Saturday, June 12, 2004
Are the Chakras Real?
Some writers insist that the chakras are not in fact "real" as actual centers of subtle feeling, but are merely abstractions or intellectual conventions. I think these are analysts who have not themselves experienced the wondrous power of the chakras as they awaken in blissful pulsation. If they had even once felt such profound rapture, they would no longer question.
Others want to arrange the chakras in an ordered hierarchy, from base to crown, sometimes even deprecating the lower chakras as aspects of "the animal nature" which we must strive to transcend. For me, each chakra is a locale which god (the goddess/the divine energetic) loves to visit. This energy seems to flow impartially in lower and higher, though it is true we become aware of the "lower" centers earlier in our development. But none is more or less worthy than another. I think of the chakras like notes on a flute, some higher, some lower, all capable of expanding into effulgent beauty.
The primary difference, I believe, is that the energy of the higher chakras draws us closer to pure consciousness, where the distinction between observer and thing observed dissolves. When rapture is awakened in the root, we are well aware that something is happening to some part of "us." At the crown, we and what we are experiencing are one.
Women, in particular, have struggled to recapture their needful connection with the creative earth energies associatead with the lower chakras. The right to survive, the right to experience the full joy of the body, the right to assert one's needs before the world--these have been brought into sharp focus in recent years through feminism. (Many yogic systems associate these capacities with the first three chakras.) Likewise the heart which opens to compassion, the throat which pours forth its own artistic expressions, the "third eye" which begets the capacity for intuitive perception--all of these are important segments of the whole.
But the chakra is more than a symbolic expression of a human trait. Each is a place which feels, and such feeling brings awareness of our lost birthright, "bliss consciousness."
At the crown, one discovers that one does not exist, after all. The only reality is overwhelming love. In that embrace, the seeker knows at last who she is, the truth of her own being, which is itself a manifestation of divine love.
.
Others want to arrange the chakras in an ordered hierarchy, from base to crown, sometimes even deprecating the lower chakras as aspects of "the animal nature" which we must strive to transcend. For me, each chakra is a locale which god (the goddess/the divine energetic) loves to visit. This energy seems to flow impartially in lower and higher, though it is true we become aware of the "lower" centers earlier in our development. But none is more or less worthy than another. I think of the chakras like notes on a flute, some higher, some lower, all capable of expanding into effulgent beauty.
The primary difference, I believe, is that the energy of the higher chakras draws us closer to pure consciousness, where the distinction between observer and thing observed dissolves. When rapture is awakened in the root, we are well aware that something is happening to some part of "us." At the crown, we and what we are experiencing are one.
Women, in particular, have struggled to recapture their needful connection with the creative earth energies associatead with the lower chakras. The right to survive, the right to experience the full joy of the body, the right to assert one's needs before the world--these have been brought into sharp focus in recent years through feminism. (Many yogic systems associate these capacities with the first three chakras.) Likewise the heart which opens to compassion, the throat which pours forth its own artistic expressions, the "third eye" which begets the capacity for intuitive perception--all of these are important segments of the whole.
But the chakra is more than a symbolic expression of a human trait. Each is a place which feels, and such feeling brings awareness of our lost birthright, "bliss consciousness."
At the crown, one discovers that one does not exist, after all. The only reality is overwhelming love. In that embrace, the seeker knows at last who she is, the truth of her own being, which is itself a manifestation of divine love.
.
