Open Enlightenment

Everything I’ve Discovered (So Far) About Chakras

At the beginning I considered ‘chakras’ flaky New Age nonsense. Then I began spiritual practice and the sarcastic grin was wiped off my face, as I experienced intense sensations that corresponded to the positions where the chakras are supposed to reside. What’s more, these episodes seemed to coincide, albeit roughly, with milestones in my practice.

Yet at the same time I noticed these experiences deviated from the traditional chakra model. This decrees that the chakras are activated in a sequence starting at the base of the spine, and culminating with the final chakra above the crown of the head that lights up at the moment of enlightenment.

The Chakras: their Sanskrit names, corresponding colours and yantras, and their positions in the body.

But my first experiences were of white light entering the crown. This happened only a few times near the beginning of practice and has not occurred noticeably since.

Granted, in those early stages, I did experience at least one episode of energy moving upwards from the base chakra, but halting at the heart. Yet not long after there were episodes of far more intense sensations in the brow chakra; and quickly after the focus switched at a similarly intense level to the throat chakra. Since then, the chakras have continued to ‘open’ in a downward sequence. It now seems clear (supposing I achieve this, although I don’t presume I will) that the base chakra will be the one that opens last.

Part of the reason why my experience deviates from the traditional model is, I suspect, that at the time the throat chakra became active, I began to take notice of Rudolf Steiner’s writings on the chakras.

Steiner’s view is that the traditional model dates to a time when humans were striving to attain clear consciousness, and thus the sequence of opening proceeded from base to crown. These days, consciousness is old hat and everyone (just about) has it. What Steiner calls ‘new spiritual organs’ now need to be developed. The process of opening the chakras in the modern age therefore involves consciousness coming down from the spiritual world and entering the physical body in order to activate and open it to a fuller perception of spirit [1].

Although this is a model that makes much sense to me, and which I have consciously worked with, I should point out that I was drawn to it because I’d already had experiences of the crown, brow and throat chakras that had overshadowed anything coming from lower down. According to the traditional model, this shouldn’t have been the case.

Steiner states that modern human beings shouldn’t necessarily expect to open the chakras beneath the heart – namely, the solar plexus, sex organs and base (Steiner, 1947). However, I experienced the opening of the solar plexus on March 16th, 2009. I remember the date because this was also when I experienced enlightenment [2]. So my experience has now challenged both models: the traditional, which says that enlightenment coincides with the opening of the crown chakra; and Steiner’s, which states that the culmination of the process in modern earthly life is the development of a new spiritual organ at the heart centre.

I’d like to be able to offer a new and better model – but I can’t. All I have are my experiences and surmises. I think perhaps we’re too quick to rush toward models in this field and sometimes less inclined to examine what these experiences for what they actually are. We’re too keen to ascribe a sequence of opening, to look for a correspondence between that sequence and the process of enlightenment, and to ascribe functions to each chakra, whereas I suspect that what underpins these experiences is nothing as simple.

If we look to experience rather than to a model, what can we say the ‘opening’ of a chakra enables us to do that we couldn’t before? What is it that we suppose we ‘feel’ during these episodes? And what has changed in us when we claim a chakra has ‘opened’?

Body

I’ve read cases of people having such intense physical experiences during the opening of a chakra that calling an ambulance begins to seem appropriate [3]. However, if a person has an unusual experience and become anxious about it, a vicious circle easily sets in and it can become impossible to separate the body’s panic-response from the underlying experience that triggered it.

Panic attacks are not primarily a ‘physical’ episode, but a secondary physical response of the body to internal sensations, ideas or fantasies. An internal experience can therefore become physical, but it would be misleading to regard it as bodily from the outset. My experience so far suggests that chakra episodes belong to precisely this category of experiences: they are psychosomatic; or we might say they lie ‘on the boundary’ between mind and body. The paradoxical significance of chakra episodes, however, is that they enable us to experience directly how there is in fact no such boundary.

Another factor that leads me to rule out primarily bodily episodes is how sensations emanating from the chakra tend to dissipate as we move on and go about everyday life. Meditating on the cushion or performing yogic exercises, the sensations can become so strong it’s impossible to pay attention to anything else. But if we break off practice and go to make food, or chat with someone, the sensation may fade entirely, or pass into the background of our experience and become unnoticeable, unless we take a conscious moment to check for its presence.

Bodily sensations do not act in the same way. If there are sensations emanating from the prostate or thyroid, for example – which are organs that correspond to the positions of the base and throat chakras – then these will insist and nag at our awareness. Sensations from the chakras do not ‘nag’ but are more like states of consciousness themselves. For instance, if I want to intensify the sensations from a chakra during a sitting, or if I want to check whether the sensations are still there after they’ve gone into the background, I have to orient my mind in a particular way; I have to ‘find’ the state of consciousness that accesses the sensations. This is different from a bodily stimulus, which will follow me around and nag at my awareness.

That said, I’ve had circumstances in which chakra sensations have ‘nagged’ and ‘followed’. These involved particularly intense or prolonged periods of practice. During my last retreat, after a period of ten days or so, the activation of the brow chakra became so intense I had a physical sensation of something stuck to my forehead, which I could feel throughout the day and night, no matter what I was doing, whether I wanted to or not. But of course, the fact that I was spending all my time meditating was responsible for this. During the retreat my mind had entrained itself to a particular state of consciousness. So, even though a chakra sensation had taken on a bodily guise, there was still a non-bodily determinant in play – that is, a particular state of consciousness.

Once again, it’s important to re-state that there is of course no rigid boundary between physical and mental. Chakra experiences are a direct experience of this fact, but I think it’s important to examine how they are not as bodily as they seem and rely on the presence of certain states of consciousness in order to enter awareness.

Feeling

When a chakra sensation arises, what is being felt? Commonly some kind of ‘energy’ is evoked to answer this. Personally, I’m never happy with explanations of subjective experiences that lean on this idea.

‘Energy’ is defined in the physical sciences as ‘the amount of work that can be performed by a force’ (Wikipedia). The work of this ‘energy’, then, is presumably to create a more or less intense feeling. So in other words, the ‘energy’ that activates the chakra works to produce a feeling of the chakra being activated.

This is useless, circular nonsense. The reason for the absurdity is that ‘energy’ is a quantitative concept and becomes problematic when applied to subjective experience. What matters about chakra experiences is not their quantitative aspect but what the hell they mean. Chakra experiences are qualitative – until, perhaps, the day arrives when we have an accurate means of measuring them. A chakra experience is a feeling.

For me, an open chakra feels as if the body were open to the outside world at its physical location. Sometimes – if the experience is intense – it feels like the opposite, as if there were a hard object (such as a pebble) embedded in the body.

There is also a sensation of flow between the perceived opening or object in the body and the outside world. This sensation is probably where the temptation to use the word ‘energy’ comes from. The idea that energy somehow ‘flows’ is so prevalent that we’re hardly aware it’s only a metaphor.

It’s also tempting to conclude that what is flowing in or out is ‘consciousness’ or some kind of ‘life-force’. If we limit ourselves purely to observation of the experience itself, the sensation of flow is extremely blissful – sometimes paradoxically so, to the point of agitation. ‘Bliss’ is the unhindered investment of awareness into the immediate reality of being alive. In other words, bliss is simply the absence of the other stupid crap (worries, attachments, distractions, etc.) that is usually bothering us. Small wonder, then, if we have the experience of some kind of ‘consciousness’ or ‘essence’ streaming in or out. But I’d suggest that this seeming ‘life-force’ is actually not a thing at all, but merely the absence of everyday crap.

I don’t mean to reduce the value of these experiences by describing them as ‘feelings’, because feelings are fine and mysterious things.

All feelings arise in the body, yet not all are of the body. Those associated with pain or pleasure arise from bodily stimuli and are indeed clearly of the body. But others, such as common emotions like ‘shame’ or ‘jealousy’, or more exotic feelings, such as ‘the feeling of having been taken advantage of’, cannot be induced by doing anything physical to the body, yet they induce bodily sensations and are instantly recognisable because they have a unique quality all their own.

As I’ve argued above, chakra sensations are not simple bodily feelings because they depend upon a state of consciousness. Bodily feelings work in an opposite direction: they attract our awareness to them, rather than depending on awareness to be there in the first instance in order to make themselves known. Furthermore, the bliss that radiates from or into the apparent opening or object in the body during a chakra experience contrasts with the pain that would emanate if the wound or foreign object were truly bodily.

Chakra sensations are, then, more like emotions that physical sensations. They are in the body but not of it. They depend on a certain state of consciousness in order to become apparent. Yet at the same time, they do indeed arise at a specific physical point. Like a complex emotion, there is a sense during these experiences that the effect of something non-bodily is being expressed bodily. In the case of an emotion, it is usually fairly easy to trace that ‘non-bodily’ something to an idea, thought or fantasy. If we feel shame, for instance, we don’t have to search hard or far within our thoughts to discover where it is coming from. What is so remarkable about chakra sensations, however, is that nothing lies behind them.

An open chakra feels like an emotion with nothing as its cause.

Organs

I don’t mean to rule out entirely the bodily or the physical from our approach, but I do want to cast doubt on those explanations framed largely in physical terms.

Major endocrine glands. (Male on the left, female on the right.) 1. Pineal gland 2. Pituitary gland 3. Thyroid gland 4. Thymus 5. Adrenal gland 6. Pancreas 7. Ovary 8. Testis.

We can’t rule out the physical because the sine qua non of a chakra experience is that it occurs at a particular location in the body. It has long been noted that the locations of the chakras correspond with the organs of the endocrine system. The chakras at the sex-organs, solar plexus, heart, throat and brow correspond with the position in the body of the ovaries / testes, pancreas / adrenal glands, thymus, thyroid and pituitary / pineal gland.

I recently came across a passage in a memoir by writer Hilary Mantel that describes her struggle with serious illness, including a failure of the thyroid gland. This organ maps onto the ‘throat’ chakra, which is traditionally associated with powers of communication. During the time her thyroid problem went undiagnosed, Mantel describes how she was no longer able to think clearly and had lost her capacity for ‘snappy summation’. In her writing she experienced difficulty getting to the point and couldn’t avoid dwelling on minor details. She expresses surprise that an organic illness could have such a specific psychological effect, and draws the following conclusion:

The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another. (Mantel 2004: 221)

I’m not qualified to pronounce on the endocrine system, so I’ll limit my observations. But as we turn to the theme of what the chakras ‘do’ or what they’re ‘for’, I’d be reluctant to rule the endocrine system out of account. The correspondence between the organs of this system and the positions of the chakras is just too exact.

However, I don’t think it’s necessary to assume that the endocrine organs are the ‘seat’ of particular capacities, in the way that popular summaries of the traditional chakra model suggest. For instance: that the solar plexus (pancreas / adrenal glands) is the seat of ‘will power’; or the chest (thymus) is the seat of ‘compassion’ [4].

What are these ‘capacities’ anyway? They’re certainly not functions of the physical body that depend upon organs in the same way as respiration, digestion and reproduction.

We couldn’t speak without a tongue, but it would be wrong to assume the tongue is the organ of language. Without a tongue we could still communicate (through writing, for instance) because language itself is not a bodily function and has a reach beyond the body. Compassion, I’d argue, is similar in its scope. In most adults the thymus gland, which sits in the location of the heart chakra (‘compassion’) is hardly active and often disintegrates over time (Wikipedia), but that does not prevent adults from manifesting compassion in many different ways. Neither does the fact that a person may never in their lives have had an experience of the heart chakra. Yet, as Hilary Mantel’s experience suggests, it’s conceivable that bodily organs may yet perform some role in capacities like these that is more immediately helpful than we imagine. It is unlikely to be a specific or exclusive role, however.

Function

If I were asked what my discovery and activation of chakras has enabled me to do that I couldn’t before, my first response would be to question what ‘activation’ really means. I’ve had experiences of five chakras in total, but I’d say that only two of them have become habitual and require none or only a little effort to tune into. I’d conclude from this that only two of the chakras are worth describing as ‘opened’ in my case; and two are ‘partially opened’.

The crown chakra I experienced at the start of my practice, but never since. I suspect its appearance signifies an initiation into spiritual awareness, and that once a person has experienced this it fades into the background forever. The experience it provided of bodily sensations somehow above and outside the body certainly seems to suit it to this purpose, but this is only my surmise.

The brow and throat chakras also opened spontaneously as a result of meditation practice. The brow chakra seems particularly closely related to meditation practice, and is so much a part of my daily experience that when I meditate I only need to turn awareness to this part of the body to feel the chakra doing its thing. I suspect there is a close association between the state of consciousness required to become aware of the brow chakra and those states of mind known within the Buddhist tradition as the first four concentration jhanas [5].

Activation of the brow chakra feels like the sense of self melting into reality and the two becoming one. It feels like having a new eye that enables us to apprehend non-duality directly, which I suspect is why it has been dubbed ‘the third eye’.

The throat chakra spontaneously kicks off during meditation from time to time. I’ve also noticed it activating outside formal practice, sometimes during social situations. When I’ve attended classes with enlightened teachers, it has seemed especially prone to start working.

The sensations from this chakra are like moments of intimacy with another when the heart seems to rise with tenderness into the mouth; or that feeling of excited release when the perfect words to express an idea or situation have arisen, and – although they haven’t declared themselves to consciousness yet – we know they’ll be there when we open up and speak. There is also a sense of exquisite vulnerability to the other, but without any taint of anxiety or fear.

Sensations from the heart chakra started to arise after I performed a kundalini yoga kriya for forty consecutive days that promised to accomplish precisely this (Rattan 1988: ‘Heart Opener’). I’d reached the conclusion that it wasn’t going to open by itself without a little push. The sensations began before the forty days were up, and at first were weak compared to how they seem now. I’m still not convinced this chakra is fully ‘open’. However, it has since become the usual limit of my practice in this field; it’s the one ‘I’m currently working on’, and it requires some effort on my part to tune into it.

When I feel it clearly, the sensation from this chakra takes the form of a very hard object in the centre of my chest, which sometimes pulsates. To intensify the sensation requires a degree of surrender that feels uncomfortable the more it’s applied. The bliss is not as detached from everyday reality as the throat and brow chakras; it’s the type of bliss that comes from acceptance of failings and sufferings, from throwing ourselves into the middle of our crap, not from relishing our current freedom from it. The heart chakra strikes me as the first ‘grown-up’ chakra, and I suspect subsequent chakras may get more and more challenging as I work my way down.

The solar plexus chakra was another I ‘forced’ with a kundalini kriya (Rattan 1988: ‘The Navel Center & Elimination’). I practised the kriya for a few weeks until my entry into fourth path (which seemed purely a result of the meditation I was doing in parallel) cracked it open perhaps earlier than it might have opened otherwise. Indeed, my entry into fourth path was accompanied by powerful sensations from this chakra that I mistook for physical vibrations from a neighbour’s washing-machine! The sensations faded after a few days and have now become the ‘wild frontier’ of my practice, which I experience only occasionally.

The sensations from this chakra are more inclusive, embracing the entire bodymind. They include an impression of rapid vibration or flickering, as if both mind and body were an image being projected from the solar plexus. Between the flickers is nothingness, provoking a vivid awareness that my existence depends on the continued willingness of nothingness to project me. The awareness that ‘something’ is causing my existence highlights issues of will, assertion and strength. When this chakra is active these issues are suddenly far more contingent. It is clear that my vitality lies not in me, but in the thing by whose grace my bodymind continues to appear.

I’ve recently started work on the next chakra down, the sex organ chakra, but there have been no results so far – and I don’t presume that there necessarily ever will be!

Capability

It would be wrong if I claimed that experience of the heart chakra had given me greater compassion; or the third-eye had given me the ability to see non-duality. Viewing a chakra experience as the acquisition of a capacity does not do justice to the subtlety of what’s going on.

The penny dropped during a meditation retreat, when I described to the teacher the uncomfortable sensations I was feeling in the heart chakra. ‘What would help unblock those feelings and move them through?’ she asked. I went away and examined the experience for a few days, and the answer surprised me: More of the same!

Chakra experiences are not a signal that we have arrived at some kind of attainment or crisis; they are that attainment or crisis. Consider: the condition on which there can be compassion is the existence of suffering. So to practice compassion we require nothing other than suffering. What certainly isn’t necessary (or possible) is ‘to become a compassionate person’; all we need do is wade out into the shit and get stuck in.

The heart chakra experience delivered me into the shit. In the same way, the brow chakra experience was not ‘giving’ me the ability to see non-dualistically, it is that way of seeing. Likewise, the solar plexus chakra is the experience that my strength belongs to something not-me; and the throat chakra shows the way to communicate with another is surrender to the other entirely. These chakra experiences have never given me anything; indeed, from the perspective of the everyday mind, they have taken things away.

Earlier I described these experiences as like an emotion with nothing as its cause. Perhaps we’re in a position now to appreciate how such a thing is not as redundant as it sounds.

The everyday mind finds the origin of its feelings in the self. There would not be anger, shame, happiness or excitement without a self telling itself stories that cause these feelings to arise. But chakra experiences, I’d suggest, belong to an order of experience that might be described as ‘transpersonal emotions’. They are not ‘our’ feelings; they are feelings with nothing as their cause.

Rudolf Steiner referred to human evolution as involving the growth of ‘new spiritual organs’:

[O]ut of our state of being enclosed within ourselves we can develop spiritual eyes and spiritual ears if we work at this ever and ever again. (Steiner 2004: 10)

The chakras would seem to be ‘spiritual organs’ of this type, because they enable us to feel emotions that arise not from our engagement with the story of self, but from a transpersonal source. They seem to offer an opportunity for seeing and engaging with the world in a different way, but not by offering ‘extra’ capacities. Instead, they take away different aspects of the capacity for self.

At the beginning of life our physical sense organs offer the opportunity to rise from unconsciousness and perceive the world in terms of self and other. Chakra experiences are the possibility of a second wave of development. Whereas practices such as vipassana meditation allow us to extend our understanding beyond dualistic perception, the chakras offer a similar route for the emotions.

We are free to understand these experiences how we please. This article represents my understanding so far, but I imagine there are many possible directions through this territory, which accounts for the wide discrepancies between the experiences of practitioners in this field, and why it’s so hard to offer a model for the sequence and function of the chakras that fits them all.

My conclusions are these: that there is no necessary order to the chakras and they do not correspond rigidly to the attainment of enlightenment. These experiences are an emotional expression of non-duality. They make their appearance on the boundary between body and mind, which affords us a direct experience of the paradoxical nature of this boundary. They also have a strong transpersonal and non-causal aspect, which I have described as being ‘like emotions with nothing as their cause’.

In the everyday mind the closest thing to ‘a feeling that does not arise from the self’ would be a perception – that is, something which enters the senses from the outside world. Another way of describing chakra experiences, then, might be to say they are feelings that are true.

This causes me to wonder whether neglect of this field of practice might result in an understanding of enlightenment that lacks an emotional or bodily basis, and is somewhat ‘autistic’ as a result.

Notes

[1] See Steiner (1947) and Lowndes (2001).

[2] ‘Enlightenment’ will be defined here as the capacity to perceive in real time the non-dualistic nature of reality. The experience I mention is defined more technically within the tradition of Theravada Buddhism as awakening into ‘fourth path’.

[3] Consider, for instance, the intense experiences described in Hine (1987).

[4] The full list of chakra capacities usually looks something like this: Base chakra = ‘stability’; sex organs = ‘creativity’; solar plexus = ‘power’; chest = ‘compassion’; throat = ‘communication’; brow = ‘intuition’; crown = ‘divine knowledge’. This list was summarised from Dharam & O’Keefe (2002).

[5] See Ingram (2008: 167f) for a helpfully clear description of these.

References

Guru Dharam Singh Kalsa & Darryl O’Keefe (2002). Kundalini: The Essence of Yoga. London: Gaia Books.

Phil Hine (1987). Kundalini: A Personal Approach.

Daniel M. Ingram (2008). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book. London: Aeon.

Florin Lowndes (2001). Enlivening the Chakra of the Heart: The Fundamental Spiritual Exercises of Rudolf Steiner. Forest Row, East Sussex: Sophia Books / Rudolf Steiner Press.

Hilary Mantel (2004). Giving Up The Ghost. London: Harper Perennial.

Guru Rattan Kaur Khalsa (1988). Transitions to a Heart Centered World Through the Kundalini Yoga and Meditations of Yogi Bhajan. Yoga Technology.

Rudolf Steiner (1947). Knowledge of the Higher Worlds And Its Attainment. Translated by George Metaxa. The Anthroposophic Press.

Rudolf Steiner (2004). Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double. Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press.

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