sorcery (low magick, as it is sometimes called, as opposed to Theurgy).  However, there is an important tradition which holds its translation to be “howling.”  I haven’t been able to (in my extremely brief search of the internet) find any explanation of this derivation.  Olulo is the only Latin word for howl that I can find, and while it actually sounds much like the some of the 'Barbarous words of Invocation', it bears no relation to the word Goetia.  If anyone has any insight here, I’d love to hear it.  I’m pretty sure I know where I personally picked up the connection of “howling” to the Goetia – that fun-loving fiend, Aleister Crowley. 

            Of course, Crowley was referring to a specific type of Goetia, the kind depicted in the famous book, the Legemeton, aka, Clavicula Salomonis, aka, the Lesser Key of Solomon the King, aka, the Goetia.  This book is a grimoire, a book which proports to instruct the reader on summoning the 72 spirits which are described inside.   Crowley wrote a phenomenal essay on the subject, “The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic”, as an introduction to his 1904 edition of the book.  I’ve always liked this interpretation of the Goetia, which is primarily psychological, even though I recognize that this was very early in Crowley’s career, and that the position he takes is one that he will increasingly abandon (although I’d argue, never completely give up).  The essential argument is that the various props (robes, incense, wands, etc) are all intended to effect the senses in such a way as to bring about certain mental phenomena, namely the Goetia.  Crowley unequivocally writes that “the spirits of the Goetia are portions of the human brain.”  In other words, they represent unconscious forces in the magician who attempts to summon them.  I should note that, should this be the case, it is a potent argument for both the traditional dangers of such an attempt (dredging up the unconscious is never ‘safe’), as well as its traditional benefits.  Psychology tells us plenty about the way “complexes” tie up the psychic energy of a person (Freud’s concept of the Libido).  If we can free this energy up, we would (according to Freud), have more mental energy at our disposal.  Therefore, such Goetic aims as learning “all arts and sciences", "what the Mind is”, or even to cause “Women to love Men, and to bring them together in Love.”  How does that work?  Well, if we work out our issues, we’re much more likely to be happy in love.  The point is that we can make use of the vast area of the mind that is the unconscious, whose forces, according to Carl Jung, always appear to be ‘other’ than the self.  Evocation of a spirit then, is a potential means of dealing with these unruly forces.  It's also, if you are predisposed to psychosis, a recipe for disaster and even schizophrenia.  
            William James, in his phenomenal classic The Varieties of Religious Experience made a wonderful case for arguing for a psychological understanding of mysticism, but in such a way as to not merely reduce mystical experience to fantasy, but showing its direct impact on the real world.  He writes "Yet the unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world.  When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so i feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal." (p561)

            Many people have compared the Goetia to the Jinn of Islamic cultures.  Jinn, according to Wikipedia, comes from a Arabic word meaning “hidden”, and that certainly would apply to “other-like” forces of the unconscious.  The Jinn share an additional mythic commonality with the spirits of the Goetia, they are both said to have been trapped or enslaved by the biblical King Solomon in a "vessel of brass". Entering into the legends of the West, the Jinn became the Genie, coming from the Latin, genius, and the "vessel of brass" became the Genie's lamp. The Latin genius was originally considered as an outside force which inspired a person, rather than a quality of a person.  For an excellent talk on this distinction, I refer you to this amazing Ted talk by Elizabeth Gilbert.  I never read Eat, Pray, Love, (and probably never will) but this talk was great.  

            This understanding of Genius as appearing as outside inspiration gives a positive twist on these unconscious forces.  But this notion didn’t originate with the Romans, but with the Greeks.  In Greek, Genius is Daimon or Daemon, which is where we get our word ‘demon’. Socrates famously talks about his Daimon, which seems to have some sort of veto power over his actions, in the Apology.  Similarly, in the Symposium, Eros is declared to not be a god, but a daimon.  In Greece, daimon was a rather neutral, or even positive concept, much like the Jinn.  Both types of hidden forces can appear as good, evil, or indifferent.  In many ways, these spirits were considered to be very human-like, even if usually immortal.  The spirits of the Goetia are usually described similarly by those who have dabbled into that questionable art. 

            There is another ‘species’ of spirits we should consider, if only to contrast – angels.  This word comes from the Greek angelos, or messenger.  Messenger of what?  Of God of course, which was considered to be the highest Good.  We have here the appearance of dualism – the increasing fixation of the Absolute World of God, so important in Neo-Platonism and Christianity.  There are “spirits of the air” (air is almost always esoterically associated with mind) everywhere, and some are worldly, some are messengers from God.  As worldliness became synonymous with ungodliness, impurity, and sin, the worldly spirits transformed from daimons to demons.   There became a division between the “messengers” and those who “howl.”  We can see this play out in the way demons are consistently depicted as dark and animal-like, and angels human-like, and effulgent.  (For more on that, see my previous post).

            While ultimately both can be seen as unconscious energies manifesting as “outside forces”, this distinction can be used to classify these things, perhaps unfairly, into two camps.  In Christianity, we’d see them as Angelic and Infernal, but for our purposes lets call them “worldly” and “transcendent”.  Yoga teaches us (rightly) that the worldly impulse takes us away from peace, from clarity about ourselves and our universe, by stirring up the citta vṛttis, the modifications of the mind.  The citta here is analogous to the Libido of Freud (not in its popular sexual connotation), as the sum total of the energy of the mind.  This energy gets whipped up by the senses, ‘modified’ into thoughts.  The word for modify is vṛtti which also means to revolve.  Swami Vivekananda describes these as ‘whirlwinds’ of the mind.  The ideal yogic state, according to the Yoga Sutras, is when these whirlwinds are completely stilled, so that the true nature of the Self is reflected by the still citta.  Devotional practices towards some ideal is a prescribed method towards this end.  Such messengers as angels may be useful, as they have been in inspiring many saints.  Spirits connected to worldly desires (concentrating the unconscious on such desires), would therefore lead to a rather uncalm mind, a sort of self-made 'hell'.  Maybe even one that howls. It is interesting to note that the method of the Lesser Key of Solomon is to first invoke one's own personal Daimon, (from the invocation "angelos ton Theon", angel of God), with faith in its authority over the 'lesser spirits' of the Goetia.

            Of course the final consideration is personal – do I want a quiet mind, or do I want to satisfy my unceasing worldy desires?  But I think that question may well be a false one.  As Sri Ramakrishna says repeatedly of Brahman, “He has become everything.”  Including the howling mad forces of worldly life.  While conventions like this dualistic ways of judging our deepest unconscious thoughts and impulses (some leading up, some down) may be useful in the gaining of self-control and attaining yogic states, they are just that, conventions.  Ultimately, these ways of looking at the world (or any ways of looking at the world) are illusory, are Maya. I think the truth is larger, grander, and stranger than any duality (including Yoga) can accurately describe.