THE PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER REFLECTS ON CHAKRA

  

 PART TWO

Shai Tubali’s “The Seven Chakra Personality Types”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 22, 2021

 

CONTEXT OF THE SEVEN CHAKRAS

 

As mentioned in PART ONE, the American Joseph Campbell never had the respect of scholars in the disciplines that he cherished and wrote with popular zest in the 20th Century. In many ways, this was also true of the English American Alan W. Watts, a prolific author who embraced Buddhism and Zen but was never considered a serious scholar by Zen masters.

That said, Watts was wildly and widely popular, especially in the Far Western United States during the radicalized clique Counter Culture of the 1960s, creating twenty-five books, books that had special meaning to me during a time of crisis in my own life.

Not being radical in any sense of the word, already in my mid-thirties in the 1960s, being Roman Catholic, the father of four children, a corporate executive with an American chemical company just returning to the United States after facilitating the formation of a new specialty chemical conglomerate in South Africa, my life felt unhinged from its previously valued anchors. The corporation controlled me, my religion owned me, and the country that I loved now felt alien to me seemingly experiencing a similar mental breakdown as I.

South Africa’s Afrikaner Apartheid Policy (or “Separate Development of the Races”) felt as if I had stepped back in the time to America's antebellum days of slavery. The majority population of South Africa, 80 percent Bantu natives were subjugated to the rule of law and political domain of the 20 percent minority of white South African Afrikaners and those of British descent. I was coming home to resign from my executive position with no idea what the next chapter of my life might be. My family thought I was suffering from nervous exhaustion. I chose to think my world, as I had been programmed, had simply deserted me (see Devlin, A Novel, 2016).

In a strange if not paradoxical way, writers with concomitant flaws and peculiar dispositions seem to surface and flourish in moments of cultural crisis and to turn their personal dilemmas into art. It was true of Campbell (see A Fire of the Mind, 1991) and Watts (see In My Own Way, An Autobiography: 1915 - 1965, 1972).

In my case, I found myself in New York City at Kennedy International waiting to change planes for Chicago, my company’s headquarters, coming across a book by Alan W. Watts titled “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are” (1966). It is a book that in another time I might not have picked up, but as it turned out, this book led to the path that I have taken over the past 55 years.

Daniel Krauthammer writes of his father, the late Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist who gave up that profession to pursue a career as a pundit and journalist, winning many awards including the Pulitzer Prize:

(The great lesson of my father was) don’t be defined by what life throws at you and you cannot control. Accept the hand you are dealt with grace, and then go on to play that hand, as joyously and industriously and vigorously as you can. What gives life meaning isn’t how the outside world defines you. It’s what you make of yourself, what you give to the world, and what you build with the ones you love. You can make your life extraordinary. It is possible (The Point of it All: Charles Krauthammer: A Lifetime of Great Loves and Endeavors, 2018, p. 330).

A different chakra seemingly beckoned Dr. Krauthammer than what the sirens of his nature originally found him successfully pursuing only to disrupt his life and abandoned his comfort zone, going from a trained listener to an untrained talker closing his office in Boston, Massachusetts, moving lock, stock, and barrel to Washington, D.C.  transmogrifying his life into the uncertainty of a new career. 

Simply put, life is a matter of making choices that ultimately define us. Take Alan W. Watts. He had a mystical dream while ill as a child and found himself fascinated with and then embracing visuals of Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to him by his missionary mother when she returned from China. This obsession would grow spirited by the writings of Eastern philosophers of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, but especially the works of esteemed Zen Buddhism scholar, D.T. Suzuki. No surprise, Suzuki wasn’t amused with the cavalier way with which Watts interpreted his ideas, with Watts experiencing similar blowback to that of Campbell with mythic Far Eastern scholars.

Basically, an autodidact, Watts’s flair for interpreting Far Eastern culture appeared to be the right medicine for the lost youth of the 1960s, who were abandoning their parents' homes and values, burning their draft cards, and escaping to Canada to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, or forming communes in Southern California and experimenting with mode changing psychedelic drugs.  These "dropouts" were open to any validation that would justify their retreat from country, culture, commitment, and convention and Watts provided that rationale.

His works embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the pragmatic, as exemplified in such works as The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety; Myth and Ritual in Christianity; The Way of Zen; Nature, Man, and Woman; The Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life; This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience; Psychotherapy East and West; The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness; The Two Hands of God: The Myths of Polarity; Beyond Theology: The Art of Godmanship; The Meaning of Happiness; The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are; Does It Matter?: Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality; et. al.

The 20th was Alan W. Watts’ (1915 – 1978) and Joseph Campbell’s (1904 – 1987) century and mainly mine as well. They influenced me with their popular appeal as I suspect Shai Tubali, the Israeli Far Eastern scholar, is  the youth of this new millennium with his "Radical Tantra."  Tubali's reference platform is to Hindu and Buddhist mystical text that dates from the 7th century or earlier, an approach that involves the display of mantras, meditation, yoga, and ritual, clearly, to generate popular appeal in the manner of Campbell and Watts.  

“Tubal’s Seven Chakra Personality Types”

I fully expect that young 21st-century minds will find Shai Tubali stimulating and possibly life-changing as readers of his works encounter the ambiguities of 21st-century life, finding contemporary existence increasingly confusing, threatening, and discombobulating from academia, science, theology, philosophy, government, media to employment.  Life has slipped from the tragic to the comedic as Americans reject their history rather than learn from it. Tubali (born 1976) is a voice of the times and the reason an outline of his book “The Seven Chakra Personality Types” (2018) is offered as an introduction to his thinking as Watts and Campbell were introduced to my own. Tubali writes:

“The essential tantra is the spirituality of the twenty-first century because it is the only system that effectively combines matter and spirit. Tantra works directly with material energies, affirms the physical universe as essentially spiritual, and therefore does not reject the world but embraces it. “

ONTOLOGY OF TUBALI’S SEVEN CHAKRAS

Shai Tubali is an Israeli scholar, international author, psychologist, and spiritualist who writes on personal psychology and self-development in pragmatic terms. In “The Seven Chakra Personality Types” (2018), he gives the reader a better understanding of their type of personality as this is still the age that promotes and idealizes introspection, self-reflection, and catharsis opening one’s emotions and declaring one’s deepest feelings unabashedly to the world.

A WORD OF CAUTION

This is an introduction to an idea that is the basis of Shai Tubali’s treatise of “seven chakra personality types.” For a comprehensive appreciation of this subject, it is suggested that you read this book. The intention here is to introduce a concept in the most general of terms that is fundamental to actually how we exist as human beings, as all seven chakras touch most of our lives. We all experience these chakras more or less in major or minor ways in our daily life.

As you ponder these chakras, author Tubali suggests the center of your universe will harbor a major chakra with a secondary chakra type and a third chakra type supportive of the other two. He claims understanding your three-chakra personality structure will help you understand and manage the urges and attractions within yourself that can lead to genuine fulfillment. The more you understand this design the more you can direct it to its optimal evolution and flowering. This can keep you from getting stuck in a living system or structure that doesn’t suit your potential. When you are aligned with your personality type not only mentally but behaviorally, you are, claims Tubali, existentially in the right place at the right time.

Imagine your major type is Chakra Four (Caretaker), Chakra Two, your secondary (Artist), and Chakra Five (Caretaker) your supportive type. You could be in any number of professions from a teacher, doctor, nurse, social worker, cleric, manager to a politician. With this in mind, this introduction to the Seven Chakra Personality Types may prove helpful.

THE SEVEN CHAKRAS & THEIR SIGNIFICANCE

The seven chakras (Sanskrit for “wheels” or “circles") belong to a Hindu system originating in India between 1500 and 500 BC. This makes it one of the oldest and most persistent psychological systems the world has ever known. The chakras were introduced by the seers of ancient India as seven major confluences within which our subtle nervous system functions as psychic centers of energy and consciousness.

At a deeper level, these seven chakras perform as centers of perception and experience. Shai Tubali suggests that through these centers we experience multidimensional reality in a display of our dominant personality types.

The first, second, and third chakras fall into the category of the material-earthly types working with materials and objects of sensory perception while engaged in the world of matter. Situationally, this group corresponds to the lower part of the human body: i.e., the legs, the base of the spine, the genitals, and the abdomen.

The fourth and fifth chakras fall in the category of more subtle types driven by our emotional-communicative endeavors. Here more refined types of interaction take place encountering the world through emotions and fantasies. The central drive of these two types is to connect and bridge the inner and outer world in groups corresponding to the chest, the lungs, and the throat.

The sixth and seventh chakras fall in the category that is even more abstract than the others as they do not experience the world directly. They are instead driven by ideas rather than concrete reality translating experience into abstract principles as the earthly tangible world holds little appeal to them. Physically, this mental-spiritual group corresponds to the head and the brain.

For readers' convenience, Tubali provides an outlined approach to these seven chakras commencing with Public Domain, then Typical Careers associated with each respective chakra, followed by the Dosha Constitution (i.e., universal life forces manifested in three different energies, or doshas, known as Vata, Pitta, and Kapha), on to Chakra Dominated Center, The Shadow Self, Time Zone, and then Famous Figures of that particular chakra and finally, Essence. The Shadow Self and Essence deserve a bit more elaboration which follows.

THE SHADOW SELF

The “Shadow Self” has fascinated writers and readers forever, and the reason for this elaboration. In analytical psychology, the shadow is either an unconscious aspect of the personality that the conscious ego does not identify otherwise known as the unconscious (i.e., everything of which a person is not fully conscious). In short, the shadow is the unknown side of our personality and contains all the parts that we don’t want to admit to having.

The term ‘the shadow’ was made popular by Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961). He saw it as the uncivilized, even primitive side of our nature. He believed that we need to fully see this dark side of ourselves if we are to be fully integrated humans. Jung didn’t feel it was just individuals who had these shadows but a “collective shadow” exists of people united in group shadows that could prove a great danger to civilization when these collective shadows are projected (e.g., Nazi Germany and the Holocaust).

Shai Tubali writes:

When we enter meditation, we meet our other half. Sometimes we look for our other half in romantic relationships, but we search for romantic partners in this psychological sense just because we do not have enough acquaintance with our other half. Our other half is what we call “our negative self.” It is not a shadow-self in the horrible sense, but it is more like the invisible self that is the opposite of what we are. It is connected to timelessness; it is connected to non-action, to being. It is the other half that is like our passive aspect, our non-personality.

Carl Jung (Psychology and Religion, 1938) writes:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.

If you imagine someone brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against… Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.

Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008) and Nobel Laureate for Literature (1970) writes:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Seeing the shadow within ourselves is extremely difficult, so it’s rarely done—but we’re good at seeing undesirable shadow traits in others. Truth be told, we revel in it. We love calling out unsightly qualities in others. The entire celebrity and political gossip industry featured on Cable News Networks are built on this fundamental human tendency.

German novelist Herman Hesse (1875 – 1962) and Nobel laureate in Literature (1946) writes:

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

THE JUNGIAN MODEL OF THE PSYCHE. HERE THE SHADOW SELF IS REFERRED TO AS “SHADE.”

Our conscious minds are where our ego-personality dwells. It is the “I” that walks around every day talking to other people. When you think of who “you” are, this is the part of yourself with which you usually identify. However, that “you” is only part of your identity that is visible to you. Your conscious awareness is like a light enabling you to observe what is happening inside your mind. Beneath that conscious “light” is a whole world of “darkness” containing those aspects of yourself that you strive to ignore. The ego is only the tip of the iceberg floating above the sea, but the unconscious mind is the vast mountain of ice lurking beneath the surface.

 

WHO & WHAT WE ARE IS TWO-THIRDS BURIED IN OUR UNCONSCIOUS

ORIGINS OF OUR SHADOW SELF

Author Jack E Othon (see Internet on “Carl Jung”) writes:

Our society teaches us those certain behaviors, emotional patterns, sexual desires, lifestyle choices, etc. are inappropriate. These “inappropriate” qualities are usually those that disrupt the flow of a functioning society—even if that disruption means challenging people to accept things that make them uncomfortable. Anyone who is too challenging becomes an outcast, and everyone else moves on.

Now, we humans are highly social creatures, and the last thing we want is to be excommunicated from the rest of our tribe. So, to avoid being cast out, we do whatever it takes to fit in. Early in our childhood development, we find where the line between what is socially “acceptable” and “unacceptable” is, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to toe it.

As we all frequently do, when we cross that line, we suffer the pain of society’s backlash. People judge us, condemn us, gossip about us, and the unpleasant emotions that come with this experience can quickly become overwhelming. However, we don’t need people to observe our deviances to suffer for them. Eventually, we internalize society’s backlash so deeply that we inflict it on ourselves.

The only way to escape from this perpetual recurring pain is to mask it. Enter the ego. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, who we are not, and what we would never do to protect ourselves from suffering the consequences of being an outcast. Ultimately, we believe these stories, and once we develop a firm belief about something, we unconsciously discard any information that contradicts that belief. In the world of psychology, this is known as confirmation bias: humans tend to interpret and ignore information in ways that confirm what they already believe.

The problem is that literally, everyone possesses qualities that society has deemed undesirable. People fall short of others’ expectations, have a temper flare-up, are excessively gassy, etc. The ideal individual in any society lives up to impossible standards.

What no one wants to admit to others is that we are all secretly failing to meet those standards. Women wear makeup, men use Axe deodorant, advertisers Photoshop celebrities, people filter their personalities with photos and status updates on social media—all to mask perceived flaws and project an image of “perfection.” Jung called these social masks we all wear our “personas.”

PART ONE – CHAKRA ONE, CHAKRA TWO & CHAKRA THREE

The first three chakras fall into the category of material-earthly types dedicated to working with the materials and objects of sensory perception. While engaged in earthly matter, each approaches matter from a different angle. The group corresponds to the lower part of the human form, the legs, and the base of the spine, the genitals, and the abdomen.

PERSONAL ESSENCE COMPARED TO PERSONALITY

We start our journey into the seven personality types recognizing that individual essence is our personal DNA, the self with which we are born, our genetic make-up at birth being a distinct part of our nature that can be developed but cannot be changed: that is, we are to be tall or short, of occidental or some combination of other ethnicities depending on the nature of our parents, with blue, brown, hazel or some other colored eyes, light or dark skin, athletically adept or not, and so on.

Our personality is our acquired self, a self that can be manipulated into a combination of other-selves, or can be changed which extends to suggesting a combination of these seven chakras.

FIRST CHAKRA: THE BUILDERS (ANUS & GENITALS)

THE BUILDERS (40%)

In the present world population – 40 percent are of this personality type. Builders are lovers of detail, foundations, and the structure of things. They are in the legal profession, police, bankers, construction workers, secretaries, engineers, research scientists, etc. They are dominated by an instructional center with strong survival instincts and tend to be self-conscious in a mainly physical world. They were the first humans on earth. Builders are not interested in the abstract and are not intensely philosophical or insightful. They are lovers of the material and objective world, attracted to forms and shapes, anything that can become a tangible reality. They are endowed with supreme practical intelligence and show us the importance of inner and outer order.

Dominate Public Domain of the First Chakra: legal institutions, police, banks, city bureaucracies, health institutions, construction work, and insurance companies.

Typically Found among policemen and policewomen, lawmakers, accountants, doctors, programmers, engineers, technicians and technocrats, construction workers, cartographers, and executive assistants.

Dosha Constitution: Kapha (water)

Dominated by a person’s instinctual center with a survival instinct physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

The Shadow Self: the frozen self-obsessed with cyclical time.

Time zone: cyclical time.

Famous people: Moses, Immanuel Kant, Kort Godel, Alan Turning, Jonas Salk, Frank Lloyd Wright, Samuel Johnson, Charles Darwin, Hippocrates.

Just as they embody the physical chakra, First Chakra personalities constitute the solid base of the world population. They tend to be the most “earthy” and closest to the ground. For better or worse, they are most astute to the laws of matter.

SECOND CHAKRA: THE ARTIST (7%)

Dominate Public Domain: They are actors, artists, musicians, in the recreational industry, celebrators of the arts and nature, environmentalists, idealists.

You typically find them among musicians, artists, comedians, stage performers, dancers, clothes designers, tour guides, people obsessed with causes.

Dosha constitution: pitta/vata (fire/air)

Dominated by: the feeling center, impulses, and the senses

Shadow self: the butterfly that gives nothing. One thing artists hate is effort. They are the laziest humans on earth.

Time zone: live in the moment

Famous people: Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jim Morrison. Andy Kaufman, Jim Carrey, Roberto Benigni, Will Ferrell, Rudolf Nureyyey, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Iris Apfel

Essence: Located in the pubic area between the genitals and the navel, the First Chakra holds within it the essence of impulse. Artists are sometimes so out of order that other chakra types are annoyed with them.

THIRD CHAKRA: THE ACHIEVERS (25%)

The public domain is the competitive arena: competitive sports, Wall Street, the military, street fights, ethnic gangs

Typically among warriors, soldiers, businessmen, mountain climbers, Olympic athletes, heavy metal bands, rappers, gangs, mafia

Dosha constitution: Pitta/Kapha (fire/water)

Dominated by the willing center

The shadow self is the failure-doing doer

Time zone in the future

Famous people: Alexander the Great, Columbus, Marco Polo, Joan of Arc, Attila the Hun, Hannibal, Richard the Lion Hearted, Genghis Khan, Bruce Lee, Gurdjieff, Che Guevara, Muhammed Ali, Lance Armstrong, Warren Buffet, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump

Essence is located in the upper belly at the solar plexus and holds the essence of force and power within. Force means "drive," and drive means unbounded concentration and directed energy to a purpose come hell or high water. They are an interesting hybrid of BUILDERS and ACHIEVERS, displaying an otherwise conflicting mix of impulsive craving and careful planning. Whereas ARTISTS are sprinters, ACHIEVERS are marathon runners with a resolute eye on the prize. The energy ACHIEVERS possess is the energy that pushes the world forward.

PART TWO – CHAKRA FOUR & CHAKRA FIVE

In moving into CHAKRA FOUR & FIVE, we are transitioning into the emotional/communitive types, moving from material-earthy types to more refined types of interaction, types that encounter the world through emotions and fantasies, displaying the faculty of imagining things, especially things that are impossible or improbable. This involves stretching the mind beyond what is known and knowable. CHAKRA FOUR & FIVE have a passion for bridging the gap between our inner and outer world through the mechanisms of communication. Physically, the emotional/communicative group corresponds to the chest, heart, lungs, and throat.

FOURTH CHAKRA: THE CARETAKERS (15%)

The focus of the public domain: nonprofit organizations, charities, volunteer organizations, support groups, religious gatherings, therapists, faith healers.

Typically found among therapists, healers, mediators, activists, volunteers, religious devotees, family oriented people.

Dosha constitution: vata/kapha (air/water)

Dominated by the emotional center, the heart.

The Shadow Self is the rejected giver.

The time zone is the present.

Famous figures: Jesus, Teresa of Avila, Florence Nightingale, David Livingstone, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Padre Pio.

Essence: We find the FOUR CHAKRA located in the lower center of the chest and holds within it the essence of the unitive force which is the building force of the universe.

FIFTH CHAKRA: THE SPEAKER (7%)

Public domain: the media, education, politics, social media, courts

Typically found among journalists, authors, teachers, principals, politicians, judges, lawyers, salesmen, entertainers

Dosha constitution; vata/pitta (air/fire)

Dominated by the communicating center voice

Shadow self: the all-controlling manipulator

Time zone: the distant future

Famous people: biblical Isaiah, John the Baptist, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Dostoyevsky, Beethoven, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, Nelson Mandela, Carl Sagan, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Deepak Chopra, Tony Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama,

Essence: the FIFTH CHAKRA lies at the base of the throat and is more than an essence of words. It is a form of the exchange of information, the shared codes that form our life in the community.

PART THREE – CHAKRA SIX & CHAKRA SEVEN

CHAKRA SIX & SEVEN make communication with the world the most abstract as they do not experience the world directly but meet it through the medium of ideas translating experience into abstract principles. The interests of these personality types are far less earthly and tangible than those of all the other types. This group corresponds to the head and the brain.

THE SIXTH CHAKRA – THE THINKER (5%)

Public domain: academia, scientific gatherings, research laboratories, and books.

Typically found among philosophers, scientists, researchers, nonfiction authors, inventors, and critics

Dosha constitution: pitta/vata (fire/air)

Dominated by the thinking center, the mind, and consciousness

Shadow self: the helpless intellectual

Time zone: the infinitely unknown future

Famous people: Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Stephen Hawkins, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jiddu Krishnamurti, P. D. Ouspensky

Essence: the sixth chakra or “third eye” is located just above the eyebrow and holds the essence of the all-organizing intelligence of the mind. Here, we are dealing with an essence that cannot be found in nature because it is beyond nature. Whether we believe in God or not, this unknown organizing intelligence gives meaning to certain laws and codes of nature. Behind the sixth chakra, this encompassing intelligence connects inner logic with everything as it peeks into the majestic and awe-inspiring but mind-blowing complexity.

Dominated by pitta/vata (fire & air), the sixth chakra attempts to understand beyond the knowable world which is evident in the works of Einstein, Freud, Krishnamurti, and Nietzsche. Thinkers have strong and penetrating vision who look intently at things but not at you. Nothing is obvious to them. It is why they are sometimes seen as arrogant, stand-offish, and confident beyond reason with their fiery perceptions.

The classical representative of their Sphere of Influence is introspection making them astute observers, of life and humanity. They don’t appear to have the needs of the other chakras tending to be serious, perhaps over serious with a certain sense of silence. Thinkers grow up to be powerful individuals who while opinionated display little comfort with the crowd. Stated otherwise, throughout human history they have been most comfortable as loners with a natural inclination of indifference to what rocks most people’s boat.

The “shadow self” of this chakra shares an acute sense of not belonging to the common human experience. Because, at heart, they are observers rather than doers, they experience difficulty getting inside other peoples’ behavior. They essentially put a wall between themselves and reality and then try to understand that wall. Einstein, for example, admitted that he was pathetic in personal relationships, typically escaping into science rather than grasp the situation for what it meant. This “shadow self” hides behind books and ideas, a prisoner of the mind, wishing, somewhat secretly, that they were not such a prisoner.

SEVENTH CHAKRA – THE YOGIS (1%)

Public domain: churches, monasteries, secret societies, sects, spiritual communities, meditation gatherings, festivals

Typically found among mystics, saints, monks, nuns, contemplatives, ascetic yogis, shamans, renunciates, sadhus, sorcerers, spiritual masters

Dosha constitution: Vata (air)

Dominated by the spiritual center core of being,

Shadow self: the anti-life mediator

Time zone: the eternal

Famous people: Gautama the Buddha, Adi Shankara, Antony of Lerins, Mary of Egypt, San Giulio, Bernadette Roberts, Ajia

Essence: Unlike the six other essences, the crown chakra’s essence, is not a force in the world. Located at the top of the head, it holds within the magnetic force that pulls everything back toward the center of the cosmos to the original force that existed before creation came into being: in other words, to the beginning of time.

The Seventh Chakra is pure Vata or the air element. Just as the other six chakras are constitutionally grounded, this chakra is intensely ungrounded. As pure space, they are energetically cool. They don’t even observe. They exist in an airy-looking structure of fragility.

Consequently, their Sphere of Influence constitutes only one percent of the world population. It includes monks, monastic life, drawn away from the busy human world at an early age seeking paths to maximum inner life and experience. 

That said, many monks are Builders, Caretakers, or Speakers at heart, but Yogis are the most pious and introverted among them. Eastern traditions tend to honor and favor natural-born recluses while this is rare in Western traditions. 

Yogis were the first to bring the concept of spiritual experience and the inner spiritual life into the world. Most fundamental to the Seventh Chakra is intuition with the purely spiritual sense of finding “heaven on earth.” 

 We experience something akin to the Seventh Chakra when we enjoy the nourishment of deep sleep. We also identify with this chakra when we enter a retreat and experience a spiritual teacher or the reading of scripture, sharing a passion for “now” or the present moment. 

Where artists claim the sensual experience of the sensual “now,” capturing ecstasy of the senses, the Yogis is attracted to the “now” by withdrawing from sensual time and the world. The six previous chakras are grounded in speech, ambition, noise, and clashes of culture, while the Yogis is ungrounded having embraced self-forgetfulness in self-absorbing meditation where silence is preferred to speech and physical urges of the libido have no place.

Another way of looking at this in human terms is in imagining the seven chakras as a seven-story building with the foundation the first chakra and the seventh chakra the penthouse.

The “shadow self” of the Yogis does not want to feel anything, know anything, be anything but preferring these states of human existence to simply evaporate for life itself is a disturbance and the “self” entirely superfluous.

The Sixth Chakra wants to keep its hands clean, not have to deal with the messiness of life whereas the Seventh Chakra doesn’t desire hands at all but in essence to experience uninterrupted peace not having to handle anything. The Seventh Chakra has no problem with everyone around them doing the hard work and taking care of all the details of life. In a word, Seventh Chakra is all about the inner journey. This is not the superficial rest of deep sleep but rather an understanding that the other side of life is rest.

It is hoped that this introduction to Shai Tubali's Seven Chakra Personality Types is found to have some value to you.  

With that, I wish you well.