One of the beautiful gifts that came to me, some day, some time, I don’t remember where it first hit me, is the system of the chakras, you know.
And it came to me through Joseph Campbell and his understanding of it. It also came to me through Ram Dass and his understanding of it. And I don’t remember where I first heard it.
Of course, the chakras were talked about. I lived in Los Angeles at the time, so I couldn’t miss a chakra conversation, unless you were hiding under a rock somewhere, especially if you were anywhere close to Santa Monica. There were all sorts of chakras that were being activated, or so the story goes, in the name of all sorts of lucrative workshops, whatever they were called : spirit dancing and ecstatic dancing and all of that. Let’s make a buck by being a yoga instructor or, I don’t know, a life coach or something. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s actually, it sounds cynical to say it like that, but it’s a whole culture. And that’s what I must have run into it there. But I don’t locate my hearing of the chakras to that.
I feel I heard it somewhere else and then had to contend with the popular color coding of it and its interpretation. But simply, Ram Dass helped me because he said, when I was at the time, when I was sort of biased toward a “well, it must be scientific,” he said, listen, don’t take this seriously. In the sense of don’t think that there’s actual fucking centers in the body and you can go cut it open and find these. Now actually, maybe there are. But I thank God for him saying it like that, because it put me in a different space and I could look at it less from a, “is this true,” and more of, well, what’s the story here? What’s the conversation that’s happening here? More organically, more life-oriented.
And to say, well, you know, you can take Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a nice little pyramid, a big base. Or you can take the chakra system. I mean, it’s kind of where I landed. It’s like, what works for you? Well, I think the chakras work better for me.
Plop yourself down, sit in the yoga posture, sit on your behind, is what we’re saying, and just breathe, okay? That’s all we’re saying. Nothing special, nothing weird. And then locate where you touch the ground.
If you consider that your body, your torso is really kind of the core, right? And the legs and the arms are extremities. And so you touch the earth at a place that, whether you’re Freud or whether you’re Jung or the way you’re Buddha, is an important place. It’s the place, the anus, the rectum. Truth is, well, I shouldn’t say truth.
I’ve heard, I think Alan Watts was the one who said it, so I have to believe it’s more or less true, is that the first thing that forms upon conception is the rectum. Basically, a tube forms, which is the beginning of the intestines, right? And he made the argument that the whole game is just about creating more tubes, so that you can then, through that tube, nutrients pass, and some nutrients are kept, and some other nutrients are, you know, put out.
And so the organism grows. And why does it grow? Well, ultimately, so that it can create another tube that can do the same, would be a very basic way of looking at life. And it makes sense.
And there is your first chakra. It is literally just like that. You either live or you die. It is very simple. It’s not a moral thing. It’s just, it’s logical. If you die, there’s nothing more to be said. If you live, well, then we can tell another story. We can talk about more chakras.
And so the first fact of life is live or die, fight or flight. And you see it, if you’re really pushed against the wall, it becomes all about that. Are you going to live or are you going to die? Are you going to fight and survive, or whatever you do, are you going to survive? That’s the fundamental question of the first chakra, pure survival.
And then the second chakra is into the genitals, into that area. And now you have won the prize. You have survived. Now you have the joy of pleasure and the joy of life. Also, it’s tension, because once you realize that it’s not a free joy, here’s the game of mating, which is in the genitals.
The seeking after pleasure is very hard work. It’s not that you’ve escaped the duality. In the first chakra, you were about, am I going to live or not? Now it’s, am I going to procreate or not? Is there a life beyond having survived? That’s the big question of the second chakra. And it’s just following the body as a map, as an analogy. You don’t need to believe these energy centers actually exist there. You don’t. It still works. That’s what’s so beautiful to me about it.
Then you get, if you do procreate, then you’re into the stomach chakra, into the power chakra. I don’t know what they’re called in Hindi and whatever, in Sanskrit, I never learned that. In the power chakra, it’s okay, you survived, you procreated, now you’re in society, you’re in culture, you’re in multiple organisms, it’s not just you who survived. Now you survived with others and you’ve created more of the same. You’re in tribe, you’re in family, you’re in nation, you’re in the brotherhood of man, you could even say. It’s competitive. Again, the question is, will my tribe survive?
First question was, will I survive? The second question is, will I be able to procreate or is this the end? Now that you’ve procreated, again, if you didn’t, then there’s no further story. But now that you have, the question is, okay, what now? Now that you’ve, can you achieve in society? Can you make a living? Can you become the king and the queen of this world?
And it’s a beautiful question. Can you become the biggest nation on earth, the most important one, the preeminent? Or will you suffer the verdict against other nations and people and tribes that have just disappeared? So it becomes a real thing to work this.
Now up till now, as many have explained, you are doing what animals have done. And it’s noble, it’s not wrong, it’s life. Animals fight or flight, animals procreate, animals have society in their own way. They all have their groups, their tribes. You’ve done well.
But as you move from the stomach, from the power – almost the law of nature as we were taught, Dog eat dog, and survival of the most adapted, you know. It seems like a big contest. It’s just life. It’s actually not the contest that we make it to be, that’s just our story. But it’s life, and life works like this.
And there’s some that move on, some genetic permutations that move on to the next round, others don’t. It’s not about right or wrong, it’s just the way the whole thing unfolds. It’s not about actually supremacy either. It’s again, things we put on it. It’s just, here’s the environment, and in this environment, these will survive. In a certain set of environment, primates survive. In another environment, cockroaches survive, and all the primates are dead.
See, but here we are. This is the game. And those who create families, who create some semblance of society, who form into nations, who have family pride and patriotism and all those things, now you have the question that is in the heart chakra. So what?
At some point, you look at the one that you saw as the competitor, or the enemy, and whether it is another human being, or maybe it’s the animal kingdom, you see, but we’re all the same. We’re all life. Where does this come from? And the heart chakra is at the center of the whole thing. There’s constellations that show you that the first and the seventh chakra, is it seventh? The first and the last go together. The second and the sixth, and the third and the fifth, something like that. But the heart is the heart, because it’s an uneven number (the total number of chakras).
So in the middle sits the heart.. And I don’t know if I did all the math right there, but that’s the basic idea that you have. Here in the heart is this mystery of union that, and anyone who has gotten to the prize that they, sort of the political prize in life, whatever the prize is of the stomach chakra, you’ve got your belly full of what life can give you, of this thing, this thing that is your reward, the wine, and the food, and even the sex that’s beneath it all. All of it. And it’s like there’s this thing that says the hunger, there’s a hunger here that goes beyond that. There’s a question that is not about the stomach, it’s about the heart. It’s about the center. It’s about love. It’s about union.
And then you begin to sing the Aum song, the Aum song, which is the three, it’s kind of the vowel of all sounds, right? That’s the idea of it, Aum, and then it ends with a mm, which is the end of all sound. And it holds all of the sounds, it’s the symbology of it.
It’s the union of everything that’s held there in the heart, in the heart chakra. And this is where we sing the songs with John Lennon, “imagine there is no heaven,” imagine there’s just one. And you feel it, and you go on trips into the jungles, and you take LSD, and you do whatever you need to do, and you feel into it, and you see it, and it’s ecstatic, it’s beautiful. You see that there is no Republican versus Democrat, these are all concepts that we’ve created. It’s just things that we’ve put onto the world, and you see that, ah, we’re all the same. I mean, Hitler and me are the same, it’s just what happened when life took you down a certain path.
And you see that, but for the grace of God there go I, and you see it all, and you want to love everything, because you see it’s all love, and you want to bring that message of love to the world. If only we can see that we are not so different, beyond the tribes that we’ve created, beyond the divisions we’ve created in a bid to survive, now we see that’s not necessary. We are beautifully already one.
And now you get into territory where words begin to fail, quite by design, because you then get into the throat chakra, which is at once a place of vocalization, so it is a place of expressing all of this, and you could say it is a place of absolute mastery. If the stomach chakra was some level of mastery over political affairs, once you push through the heart chakra you get to the throat, if you have the words, you are a creator of worlds. You are not a political entity anymore, you are a wizard. You are a creator of worlds, because if you can speak authentically of everything that precedes the throat, if you can speak of survival, if you can speak of sex, if you can speak of power, if you can speak of love, well you have the world. And it’s not because you are thinking of owning it, that would be back to the power chakra, not because you’re pursuing pleasure that will just be the second chakra, not because you want to survive, but because of all of that, and because of your vision for love. Now we’re talking a song that gets sung from the throat.
But it’s also the end of all conversation. It’s also where all conversation stops, because what else can be said beyond the throat? Well lots, but not in words. And there is this idea that as you move through the throat chakra – it’s been said this way and I like it, it could be misunderstood because of the way we were taught, but it’s where you slay all your idols.
This is where all gods must die. And it makes sense because even in the heart chakra, you are still dealing with a concept. As much as you felt into love and you preached it, you are still promoting an idea, the idea of oneness. Even as you see your God is one, as it says in the Bible, hear O Israel, your Lord, your God is one. As it says, it’s true. That is, as you hear it and see it, it’s a concept. And it is an absolute violation of the first commandment that you will not make any image.
And so here is the death of all images. All concepts, even the most loved concept and the one that at this point must feel the truest, the concept of oneness – it goes.
And now it becomes really difficult to talk about anything because the words are gone, right? And the gods are gone. What map is there at this point?
As you move into what is called the third eye, now again, you listen to people from new age worlds and they talk of the third eye, but they speak of it as some sort of competitive advantage, right? Because that’s, I don’t know, when you’re in, say, the lower chakras, you’re going to hear these things and you’re going to make of them what fits that lower. If you want to succeed in the world, you’re going to look at everything, even the oneness message as a way to get ahead. And it’s beautiful. What else are you going to do? You’re going to look at all of this conversation. If you’re in the pleasure chakra, you’re going to look at a way, you’re going to call it whatever you want to call it, tantric sex, you’re going to look at a way to make pleasure out of spirituality and spirituality out of pleasure, and there’s nothing wrong with it, but it helps to see it.
So when we get into the third eye, all the talk about, oh, now you’re an ascended master, that’s best understood to be somewhere else, like the power chakra. You know, here you’re actually beyond words, beyond structures of any sort. So again, hard to talk about, right?
But what does come from it is a knowing, I mean, we saw it about the throat chakra, that there’s a mastery. What’s beyond the mastery? Well, what I can talk about as far as the third chakra goes is this – it is intimately connected to the second, and so in the second chakra you have the animal desire for procreation and the dance between the masculine and the feminine, and in the third eye you encounter that essential dualism of the universe again, and it is beyond words a mystical union of the masculine and the feminine.
It cannot be spoken of. If you speak of it, you’re going to romanticize it and you’re going to be somewhere else, but it’s there. It is simply that before anything, just after everything gets created, you have duality, you have a this and a that, you have an on and an off, you have a positive and a negative, you have masculine and feminine. It’s the very nature of life.
Even when you don’t conceptualize it, even if you get rid of concepts, you still sit with a knowing that this essential nature of being is dualism, it’s a duality to it. You could say it many ways, you could say something versus nothing, not versus, but there is something, the only way you can know it is because it’s against the backdrop of nothing.
Now of course we’re conceptualizing the hell out of this conversation, we get it, but we can’t speak of these things without some words. Just know that all of this is actually not, they’re just pointing to a mystery that is best understood in complete silence, beyond words, not in a high-minded mystical way, don’t make a spirituality of it, it’s just the truth.
Before you wake up there’s nothing, when you wake up – everything! The world doesn’t exist the seconds before you wake up in the morning, and then the world exists, that’s all we’re saying, that’s all we’re saying.
There’s a dance here, a dualistic dance, and then as I have been taught, I’ve begun to see this, but. There are paths, as is taught in the East, there are paths through all of the chakras to open you up to life, really, that’s what it is, but the path from the third eye to the crown chakra, there’s no path, there’s no path. How do you go from duality into a unity that at once is the obliteration of absolutely everything? We thought we’ve left concepts at the throat, and there was still this special category of dualism given to the nature of how life is perceivable, right? How do you perceive things if it’s not against the backdrop of that? And then you get to a place of oneness, but it’s of nothingness, that’s the crown chakra.
Now, it’s a map, it’s a map of life, and we all are somewhere, basically, kind of, I don’t know, located, if you like, we have an emphasis on it, and you can see, you could speak to a human life and the progression of a life through chronology, but it’s also true that some people are at the age of 15 already up there somewhere else, they’ve done with the politics of the world and done with family, and at the same time you could have somebody at the age of 80 just wanting to bang any chick that he can find.
There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just a map, it’s not preaching anything, it’s just saying here is a way to locate yourself in this space of life. And the big mistake is to think, well, I am on the third chakra, now I’m going to transcend to the fourth. No, you transcend nothing. If you think like that, you’re just merely articulating the politics of the third chakra. You are merely speaking from that level of consciousness.
If you really get to the fourth chakra, you realize that there’s no point in thinking of ascension. Maybe you can think of it as a concentric circle that just broadens and you have a greater capacity for life, but that came to you because you took on suffering and not just in a martyrs where you just embraced it, you saw that life is not ultimately survivable, and in that is a wisdom and a moment and you’re open, and there’s no prize there.
There’s only a gratitude for this new capacity that suddenly is there that you didn’t design. That’s more how you would feel about the heart chakra. But of course, even that can be taken as some sort of subtle prize, but that’s okay. The maps help you see where you’re at. If you’re fighting, competing, and contending, well, you’re mostly in the fourth chakra, and that’s fine, because guess what? The whole beauty is actually to just be what you are.
This is what I’ve been taught through this. The map just, the map, if your response to the map is some sort of performance anxiety, take that as a beautiful lesson of where you’re at, and if the map is something that just makes you celebrate, take that as a lesson.
Or not. I mean, frankly, do what you want. But I’m saying, if you want to see where you’re at, then see what happens to you. If you think this whole thing is about climbing a ladder and being the one at the top that nailed it, that did it right, and now must get the prize, well, God bless you. The chakras tell you that you’re in a beautiful place, but it’s not how it works. Whatever you think is a prize is going to be dead in a few years. Nothing’s going to exist of it. So what are you even thinking of? So we can just take all of it and love it.
And even there, that throat chakra situation where, you know, it’s a moment when all concepts go, right? And again, the map doesn’t say now you must. There’s no imperative. That’s our reading of it from the way we were taught. It’s just telling you there’s a time. It happens maybe this time for you, maybe it happens, maybe not. But if it does happen, you can locate yourself.
So that’s a very long way, I didn’t expect to talk for a half an hour about it, of just reflecting on a map, a beautiful map of life, and it’s meant a lot to me through the years and even as one realizes at some point that too goes, it’s still a beautiful thing. I call it a song of hope. That’s what I call it.
You know, one of these ideas that we have, these, I think people will call it, some of the younger people will call it the downloads we receive from the universe, and they are meant to self-destruct. They have in them the signature of their own destruction.
They’re not meant to be held to. They just point to something bigger and grander and more glorious and beautiful, like a song that leads you home.
Once you’re home, you don’t need the song, the song is gone. You’re home. And this is what the chakras are to me, they’re a song of home.