Wheels of Life

by Anodea Judith

  Chakras relate primarily on levels of their own vibration through resonance. Therefore, if one person has a fourth chakra that is very open and her partner has one that is closed, her very openness may serve to open his closed chakra. The reverse can also be true but is less often the case. An open chakra that finds no counterpart in the immediate vicinity will usually find outlets elsewhere. Heavy downward emphasis in one person's system, however, can pull energy out of another's upper chakras, resulting in what may feel like a closing down of those centers.

  It is also possible that an open chakra may dominate another's closed chakra if it is on the same level. John, who is open in the fifth chakra, is paired with Paul, who is closed. John, therefore, does all the talking, and Paul retreats into greater silence. Or take the example of Bill and Mary. Bill's openness on the third chakra level keeps Mary, who is weak in that area, at a constant disadvantage, heightening her feeling of powerlessness. If he can be sensitive about this issue, she can learn from him and they will gradually balance out. If we are aware of the dynamics involved, we can better avoid the pitfalls.

  The number of combinations that exist between people in relationships is infinite. If you want to examine a relationship, it can help to make a diagram of where you feel each person is most open and most closed. Most information becomes apparent through keen observation. The chakras then become a metaphor for explaining those observations.

  FIGURE 11.2

  Chakras of a couple who have similar chakra energies.

  CULTURE-THE RELATIONSHIPS OF MANY

  If two people in a relationship can have so many different patterns, what happens when we consider our culture as a whole? Aren't we all affected within our chakras by the culture at large?

  The answer to this is a resounding yes. If one person can stimulate or depress another's energy on particular levels, several people can do it all the better. For this reason culture plays an important part in the state of our chakras, both positively and negatively.

  Currently, Western culture appears to be heavily oriented toward the lower three chakras, with a predominant focus on money, sex, and power. It is tempting to interpret this as a need to deemphasize these chakras and become more "spiritual." In actuality, however, the sacredness of the first three chakras is already denied, and this promotes a fixation on their shadow aspects.

  When there is undue fixation on a particular level, there is something basic that has not been fulfilled.

  When the sacredness of our connection with the Earth is denied, it is replaced by materialism. Monetary empires become the means to security-having a bigger house, better car, or higher salary. This attachment perpetuates itself, since it defiles the planet, and takes us further away from our source. Like junk food, materialism does not satisfy the first chakra, but creates a greater hunger. Similarly, if we don't take care of our body, we eventually get sick and become preoccupied with our health. Over emphasis on the first chakra comes from a lack of energetic grounding and reverence for Nature. Western materialism can be seen as a cultural compensation for the loss of the Goddess as Mother Nature.

  In chakra two, the sacredness of sexuality is denied publicly, while sexuality is used in most advertising, and annual sales of products to make us "sexier" rank in the billions. We are promised fulfillment through sexual attractiveness alone-not through the act of sex itself, or through ongoing relationship. The shadow side of denied sexuality is rape, child molestation, sexual harrassment, pornography, sexual addiction, and public fascination with political sex scandals. Our attachment at this level reflects a lack of fulfillment.

  In the third chakra, issues of power and energy impact everyone's lives. Power is put in the hands of the few, and victimization and powerlessness become the cry of many. Power is seen as existing outside the self, and can be increased by having more money, being sexually attractive, or playing by the rules until someone higher up makes you a rule maker. As we said in Chapter 4, power tends to be modeled in terms of power-over, rather than power-with. In most situations, conformity is rewarded and individuation is discouraged. Our greatest public investment is the military, a system designed for one purpose only: to exert power and control when necessary through violence and intimidation.

  There is less cultural conflict around the issue of love, as it is generally agreed by nearly everyone that love is one of the most important elements of life. However, the practice of love often falls short of the ideal. Money is poured into buying new bombers while the homeless sleep in doorstops on city streets. Racism, sexism, ageism, religious intolerance, and prejudice of every kind erode the practice of love and compassion that is the true realm of the heart. Love is reduced to fleeting romantic liasons between heterosexual adults, and even that is fraught with pain and frustration, with broken hearts, rampant divorce rates, and broken homes.

  The fifth chakra is opening up widely on a cultural level. Mass communication of every kind connects each of us to the cultural matrix, and supplies us with instant information at every moment. Yet, the media, as we said earlier, pollutes our thinking with violence and sensationalism. We are polluted with noise in our daily life, from telephones and traffic to airplane and industrial noise. We fail to give this chakra the attention it needs and take care as to what we put on the airwaves and feed into the cultural nervous system.

  The spiritual realms of chakra six and seven are just beginning to open up. Spiritual books have a greater market than ever before. People are learning to use their intuition and they are going to psychics for advice. More and more people are exploring religious diversity in their personal practice, incorporating Eastern and Western, ancient and modern techniques. Information is more accessible and plentiful than ever before.

  Yet, there is still a long way to go before entry into the upper chakras is culturally sanctioned. There are far more people in commercial business than there are meditators. Psychics are suspected to be frauds. Spirituality often meets with cynicism, or outright judgment from those who see non-Christian practices as "going to the devil." The emphasis is so heavy on the lower chakras that the very rhythm of the culture makes it hard to meditate or find time for creative pursuits. Our language has few words to describe psychic phenomena, and the "spiritual type" is apt to find himself misunderstood. Our culture appears to suffer from spiritual poverty.

  Different cultures have different chakra emphases. India, for example, emphasizes spiritual pursuits while de-emphasizing the development of personal power and materialism. India is known for its "upper chakra" orientation, and many people travel there to absorb spiritual teachings. Yet there is abject material poverty in India that is shocking to Americans.

  Because cultural emphasis plays so large a role, those who wish to open up in new areas need to find people of similar temperament. Here they can find strength and support for their struggles as they learn and grow in new areas.

  While we are each necessarily influenced by the culture around us, it also helps to realize that we can, by our own state of mind, affect our surroundings in return. Each time we raise or expand our own consciousness, we are making a cultural contribution. Each time we find others of like mind, we are strengthening that contribution. Every conversation contributes to the overall gestalt.

  In understanding the relationships of our own chakras to the greater flow of culture around us, it helps to explore the evolutionary trends of consciousness throughout history. As we learn about what has come before, we can better project what probabilities the future may hold. Then our own part in that future is clarified.

  Chapter 12

  AN

  EVOLUTIONARY

  PERSPECTIVE

  our current millennial transformation, we find the Chakra System again provides an elegant map for the collective journey, shedding new light on the age old questions, Where are we? How did we get here? and Where are we going?

  The first question, where are we?, can best be answered with a metaphor. It is generally agreed by anyone
who keeps up with current events that we are in a state of massive global transformation. This transformation can be likened to a collective "coming of age" ritualmuch like the tribal rituals that take an adolescent from childhood to adulthood. From the perspective of the Chakra System, the challenges that face us today can be understood as the passage through the chakra most associated with transformation itself, the fiery third chakra. We are burning the fuel of the past to illuminate the path of the future. Chakra three represents the current dominant values of power and will, energy and aggression, ego and autonomy, that must be incorporated, resolved, and transcended in our journey to the next level, chakra four, the realm of the heart, with its attributes of peace, balance, compassion, and love. We can look at this passage as a collective ritual of "coming of age in the heart."

  Lest you think this sounds like a utopian fantasy hashed over from the sixties, let me put this in perspective with an evolutionary time line, dating back over the last 30,000 years of human history. This will then address the next question: How did we get here? which in turn brings us clues to that third and most important question: Where are we going? for out of that question arises the new global vision that is so desperately needed at this time.

  How did we get here?

  Chakra One: Earth and Survival

  In chakra one the element "earth" and the instincts of "survival" are linked together to form the foundation of the entire Chakra System. On an individual level, we must insure our survival before we evolve to any other levels. Just as personal survival is dependent upon our connection to the Earth, so is our collective survival-specifically, the health of the biosphere-which we would do well to regard as the foundation for all future unfolding. As we personally reclaim the sacredness of the physical body, the Earth becomes the sacred body of planetary civilization, our collective first chakra.

  We recall that the Sanskrit name of the first chakra is Muladhara, which means: "root." Our roots are found in the past, the religio, or relinking, that brings us back to core principles, to simplicity, and unity. Our Paleolithic ancestors lived closer to the Earth, whose living web surrounded them as the ground of existence. They hunted game, gathered plants and lived in caves, sometimes traveling nomadically across the surface of the land, highly vulnerable to its moods and tides.

  The Earth, as womb, was our origin, the mother that birthed us, our beginning, our foundation. The Earth, in her natural, numinous state, was the central religious influence of Paleolithic societies, worshipped by our ancestors as a living Goddess. Earth as life-giver and life-taker, and the Earth Mother as birther and regenerator, was synonymous with survival itself. Nature was the original template for the origin of life, the ground upon which it was formed, the very root of our existence.

  With cultural values that debase both the body and the Earth, while simultaneously denying our past, we have literally cut ourselves off from our roots. In so doing, we are hindering our very survival and our ability to grow beyond this level. While the evolutionary direction of consciousness appears to be one that moves upward through the chakras, like living plants, we only grow taller by sending roots deep into the soil. Our growth must move in both directions simultaneously-upward toward the complexity of the future and downward, anchoring our roots in the simplicity of the past.

  We cannot deny the roots of our past, nor our connection to the Earth, and have a future as a species. It is not surprising that movements abound reclaiming this ancient spiritual connection to the Earth, to Paleolithic mother goddesses, and to primal practices that link us directly and simply with this foundational level of mythic consciousness. This re-linking with Earth as a spiritual center can be a stabilizing influence in the massive changes that will indeed occur. It does not arrest our development, but secures it. As Marion Woodman has stated: "If we do not reclaim the sacredness within matter, this planet is doomed .112

  When a child is an infant, he is bound to his mother for survival. His field can be conceived as a circle surrounding the mother as the center. He can only move just so far away from the center and still survive. This stage is characterized by the Jungian writer, Gareth Hill, as the Static Feminine, one of four states in the dialectic of static and dynamic masculine and feminine principles.' The symbol of the Static Feminine is a circle with a dot in the middle, much like the breast a child feeds upon. The circle is the limit that we can travel from the center and still survive. As we grow, that limit expands.

  Just as the infant child is bound to the mother, our culture in its infancy was totally bound by the parameters of Mother Nature. She was the all-powerful center and ruler of our experience. As children of the Earth we were held by her rhythms of light and dark, warm and cold, wet and dry. She was the all-powerful good mother and bad mother who gave us bounty or destruction. Our spiritual roots are found in reclaiming the very sacredness within this phenomenal planet upon which we live.

  Chakra Two: Water and Sexuality

  Once an organism has secured its survival, it next turns to pleasure and sexuality. Chakra two, associated with the element water, represents the urge toward pleasure, the expansion of one's world through sensate exploration, the realm of emotions, and the play of opposites that occurs through sexuality.

  The beginning of the second chakra cultural stage was marked by the climatic change that occurred at the end of the last great Ice Age, (10,000-8000 B.C.E.). This global springtime coincided with the beginnings of agriculture, the beginnings of seafaring, and the eventual development of irrigation technology-all aspects of the water element. Astrologically, it was the dawning of the age of Cancer, a cardinal water sign. The underlying theme of fertility, dominant in the Neolithic era, also fits with the watery aspect of procreation, and through its 7,000 years of stability, population estimates reveal a growth from 5 million to 100 million.4 This marked increase brought its own challenges, further stimulating the growth of consciousness and culture.

  The development of agriculture eased some of the demands of survival, enabling larger populations to be supported with relative stability. This created an enormous flowering of culture in terms of art, religion, trade, architecture, and early forms of writing. Because the archetype of the Great Mother was still the predominant principle during the Neolithic period, this stage is still characterized by the Static Feminine, though new elements were beginning to stir.

  When fertility is worshipped, so is birth. With children come the growth of both males and females, and inevitably the worship of both genders. In the Great Mother mythology, there gradually emerged a mythical counterpart, the Son/Lover. As this archetype gained prominence, the inequalities in the mythical status between the sexes, as mother and child, would have become increasingly apparent. The role of the male, given a sacred honor as hunter in the Paleolithic, would have been much reduced in an agricultural society, whose emphasis is upon fertility. Much conjecture has been made about gender politics during this era and its ensuing downfall. Whether it was a balanced partnership society, as suggested by Riane Eisler,' or a golden age of matriarchy, as suggested by some wistful feminists, archeological research shows a general absence of fortifications or implements of war, instead revealing a peaceful, prosperous, and deeply religious growth of communities.6

  However, inequalities cannot remain stable indefinitely, and whether by violent invasions from invading patriarchal tribes from the northern Steppes, as suggested by Marija Gimbutas,' or by gradual transformation of the culture from within, the mythical Son/Lover and the Great Mother as ruling principles of Nature, were brutally overthrown by a warrior Father God, leading us to the eventual replacement of the Goddess cultures by a ruling and aggressive patriarchy. This violent and tumultuous change ushered in the beginning of our current era, the dawning of the third chakra.

  Chakra Three: Fire and Will

  Chakra Three is related to the element fire and marks the emergence of power that arises when consciousness awakens to individual autonomy and the development of personal will
. Free will is a relatively new element that has only recently been introduced into the evolutionary mix. No other animals have fire, and none can transform themselves and their environment to the degree that humans can. Free will allows us to break away from passive habits, dictated by the past, and create a new direction. Free will is essential for breaking new ground, for the innovation that is the precursor to all change, and hence cultural evolution itself.

  In child development, this stage is marked by the beginnings of impulse control, as the child learns to curtail his or her instinctual urges in favor of more socially acceptable behavior. This mastery also awakens the potential for individual autonomy, and the simultaneous need to determine one's own reality, which takes place, albeit clumsily, during the willful stage of the "terrible twos."

  In a culture, this stage is marked by a civilization that is less deeply bound to the cycles of Nature, but has expanded, through progressively more complex technology, beyond the limitations that Nature imposes. It is unclear, during the Neolithic, how much individuals had a sense of their own autonomy, outside the mandates of the community. Anyone who has lived the life of a farmer knows how it binds one to the cycles and whims of Nature. My conjecture is that increased technological capability allowed the possibility of divergence from Nature which, in turn, awakened the potential for free will. Unfortunately, some individuals or tribes would have come to this realization before others, allowing them to use their new found will to control and dominate others who were weaker or who had not yet awakened their own will.

  Over the next several millennia, rising masculine forces pushed against the dominant numinosity of the Mother Goddess and spawned an aggressive period of civilization that has continued into the present day. The force it must have taken to supplant the fundamental religious symbols that existed since the beginning of conscious time must have been considerable indeed. What could possibly equal the miraculous life-giving powers of the Goddess?