MULADHARA (Earth element)
There
is an immediately evident and more than coincidental likeness of Gafurius’s
serpent descending through a graded universe to the Indian idea of a yogic
“serpent channel” descending from the crown of the head, down the spinal column
to a “lotus center” located between the anus and the genitalia that is known as
“Root Support” (muladhara), where the spiritual energy (sakti) of
the unawakened individual sleeps, coiled on itself like a dormant snake
(Sanskrit kundalini, “coiled serpent”), which is to be aroused through
yoga and brought, uncoiling, up the spinal channel to a radiant lotus at the
crown of the head called “Thousand
Petaled” (sahasrara).
At this point the serpent is like a
dragon. We all know the character of dragons – at least,
Western dragons: they live in caves, and they have a gold hoard in the cave, and
they have a beautiful girl whom they have captured in the cave.
They can’t do anything with either treasure or maiden, but they simply
want to hold on. Dragons, like people whose lives are
centered around the first cakra, are based around gripping, holding on to
power, holding on to a life that is no life at all because there is no animation
in it, no joy in it, no vitality in it, but just grim, dogged existence.
The nature of the
kundalini at muladhara is that of
Ebenezer Scrooge before he undergoes that grand journey and transformation at
the hands of the three ghosts (…) MoL 30
Take the Muladhara cakra, which seems very simple.
Its psychological location is in the perineum. You
assume you know all about it, but psychologically what is Muladhara?
You think of it as that region down below in the abdomen, having to do
with sexuality and all sorts of unsavoury things. But that is
not Muladhara; muladhara is something quite different.
You will probably be puzzled when I tell you my conception of
Muladhara. You see, muladhara is a whole world; each cakra
(Hauer defined cakras as “symbols of the experience of life” (HS, 58) is a whole
world. Perhaps you remember the picture which I showed of a
patient, where she was entangled in the roots of a tree, and then above she was
stretching up toward the light. Now, where was that woman
when she was in the roots? Answer: In Muladhara.
(The) self is then asleep. And in which
stage is the self asleep and the ego
conscious? Here,
of course, in this conscious world where we are all reasonable and respectable
people, adapted individuals as one says. Everything runs
smoothly; we are going to have lunch, we are under certain obligations and
cannot run away easily without getting
neurotic; we have to look after our
duties. So we are all in the roots, we are upon our root
support. (“Root support” is the literal translation of
Muladhara). We are in the roots right in this world – when
you buy your ticket from the streetcar conductor, … that is the reality as you
touch it. And then the self is asleep, which means that all
things concerning the gods are asleep.
If we assume that Muladhara, being the roots, is the
earth upon which we stand, it necessarily must be our conscious world, because
here we are, standing upon this earth, and here are the four corners of this
earth. We are in the earth
mandala. And
whatever we say of muladhara is true of this world. It is a
place where mankind is a victim of impulses, instincts,
unconsciousness, or
participation mystique, where we are in a dark and unconscious place.
We are hapless victims of circumstances, our reason practically can do
very little.
Moreover, when we are in this three-dimensional space,
talking sense and doing apparently meaningful things, we are nonindividual – we
are just fish in the sea.
Some strange
urge underneath forces (us) to do something
which is not just the ordinary thing. So we may assume that
the place where the self, the psychological non-ego, is asleep is the most banal
place in the world – a railway station, a theater, the family, the professional
situation – there the gods are sleeping; there we are just reasonable, or as
unreasonable, as unconscious animals. And this is Muladhara.
If that is so, then the next cakra,
svadhisthana, must be the
unconscious,
symbolized by the sea, and in the sea is a huge leviathan which threatens one
with annihilation.
(Muladhara) is characterized as being the sign of the earth;
the square in the center is the earth, the elephant being the carrying power,
the psychical energy or the libido. Then the name muladhara,
meaning the root support, also shows that we are in the region of the roots of
our existence, which would be our personal bodily existence on this earth.
Another very important attribute is that the
gods are asleep; the
linga is a mere germ, and the
Kundalini, the sleeping beauty, is the
possibility of a world which has not yet come off. So that
indicates a condition in which man seems to be the only active power, and the
gods, or the impersonal, non-ego powers, are inefficient – they are doing
practically nothing. And that is very much the situation of
our modern European
consciousness. TPoKY23
If you look at the symbol of the muladhara in such a way, you
understand the purpose of the yoga in the awakening of Kundalini.
It means to separate the
gods from the world so that they become active,
and with that one starts the other order of things. From the
standpoint of the gods this world is less than child’s play; it is a seed in the
earth, a mere potentiality. Our whole world of
consciousness
is only a seed of the future. And when you succeed in the
awakening of Kundalini, so that she begins to move out of her mere potentiality,
you necessarily start a world which is a world of eternity, totally different
from our world.
For the convictions of the muladhara
world are very necessary. It is exceedingly important that
you are
rational, that you believe in the definiteness of our world, that this
world is the culmination of history, the most desirable thing.
Such a conviction is absolutely vital. Otherwise you
remain detached from the muladhara – you never get there, you are never born,
even. There are plenty of people who are not yet born.
They seem to be all here, they walk about – but as a matter of fact, they
are not yet born, because they are behind a glass wall, they are in the womb.
They are in the world only on parole and are soon to be returned to the
pleroma where they started originally. They have not formed a
connection with this world; they are suspended in the air; they are neurotic,
living the provisional life. They say: “I am
now living on such-and such a condition. If my parents behave
according to my wishes, I stay. But if it should happen that
they do something I don’t like, I pop off.” You see, that is
the provisional life, a conditioned life, the life of somebody who is still
connected by an umbilical cord as thick as a ship’s rope to the pleroma, the
archetypal world of splendor.
Cont’d … Now, it is most important that you should be born;
you ought to come into this world – otherwise you cannot realize the
self, and
the purpose of this world has been missed. Then you must
simply be thrown back into the melting pot and be born again.
As
we have seen … muladhara is the symbol of our present psychic situation, because
we live entangled in earthly causalities. It represents the
entanglement and dependence of our
conscious life as it
actually is. Muladhara is not just the outer world as we
live in it; it is our total
consciousness
of all outer and inner personal experiences. In our conscious
life of every day we are like highly developed animals, tied down by our
environment and entangled and conditioned by it.
At
this level the psyche is practically inert. It is just
hanging on to life, and my mental image for this is dragons, which, as we know
from biology, guard things in caves. The customs of the
dragon have been studied for many millennia. They guard
things in caves – beautiful virgins, symbols of Cakra 2, the cakra of
sexuality; and heaps of gold, Cakra 3, possession and winning.
They don’t know what to do with either, but they simply guard.
This is the condition of the whole psyche when the energy is bound up in
the muladhara, no zeal for life, no positive action, only reaction.
TMTT 144
The psychology appropriate to this dull condition is that of
behaviourism. You don’t have an active psyche, only a
reactive one. Nietzsche calls this position that of groveling
before sheer fact. Actually, there’s no such thing as sheer
fact; it’s the object for a subject.
The
attitude of the mind beholding the object is what changes the character and
meaning of the fact. People who hang on like this we call
creeps. They are exactly, you might say, the incarnation of
the character of Cakra 1. Art on this level is simply
sentimental naturalism. It has no breakthrough to the
radiance.
(The
picture above with the elephant) is a representation of Cakra 1.
The rectangle is of the element earth, the grossest of the elements.
In the center is a red triangle, the yoni. This
is the womb, or the sex organ, of
mother cosmos. We are
within her womb. She is time-space, including a priori
forms of sensibility and of the categories of knowledge. It
is within that womb that we are.
The lingam here, the male organ, represents the energy that breaks
into that womb. Now this is interesting and important:
the lingam represents the energy coming from the transcendent,
coming into the womb, but the lingam is not antecedent to the womb,
because there are no things; there are no pairs of opposites until you get
within the womb. So this is a manner of symbolization that’s
proper to already being in
time and space. There is no pair
of opposites in the transcendent. It is neither male nor
female. When we talk about brahman being the still
energy and maya the active energy, we are talking in dualistic terms
again. The transcendent is transcendent.
It transcends all thinking. And so we can’t think about it.
As Heinrich Zimmer used to say, “The best things can’t be said.”
This is why. TMTT 146