My Current Hero

I just came across an interview with my current favorite religious thinker, Jeffery Kripal.  Some of you may have heard me talking about him.  I call him my hero because I think his writing is in many ways heroic in its aim to dramatically change the way we think about religion and religious experience.  I'm currently reading the book that is mentioned, and its every bit as interesting as it sounds.  Enjoy!

Svadhisthana – The Abode of the Soul

Magic is real.  This is the message the 2^nd Chakra whispers into our soul nightly, and sometimes its moonbeams penetrate even into the safe and ordered day-lit world to challenge our preconceptions and certainties.  When we see the world through the softening, enchanting world of the 2^nd chakra, it becomes an enchanted world of living presences, of meaning and depth, and of an opening to possibility.  This is the question, rather than the statement.  The “what if” of fantasy and sci-fi, rather than the clear cut realm of fact and empirical description (which becomes less clear-cut the deeper we probe).  This is the multi-pointed consciousness expressing itself creatively in an infinite number of potential ways, rather than the ‘either/or’, ‘is’ or ‘is not’, 0 or 1, light or darkness.  Moonlight is neither light nor dark, but the subtle shades in between, what psychologists like James Hillman, Carl Jung, or Thomas Moore tend to call the ‘soul’ – the intermediary between spirit, the high flights of reason and religion, and earth, the hard matter and the body.  Soul brings the spirit to earth by Art, and upraises the earthly to the spiritual by the same means.  This is more than the aesthetic sense (although it includes it), but it is our very capacity for imagination, the very embryonic fluid of all original ideas. 

            Svadhisthana means “abode of the self” which we may also usefully take as “abode of the soul.” It is located in our sacral region, which corresponds to our reproductive centers, the physical location of our ability to create life.  Interestingly, this important center is similarly located in Sufism (the Nafs), and Kabbalah (the Nephesh).  Both refer to a kind of energy or soul which is necessarily relational and we might say interpretive.  Its inestimable energy in all systems is said to be related to desire, or Eros, which, depending on its object, inclines either downwards, towards matter (usually with the standard moralisms and shame associated with sexuality), or upwards, towards spirit.  It is ambiguous, religiously dangerous, and even occasionally transgressive. It is, in a word, powerful. 

            As the essence of our creative potential, our ability to interpret and reinterpret for ourselves, powerful is an understatement.  Its not hard to see why this power, or means of accessing it are feared and often repressed, especially by religious orthodoxy (who reserves the right to interpret for its own specialists) and repressive governments (who reserve power in general for itself, preferring passive subjects to creative ones).  This is not the power of order, but of the chaos from which all things spring. Imagination, the key to this power’s mysteries, is often itself attacked and ghetto-ized.  In the dominant culture of the West, imagination and its associated ways of knowing (feeling, empathy, gnosis) are accepted mainly in children, women, and certain special classes like ‘artists’ which is to me merely a way of putting this way of knowing in a locked box while enjoying its fruits as entertainment.  Other understandings of this power are considered ‘fringe’ and locked away in various sub-cultures.  A good example is this NY Times critic’s complete misreading (and subsequent lashing of the critic) of HBO’s new fantasy series, A Game of Thrones.  Sci-fi/Fantasy fans will recognize here an ongoing lack of acceptance of this sort of fiction.  These things seem inexplicable to the mainstream, which sadly lacks the imagination to see even its own mental cage.

            The dominant way of knowing, the only one allowed in official discourses, is of the 1^st and 3^rd Chakras.  In the first chakra, we deal with the world concretely (earthily), and we see objects as utilitarian or useless.  The world is mechanistic, and so is a human being.  This is the positivist/materialist point of view, one woefully incomplete and incapable (I believe) of describing the fullness of human experience.  While this point of view appears to be in decline in some parts of the academic community, it appears to be on the upswing in politics and mainstream culture.  The world has been divided into the material world of science, quantitative measurements, and empiricism which we accept and trust, and as that subjective world of “whatever the hell that is,” as scholar of religion Jeffrey Kripal sarcastically puts it.  As society seems to trust less and less in the vagaries of the humanities, looking instead for utilitarian “dollar values” for education programs, we are collectively disowning a massive portion of the human experience as something of no value because it is difficult to quantify a use for it.  Love becomes merely a way of luring us, carrot and stick style, to reproduce.  But anyone who has ever been in love will tell you (if you don’t know yourself) that is not how it is experienced.  This is because love does not belong to the dominant paradigm of the 1^st and 3^rd chakra (except where it is mere reproduction or a disturbing power dynamic respectively), but to the 2^nd and 4^th.  These chakras dissolve differences in their softer light, allowing for an experience of the world that is interconnected, holistic, which breaks down the fallacy that we are all separate units, island-like egos with vast spaces separating us.  The 2^nd Chakra does this by bridging the gap with feeling, and in doing so unites heaven (the realities of the 4^th chakra and above) and earth (the world of the 1^st and 3^rd chakras).  The feminine nature of this chakra, as opposed to the very masculine 1^st and 3^rd, attests to possibility of such a union in symbolism as the mystic Wedding.

            Much of what I’ve been really doing with this blog is trying to come to terms with much of this.  For me personally, the powers of the second chakra have in truth moved me more than any other.  You can see that in this blog I’m often philosophical, and I encourage skepticism and a certain empiricism in myself and others.  I respect science, especially the findings of psychology.  But you may also note that I’m applying this mentality, which can be seen as relating to the 1^st and 3^rd chakras, to 2^nd chakra ideas.  What I’m interested in is the fantastical, the ambiguous, the numinous, and the spiritual.  The reason for this is that my 2^nd chakra, my soul, has enriched and even directed much of my life.  I have had tremendous experiences of soul, as well as of spirit and earth.  I have seen magic work, telepathy happen, and the world as we know it break down in the face of ways of knowing that are completely different, other, from normal daylit consciousness.  But yet I am consciously masculine and a product of the culture in which I was raised.  I was lucky enough to receive a first rate education.  I like to think of myself as rational and intellectual.  Therefore, I can’t help but try to understand these dreams in the daylight of reason, to make the fantastical and imaginal make sense.  I desire to understand the nature of meaning itself.

            Yet, when we turn the lights up, the magic often vanishes, like a rain puddle when the hot sun bears down on it.  It’s like a candle-lit dinner where the maitre d’ brings up the house-lights unexpectedly – it ruins the mood.  And the mood is where the soul is, where the power is stirred up in us.  It may well be that my quest was doomed before it even began.  Is it possible to build a coherent way of interpreting the world in which we can find balance between hard facts and ambiguous imaginings?  My recent reading has been all over this possibility, and the diversity of exactly how such a thing could be perhaps proved James Hillman’s point – the soul is ultimately as multiple as its images, and interpretive models that aspire towards its truths must be as multiple as our souls.  We have to be careful not to dry up the ocean within us with too much harsh light, to much egotic separateness, and face the music of the spheres.  The title of this blog, “Slouching towards Bethlehem” hints at what is to me only yet dimly realized, a “rough beast” of a philosophy that brings my experiences, rational or otherwise, into one being – a complete idea.  It is a struggle for wholeness in my own being, and has been as difficult as any other kind of birthing.  This “beast” of an idea I feel growing within me, kicking and poking me from within with its horns, hoping one day to be born.  Under the surface it lurks, and I cannot yet tell whether when it surfaces it will be a stillborn monstrosity, or the radiant child of my hopes.

            So dim the lights, light some candles, put some music on (or better yet, create your own), and set the mood for a night of enchantment.  Feed your soul with images and beauty.  Dare to let yourself be inspired and revitalized.  Without the magic of the soul we experience life as lifeless, dry, and disconnected from meaning.  It becomes a thing to be endured stoically rather than richly experienced.  Instead, enshrine the soul here, in its proper abode, on its own terms, without reduction to biological utility or mere myth.  An entire ocean of possibility will open up before you.

            To end, I leave you with a quote to hopefully provoke some imaginings in your own mind, from a book I’m reading right now, Jeffrey Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible.  Enjoy!

            “This… is why the necessarily objectifying nature of the scientific method can pick up the slightest examples of something like psi in the controlled laboratory, but must miss  all the most robust paranormal ones in the real world of human experience.  I have heard contemporary parapsychologists joke about what J.B. Rhine really accomplished at Duke University by operationalizing psychical research and insisting on controlled laboratory conditions and statistical approaches:  he figured out how to suppress psi and finally make it go away.  Bored sophomores staring at abstract shapes on playing cards is no way to elicit  psychical phenomena. 

            “But love and trauma are.  Consider what we will encounter below as the classic case of telepathic dreams announcing the death of a loved one.  Such dreams are not objects behaving properly in an ordered mechanistic way for the sake of a laboratory experiment.  They are communications transmitting meaning to subjects for the sake of some sort of profound emotional need.  They are not about data; they are about love.” (Italics are Kripal’s), p. 24

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!

What the hell are the Chakras anyway? Part II

            My understanding of the chakra system is essentially based on the above.  The chakras are fundamentally ways of localizing or projecting psychic contents onto parts of the body.  This appears to be something deep in our nature as human beings.  Across the world we humans feel with our ‘heart’, despite the inescapable fact that the physical heart is just a big blood-pumping muscle.  We may, like George Bush, know something in our ‘gut’.  When we try hard to remember something, we look ‘up’ even with out physical eyes, right to where we locate the 3^rd eye chakra.  In esoteric systems arising from every religious tradition there is the appearance of systems of the subtle body which link certain ideas and experiences to various ‘centers’ in the body.  More surprisingly, these centers often mean similar things, like the example of the physical heart being tied not only to impersonal compassion but to attachment to those we love.  We may say therefore that this facility of projection may be not learned but innate; that it archetypal.

            Does all this mean that our compassion is ‘in’ the physical heart in any real way?  Not necessarily, and here’s where our thinking can get bogged down.  Compassion is no more located ‘in’ the heart than the above woman’s daddy issues are ‘in’ her boyfriend, and no more than my love of my wife is ‘in’ my wife.  The compassion, the daddy issues, my love for my wife, these exist in the mind alone.  In the latter case, its experience is provoked by my seeing her, and in the others it is externalized and projected onto an other or body part.  Ultimately, our experience of the world is not objective, but is a combination; a sort of 2 part hologram made up of the sense images presented to the brain, and whatever glosses the mind overlays upon it.  This is why no one will ever find the chakras in the spine or anywhere else outside of the mind.  Why these areas should specifically be thus associated is a mystery, and thus far those who have tried to explain it have only ended up confusing the issue by confusing their inner visions with objective fact.

            Believers in the chakra system may find themselves discomforted by my assertions, and may feel that I am trivializing an important experience or ‘reducing’ the chakras to figments of the imagination.  This is not what I’m saying at all.  All of our experience is ultimately ‘in the mind’, even the apparent world of sense.  But the purely sensory aside, our human experience is not of a materialistic world of hard facts and matter, but of emotional shading, pet notions, intuitive meanings, and a quest for personal satisfaction and happiness.  A hard-minded scientist may look at the chakras as nothing but imagination, but he could not deny that our models of atoms are but imaginings of detected forces that we create to make sense and use of them.  Similarly, while he may explain love as little more than instincts and hormones, when he falls for someone those descriptions will not suffice to capture his actual experience, and he may turn instead to the vague and unscientific poem or love song.  We can benefit from making a distinction between the observation of objective ‘facts’ of the sensory world (like the skeletal system) and observation of subjective experiences of our own psyche.  This is not to say that these subjective experiences are not based on and contiguous to those ‘objective facts’, but our experience is often quite different than whatever is happening objectively (and in the case of the chakras, we really only have the smallest understanding of what that may be).  Our experience of the relation of the sun to the earth is that the sun rises and sets, but in reality that is not what is happening.  But if we were to directly experience the earth as moving rather than stationary we would quickly become too disoriented to do much of anything.  This is a good example, because although we now all know that the earth is in fact moving around the sun, it doesn’t change our personal experience of it, and that experience is not fundamentally different than that of a person who lived in ancient times. Similarly, an understanding of the chakras as mental phenomena does not change our experience of the chakras as apparently localized in the body.

            What I’m trying to say is that mental objects are no less real and important as physical objects, and should not be treated as such.  Above the level of basic survival, mental objects are usually far more of a preoccupation in our lives than any physical object – after all, isn’t the pursuit of happiness itself a quest for a mental state?  When we decide to investigate the inner world more deeply, we must first separate it into discrete forms and structures, just as the ambivalent ocean of milk must be churned to bring out the various objects of the world.  Similarly, we bring out contents from the unconscious and project them out into the world – onto people, or in the case of the chakras, onto the body itself.  This is because we are evolved to think most clearly about physical objects, and that is all our language is developed to handle.  A chakra is so called because a wheel as a symbol can bring up associations of movement, of limited circumference and stable center, not because what is being described has anything in common with a physical wheel of any kind.
 

            The reality of projection, combined with the impossibility of locating the chakras in an autopsy, results in what is often called the subtle body, or astral body.  A way this is often arranged is the 3 body model:  the gross body (the physical body), the subtle body (where the chakras are said to be located), and the causal body.  The last is the deepest, and we might liken it to the Ocean of Milk itself before its separation.  It is by nature undifferentiated, and from it is said to come the subtle body, which in turn is the template for the gross body.  To me, the subtle body is ultimately the vast mental world, inclusive or the projections we overlay onto the physical world.  It is harder to experience directly, hence subtler, and is experienced often as ‘prior’ to the gross.  This is how it is also described in Neoplatonism, which is the Western version of the same idea.

            This brings me full circle back to the creation myth we went into in the last post.  The churning of the ocean of milk was superficially understood as the creation of the world, but esoterically understood as an undoing of the very same process.  Here we have the causal body giving rise to the subtle, which in turn gives rise to the gross.  Where do we get this notion, and why do we care?  It comes from the experience of the mystics and seers themselves.   When we shift our awareness from the hard earth of the gross body, we enter the realm of the mind and its projections.  In order to deal with these mental contents meaningfully, we have to see them as outside of ourselves, as a vision within or projection without.  Either way, we get a new perspective and objectivity in relation to it.  Therefore, a system is developed by the unconscious (it is rarely a conscious choice) or learned from a system like Tantra, and is experienced as a ‘world’ that exists contiguous with (but distinct from) the sense world of physical objects – the ‘astral’ world. When we see the body with this lens, we see the physical body, and we also see the projections we place on it in the form of symbolic systems like the chakra.  This is how the mind sees them, so we assume that such exists in the same way that a table exists.  Similarly, when these contents and complexes are dissolved back into their basic ‘causal’ state, we have the experience of the causal body.

            Ultimately we only find ourselves in murky water when we start to assume that our mental experiences, such as symbolic visions (of figures, elements, of heavens, etc), have a reality of the same type as the various objective objects of the earth.  They are just as important as such facts, but important doesn’t mean literally true.  This is what is meant by the classic mystic injunction “don’t confuse the planes.”  The astral (mental) world does not follow the same rules as the physical, and what is true there may not be true here.  Confusing the two is like confusing the experience of the sun apparently moving across the sky with objective fact.  It appears that way, but we must always remember in the back of our mind that the actual situation is the opposite.  Only the naïve take symbols literally, however helpful and significant they may be.

            When I showed this post to Adrea, she asked an excellent question - what about the use of a pendulum to detect the chakras and energy centers.  This is done when you hold a pendulum over a chakra 'site', and it then moves in various ways which can be interpreted by the reader.  You can try this for yourself very easily and find it works.  What I did in response to Adrea's question was to hang a pendulum from a fixed object (not someone's hand) and demonstrated that for both of us, the pendulum did not move when encountering a chakra.  Ultimately, it is the other person that can detect the chakra, because chakras are interpersonal psychic realities, like the reality of the earth not moving and the sun traveling across the sky, rather than a reality independent of mental life, for instance the fact that the earth does in fact move.  This does not discount ways of knowing other than sensory, like telepathy (which I believe in), the intuitive ability to detect tremendous amounts of information from another person, or even 'energetic healing' which certainly seems to be able to effect plants and animals alike.  Using the chakra model as a structural support for intuition is a valid and useful method of holistic and intuitive healing, but the experience itself may not be, on an objective level, exactly what it seems.

            To recapitulate all this, we can say that the chakras are the localization of psychic contents in the physical form in the form of 7 (or more) archetypal divisions of human experience.  What each of these divisions signify will be topics for later posts.  The means of working with the chakras is to ‘open’ them – i.e., accessing the mental energy locked up in associated complexes and contents.  The technique I’ll be using in my class is called “Tattva-Shuddhi” or element purification, and it is likened to dissolving each chakra, starting at the bottom, or ‘earth’, into the next until they once again become undifferentiated; i.e., resolved back into its causal state in an attempt to experience the ultimate nature, or soul, in itself.  This process is sometimes called Laya Yoga.  Laya means absorption or dissolution.  What is being dissolved?  The complexes.  What is being absorbed?  The newly freed mental energy.  Clearly this is a process of years, not a mere 7 weeks, but we can (and do) practice this again and again with the hope that one day we can break through to the final goal.  In Tantra this goal is poetically described as the union of the goddess Shakti (the manifested reality, or body-mind complex) with Shiva (the soul, or absolute consciousness).  It is effected by the uplifting of the body-mind from its lowest level (the 1^st or ‘root’ chakra) where Shakti is said to be at rest after the exertions of her manifestation, dissolving it into the 2^nd chakra, and so on until Shakti meets her consort at the crown chakra, located at the top of our head.

            For the next 7 weeks we will systematically explore each of the divisions of ideas, and if you care to meditate on the chakras to unlock your personal unconscious, to perhaps begin the process of Laya or dissolution.  I hope you’ll join me in exploring this powerful system.

What the hell are the Chakras anyway? Part I

The chakras, energy, prana, and the whole 'subtle body' thing can be an extremely vague and confusing set of ideas.  What do we mean when we talk about chakras, chakra opening, chakra balancing, chakra purification, etc?  Do a quick google search and you’ll see the diversity of ideas and the strange convolutions of language that this subject seems to generate.  In one place chakras are “energy centers”, in another they are related to (or even reduced to) glands and nerve plexii (that is the plural for plexus, right?), and in another they are related to the astral body or aural field.  To the hard-minded type, this sort of language can make the whole thing easy to write off as hogwash.  They start looking around for the auras and astral body, and can’t detect a thing.  To the more intuitive-minded, descriptions of the chakras seem to echo an intuited truth that is vaguely perceived, and perhaps with practice perceived directly and “seen” in a vision.  My goal in these two posts (broken up for length) is to try to present my theory about the chakras as clearly as I can. Although the very subtlety of the subject matter makes a certain vagueness unavoidable, I will try to avoid the mystification and obfuscation (intentional or not) that is ubiquitous in this field.

            The chakras are usually described as “energetic centers”, “psychic centers”, or some such “center”.  The word ‘chakra’ (pronounced ‘cha-kra’, not ‘sha-kra’) just means ‘wheel’, but this, psychologically speaking, implies a center.  A wheel is essentially a mandala shape, an organization of images around a single point in the center.  The circumference is the limit which contains the related ideas.  The chakras are often described as moving, spinning, or revolving, implying constant change and flux.  This also relates to the idea of the ‘chitta vritti’ of modification (vritti) of the mind-stuff (chitta), or libido. Vritti implies change, revolution (as in Parvritta Trikonasana, rotated triangle pose), or movement.  We can think of the chittam or libido as an ocean of undifferentiated mental energy, within which are numerous eddies, waves, and whirlpools which are our thoughts.  Some of these harden into habits, hard notions, and complexes. In my last post (on the Ocean of Milk), I briefly touched on the idea that our complexes are ‘knots’ in the libido, or sum total of mental energy.  These knots bind up energy into forms, these forms forming the structure of our individual psyche.  Got picked on in middle school?  That probably effects how you see the world, and creates life-patterns that give form to your conception of yourself and your world.  Had a supportive and stable family situation growing up?  That too creates your way of interacting with the world.  When we identify closely with these patterns, we are limiting the potential ways we understand ourselves and our environment.  There is nothing inherently wrong with this – if it was any other way, we would have no individuality, or even motivations, and the beauty of diversity would be lost, because there could be no action. 

            A totally calm chittam (the yogic state of “chitta vritti nirodha”, cessation of mental change), is a state of potential and not activated, manifest energy.  This is a state of separation from the world, and of identifying with the undifferentiated soul itself rather than the specific persona (as an aggregate of the chitta vrittis).  This, according to the Yoga Sutras, is the goal of yoga.  But should the ultimate goal be to remain therein, absorbed in the ultimate unmanifest reality?  To me, this seems like escapism, and a pathological rejection of the world.  I think the healthier and mature way is presented in such thoughts as “after enlightenment, the laundry.”  Or of the college student who asked the Zen monk “what would you do if one day you were on your way to get some ice cream and you achieved nirvana?” to which the monk replied “I’d probably go enjoy some ice cream.”  In many traditions there is an important grounding, a rooting of even the highest flights of the spirit into the grossest earth.  High meditative states mean nothing if you still going around acting like a jerk to everyone when you’re not meditating.  Ultimately, we live on the earth, not in heaven. 

            Tantra, the religious tradition which developed the chakra system most completely (part of Hinduism, related to but distinct from yoga, Vedanta, etc.), also provides an answer to the ‘unworldliness’ of the more traditional yogic systems.  It does this through the veneration not only of the pure Purusha (soul) freed from its samyoga (bondage) in Prakriti (matter-mind), but by the veneration of the principal of manifestation itself – this stuff that we live in, of which the body, the mind, and everything else is made of.  This is the idea of this  world itself as God.  In the Yoga Sutras, Purusha is the only goal, and Prakriti (the world) is what must be ultimately rejected in order to experience that goal.  In Tantra, Prakriti is called Ma, the Goddess, Shakti (meaning power), and is worshiped equally with her counterpart, or with even more devotion.  Her counterpart is called here Shiva, which we can treat as consciousness, the Self, and the soul.  What is recognized herein is not only that manifest reality is a good thing, but also that the mind-body complex, which is considered Prakriti, or various stages of matter, is the vehicle for enlightenment.  This is far from the idea that the body or mind is a burden, but it also is inclusive of the notion that the mind-body can also act as a prison.  It is therefore neutral, able to be used for animal pleasure, or to scale the heights of the soul.  The body-mind is the cause of bondage, but it is also what is liberated; the soul is already free.

            Sir John Woodruff in his book The Serpent Power sums this positive notion of the world up well:  “One of the cardinal principles of the Shakta-Tantra is to secure by its Sadhana [practice] both Liberation (Mukti) and Enjoyment (Bhukti).  This is possible by the identification of the self when in enjoyment with the soul of the world.”  It is the recognition that all souls are one soul experienced not only in the highest states reached by the renunciate (the unmanifest), but also in the daily experience of the embodied soul (the manifest).   Realization of that, as opposed to merely intellectualizing it, is difficult either way, and with ultimately the same obstacle – the false identification of the self with the characteristic habits of mind, the body, and persona.  If we are ‘this person’ we can never experience the world from any other  than the egotic point of view.  If we learn to loosen the borders of our little self, we get a shift of perspective, and are able to create a new relationship with the contents of our own mind.  To me, this is ultimately what Tantra and the chakra system is all about – a way to gain perspective on, and to ultimately resolve and dissolve, our own complexes and ways of thinking about the contents of our experience.

            In psychology, this is often done by what is called ‘projection’ – this is where psychic content, say unresolved issues, are externalized and overlaid onto an outside object, often a person.  An example:  a woman’s unresolved issues with her father are projected onto her mate.  Women are often said to marry their fathers.  There may be repetitions of similar behavior with all previous boyfriends, etc.  What this really represents is an externalization of a content that can’t easily be assimilated, but when it is outside of us it can represent an opportunity to change the way we look at it, or change the habit – but only when we can reclaim, or reabsorb the projection.  Otherwise, the projection leads us on a merry chase and we replay the same dramas over and over again.  But if the content is separated from the self it can then be reabsorbed into a more stable whole, a higher synthesis.  You may be beginning to see the connection with my previous two posts. 

Read on to Part II

Stories from the Bhagavata Purana: Part II, Churning the Ocean of Milk

You may have heard of Creatio ex Nihlo (creation out of nothing), but have you ever heard of Creatio ex Lactis (creation out of milk)?  That’s my subject for today – the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, which is usually understood as a creation story but has much more to it than that.  It is a bit more elaborate than the Gajendra story, so please pardon the length of the post.  First, my synopsis (complete text here):

            Picking up where we left off in my last post, the paradise-like mount Mandara (Meru) floats in an ocean of milk.  After the Gajendra tale we discussed, the devas (“shining ones,” or Gods) and the asuras (demons) end up fighting a terrible war.  The Supreme Deity (Brahman the absolute, symbolized here as Vishnu) calls up Shiva and Brahma (the creator god, not to be confused with Brahman, the impersonal absolute) and suggests that to stop the war they convince both sides to join forces for a truly epic task:  churning the ocean of milk to find the mythic amṛta (pronounced ‘amrita’), or nectar of immortality.  Mṛta means death, and when you add an ‘a’ in Sanskrit, it reverses the meaning (like theist becoming atheist).  The amṛta then is the essence of life itself, the divine ambrosia which makes whomever drinks it immortal.  There are parallel European myths, such as the Norse Idunn with her youth maintaining golden apples, and more closely the ambrosia of the Greek Gods, with which there is a clear linguistic connection.  

            Who doesn’t want eternal youth?  Demons and gods both are excited about the prospect, so the war is quickly suspended and both the good guys and bad guys team up to churn the ocean.  Vishnu’s great serpent (called ananta, or "endless") uproots the great mountain so that they can use it as the dasher to churn the milk, and he also acts as the rope they use to rotate the mountain.  The mountain immediately starts to sink, but Vishnu is there in a pinch and holds it up by becoming a giant turtle.  The assembled forces then begin to churn the ocean.

            The first thing that happens is that an intense heat is generated, so that the gods can barely continue.  Also, the churning awakens the various nasties living in the milky “waters” – crocodiles and serpents especially.  The workers appeal to Vishnu, gives them the strength to persevere.

            Now the churning starts to bear its fruit.  Although in the story 14 different things come up, I'm going to limit myself to talking about the main three.  First comes the hālahala, a terrible fatal poison which threatens to spoil everything and poison every living thing on earth.  Desperate, they turn to Shiva, who, being so holy, and so self-contained and perfected, offers to drink all the poison up.  When he does so, it turns his face blue permanently.  A few drops of course spill, which become the venom of poisonous animals. That’s just how these creation myths go.

            Now that the poison is gone, the crew gets back to work, churning away for thousands of years.  The next thing to come is Lakshmi, the great goddess of fertility, wealth, and essentially all worldly goods and material happiness.  Immediately everyone gets distracted, presumably because of her sheer sexiness.  Most forget the amṛta entirely, even starting to fight over her.  Vishnu solves this problem, upraising Lakshmi to his side as his wife.  With her enthroned in heaven, everyone can get get back to work.  

            Finally, the amṛta comes out in a pot carried by the divine god of medicine, and no sooner does it arise than it is stolen by the asuras, which of course starts another war.  The devas eventually win, destroying the asuras and the nectar is rescued and the gods become immortal.  Creation also arises out of this churning (Lakshmi, etc). 

            Now lets get into what all this means.  Swamiji’s narrative was what got me started on this, so I’ll give that first:  the churning is yogic meditation, which first brings up poison, or impurities and complexes, to the surface of the mind which can only be absorbed by a yogi whose non-attachment, austerities, self-control, and self-understanding are like unto that yogic archetype Shiva.  Then comes Lakshmi, which represents the Siddhis, the “perfections” or “powers” that come to the yogi as he nears the goal.  These are traditionally said to be distractions from the path as it is tempting to use them for worldly gain and can lead the yogi to a great fall.  We see this in the churners forgetting their work when they see the beautiful Lakshmi.  The worldly powers must be offered up to higher ideas and wedded to God; in other words, used only for spiritual purposes, if at all, so that the churning can continue.  Lastly comes the nectar itself, knowledge of the Self, the immortal part of us, which we might call the immortal soul. 

           

            I must say, I love this interpretation, as it certainly follows the process of meditation, but reading the actual text I feel the need to add to it my own thoughts.  I've been reading a lot of Jung lately, so it's going to be heavily psychological.  You may recall from last time that the Ocean of Milk can be seen as the Unconscious, and that its an ambivalent symbol containing both our primal fears and issues (crocodiles and other reptiles), as well as the nectar of immortality itself.  The mountain is an earth symbol, stability, and here also I’d say consciousness, which is dislodged from its thrown by the serpent of wisdom, and nearly drowns.  Only the intervention of God (self surrender), saves it.  The serpent can also be a connection to the idea of kundalini, the shakti or power of consciousness dwelling in the spine.  It is kundalini which rises up to activate each of the chakras.  The churning first brings uncomfortable heat, as anyone who has ever examined himself, or for that matter practiced hatha yoga, knows.   The heat can also represent tapas, or austerity, the 'heat' generated by the purification of the body and mind.  It is characteristically unpleasant and difficult. Only faith in the process gets us over that first hurdle.  We get used to it and then we are able to start churning in earnest.

            The first things that come up are the complexes, the “issues” we all have under the surface.  Complexes are defined by Freud as essentially knots in the Libido, the sum total of our mental energy.  These knots “tie up” this energy, and when we work them out, whether through therapy or meditation, the release the energy back into the whole.  Jung adds to this that it is as if these complexes (and other psychic contents) seem to act autonomously, and he suggests that consciousness has invested them with a bit of itself.  By that logic, undoing these knots is reclaiming and unifying consciousness.  Clearly, this isn’t easy, and there’s a reason the poison was said to spread in every direction to destroy everything it touched.  Aren’t our own inner demons kind of like that?  Think of an irrational fear you might have and how that can poison an otherwise good experience.  Think of how jealousy can poison a beautiful relationship.  Without self-control and non-attachment, reclaiming these things (“swallowing” them), is nearly impossible. 

            Ah, but what rewards there are for those who are willing to do the work!  Lakshmi herself, all worldly good, comes out of the churning next.  In my opinion, the Siddhis of yoga are the increased mental (and physical) power that is unlocked as we work out our physical and mental knots.  The more mental (or physical) energy we reclaim, the more “powerful” we become.  Of course, if we began the process frustrated with the world, our new-found power may cause us to get lost in it.  Suddenly, the things that seemed unattainable become easy to the yogi, be it finding a healthy relationship (now that we’ve left our issues at the door), being physically able to enjoy the body in sports and recreation, or having the concentration and mental power to make lots of money.  The temptation is to stop at this point to enjoy our results. It's very common to use yoga as a way to merely “fix” ourselves, or help us function better in the world of men.  I don’t honestly believe that there’s anything wrong this – we should be glad for any yogi who is able to digest his own poison.  However, this text (and the whole tradition) is emphatic in its teaching that there is more yet available for those who can take their worldly power and dedicate it up to God (marrying Lakshmi to Vishnu).  This giving up of the fruits of our labor is called karma yoga, sublimating our worldly activities - work as prayer.  We can also consider this in terms of universal archetypes.  Lakshmi is the divine mother, the earth goddess, which here ascends to heaven as a divine consort.  We see something similar in the Catholic notion of the Assumption of the Virgin.  Jung makes a big deal of this in numerous works, and for good reason.  Mary, the earthly woman in whom Christ gestates, can be considered the “shadow” of the Holy Trinity which so conspicuously lacks a female component – Christianity’s blind spot we might say.  The Assumption of the earthly woman, bodily rather than in spirit, to heaven, has been depicted in art and literature for centuries, but it was not a part of official church doctrine until the 1950s, and then only in response to popular belief, not the church fathers.  See Jung’s Answer to Job for a more complete discussion of this.

            The last thing is of course the nectar itself, the symbol of the goal, which creates a war again between the devas and asuras.  I encourage you to glance back at an older post of mine, “Daddy, why do the Demons Howl,” for a bit about what the asuras represent.  We can liken the devas, the “shining ones”, to the opposite, the uplifting and virtuous thoughts of the mind.  We may take this war as a final conflict of the opposing forces in the mind, provoked by the end being in sight. It’s a fierce battle, and at its climax, the demons create a terrible illusion of a mountain from which falls burning trees, rocks, etc, and this nearly causes the lines of the devas to break and run.  But at the last moment, the supreme Lord himself appears on the battlefield, and the illusion instantly vanishes.  It’s an intriguing moment:  the illusion is specifically a mountain, which seems again to be a symbol of stability, and probably the ego itself.  We can call this the illusion of a stable ego, which the demonic forces exist only in relation to.  You can look at it this way – “demonic” ideas, as symbolized by the asuras, are given power only because we mistake the ego as the whole Self (taken either in a Jungian or Vedantic sense).  The thought to steal or possess is only possible in relation to the ego, which feels itself special and deserving of possession. In other words, we can look at the egotic asuras as selfish motivations and the limited attitude of the individual ego.  We can only justify selfish behavior when the ego appears dominant and stable.  If the ego is seen as illusory, then how do we justify gratifying its desires?  So too here, as the Lord, i.e., the true Self in the religious sense, or as a symbol for the totality of the psyche (in the Jungian sense), destroys at last the illusion so cherished by the asuras, and allows the gods victory.  

            Interestingly, this victory is not as complete as it first appears.  Even after the asuras are slain, the Supreme One causes them to be revived.  There will be later wars between the two factions, and this appears to be God’s desire.  The lesser gods have faith in that plan, but don’t always understand it.  The demons don’t get it at all, even possibly thinking God on their side (like all egoists) and they continue on their destructive path.  I’m not going to go too far into it, but after the churning story, Bali, the greatest of the demons, even invades heaven, taking over earth and heaven.  He is tricked into giving Vishnu in one of his forms 3 footsteps of his new realm, whereupon Vishnu reveals to Bali his true celestial form, with one step covering the whole earth, with another heaven.  Bali, enlightened by the vision, offers his own head (ego), “a man’s most prized possession” as he puts it, as a place for his third step.  He becomes changed thereby, and tells the rest of the demons to retreat.  To paraphrase “The same Supreme Lord that helped us before (revived us) now wishes for our defeat.  We cannot therefore win by any means, and we must therefore retreat until the time is right for us.”  This is a wonderful change of events.  Bali, the demonic general, comes to a new understanding of himself and his type in the relationship to the whole (psyche).  Both the devas and the asuras are changed by this conflict, and a new order is given to the world.  To me, this can be just as easily read as saying a new order is given to the mind.

            In a way this esoteric interpretation is actually a full reversal of the popular meaning.  Meditation and many forms of mysticism actually seek to reverse the process of creation, and if you think about it, that’s really what this is describing.  The undivided Ocean of Milk is not the primordial unconscious, but the unconscious we start with when we begin to meditate: a mixture of poison, power and nectar.  Through the churning we separate out what the years have added to the psyche, trying to get at the immortal primal self or soul that underlies it.  The power and the poison are like nature and nurture, creating the content of the ocean, while the nectar is our bare essence.  If anything, we start with the amrita, and acquire the poison through our experience.  This “creation” myth esoterically interpreted is actually its opposite, a myth of “uncreation.”  I can’t help but think of the gnostic ascent, in which as the soul ascends upwards it sheds the influence of the planets (symbolical of the personality traits), getting lighter and lighter until only the bare soul stands before God.

            As I’ve covered most of this Canto, so its fitting that I end with its final image: Vishnu incarnated as a giant fish.  I’ve been reading Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis, and he dedicates some space to fish symbolism, emphasizing the unblinking quality of its eyes.  This appears in two forms, either the constellated form (many eyes, often appearing as stars), and a singular form (the eye of God).  Given the aquatic nature of this whole chapter, and thereby its connection to the unconscious, we can describe the various forces of the psyche that appear in it as the constellated unconscious; the autonomous complexes and forms which have to be resolved, i.e., fight it out, that their energy may be reclaimed.  If you’ve seen the movie Inception (which I heartily recommend), you may remember the moments where the unblinking eyes of the “projections” turn upon the dreamer – that’s the constellated unconscious.  The ocean of milk here is separated (as light from darkness) into the poison, the powers, and the nectar.  The differentiation requires a new order to be created; paradise cannot be regained once we have tasted the fruit and we have to find a new wholeness, and perhaps a new relationship with ourselves.  A battle must be fought in the mind for dominance, aka unification, of the world. And at the end the text presents as its last image of the chapter something that seems to have little to do with the rest of the story – God incarnating as a giant fish, with its unblinking eye, the eye of God.  This, as Jung would no doubt agree, is a symbol of the Self, the totality, now swimming dominantly in the ocean of the unconscious, whose unblinking gaze the newly reconstructed ego (like the enlightened Bali) can never again hide from.  The Self has become One whole, One mind, One God, and though the battles go on, even the generals of the forces of evil now know that there is a place for the good and the evil in the hands of God.

Stories from the Bhagavata Purana: Part I

            There’s a fascinating Hindu creation story in the Bhagavata Purana which Swamiji recently brought to my attention.  The Bhagavata is a rather long Vaishnava work, mostly detailing Vishnu’s (as Krishna) various incarnations but containing a wealth of other stories.  The 8^th Skanda, or Canto, called “Withdrawal of the Cosmic Creations” is particularly interesting to me, as it contains the story of the Churning of the Ocean of Milk.  You may have heard of it before, but I’d like to analyze it in a bit more depth.  It’s an important story, often told in a simplified form to children, but it is also a rich source of traditional exegesis, as well plenty of fodder for my own more modern interpretation.  I’ll retell part of the story here, and hopefully we’ll get at some of the underlying archetypal currents.  Before I get to the Milk story however, I’d like to start with the opening of the Canto, which superficially seems to have rather little to do with the rest of it (other than establishing the setting), but is very valuable in its own right.

            The Canto begins with the depiction of a setting much resembling Paradise, or the Primal Garden.  It is a mountain of three peaks rising out of an Ocean of Milk.  In this “garden” there is perfect harmony, lots of beautiful flowers, and peace among the inhabitants.  This peace is largely due to the power of the Elephant King Gajendra, who protects the small animals from the larger.  One day, he comes across a pool of refreshing water, and being a family man, brings his family along for a dip and drink on the hot day.  Being lost in the thoughts of his family, his foot is grabbed by a crocodile in the water.  All the other elephants come to help, but they can’t drag Gajendra out, as none is as at home in the water as the Crocodile.  Gajendra, realizing that no one can help him, surrenders himself to the Supreme One, and in so doing so is saved, the Crocodile being cut in half by the Lord’s power.  He then goes about the island praising the Lord, doing mantra and sacrificing, etc.  He then receives the further grace of remembering his past incarnation (something not normally allowed to animals) as a ascetic yogi who in meditation failed to rise to greet an ancient Rishi (seer), and was thus cursed by him to incarnate as an elephant.  He is then taken up as an associate of Krishna, and is allowed to ride upon the back of Garuda, the King of the Eagles.

            The story completely shifts course after this, but before I go further, I want to take apart what we’ve already seen.  Firstly, the Garden is the primal creation, the world before the Fall in the Abrahamic religions. It represents a state of innocence, and we can interpret the myth of the Fall as an awakening to consciousness - the eating from the tree of knowledge, prompted by that wise old serpent (that's the gnostic interpretation anyway).  In the Bhagavata, there's a similar "bliss in ignorance" (as we see, the elephant does not really know his own nature at first), and everything appears harmonious and without conflict. 

            As we have seen, the harmony is partially based on the efforts of Gajendra, the elephant King.  Things appear orderly, but we know there's more in the world than the innocent elephants know, and not all of it is good. The elephant is the traditional Indian symbol for the earth element and the root chakra, being large, physically powerful, and as immovable as a mountain. The elephant is stability, has ties to our roots (an elephant never forgets), and here the King of the Elephants is also described as a house-holder, connecting him with family life (the in-group, or tribe).  It is this that gets him in trouble, the text tells us.  By enjoying his family he is distracted and fails to notice the danger in the water.  He is, we might say, unconscious of it.  Water here is a crucial symbol, one which C.G. Jung never fails to connect to the unconscious and the irrational part of us that lurks under the surface.  It is an ambivalent symbol, as the unconscious is so incomprehensibly vast.  It is the nourishing, sustaining, life-giving water, the font of renewal (baptism), the creative power, as well as the keeper of our secrets, the place where our Shadow dwells, and can be full of unexpected dangers, symbolized by the Crocodile.  Gajendra brings his family to the water to rest and relax, to restore from the hot day.  Water also represents the feminine or relational quality (usually unconscious in men), which appears as Gajendra’s distraction by the familial relationships.  He is unable to see what lurks under the calm surface.  We may remember the Greek Narcissus, who caught his own image (the reflection in his unconscious, his persona) in the water, was fascinated and drowned.  Here, the elephant, the strongest of beasts, is caught as well, and begins a mighty struggle to extricate himself.  But, not being a water animal (the conscious ego is not the native inhabitant of the unconscious), he can’t free himself under his own power.  Neither can outside forces help him.  It is only by surrender to a higher power, a Redeemer, which Jung would call the image of the complete Self (not in the sense of the soul or atman, but in the sense of the totality of the psyche, conscious plus unconscious), that he is able to get free.  We might say that he then “gets some religion.”  His further grace of remembering his past incarnation is also worth commenting on.  He was once human, and because he was too lofty a yogi (who couldn’t even bother to pay attention to his surroundings – life on Earth), was given an animal form, specifically the symbolic animal of the Earth.  In other words, he is made to descend.  But by his struggle in the waters, he is uplifted, and his ego is understood and transcended. He ceases to identify merely with the conscious ego, but with more of his whole Self.

            The lowest chakra is the Muladhara, or "root support" Chakra, and in Hindu mythology the world is said to be supported by elephants, and they symbolize Earth.  The second chakra is connected to water, and is emotional and fascinating (sex is an important association).  So we see here Gajendra stepping up into the second chakra, symbolized by being pulled into the water.  After his struggle, he dedicates himself to spiritual work, what we might call tapas.  This is connected to the internal flame of motivation and purification (Sulphur in alchemy), and the fiery 3^rd or egotic chakra.  By grace he is given knowledge of past lives, which effectively overthrows the limited egotic point of view (psychologically, we might say he becomes aware of other 'selves').  He recognizes that he is a high soul, who, because of past karma, has been brought low (to the earth).  By this, he is upraised by Krishna, who is said to rule the heart, and is given the privilege of riding upon the back of the Eagle King Garuda, a clear symbol of air. Air is the element of the 4th or heart chakra.  We may say, in total, that the story of Gajendra is the story of a man who rises high spiritually, but who is forced to “come back down to earth” before he may once again ascend, this time higher than before.  For many of us, this is what working with the chakra system is like.  It makes you start at the beginning, to get humble and dirty down in the gritty earth, before we can rise up again on the back of Garuda the Eagle. 

            I bring up the chakras because I’ll be starting a 7 week Chakra Cycle in my Sunday 10am Open Level Flow with Meditation class next week (4/10).  I hope to include a post on each of the Chakras as we progress through each, and it is helpful to understand them as symbols associated with very real psychic contents.  Stories like the above can be very useful in understanding the psychic processes that can result from meditation on these powerful symbols.  As this post has gotten lengthy, I’ll break it up and discuss the Ocean of Milk next time.