Chakras
(If) you study Tantric Yoga and Hindu psychology you will find the most
elaborate system of psychic layers, or localizations of
consciousness up from
the region of the perineum to the top of the head. These ‘centres’ are the
so-called chakras, and you not only find them in the teachings of yoga
but can discover the same idea in old German alchemical books, which surely do
not derive from a knowledge of yoga.
Or say psychical psychology; that would express the science
of psychical things. The reality we reach there is a
psychical reality; it is a world of psychical substance, if we can apply such a
term. I think we get nearest to it when we say it is a world
of psychical reality. So another point of view to explain the
series of the cakras would be a climbing up from gross
matter to the subtle,
psychical
matter. TPoKY 43
The Chakras
The
thing that unites them all, that expresses them all, is the concept of
energy. In philosophy, for instance, take the example of
Plato in his parable of the cave. He tries by that rather
clumsy parable to explain the subjectivity of our judgment, which is really the
same idea which was called later on in the history of philosophy the theory of
cognition. He describes people sitting in a cave with their
backs against the light, looking at the shadows on the wall, cast by the moving
figures outside. Now, this is an exceedingly apt parable to
explain the problem, but it needed more than two thousand years until that
problem was formulated in a philosophically abstract way in Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason.
We have a central spine nerve, running up the center of the spine, called sushumna. And on each side is a side nerve. The one that is here rendered gray is called ida and refers to lunar consciousness. This is the most important clue to the whole thing – lunar consciousness, consciousness that dies, as the moon does, and is resurrected. The serpent casts away its skin to be born again. So it represents the power of life, energy, and consciousness to throw off death. But it is in the field of death. It is consciousness in the field of death. It is consciousness in the field of death, throwing off death and putting on new bodies – reincarnation or the sequence of the generations. Every time a new generation is begotten, the death of this generation is thrown off and life has moved on. TMTT 140
