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Chakra #1: Mooladhara (Area of consciousness for the physical body)
Name: Sanskrit word moola means ‘root’ or ‘foundation’, base of chakra system
The energy content of the first or Tribal chakra is tribal power. The word tribe is not only a synonym for family but an archetype, and as such it has connotations beyond its more conventional definition. Archetypally the word tribal connotes group identity, group force, group willpower, and group belief patterns. The first chakra grounds us, it is our connection to traditional familial beliefs that support the formation of identity and a sense of belonging to a group of people in a geographic location. To connect to the energy of your first chakra, focus your attention for a few moments on something tribal that triggers an emotional response in you:
Questions for Self-Examination:
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Chakra #2: Swadhisthana (Area of consciousness for the emotional body)
Name: Sanskrit word swa means ‘one’s own’ and adisthana means ‘dwelling place or residence’
This chakra resonates to our need for relationships with other people and our need to control to some extent the dynamics of our physical environment. All the attachments by which we maintain control over our external lives, such as authority, other people, or money, are linked through this chakra to our energy field and physical body. The illnesses that originate in this energy center are activated by the fear of losing control. The energy in this chakra enables us to generate a sense of personal identity and protective psychological boundaries. As we continually assess our personal strength in regard to the external world and its physical seductive forces – such as sex, money, addictive substances, or other people – the second chakra energy of a healthy physical ego keeps us able to interact with the world without having to negotiate or sell ourselves; it is the energy of self-sufficiency, a survival instinct for being in the world.
This chakra has procreative energy that is both biological and spiritual: we desire to create children and also to bring our creative ideas into physical form, which is crucial to our physical health as to our spiritual.
The primary fears in this chakra are the loss of control, or being controlled by another, through the dominating power of events or conditions such as addiction, rape, betrayal, impotence, financial loss, abandonment by our primary partner or professional colleagues.
The primary strengths are the ability to survive financially and physically on one’s own to defend and protect oneself; the ‘fight or flight’ instinct; the ability to take risks; the resilience to recover from loss whether of family members, partners, property, occupation, or finances; the power to rebel and re-establish a life; and personal and professional decision-making ability and talent.
The sacred truth inherent in the second chakra is ‘Honour One Another’. This truth applies to our interactions with each other and with all forms of life. From a spiritual perspective every relationship we develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves the purpose of helping us to become more conscious. Some relationships are necessarily painful because learning about ourselves and facing our own limitations are not things we tend to do with enthusiasm. We often need to be spiritually ‘set up’ for such encounters.
Spiritual messengers bring into our lives-and we into theirs-revelations about our own strengths and weaknesses. From relationships within the home to those at work to community or political activity, no union is without spiritual value; each helps us grow as individuals. We can more easily see the symbolic value of our relationships when we release our compulsion to judge what and who has value and instead focus on honouring the person and the task with which we are involved.
The second chakra’s energy has an inherent duality. The unified energy of the first chakra, represented by the tribal mind, becomes divided into polarities in the second chakra. The division of forces has been given many names: yin/yang, anima/animus, male/female, sun/moon. Understanding the significance of these opposites is the key to working with second chakra issues. The energies of the sefirah of Yesod and the sacrament of Communion combine with these dual energies of the second chakra to ensure that we “attract” to ourselves relationships that help us come to know ourselves. Well known expressions such as “Like attracts like” and “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” acknowledge that an energy working “behind the scenes” seems to organize when and where we meet people – and always at the right time. The spiritual challenge of this second chakra is to learn to interact consciously with others: to form unions with people who support our development and to release relationships that handicap our growth.
Physical science recognizes second chakra energy as the law of cause and effect (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction) and the law of magnetism, these laws mean that we generate patterns of energy that attract people who are opposite us in some way, who have something to teach. Nothing is random; prior to every relationship we have ever formed, we opened the door with energy that we were generating.
The energy of the second chakra helps us evolve beyond the collective energy of the tribe. Choice is born out of opposites, and the duality of the second chakra is forever challenging us to make choice in a world of opposing sides, of positive and negative energy patterns. Every choice we make contributes a subtle current of our energy to our universe, which is responsive to the influence of human consciousness.
Managing the power of choice, with all its creative and spiritual implications, is the essence of the human experience. All spiritual teachings are directed toward inspiring us to recognize that the power to make choices is the dynamic that converts our spirits into matter, our words into flesh. Choice is the process our spirits of creation itself.
The fact that our choices weave our spirits into events is the reason the major spiritual traditions are formed around one essential lesson: Make your choices wisely, because each choice you make is a creative act of spiritual power for which you are held responsible. Further, any choice made from faith has the full power of heaven behind it – which is why `faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain.` And any choice made from fear is a violation of the energy of faith.
Choice has a mysterious aspect, however, for we will never completely know the full outcome of any choice we make. A primal lesson of the second chakra is the paradoxical nature of choice: what seems right can turn out wrong; what appears good can end up bad. Just when everything is going smoothly, chaos breaks things up.
Paradoxically, while the energy of the second chakra inclines us to try to control our lives, the lesson of the second chakra is that we cannot be in control. We are physical beings and energy beings, but since the physical world cannot be controlled, the task before us is to master our inner responses to the external world, our thoughts and emotions.
Nevertheless, we all struggle in a seemingly never-ending cycle of disappointment in which we attempt to control our lives. We search endlessly for the one grand choice that will put everything in our lives into permanent order, halting the motion of change long enough to establish final control over everyone and everything. Is that choice the right career? The right marriage partner? The right geographic location? In seeking this one right choice constantly, we give form to our fear of the changing rhythm that is life itself. In looking for this single external person or thing that will forever bring us peace, stability, love, and health, we dismiss the more authentic power that lies “beyond our eyes and not in front of them.” The truth contained within the paradoxical nature of dualism is this: It is not what we choose that matters; our power to influence an outcome lies in our reasons for making a certain choice.
The challenger of the second chakra is to learn what motivates us to make the choices we do. In learning about our motivations, we learn about the content of our spirits. Are you filled with fear, or are you filled with faith? Every choice we make contains the energy of either faith or fear, and the outcome of every decision reflects to some extent that faith or fear. This dynamic of choice guarantees that we cannot run away from ourselves or our decisions.
Choice and Relationships
Second chakra energy is extremely volatile because it seeks to create. It is also linked to the issues of physical survival: sex, power, and money, the currencies of relationships. As we set out to carve a place for ourselves in the physical world, our internal conflict between faith and fear is often buried underneath the survival issues that dominate our thoughts: Can I earn a living? Can I find a partner? Can I take care of myself?
The shadow side of second chakra issues consists of our most prevalant fears: rape, financial loss and poverty, abandonment, isolation, impotence and the inability to care for ourselves. Each of these fears has the power to control us and to direct our actions for an entire lifetime. In the language of the Scriptures, these fears qualify as “false gods.”
In order to learn about our motivations – to discover our personal “false gods” – we need relationships. To form a relationship, we use some of our energy or personal power. Once the relationship is formed, we may ask, often unconsciously: Is this relationship drawing power from me, or am I drawing power from it? Where do I end, and where does the other person begin? What is my power, and what is the other’s power? Am I compromising myself, in exchange for safety, or money, or status? While there questions are essentially healthy, in most relationships we begin thinking in terms of psychologically diverse and conflict-inducing opposites: me or you, mine or yours, good or bad, winner or loser, right or wrong, rich or poor.
Symbolically, these conflicts represent most people’s relationship to God: my power or Yours – are You really with me on this earth, or must I try to control everything myself? And even if a Divine power is manoeuvring behind the scenes, how do I know what choices to make? This primary conflict of faith is present in every one of our relationships.
Paradoxically, our challenge in managing these conflicting energies is to maintain them in the consciousness of the inherent oneness of the universe. We begin this journey by exploring conflict within relationships: Relationships generate conflict, conflict generates choice, choice generates movement, and movement generates more conflict. We break free of this cycle by making choices that transcend dualism and the perceived divisions between ourselves and others, and between ourselves and God. So long as we focus on trying to control another person and forget that that person is a mirror reflecting back to us our own qualities, we keep conflict alive within ourselves. Seeing ourselves and others in symbolic unions, however, helps us accommodate differences.
In summary: Second chakra energy gives us our basic survival instincts and intuitions, as well as our desire to create music, art, poetry, and architecture, and the curiosity to investigate nature in science and medicine. Our creative energy draws us into an internal dialogue with the polarities of the self, our self, our conflicting inclinations, and it compels us to form external relationships to resolve these polarities.
Questions for Self-Examination:
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Chakra #3: Manipura (Area of consciousness for the mental body)
Name: Manipura is derived from two Sanskrit words: mani meaning ‘jewel’ and pura meaning ‘city’. Manipura literally means ‘city of jewels’
Third chakra energy, the energy of personal power chakra, becomes the dominant vibration in our development during puberty. It assists us further in the process of individuation, of forming a `self`, ego and personality separate from our inherited identity. This energy center also contains most issues related to the development of personal power and self-esteem.
The third chakra completes the physical trilogy of the human energy system. Like chakras one and two, it primarily relates to a physical form of power. Where the first chakra resonates to group or tribal power, and where the second chakra resonates to the flow of power between the self and others, the third chakra relates to our personal power in relation to the external world.
Energy Connection to the mental emotional body, often called the solar plexus, is our personal power center, the magnetic core of the personality and ego. The illnesses that originate here are activated by issues related to self-responsibility, self-esteem, fear of rejection, and an oversensitivity to criticism.
The third chakra mediates between the primary external (which is characteristic of the first and second chakras) and the internalization of consciousness. The first chakra has an external center of gravity and is always located within a group mind. The second chakra, too, has an external gravitational center but focuses on relationships and their effects on us. In the third chakra, however, the gravitational center is partly internalized, as our focus shifts from how we related to people around us to how we relate to and understand ourselves.
Primary fears: Fears of rejection, criticism, looking foolish, and failing to meet one`s responsibilities; all fears related to physical appearance, such as fear of obesity, baldness, or aging; fears that others will discover our secrets. The illnesses that originate here are activated by issues related to self-responsibility, self-esteem, fear of rejection, and an over sensitivity to criticism.
Primary strengths: Self-esteem, self-respect, and self-discipline; ambition, the ability to generate action, and the ability to handle a crisis; the courage to take risks; generosity, ethics, and strength of character.
The energies that come together in this chakra have but one spiritual goal: to help us mature in our self-understanding – the relationship we have with ourselves, and how we stand on our own and take care of ourselves. We all have faced or will face an experience that reveals to us our own internal strengths and weaknesses as separate from the influence of our elders. The spiritual quality inherent in the third chakra compels us to create an identity apart from our tribal self. As we develop a sense of self, our intuitive voice becomes our natural and constant source of guidance.
How we feel about ourselves, whether we respect ourselves, determines the quality of our life, our capacity to succeed in business, relationships, healing, and intuitive skills. Self-understanding and acceptance, the bond we form with ourselves, is in many ways the most crucial spiritual challenge we face. In truth, if we do not like ourselves, we will be incapable of making healthy decisions. Instead, we will direct all of our personal power for decision-making into the hands of someone else: someone whom we want to impress, or someone before whom we think we must weaken ourselves to gain physical security. People who have a low sense of self-esteem attract relationships and occupational situations that reflect and reinforce this weakness. No one is born with healthy self-esteem. We must earn this quality in the process of living, as we face our challenges one at a time.
The third chakra in particular resonates to the boundaries of the physical body. Are we physically strong or weak? Able or handicapped? Beautiful or scarred? Too tall or too short? From a spiritual perspective, any and all physical assets and limitations are illusory, mere `life props`. Yet a person`s acceptance of or resistance to them is critical to entering spiritual adulthood. From a spiritual perspective, in fact, the entire physical world is nothing more than our classroom, but the challenge to each of us in this classroom is: Given your particular body, environment, and beliefs, will you make choices that enhance your spirit or those that drain your power into the physical illusion around you? Again and again, the challenges of the third chakra will cause you to evaluate your sense of power and self in relation to the external world.
We reorder our lives when we choose spirit over the illusions of the physical circumstances. With each choice we make, we either become more involved in the illusory physical world, or we invest energy into the power of spirit. Each of the seven chakras represents s different version, or manifestation, of this one essential lesson. Each time we choose to enhance our internal power, we limit the authority of the physical world over our lives, bodies, health, minds and spirits. From an energy point of view, every choice that enhances our spirits strengthens our energy field; and the stronger our energy field, the fewer our connections to negative people and experiences.
The stronger our spirits become, the less authority linear time can exercise in our lives. To some extent linear time is an illusion of the physical world, tied in to the physical energy of the first three chakras. For physical tasks, we need this physical energy; for example, when we need to take an inspiration from thought to form, we run it through linear steps. But in terms of our belief in our ability to heal, our concept of time should be re-examined.
The illusion that healing takes a “long time” holds considerable authority in our culture. Believing it makes it true. In the Book of Genesis, Yahweh “breathed into his nostrils a breath of life, and thus man was born.” By choosing to believe something, we breathe our breath into that belief, giving that belief authority.
Our culture believes that healing painful childhood memories requires years of psychotherapy, but that need not be the case. If one believes it, healing painful memories and releasing the authority they have within one’s life can happen rapidly.
The length of healing processes becomes calibrated to the time that the tribal mind attributes to them. For instance, the group mind currently believes that certain cancers take six months to kill us, that people with AIDS can live for six to eight years, that grieving a mate’s death requires at least one year, and that grieving a child’s death may never end. If we believe these assessments, we give the tribal mind power over our lives instead of exercising our personal power. If your spirit is strong enough to withdraw from the authority of a group belief, it is potentially strong enough to change your life.
Self-Esteem and Intuition
Intuition is neither the ability to engage prophesy nor a means of avoiding financial loss or painful relationships. It is actually the ability to use energy data to make decisions in the immediate moment. Energy data are the emotional, psychological, and spiritual components of a given situation. They are the “here and now” ingredients of life, not nonphysical information from some “future” place. For the most part information that is accessible to intuition makes its presence known by making us feel uncomfortable, depressed, and anxious – or at the other extreme, drifty and detached, as if we were suddenly cut off from all of our own feelings. In dreams of an intuitive nature, we receive symbols of change or chaos. Such dreams often occur more intensely during emotional crises. Energy or intuitive sensations signal that we have reached a crossroads in our lives and that we have an opportunity to influence the next stage of our lives, at least to some degree, through the choice we make now. The intuition and the independence of the third chakra together give us the capacity to take risks, to follow through on gut hunches.
If a person suffers from low self-esteem, he/she cannot act on her intuitive impulses because her fear of failure is too intense. Intuition, like all meditative disciplines, can be enormously effective if, and only if, one has the courage and personal power to follow through on the guidance it provides. Guidance requires action, but it does not guarantee safety. While we measure our own success in terms of our personal comfort and security, the universe measures our success by how much we have learned. So long as we use comfort and security as our criteria for success, we will fear our own intuitive guidance because by its very nature it directs us into new cycles of learning that are sometimes uncomfortable.
An empowered sense of self can also develop in stages, over the course of our of our lives, in a series of mini-initiations. Every time we advance in self-esteem, even in a small measure, we have to change something about our external dynamics. For the most part we abhor change, but an initiation represents the necessity to change. We may end a relationship because we have become sufficiently empowered that we need a stronger partner. Or we may quit a job because we need to break out of our safe and familiar patterns and test-fly our own creativity. Too much change that happens too rapidly can be overwhelming, so we try to manage our own empowerment by taking on only one challenge at a time. As we do, one by one, the changes we undergo form a pattern in our journey toward personal power. As we gain strength and stamina from living with self-esteem, our intuitive abilities emerge naturally.
In summary:
We are all on a pilgrimage of sorts, through it is certainly not necessary to travel physically to sacred places and conduct ceremonies to release our past. It is necessary, however, to travel spiritually and to shed the fears that block us from recognizing the beauty in our lives, and to come to a place of healing and self-acceptance. We can take this type of journey daily in the privacy of our own prayers and meditation.
Questions for Self-Examination:
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Chakra #4: Anahata (Area of consciousness for the astral body)
Name: Sanskrit anahata actually means ‘unstruck’ or ‘unbeaten’
The fourth chakra is the central powerhouse of the human energy system. The middle chakra, it mediates between the body and spirit and determines their health and strength. Fourth chakra energy is emotional in nature and helps propel our emotional development. This chakra embodies the spiritual lesson that teaches us how to act out of love and compassion and recognize that most powerful energy we have is love.
Energy Connection: This chakra resonates to our emotional perceptions, which determine the quality of our lives far more than our mental perceptions. As children, we reast to our circumstances with a range of emotions: love, compassion, confidence, hope, despair, hate, envy and fear. As adults, we are challenged to generate within ourselves an emotional climate and steadiness from which to act consciously and with compassion.
Symbolic Connection: More than any other chakra, the fourth represents our capacity to “let go and let God.” With its energy we accept our personal emotional challenges as extensions of a Divine plan, which has as its intent our conscious evolution. By releasing our emotional pain, by letting go of our need to know why things have happened as they have, we reach a state of tranquillity. In order to achieve that inner peace, however, we have to embrace the healing energy of forgiveness and release our lesser need for human, self-determined justice.
The challenge inherent in this chakra is similar to that of the third but is more spiritually sophisticated. While the third chakra’s focus is on our feelings about ourselves in relation to our physical world, the fourth chakra focuses on our feelings about our internal world – our emotional response to our thoughts, ideas, attitudes, and inspirations, as well as the attention we give to our emotional needs. This level of commitment is the essential factor in forming healthy relationships with others.
Primary fears: Fears of loneliness, commitment, and “following one’s heart”; fear of inability to protect oneself emotionally; fear of emotional weakness and betrayal. Loss of fourth chakra energy can give rise to jealousy; bitterness, anger, hared, and an inability to forgive others as well as oneself.
Primary strengths: Love, forgiveness, compassion, dedication, inspiration, hope, trust, and the ability to heal oneself and others.
Sacred truth: The 4th chakra is the power center of the human energy system because Love Is Divine Power. While intelligence or “mental energy” is generally considered superior to emotional energy, actually emotional energy is the true motivator of the human body and spirit. Love in its purest form – unconditional love – is the substance of the Divine, with its endless capacity to forgive us and respond to our prayers. Our own hearts are designed to express beauty, compassion, forgiveness, and love.
We are not born fluent in love but spend our life learning about it. Its energy is pure power. We are as attracted to love as we are intimidated by it. We are motivated by love, controlled by it, inspired by it, healed by it and destroyed by it. Love is the fuel of our physical and spiritual bodies. Each of life’s challenges is a lesson in some aspect of love. How we respond to these challenges is recorded within our cell tissues: we live within the biological consequences of our biological choices.
Learning the power of Love: Because love has such power, we come to know this energy in stages. Each stage presents a lesson in love’s intensity and forms: forgiveness, compassion, generosity, kindness, caring for oneself and others. The stages follow the design of our chakras: we begin learning love within our tribe, absorbing the many expressions of its energy from our family members. Tribal love can be unconditional, but it generally communicates the expectation of loyalty and tribal support; in the tribal setting, love is an energy that is shared among one’s own kind.
As the second chakra awakens and we learn the bonds of friendship, love grows to include “outsiders.” We express love through sharing with and caring for others to whom we are not connected through blood. And as our third chakra awakens, we discover love of external things, of our personal, physical, and material needs, which may include athletics, academics, fashion, dating and mating, occupation and home, and body.
All three of these lower chakras involve love in the external world. At some time in our civilization, these three practices of love were all that life required. Very few people needed more than tribal and partnership love. With the advent of psychotherapy and the spiritual movement, however, love became recognized as a force that influences and perhaps determines biological activity. Love helps us heal others and ourselves.
Life crises that have issues of love at their core – divorce, death of a loved one, emotional abuse, abandonment, adultery – are often the cause of an illness and not just an event that coincidentally precedes it. Physical healing often requires, and may demand, the healing of emotional issues.
The expression “If you can’t love yourself, you can’t love anyone else” is commonplace. Yet for many people loving oneself remains a vague notion, which we often act out in material ways – through shopping sprees and outrageous vacations. But rewarding oneself with trips and toys is third chakra love – using physical pleasure to express self-appreciation. While this type of reward is enjoyable, it can obstruct our contact with the deeper emotional stirrings of the heart that emerge when we need to evaluate a relationship, or a job, or some other troubled circumstance that affects our health. Loving oneself as a fourth chakra challenge means having the courage to listen to the heart’s emotional messages and spiritual directives. The archetype to which the heart most frequently guides us for healing is that of the “wounded child.”
The “wounded child” within each of us contains the damaged or stunted emotional patterns of our youth, patterns of painful memories, of negative attitudes, and of dysfunctional self-images. Unknowingly, we may continue to operate within these patterns as adults, albeit in a new form. Fear of abandonment, for example, becomes jealousy. Sexual abuse becomes dysfunctional sexuality, often causing a repetition of the same violations with our own children. A child’s negative self-image can later become the source of dysfunctions such as anorexia, obesity, alcoholism, and other addictions as well as obsessive fear of failure. These patterns can damage our emotional relationships, our personal and professional lives, and our health. Loving oneself begins with confronting this archetypal force within the psyche and unseating the wounded child’s authority over us. If unhealed, wounds keep us living in the past.
Healing is possible through acts of forgiveness. In the life and teachings of Jesus, forgiveness is a spiritual act of perfection, but it is also a physically healing act. Forgiveness is no longer merely an option but a necessity for healing. Jesus always first healed his patients’ emotional sufferings; the physical healing then followed naturally. While Jesus’ healings have been interpreted by many theologians and Sunday school teachers as a Divine reward for those who confess of misbehaviour, forgiveness is an essential spiritual act that must occur in order to open oneself fully to the healing power of love. Self-love means caring for ourselves enough to forgive people in our past so that the wounds can no longer damage us – for our wounds do not hurt the people who hurt us, they hurt only us. Releasing our attachment to these wounds enables us to move from the childlike relationship with the Divine of the first three chakras into one in which we participate with the Divine in acting out of the love and compassion of the fourth chakra.
The fourth chakra energies propel us further into spiritual maturity, beyond a parent-child dialogue with the Divine, beyond praying for explanations for events, beyond fearing the unexpected. The wounded child sees the Divine as operating a reward and punishment system, with humanly logical explanations for all painful experiences. The wounded child does not understand that within all experiences, no matter how painful, lie spiritual insights. So long as we think like a wounded child, we will love conditionally and with great fear of loss.
Our culture as a whole is evolving toward healing from its emphasis on wounds and victimization. Having entered into the power of our wounds, however, it is difficult to see how we let go of this negative power and move ahead to become “unwounded” and self-empowered. Ours is a “fourth chakra culture” that has not yet moved out of our wounds and into spiritual adulthood.
Questions for Self-Examination:
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Chakra #5: Vishuddhi (Area of consciousness for the etheric body)
Name: Sanskrit shuddhi means ‘to purify’, known as the ‘purification centre’
The fifth chakra embodies the challenges of surrendering our own will power and spirits to the will of God. From a spiritual perspective, our highest goal is the full release of our personal will into the “hands of the Divine.” Jesus and Buddha, as well as other great teachers, represent the mastery of this state of consciousness, complete union with Divine will.
Energy connection to the emotional body: The fifth chakra resonates to the numerous emotional and mental struggles involved in learning the nature of the power of choice. All illness has a connection to the fifth chakra, because choice is involved in every detail of our lives and therefore in every illness.
Symbolic connection: The symbolic challenge of the Willpower chakra is to progress through the maturation of will: from the tribal perception that everyone and everything around you has authority over you; through the perception that you alone have authority over you; to the final perception, that true authority comes from aligning yourself to God’s will.
Primary fears: Fears related to our willpower exist within each chakra, appropriate to that chakra. We fear having no authority or power of choice within our lives, first within our tribes, then within our personal and professional relationships. And then we fear having no authority with ourselves, being out of control when it comes to our response to substances, to money, to power, to another person’s emotional control over our well-being. And finally, we fear the will of God. The notion of releasing our power of choice to a Divine force remains the greatest struggle for the individual seeking to become conscious.
Primary strengths: Faith, self-knowledge, and personal authority; the capacity to make decisions knowing that no matter what decisions we make, we can keep our word to ourselves or to another person.
Sacred truth: The fifth chakra is the center of choice and consequence, of spiritual karma. Every choice we make, every thought and feeling we have, is an act of power that has biological, environmental, social, personal, and global consequences. We are everywhere our thoughts are and thus our personal responsibility includes our energy contributions.
What choices would we make if we could actually see their energy consequences? We can approach this kind of foresight only by abiding by the sacred truth Surrender Personal Will to Divine Will. The spiritual lessons of the fifth chakra show us that actions motivated by a personal will that has trusted in Divine authority create the best effects.
Understanding the energy consequences of our thoughts and beliefs, as well as our actions, may force us to become honest to a new degree. Lying, either to others or to ourselves, should be out of the question. Genuine, complete healing requires honesty with oneself. An inability to be honest obstructs healing as seriously as the inability to forgive. Honesty and forgiveness retrieve our energy – our spirits – from the energy dimension of ‘the past’. Our fifth chakra and its spiritual lessons show us that personal power lies in our thoughts and attitudes.
The most costly energy consequences come from acting out of fear. Even when choices made from fear lead us to what we desire, they generally also produce unwanted side effects. These surprises teach us that choosing from fear transgresses our trust in Divine guidance. We all do live, at least periodically, within the illusion that we are in charge of our lives. We seek money and social status in order to have greater power of choice and so that we do not have to follow the choices others make for us. The idea that consciousness requires surrendering personal will to Divine will stands in direct conflict with all that we have come to consider the measure of an empowered person.
Thus, we may repeat the cycle of fear-surprise-fear-surprise, until we reach a point of prayer in which we say: You choose, and I’ll follow. Once we release this prayer, guidance may enter our lives, along with endless acts of synchronicity and coincidence – Divine “interference” at its best.
The essence of the fifth chakra is faith. Having faith in someone commits a part of our energy to that person; having faith in an idea commits a part of our energy to that idea; having faith in a fear commits a part of our energy to that fear. As a result of our energy commitments, we – our minds, hearts, and lives – become woven into their consequences. Our faith and our power of choice are, in fact, the power of creation itself. We are the vessels through which energy becomes matter in this life.
Therefore, the spiritual test inherent in all our lives is the challenge to discover what motivates us to make the choices we do, and whether we have faith in our fears or the Divine. We all need to address these questions as a matter of spiritual thought or as a result of physical illness? We all reach a moment when we ask, Who is in charge of my life? Why aren’t things working out the way I want? No matter how successful we are, at some point we will become conscious that we feel incomplete. Some unplanned event or relationship or illness will show us that our personal power is insufficient to get us through a crisis. We are meant to become aware that our personal power is limited. We are meant to wonder if some other “force” is acting in our lives, and to ask, Why is this happening? What do you want of me? What am I meant to do? What is my purpose?
Gaining an awareness of our own limitations opens us to considering choices we would not otherwise have made. During the moments when our lives seem most out of control, we may become receptive to a guidance that we would not have welcomed before. Then our lives may move in directions we had never anticipated. Most of us end up saying, “I never thought I would be doing this or living here, but I am, and all is well.”
It may help you to arrive at the point of surrendering if you can use symbolic sight to view your life as only a spiritual journey. We have all known people who have recovered from dire circumstances – and credited the fact that they let the Divine take over. And every one of these people shared the experience of saying to the Divine, “Not my will but Yours.” If that one prayer is all that is required, why are we so afraid of it?
Remember that your physical life and your spiritual path are one and the same. Taking pleasure in your physical life is as much a spiritual goal as achieving a healthy physical body. Both are the consequences of following Divine guidance in making choices of how to live and of acting out of faith and trust. Surrender to Divine authority means liberation from physical illusions, not from the delights and comfort of physical life.
The spiritual energies of the fifth chakra guide us toward that point of surrender and the greatness through love, which directs us to be as loving as possible in all circumstances. Sometimes the greatest act of love is to withhold judgement of another or of oneself. Again and again we are reminded that being judgemental is a spiritual error. Developing the discipline of will allows us to refrain from releasing negative thoughts toward others or ourselves. By being nonjudgmental, we attain wisdom and defeat our lives. This teaches us to release the need to know why things happen as they do, and to trust that whatever the reason is, it is a part of a grander spiritual design.
Questions for Self-Examination:
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Chakra #6: Ajna (Area of consciousness for the celestial body)
Name: The ajna comes from the Sanskrit root which means to know, to obey or to follow. Literally, ajna means ‘command’ or ‘monitoring centre'
The sixth chakra involves our mental and reasoning abilities, and our psychological skill at evaluating our beliefs and attitudes. The Mind chakra resonates to the energies of our psyches, our conscious and unconscious psychological forces. Within Eastern spiritual literature, the sixth chakra is the ‘third eye,’ the spiritual center in which the interaction of mind and psyche can lead to intuitive sight and wisdom. This is the chakra of wisdom.
The sixth chakra involves our mental and reasoning abilities, and our psychological skill at evaluating our beliefs and attitudes. The Mind chakra resonates to the energies of our psyches, our conscious and unconscious psychological forces. Within Eastern spiritual literature, the sixth chakra is the ‘third eye,’ the spiritual center in which the interaction of mind and psyche can lead to intuitive sight and wisdom. This is the chakra of wisdom.
The challenges of the sixth chakra are opening the mind, developing an impersonal mind, retrieving one’s power from artificial and “false truths”; learning to act on internal direction; and discriminating between thoughts motivated by strength and those by fear and illusion.
Energy connection to the emotional/mental body: The sixth chakra links us to our mental body, our intelligence and psychological characteristics. Our psychological characteristics are a combination of what we know and what we believe to be true, a unique combination of the facts, fears, personal experiences, and memories that are active continually within our mental energy body.
Symbolic/perceptual connection: The sixth chakra activates the lessons that lead us to wisdom. We achieve wisdom both through life experiences and by acquiring the discriminating perceptual ability of detachment. Symbolic sight is partly learned “detachment” – a state of mind beyond the influences of the “personal mind” or “beginner’s mind” that can lead to the power and insight of the “impersonal” or open mind.
Primary fears: An unwillingness to look within and excavate one’s fears; fear of truth when one’s reason is clouded; fear of sound, realistic judgement; fear of relying on external counsel, of discipline; fear of one’s shadow side and its attributes.
Primary strengths: Intellectual abilities and skills; evaluation of conscious and unconscious insights, receiving inspiration; generating great acts of creativity and intuitive reasoning – emotional intelligence.
Sacred Truth: The sacred truth of the sixth chakra is Seek Only the Truth. It compels us to search continually for the difference between truth and illusion, the two forces present at every moment. Separating truth from illusion is more a task of the mind than of the brain. The brain commands the behaviour of our physical body, but the mind commands the behaviour of our energy body, which is our relationship to thought and perception. The brain is the physical instrument through which thought is transferred into action, but perception – and all that is associated with perception, such as becoming conscious – is a characteristic of the mind. In becoming conscious one is able to detach from subjective perceptions and see the truth or symbolic meaning in a situation. Detachment does not mean ceasing to care. It means stilling one’s fear-driven voices. One who has attained an inner posture of detachment has a sense of self so complete that external influences have no authority within his or her consciousness. Such clarity of mind and self is the essence of wisdom, one of the Divine powers of the sixth chakra.
Becoming detached and conscious means getting certain perceptions from our minds into our bodies. It means merging with perceptions that are truth and living them so that their power becomes one and the same as our own energy.
Take, for instance, the truth “Change is constant.” Mentally we can absorb that teaching with little difficulty. Yet when change occurs in our lives – when we notice we are aging, when people we love die, or when relationships shift from being intimate and loving to distant – this truth terrorizes us. We often need years to recover from some changes because we had hoped that it – whatever “it” was – would remain the same. We knew all along that it would change, but we can’t help hoping that the energy of change will pass by this one part of our lives.
Even when “Change is constant” feels like an enemy that has swept away a happy part of our lives, our lonely times will come to an end and a new part of life will begin. The promise of “Change is constant” is that new beginnings always follow closures.
Consciousness is the ability to release the old and embrace the new with the awareness that all things end at the appropriate time and that all things begin at the appropriate time. This truth is difficult to learn to live with because human beings seek stability – the absence of change. Therefore becoming conscious means living fully in the present moment, knowing that no situation or person will be exactly the same tomorrow. As change does occur, we work to interpret it as a natural part of life and strive to “flow with it,” as the Tao Te Ching counsels, and not against it. Trying to make things remain the same is useless as well as impossible. Our task is to contribute the best of our energy to every situation with the understanding that we influence, but do not control, what we will experience tomorrow.
The meaning of detachment: the realization that no one person or group of people can determine your life’s path. Thus, when change comes into your life, it is because a larger dynamic is moving you along. It may look like a group of people conspired to have you removed from a job or something similar – but that is the illusion. If you choose to believe that illusion, it will hold you captive, maybe even for a lifetime. But if it hadn’t been the right moment for you to move on, the “conspiracy” would not have been successful. That is the higher truth of this life change, and the symbolic sight that accompanies detachment allows you to see it.
Obviously, none of us wake up one morning and announces, “I think I’ll become conscious today.” We are drawn into a desire to stretch the parameters of our minds through the mysteries we encounter. All of us experience, and will continue to experience, relationships and events that cause us to re-examine our understanding of reality. The very design of our minds compels us to wonder why things are as they are, if only within our own personal confusion.
The following instructions provide a starting point for developing the impersonal mind and achieving symbolic sight, the ability to see through illusion and grasp the energy power behind the scenes. Following these steps may help you attain symbolic sight and increase your ability to reach the dimension of Divine reasoning.
There is nothing easy about becoming conscious. We are forever looking for the easy meditation, the easy exercise, that will lift us out of the fog, but consciousness doesn’t work that way. Ironically, there is a simple way out, only it’s not easy: Just let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be, and embrace the life that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.
So many people struggling to find their way are in that necessary but confusing state of waiting. A part of each of them is eager to allow the Divine will to direct their lives, yet they remain tormented by the fear that they will lose all comfort on the physical plane should they actually surrender to it. So they are held in a waiting position until they are strong enough to release that fear and embrace the deeper truth that “all will be well – not “well” by our definition, perhaps, but certainly by God’s.
Becoming conscious means changing the rules by which we live and the beliefs we maintain. Our memories and attitudes are literally rules that determine the quality of life as well as the strength of our bonds with others. Always, a shift in awareness includes a period of isolation and loneliness as one gets accustomed to the new level of truth. And then always, new companies are found. No one is left alone for long.
Pineal Gland and Its Esoteric Origins:
Questions for Self-Examination:
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Chakra #7: Sahasrara (Area of consciousness for Ketheric body)
Name: Sanskrit word sahasrara means ‘one thousand’, implies that its magnitude and significance is vast, in fact, unlimited
The seventh chakra is our connection to our spiritual nature and our capacity to allow our spirituality to become an integral part of our physical lives and guide us. While our energy system as a whole is animated by our spirit, the seventh chakra is directly aligned to seek an intimate relationship with the Divine. It is the power of prayer (intent). It is also our “grace bank account,” the warehouse for the energy we amass through kind thoughts and actions, and through acts of faith and prayer. It enables us to gain an intensity of internal awareness through meditation and prayer. This chakra represents our connection to the transcendent dimension of life.
Energy connection to the physical body: The seventh chakra is the entry point for the human life-force, which pours endlessly into the human energy system, from the greater universe, from God or the prime creator. This force nourishes the body, the mind, and the spirit. It distributes itself throughout the physical body and the lower six chakras, connection the entire physical body to the seventh chakra. The energy of the seventh chakra influences that of the major body systems: the central nervous system, the muscular system, and the skin.
Energy connection to the emotional/mental body: The seventh chakra contains the energy that generates devotion, inspirational and prophetic thoughts, transcendent ideas, and mystical connections.
Symbolic/perceptual connection: The seventh chakra contains the purest form of the energy of grace or prana. This chakra warehouses the energy generated by prayer and meditation and safeguards our capacity for symbolic sight. It is the energy center for the spiritual insight, vision, and intuition far beyond ordinary human consciousness. It is the mystical realm, a dimension of a conscious rapport with the Divine.
Primary fears: Faith in the presence of the Divine, and in all that faith represents within one’s life – such as inner guidance, insight into healing, and a quality of trust that eclipses ordinary human fears; devotion.
Sefirot/Sacrament connection: The sefirah connected to the seventh chakra is Keter, which means “crown.” Easter spiritual traditions refer to the seventh chakra as the crown chakra. Keter represents “nothingness,” the energy from which physical manifestation begins. It is thought to be eternal, with no beginning or end. The Christian sacrament related to the seventh chakra is Extreme Unction (or Last Rites), the sacrament administered to the dying. Symbolically, Extreme Unction represents the process of retrieving one’s spirit from the various “corners” of one’s life that still hold “unfinished business,” or releasing regrets that continue to pull at one’s consciousness, such as words that should have been spoken but were not, or words that should not have been spoken. Unfinished business would also include relationships we wish we had ended differently or paths we wished we had taken but did not. At the closure of our lives we consciously draw these memories to a final point, accepting the choices made at the time and releasing the feeling that things could have or should have been otherwise. This is what it means to “call one’s spirit back” in order to leave this world and return to the spiritual dimension complete.
The final statement by Jesus, as he hung on the cross, may well have initiated this sacrament. He said to his mother and to his disciple John, “Woman, behold your son. John, behold your mother.” Then turning his attention to God, Jesus said, “Forgive them, they know not what they do,” and “It is finished. Unto you I commit my spirit.” These statements embody the conscious closure of one’s life and the preparations to return to an eternal spiritual identity.
From a different symbolic perspective, this sacred Rite represents a ritual that should be a regular part of human life. At many points during our lives, we face a crossroads where we need to let a previous phase of life “die.” The less we hold on to the physical world, the more we position ourselves to access consciously the energy of the crown chakra, our transcendent link to the Divine.
Sacred truth: Seventh chakra energy motivates us to seek an intimate connection to the Divine in everything we do. This spiritual desire for connection is significantly different from the wish for connection to a religion. Religion, first of all, is a group experience whose main purpose is to protect the group, primarily from physical threats: disease, poverty, death, social crises, and even war. Religion is rooted in first chakra energies. Spirituality, on the other hand, is an individual experience directed toward releasing fears of the physical world and pursuing a relationship to the Divine. The sacred truth of this chakra is Live in the Present Moment.
Seeking a personal spiritual connection shakes us to our core. Our conscious or unconscious prayer to come to know the Divine directly goes something like this: “I no longer want to be protected within the group, nor do I desire to have a mediator filter my guidance for me. I now want You to move into my life directly and remove from my life any obstacle – be it person, place, or occupation – that interferes with my ability to form an intimate union with You.” As Meister Eckhart wrote in The Soul Is One with God, the ultimate aim of the mystic is identity: “God is love, and he who is in love is in God and God in him.”
In seeking union with the Divine, we are asking to have all physical, psychological, and emotional “illusions” removed from our lives. Once this process of removal begins, we awaken an internal voice of authority that immediately begins to compete with every external authority in our lives, which can throw us into internal turmoil, or even “spiritual schizophrenia.”
This shift from religion to spirituality is not a simply a cultural trend. It is an archetypal reorganization of our planetary community, which now has access to the universal truths available through symbolic sight. Symbolic sight includes a sixth sense of intuition, which senses the connections among all living energy systems. This intuitive sense of connection is moving us as a planet toward a holistic understanding of health and disease, of the environment and its biodiversity, and of social priorities for service and charity. This movement toward working as “one world” is an extension of the release of the Divine Light into the world. It seems as though humanity is “under orders” to mature spiritually to a level of holistic sight and service, and any number of paths of service to fulfill those orders have opened up to us.
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