THE
PERIPATETIC PHILOSOPHER
REFLECTS
ON CHAKRA
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
July 8, 2021
Part
One: Pragmatic look at Chakra
Most writers of ideas
rely on second sources yet publish ideas as their own. Experts have dedicated their lives to many
themes and ideas with which writers such as Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987) have
had a particular fondness. The use of these
archival works may be translations of original works or interpretations of
original works along with the researcher’s own biases.
This is so with the
Irish American Catholic writer, Joseph Campbell. Having read his “Hero of a Thousand Faces,” “The
Power of Myth,” and viewed a television series of his lectures at Sarah Lawrence College, along with his
television series of interviews with Bill Moyer also titled “The Power of Myth,” you get a sense of
his belief in a person’s “following his bliss.”
This is quite apparent in Stephen and Robin Larsen's Joseph Campbell biography,
“A Fire in the Mind.”
That said, many folklore
and Sanskrit scholars, as well as anthropologists and mythologists, fail to
take his works seriously. To this
reader, he has value whatever sacrosanct scholars of these disciplines may
insist on saying. Any of us who write
with an inner disciplinarian flair know the feeling of being discounted as
amateurs as if such a designation is derogatory.
Campbell dedicated his
life to teaching courses in literature and mythology at Sarah Lawrence College for 38 years while creating these
works. He was an inspiring teacher able
to read and write in German, French, and Sanskrit while fascinated with the
works of Indian philosopher and theosopher Krishnamurti
whom he had met in his youth while returning to the United States from Europe
on an ocean liner.
Along with having benefitted
from Campbell’s select works and many Krishnamurti's works with some twenty works
in tatters in my library having referred to them so often, I identify with
writers unhampered by parochial concerns, which brings me to the purpose of
this little essay.
WHAT
IS YOUR CHAKRA PERSONALITY TYPE?
Joseph Campbell in his
book “Transformation of Myth through
Time,” has a metaphor for chakra that is quite delightful – the
dragon. This chakra dragon doesn’t do
anything of value, but guards that which is valuable. Dragons hoard jewels and kidnap beautiful
women but have no idea what to do with either.
They are only concerned with existing.
For me, Campbell’s metaphor has been a source for describing our
culture, which I call “waist-high,” meaning that we have failed to get above our
gonadal or psychosexual needs manifested in a compulsive preoccupation with the
material needs of our compulsive self, which brings me to contemplating “The
Lotus Ladder” of the Chakra.
It was during the
centuries of the burgeoning values of pagan, Jewish, and Christian gnostics
more than 2,000 years ago that Rome’s Near Eastern Provinces (and the first
four centuries of the Christian era) that in Hindu and Buddhist India the first
signs of what would be known as Tantric practices would appear.
The essential alphabet
of all Tantric lore is to be learned from the doctrine of life and the seven
circles of chakra or lotuses of the kundalini system of yoga.
WHAT
IS CHAKRA?
SEVEN LOTUS CENTERS OF THE KUNDALINI
FIRST
CHAKRA (ANUS & GENITALS OR ROOT)
The precise lotus of
this center is at the base of the human body and midway between the anus and
the genitals. The character of the
spiritual energy at this point is of the lowest intensity. The world is viewed as uninspired materialism
governed by logic and hard facts while the psychology expressed in
behavioristic terms is reactive, not active, on automatic pilot so to
speak. There is no real zeal for life,
no explicit impulse to expand one’s horizons.
There is simply a lethargic hanging on to existence. It is this “grim and bear it” grip on reality
that must finally be broken to have any appreciation of life and its
potential. In contrast to the reality we
face, there is a propensity to hoard and
guard our jewels whatever they might be as we are consumed with envy of what
others have and jealous that what we have may be taken away from us. There is no joy and only a fatalistic view
that “here I am and here I stay.”
CHAKRA
TWO (GROIN OR SACRAL)
When the Kundalini is
active at this level, the whole aim of life is in sex with not only every
thought and act sexually motivated, either as a means toward sexual ends or as
compensating sublimation of frustrated sexual zeal, but everything seen and
heard is interpreted compulsively, both consciously and subconsciously, as
symbolic of sexual themes. Psychic
energy, that is to say, has the character here of the Freudian libido. Myths, deities, and religious rites are
understood and experienced in sexual terms.
I write about this in “The
Short Inscrubable Life & Terrible Fate of the Domesticated Lion,
Zimba! Human Cruelties of a Similar
Kind” (2017). It is the latter
theme that I cover those obsessively consumed with their sexuality, starting
with Roman Catholic Priests abusing children, then continuing with evangelist
preachers precipitously falling from grace: to wit, Jimmy Lee Swaggart, Ted
Haggard, Jim Bakker, Ken Hovind, Robert Tilton, Billy James Hargis, Peter
Popoff, George Alan Rekers, Lonnie Frisbee, Gilbert Deya Tony Alamo, and
Michael Alfred Warnke, then others equally prominent while similarly obsessed
such as Bill Cosby who went to prison and Bill O’Reilly who lost his superior
status on Fox Cable Network to be
eclipsed in humiliation (pp. 89 – 124).
On the positive side, this center of life concerns fertility rites, marriage rites, and orgiastic festivals. According to Tantric learning, while functioning from this psychological center is sexual, sexuality is not the primal ground, end, or even sole motivation of life. Any fixation at this level is consequently pathological. Everything then reminds the blocked and tortured victim of sex. What is the likelihood of finding a cure? The method of Kundali is to recognize affirmatively the force and importance of this center and let the energies pass on through it to become naturally transformed to other aims at the higher centers of the “rich in happiness” Sushumna.
CHAKRA
THREE (NAVEL OR SOLAR PLEXUS)
Chakra is at the level
of the navel. It is called “Manipura,”
or “City of the Shining Jewel” for its fiery heat and light. Here the energy turns to violence and it aims
to consume, to master, to turn the world into oneself and one's own. The appropriate Occidental or psychology
of the West would be the Adlerian (i.e., Alfred Adler’s psychology) of
the “will to power.” Now, even sex
becomes an occasion, not of erotic experience, but an achievement, a conquest,
the self-assurance that one counts for something. It can also be revenge for real or imagined
slights perhaps early in life with an obsession to make them right. The presiding Hindu deity is Shiva in his
terrible guise as an ascetic smeared with the ashes of funeral pyres seated on
his white bull Nandi.
SHIVA
ON THE WHITE BULL, NANDI
All three of these
three lower chakras are of the modes of man’s living in the world in his naïve
state, outward turned, as his inward self as a mystery to him and therefore he
is vulnerable to deception, exploitation, and the influence of disparate types
who would make a man a slave to their demands and needs. In a state of outward turn, the modes of life
are those of lovers, fighters, builders, accomplishers. They are driven by greed and with greed,
there is never enough success, never enough accomplishments, never enough
tangible evidence that their existence has significance. Joys and sorrows at this level are a function
of achievement in the world “out there!”
What others think of them matters as they see everything in terms of
what is gained and what is lost. People
who function at these levels, throughout history, which is the majority of our
species, have had to be tamed, controlled, and brought to heel through
inculcation by a controlling sense of duty and shared social values.
These controls are
enforced not only by secular authority but by all the grandiose myths of
unchallengeable divine authority to which every social order, each in its own
way, has had to lay claim to the individual’s will. Wherever motivations of
these kinds are not checked and effectively brought under control, men, as the
old texts say, “become wolves unto men.”
Obvious religion
operating only on these three levels, having little or nothing to do with the
fostering of inward, mystical realization, would hardly merit the name of
religion. Consequently, as the move is
away from inward to the dominance of outward, belief in a deity or life beyond
comprehension after death has little appeal.
The outward thinker scoffs at those who claim otherwise while hiding
their self-scorn in relentless activity for they are unable to believe in
anything.
Hence, to interpret the
imagery, powers, and values of the higher chakras in terms of the values of
these lower systems is to mistranslate them miserably, and to lose contact with
oneself, thereby with the whole history and heritage of mankinds’ life in the
spirit. And so, to ascend to CHAKRA FOUR
at the level of the heart, what, Dante called in his “Divine Comedy” (1320) La Vita Nuova, “The New Life” begins. And the name of this new center is Anahata,
which means “Not be stuck.” As we have seen in the FIRST THREE CHAKRAS,
is to be prisoners of the mind when the same errors are repeated ad infinitum
and stuckness is eternally demonstrated by being obsessed with solving problems
with the same thinking that caused the problems. It is at the heart level where the sound is
heard that is not made by any two things striking together.
CHAKRA
FOUR (HEART)
True, every sound
normally heard is of two things striking together; that of the voice being the
sound of the breath striking our vocal cords.
The only sound not so made is that of the creative energy of the
universe, the hum so to speak of the void, which is antecedent to things, and
of which things are precipitations. This
is the sound heard from within, within oneself, and simultaneously within
space. It is the sound beyond silence
and heard as OM, the sound resounds of the wonder of existence. OM is the seed sound, the energy sound, the
Shakti of all being, and in that sense analyzed by seers and teachers of the
Upanishads.
OM is a monosyllabic word, as compared to AUM, which is tri-syllabic. ... Om is simply pronounced the way it is written. Against this, Aum is pronounced as aa-uu-eemm. In Sanskrit, 'O' is a diphthong sound. A diphthong is a sound formed by combining two vowels in a single syllable. The sound begins as one vowel sound and moves towards another. The two most common diphthongs in the English language are the letter combination as in “cloud” or “cow”.
On this plane of experience, I am not you nor is this that; A is not-A; cause and effect, God and the world, are not the same, and all mystical statements are absurd suggesting another order of existence. Anything perceived by the waking mind must already have come into being, and so is already a thing of the past.
Science, the wisdom of the mind awake; and of “hard facts” can consequently be knowledge only of what has already become, or of what in the future is to a repeat and continuation of the past. The unpredictability of the creative present is inaccessible to its light. So, thus we come to the letter “U” that represents the field and state of Dream Consciousness, where, although subject and object of the situation may appear to be different and separate from it and each other when they are the same.
A dreamer is surprised and even threatened by his dream, no knowing what it means; yet while dreaming, he is himself inventing it. So, the two aspects of one subject are playing hide-and-seek with each other. One is in creative action while the other in half-ignorance. The figures of dreams are the macrocosmic counterparts of the images of dreams, a personification of the same powers of nature that are manifested in dreams so that on this plane the two worlds of the microcosm, interior, and exterior, individual and collective, particular and general, are but one. The individual’s dreams open to universal myths. The gods in vision descend to the dreamer as returning aspects of himself.
Mythologies, which are all a part of our heritage, are public dreams that move and shape society. One’s dreams are but little myths of our private gods that are moving and shaping oneself through revelations of the actual powers that move and shape us; revelations of our actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which our lives subliminally attain a certain order. In our Dream Consciousness, one is at the ready to initiate a creative now through one’s life experiences by activating the forces that in due time bring to pass unpredictably as events on the plane of Waking Consciousness and be therefore observed and experienced as facts.
When awake, we are conscious only of what has become and in the dream of what is becoming. Goethe said, “Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.” Deep Dreamless Sleep is dissociated from all commitments whatsoever, and so finds us returning to that primal, undifferentiated, and unspecified state of latency, chaos, or potentiality from which all that will ever be to us and for us must in time arise.
Russell Conwell wrote, “Acre of Diamonds” (1890) in which he insisted that all of the opportunities you could want can be found where you are now — in your present community, job, family, and other circumstances. For best results, we need to dig in our backyard, to find opportunities where we are now, in our present circumstances.
As the Upanishad describes, “Just as those who do not know the spot might pass over a hidden treasure of gold again and again but not find it, even so, do creatures here to the Brahma world, day after day, in deep sleep, and not find it.”
Psychotherapist C. G. Jung writes, “The deeper layers of the psyche lose their uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down, as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence, at the bottom, the psyche is simply world.”
The sound AUM, then, is not made by any two things striking together but floating as it were in a setting of silence. The seed of creation heard when the rising Kundalini reaches the level of the heart is the Great Self abiding with the opening of the portal to the void.
CHAKRA FIVE (THROAT)
The throat is considered by the yogi as the purgatorial fifth chakra that is striving to clear his consciousness of the turbulence of secondary things and to experience the unveiled voice and light of the Lord that is the Being and Becoming of the universe. The FIFTH CHAKRA has at its command several means by which to achieve this aim. There is the discipline known as “heat & fire,” formerly practiced in Tibet and known as Dumo, which denotes “a fierce woman who can destroy all desires and passions.” This yogi requires the activation of the energy at the THIRD CHAKRA or NAVEL. Through a special type of breath control and the visualization of an increasing fire, this is experienced at the intersection (just below the navel) of all three spiritual channels.
What is happening here is that the powers of the lower chakras are being activated and intensified to force them to open and to release the energies they enclose for these are the energies that in the higher chakras are to lead to spiritual fulfillment.
In this introverted exercise, the aggressive fires of chakra three are being turned inward, against enemies that are not outside but within to burn away obstructions to the Mother Light that are lodged within oneself. This as a Dumo fire is to be lengthened upward from the navel chakra to the highest centers of the head. The imagery is sexual, the fire is female and the dew that receives and consumes is male. Thus this yoga the energies of either the sex instinct or of the will to power may be employed to assist in shattering and surpassing the limits of the lower instinct system itself to produce bliss.
The sense of this becomes clear when the Dream Yoga is regarded as supplementary to the Illusory Body Yoga. In this way, the clinging to time manifested between the dichotomy of the Dream and Waking states can be conquered. This involves going past the illusory forms of both waking and dreaming by visualizing one’s entire body as dissolving into the syllable of the heart center and this syllable itself dissolving into light. There are four forms of this light: the light of revelation; the light of augmentation; the light of attainment; and the light of the innate.
Anyone able to so concentrate before going to sleep, on the fourth of these forms of light, the Innate Light, holding to it on passing into sleep, will experience the dissolving of both dreams and darkness in that light, and with that, will have passed into the state of Deep Dreamless Sleep awake.
CHAKRA SIX (BROW OR “THIRD EYE”)
When the tasks of Chakra Five have been accomplished, two degrees of illumination become available to the perfection of the saint, that at Chakra Six, known as “unconditioned rapture,” Ramkrishna is used to ask those approaching him for instruction: “Do you like to speak of God with form or without?” And we have the word of the great doctor, German theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 - c. 1328), referring to a passage from Chakra Six and Chakra Seven: “Man’s last and highest leavetaking is the leaving of God for God.” He adds, “If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough, for the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. Every creature is a word of God.”
The first of these two centers known as the lotus of “Command,” is above and between the brows, shining “like a chain of lightning flashes,” supporting the sign of the syllable OM, of which the sound is here fully heard. And here, too, the form is seen of one’s ultimate vision of God, which is called in Sanskrit, “the Qualified Absolute.”
When the mind reaches this plane, one witnesses diving revelations day and night. Yet even then there remains a slight consciousness of having seen the unique manifestation man becomes mad with joy as it were and wishes to be one with the all-pervading Divine but cannot do so. It is like the light of a lamp inside a glass case. One feels as if one could touch the light, but the glass intervenes and prevents it.
For where there is a “Thou” there is an “I,” whereas the ultimate aim of the mystic as Eckhart has declared is identity: “God is love, and he who is in love is in God and God in him.”
If we remove the glasslike barrier of which both our God and ourselves will explode then into light, sheer light, and one light beyond names and find forms, beyond thought and experience, beyond even the concepts of “being” and “non-being.” The soul in God, Eckhart has said, “has naught in common with naught and is naught to aught.” And again, “There is something in the soul so nearly kin to God that it is one and not united.”
The “Unqualified Absolute” refers to the realization of this chakra. While at its center, brilliant as a lightning flash, is the ultimate yoni-triangle, with which, well concealed and very difficult to approach, is the great shining void in secret served by all gods.
“Any flea as it is in God,” declared Eckhart, “is nobler than the highest of the angels in himself.”
[When I was a boy in my late pre-teens to early teens, my uncle, Dr. Leonard M. Ekland, a scholar, economist, and widower, who was a department head at the University of Detroit, would have me take a bus from my home in Clinton, Iowa to Detroit, Michigan, where I would join him and my cousin, Robert on a jaunt to his summer cottage in north-central Michigan on Higgins Lake. There we would play touch football in the lake with his assistant, Norb Bartos, then have lunch together. Robert and I would argue about baseball at the lunch table, that is, until one day my uncle told us, “From now on I’m going to tell you about the great religions of the world and their great advocates.” That is when I became acquainted with Zoraster and the mystic, Meister Ekhart. My cousin resented these interruptions in our discussions on Major League Baseball, but I found to my surprise, that I looked forward to them, and given my inclination, to remember them many years later. I am not a scholar on religion; nor do I know that much about Sankrit, the Upanishads, or, indeed, the Seven Levels of Chakra. My source for this discussion is Joseph Campbell’s “The Mythic Image” (1974) which is fascinating reading, which will be followed by a display of “The Seven Chakra Personality Types” (2018) by the scholar Shai Tubali.]
CHAKRA SIX is in the area of the “third eye,” which is found in the space between the eyebrows. It encompasses the pituitary gland, eyes, head, and lower part of the brain. An invisible yet powerful “third eye” is your center of intuition. A spiritual chakra, which means “beyond wisdom,” leads you to n inner knowledge that will guide you if you let it. An open Chakra Six can enable clairvoyance, telepathy, lucid dreaming, expanded imagination, and visualization.
Your world is experienced through the five senses. Even before you passed through the womb, you heard noises like your mother’s voice and heartbeat and listened to muffled sounds outside. You experienced touch, taste, and even perceived light. And since the moment of birth, you’ve attributed your experiences to what you perceive through the senses. You’ve learned to trust your senses in what you can taste, smell, touch, see and hear. While sense perception is great in life experience it limits you when it comes to expanding your spiritual awareness. our world is experienced through the five senses. Even before you passed through the womb, you heard noises like your mother’s voice and heartbeat and listened to muffled sounds outside. You experienced touch, taste, and even perceived light. And since the moment of birth, you’ve attributed your experiences to what you perceive through the senses. You’ve learned to trust your senses in what you can taste, smell, touch, see and hear. While sense perception is great in life experience, it limits you when it comes to expanding your spiritual awareness.
Your physical senses can give you clues as to how to follow your intuition. For example, have you ever had the feeling that a carton of milk was bad? You smell the milk, look at the expiration date that’s still a couple of weeks away, and even ask everyone in the house, “Is this milk bad?” Then, not detecting anything concrete, you go ahead and drink the milk but experience severe stomach pain, as result. That's because, on a very subtle level, your sense of smell detected something that wasn’t right and gave you a cue that you doubted.
Here’s another example: you’re making a business deal with someone and everything adds up. The person seems honest. But when you shake hands you feel that the energy just isn’t right. When the deal goes through, you find out it was corrupt.
These clues come through your senses. Yet, when something is intuitively wrong but isn’t concrete or visible you tend to ignore it. The good news is that you can learn to trust intuitive clues (see The Fisher Paradigm©™ 2020) and make better decisions based on your intuitive sense. When your decisions turn out right, write them down to reinforce that your intuition guided you in the right direction. Remember that just like the animals in the forest, you too have always had this sixth sense; you simply need to find. Trust and use it again.
When the “third eye” is opened, you experience increased pressure in your head. This is the most common symptom of an open third eye. You feel a growing pressure between your eyebrows with sensitivity to light but seeing beyond the obvious with a heightened sense of self. This is animal instinct and everyone has it, but the majority don’t trust it and allow themselves to surrender to what is obvious which often is not what it seems.
CHAKRA SEVEN (THE CROWN)
This chakra is all about spiritual connection and transformation. It lifts and inspires you, connecting you to the divine (you might call this angelic energy, the Source, or God.) This chakra also gives you a sense of your divinity, the awareness that you are a soul in a human body. The crown is associated with space or nothingness. These qualities represent self-transcendence, oneness, and the merging with the infinite source of creation, or the phrase Sahasrara which in Sanskrit is meaning for infinite.
When you open your crown chakra, you feel a tremendous peace and calming feeling rush over your being. All anger, frustrations, and anxiety fall to the wayside because you cannot help but live in the here and now. You start to feel an inner connection between all beings as well as the beings in the spiritual world.
An overactive crown chakra can leave you feeling vulnerable to many physical and non-physical symptoms, including light sensitivity, mental fogginess, dissociation, and lack of inspiration. When the crown chakra is overactive, it will feel like you're right in the middle of a crisis and you cannot find your way back.
You know the crown chakra is open for you are wont to have headaches; nausea; dizziness; drowsiness; migraines; and tingling in the head. These are the most common symptoms of the Crown chakra opening of the crown chakra; pulsating electrical shocks in the head which can be felt throughout the body including itching on the top of the head;
Some crown chakra healing practices that will help you balance this energy center are meditation, stop believing your thoughts, humming, or chanting the sound “OM.”
On the one hand, what blocks the crown chakra is stress, illness, emotional upset, or conflict which can cause blockages or imbalance in your chakra system. When the crown chakra becomes blocked, it can often cause you to detach yourself from the world around you and lead to spiritual malaise. Signs of an underactive crown chakra: lack of inspiration. On the other hand, what activates crown chakra is to feel calm and peaceful, even when under pressure. make sound, discerning decisions. feeling deeply connected to all living beings. This is firmly rooted in the present moment with regular experiences of pure awareness.
Burn Sahaswara incense and essential oils. Through aromatherapy, we can awaken the crown chakra and inspire connection with the divine energy. Connect to your crown chakra by burning enlightening aromas like myrrh, camphor, and frankincense. Repeat positive affirmations about enlightenment and spiritual connection.
Once all of the chakras are opened, the energy evens out and becomes balanced. Open the Root Chakra (anus & genitals). This chakra is based on being physically aware and feeling comfortable in your situation. If opened, you should feel well-balanced and sensible, stable and secure.
What Happens When Kundalini Reaches Sahasrara or the Crown Chakra? Kundalini is our energy and has the shape of a “serpent”. When it reaches the crown chakra and stays there it means that it has engulfed, healed, and transcended all the imbalances up to this level. This represents unity between Kundalini, the soul, and the higher self.
When you open your “third eye,” it is linked to perception, awareness, and spiritual communication. Some say that when open, “the third eye chakra” can provide wisdom and insight, as well as deepen your spiritual connection.
Signs that your “Third Eye” is starting to see involve feeling increasing pressure in your head. This is the most common symptom of an open third eye with a growing pressure between your eyebrows, giving you foresight, sensitivity to light, and a gradual change in perception beyond the obvious as well as a heightened sense of self.
NEXT
PART TWO: Shai Tubali’s “The Seven Chakra Personality Types”
No comments:
Post a Comment