The Chakras – Part 3

Sex and Kundalini

DURING an experimental LSD session with a psychiatrist, a man who had for some years been practising yoga, experienced an insight into kundalini and the Chakras. Writing about the experience he says:

During the previous hours, I had passed through, what seemed to me, at the time, my major unconscious fears and problems. I had faced sexual desires I previously had not known existed in me. I had relived a child-hood medical operation that had left unknown terrors and shock in me, and I had emerged cleansed.

I had, in brief, gradually gone backwards through my life, sorting out the tangles, and eventually regressing to the life in the womb. As it happened, I realised this was not life in my mother’s womb, but in the cosmic womb. In other words, I had descended to the most basic or fundamental level of awareness.

I then reached a point where if I went back any further I would cease to exist as an individual. I was confronted, in fact, with the formless, dark unknown which had created me, and from which I had emerged. I suppose this is what people call God: our source of being.

It was without any form, and simply existed, everywhere. But through years of meditation I knew I could trust it implicitly. I knew with utter conviction that it had created me, and therefore, even if I cast myself into its depths and was lost in its dark void, it would not matter, as this was my real self, and nothing would be lost. Therefore I let go. I let myself drop into the void. I surrendered myself to it.

Instead of losing myself, it was as if the power of life itself took hold of me and began to grow me in to a new manhood – a rebirth. Gradually, from the foetal position, I opened out like a seed. It was like the way plant growth is speeded up on film, and I saw how as an individual I was experiencing the power of life growing into physical existence, and realising itself as a man – as me.

I had a tremendous insight into how we relate to life, and how it is expresses in stages or levels. A plant, for instance, starts with a seed. The next stage is the growth of a root. After that the stem and leaves develop. A man or woman starts as life, which attaches to a fertilised ovum and opens it up, in the sense of developing a body. It roots into the fertile ‘soil’ of the mother’s womb.

At a certain stage, awareness is lit in the foetus, and it is conscious of sensation. Sensation is the very basis of personal development, but out of sensation develops like and dislike, attraction and repulsion.

This I felt was centred in the root Chakra. Out of all the variations of sensuality, attraction and repulsion, sexuality gradually emerged, centering on the abdominal Chakra. I saw that without awareness sensuality couldn’t arise, or without sensual awareness, sexuality couldn’t develop. It could be compared with a flower without a stem or roots.

From sexuality there developed relatedness. The Chakra for it being the navel. Through being able to relate in finer ways sympathy emerges, and compassion. This is centred on the heart Chakra. Next came a finer degree of sympathy – empathy – the direct experience of someone else’s feelings. ‘This was possible through the throat centre. The brow Chakra was an extension of experience, a summing up of experience, which we call knowledge or understanding – understanding what we experience, and fitting our life into the universal scheme of things.

At the crown, God in man flowers, buds out, so all below is lifted into an opening to the cosmos. I saw that if I could but keep casting myself into life; if I could but keep in harmony with my source, it would grow me into my full stature. Then life spoke to me as if in silence, and said: ‘Come to me daily and offer your whole being as you have just done. Then I will grow you’. Then I too made a promise – ‘I will come’.

Magnetic field

In what has been said so far about Kundalini, the Aura and Chakras, a great deal of information has been gathered together. Perhaps now we can look at each Chakra in more detail, trying to define its functions, bodily connections, and ways of development. One last thing remains to be said before this is done though: the Chakras themselves are in the aura or magnetic field of the body, but each connects with definite points in the body as by a flower stalk or root.

Traditional Yoga says that each connects with the spinal cord or brain at different points. The spinal cord is depicted as itself the stalk of a Lotus, having its root in Muladhara (root) Chakra. The stalk puts out stems, or lotuses – the Chakras – and blossoms in the crown Chakra. But none of the lotuses can open, or become a part of conscious function, until the Kundalini power, still unexpressed after its creation of our body and personality, is aroused and rises through the spine.

The spinal cord is called the Sushumna Nadi, a ‘nadi’ being a pathway of the creative energy. What this amounts to is that our latent or dormant possibilities – our potential for growth – are aroused or allowed to express themselves. Yoga and the Occult both say that man has the possibility of becoming aware of cosmic rather than of individual consciousness, and of seeing levels of life that are at present invisible. Through this rising of Kundalini up the spine, the negative and positive energies comprising our being (Shiva and Shakti or creative energy and body) are brought into a state of unity.
sympathetic nervous system

On each side of the Sushumna Nadi is another ‘nadi’ – the sympathetic nervous system, which in Yoga are called Ida and Pingala. These are the physical trunk lines or nadis for the creative kundalini in its negative and positive aspect. This is why the sympathetic nervous system is the system which controls the creative, healing and destructive activities of the body.

If the latent Kundalini is made to rise through one of these nadis instead of the Sushumna, the whole being will be polarised in a negative or positive manner – i.e. hyper active, over heated, flushed skin – or inactive -cold – blood withdrawn from surface. Such accidents usually occur only when a person is trying to rouse the Kundalini in a forced way through personal effort, or an event kicks it into operation unnaturally. It can be redirected.

The Sushumna Nadi is the axis along which the kundalini flows. As an axis it has its negative and positive, also has its core or equilibrium. The root Chakra is negative and the source of (internal) power. The crown Chakra is positive and is the centre of wisdom, and the equilibrium or balance is the heart Chakra, the centre of love. These three, Power, Love and Wisdom, interact in the other centres.

Occidental systems of description agree with this generally, but point to the endocrine glands as the physical powerhouse of the Chakras. The staff of mercury, for instance, with its twining snakes around a central pole, symbol of the medical profession, is looked upon as representing the creative energy, with the snakes as negative and positive aspects. It is the same as Sushumna with Ida and Pingala.

The two wings near the top of the staff are the two-petalled lotus, and the bulb on the top is the Sahasrara Chakra.

Jewish symbolism is said to use the seven candles to represent (within the temple, which is the human body) the seven lights. Christian mysticism also uses the number seven in similar ways. The seals and the seven churches, spoken of in Revelation, are said to symbolise the lotuses. But although Western mysticism has mentioned the lotuses directly or indirectly for centuries, as in India, different writers described them in different ways.

Greater detail

However, let us now look in greater detail at each Chakra, starting with the Muladhara Chakra. This is also called the Mulhadhara Lotus or Root Chakra and it has four petals.

In Yoga tradition, it is shown with a seven-trunked elephant within a central square. Within this square is an inverted triangle, with a snake coiled round a lingam. The lingam represents the male, creative force; the snake is the female creative force; the elephant is the cosmic mind or energy, and has seven aspects. The symbolism of the snake may have come about because when cut open, the spinal cord probably looks like a thin white snake lying between the anus and the brain.

The stalk of this lotus is said to be connected with the ‘mouth of the Sushumna’. Lama Govinda gives it as connecting with the sacral plexus. All list this as being governed by the element Earth. The Sat – Chakra – Nirupana says, ‘By meditating thus on Her (Kundalini) who shines within the Mula-Chakra, with the lustre of ten million suns, a man becomes Lord of speech and King among men, and an Adept in all kinds of learning. He becomes ever free from all diseases, and his inmost Spirit becomes full of great gladness. Pure of disposition, by his deep and musical words, he serves the foremost of the Gods’.
no different from the rest

Despite these wonderful promises, most people who experience an ‘opening’ of the Chakra, remain very much like the rest of us. Also many people do not experience the start of Kundalini at the base of the trunk, but at the top of the head as as a downward flow in the body. One thing they have in common however, wherever it begins, that point often feels like a door. In other words, it sometimes feels as if something in the body opens, or suddenly lets go. When this is at the base of the spine, it feels as if a tension has dropped; an opening of some sort has occurred, releasing an influence into our being. Occasionally a peculiar feeling occurs in the rectum, or thereabouts. See The Descending Divine Energy

Sometimes a buzzing is heard, or a vibration felt. But for each person it is slightly different. Eileen Garratt says ‘In the first state there is an instinctive reaction which registers in the nerve centres of the stomach, accompanied by an intense and primitive desire’.

A man says, ‘It is as if there were space under my hips – as if something opens’. Cayce describes it as:

Vibrations which are emanations of life from within, a material expression of a spiritual influence, a force that emanates from life itself.

When we quiet the physical body through turning the mind toward the highest ideal, there are aroused actual physical vibrations as a result of spiritual influence becoming active on the sensitive vibratory centres in the body.

When we attune ourselves to the Infinite, the glands of reproduction may be compared to a motor which raises the spiritual power in the body. The spiritual power enters through the Lydigian glands (located above the genitals). This Lydigian centre is like a sealed or open door, according to the use to which it has been put through spiritual activities. (A Search for God. A.R.E. Press).

It is reasonably easy to understand this root Chakra from the analogy of a magnet. It is the negative end of our ‘axis’. Like the negative end of a battery or magnet, it attracts or is receptive to and open to current coming to it. But it is positive internally. That is, the power received from outside is projected through its own system. This is why it is spoken of as a ‘door’. We have already seen how Wilhelm Reich found that ‘orgone’ energy flowed from the base of the spine, but was blocked in most people.

This illustrates how the door can be open or closed by our attitudes, our inbuilt characteristics. The crux of whether this ‘door’ is open or closed, rests then on how we relate to life itself.

Are our conscious and unconscious attitudes or reactions life negating? Do we say ‘NO’ to life in us, negating our emotions, our instincts, our love and creative ideas? Or is our being a ‘YES’ to life? This is the door we open or close. If it is open, More of life can express in us. If it is closed …?