Death is the only power equal in strength to the ability to create Life. Thus the fear of death became a prime motivator of culture and behavior. The miracle of birth, which could only emerge from the feminine, became instead the willed creation of the masculine God. Thus the future emerged from the head, not the body, from fear rather than trust. The masculine archetype, in order to gain ascendance, was forced to prove an equivalent power through constant demonstrations of domination, war, and heroic activity.
The change from the peaceful Goddess cultures of the Neolithic to the aggressive sun-worshiping culture began with the invasions of the horse herders who descended from the northern steppes, around 4300 B.C.E.B Over a series of invasions and subsequent insurrections through the next three thousand years, this era was firmly established by the Iron Age, (circa 1500 B.C.E.), and the Goddess cultures had been sent to the Underworld of lost civilizations, to be replaced by an era typified by power, domination, and war. The Iron Age coincides with the astrological age of Aries, a cardinal fire sign, fire being the element of the third chakra. This change was made possible by the use of fire to forge metals, from which tools and weapons of war were made. Metal tools offered advantages in the struggle for survival, superiority over others, and a further stimulation of strategic thinking. The ability to do more with less enabled increased production that required greater coordination and governing by theocratic power structures, such as how to store and distribute grain, trade goods, or manage water resources. Weapons enabled the domination of one culture over another.
The third chakra heralded the birth of individualism, whose mythic theme was the Hero's Quest-the goal of which was to slay the dragons of the old ways (overthrow the unconsciousness of the past) and find one's individual power. This awakening of individualism occurred through heroic acts, the transcendent freedom brought by technology, and use of aggression as a basic mode of survival. Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods, is a pivotal mythic figure of this age.
The most important thing to understand about this chakra-and its corresponding age-is that, for better or worse, it is generally achieved through an initial rejection of the values associated with the previous two levels-earth and water. Indeed, fire cannot burn if there is too much of either element. This denial of our underlying foundation is not a healthy way to grow. It reflects an immature, initial attempt to reroute the collective consciousness into a new direction from the passive, habitual tendencies of the lower chakras.
To the emerging patriarchal system, this meant a rejection and outright domination of the primary values of the previous Neolithic culture-which were the values of the first two chakras-the sacredness of the Earth, sexuality, emotion, women, community, and cooperation-essentially flipping all of these values into their opposites. Thus the peaceful Earth Goddesses were replaced by thunderous Sky Gods, the miracle of birth was supplanted by the fear of death, the sacredness of sexuality repressed, and cooperative partnership was replaced by hierarchical control. With this change, the basic order of life-as it had been known since the dawn of human consciousness, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years-was broken.
In Hindu mythology this can be likened to the ascentionist approach, exemplified in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, whose aim is to attain liberation by separating consciousness from its embeddedness in matter. As in most patriarchal religions, the direction emphasized was up, favoring heaven and devaluing the Earth. Indeed, this emphasis may have been necessary at the time to steer attention away from mundane concerns in order to realize there are other levels of reality. Opening up to another polarity in the cosmic dance expands our horizons and our choices. This polarity then allows the dynamic interplay of forces that is necessary to create power.
The third chakra age is characterized by the Dynamic Masculine, whose symbol is a circle with an arrow-the symbol we use for both the male and for the planet Mars, which represents aggressive energy. The arrow pushes away, in linear fashion, from the static circularity of the feminine in order to chart a new direction. Before the new direction can be established, however, the habits and customs of the old, which have been the ruling structures of consciousness, are often destroyed.
From the patriarchal domination of the Iron Age through the rising Scientific and Industrial revolutions, two world wars and countless other violent skirmishes, to the current creation of spacecraft and computer technology-the third chakra characteristics of aggression, technology, and political power still haunt us today. Issues of power and energy, excessive control and domination of others, are paramount in today's current events. Use of the world's resources for our incessant demands of energy production are central ecological concerns. Issues of reclaiming our personal wills which have been dominated by parents, schools, bosses, and government are central issues in the many twelve-step groups that assuage the victims of our current dominant paradigm. Empowerment is a buzzword of today's psychology, counteracting the "victim mania" that is such a central theme in today's recovery movement.
Aggression and violence dominate our newspapers, entertainment, and politics. The possibility of burning ourselves into blackened history through nuclear warfare, though receding since the retreat of the Cold War, still looms as a potential threat. Yet the fire of our time is also igniting new technologies, new channels of consciousness, heating up the chaotic motion of disjointed individuals in the planetary soup, moving them faster and faster as they converge upon each other toward a massive transformation to the next level.
The development of individualism, will, technology, and "empowerment" are essential steps in creating global consciousness. Individualism has brought us diversity, the possibility for greater novelty, and a sense of separateness that awakens individual will, necessary to become active co-creators of evolution rather than passive recipients. Where earth and water flow downward, passively following gravity, fire transforms the movement upward, enabling us to reach the upper chakras, collectively reaching toward an expanded global consciousness. It was perhaps the control of fire that initially stirred human consciousness into awakening, some half-million years ago. It is now the fires of our current technologies that are capable of awakening-or decimatingglobal consciousness. These are the uncertainties we face in this millennial transformation. But before we come fully into the present age, there is one more era that we must examine-humanity's first attempt to get to the heart-the Christian era.
Chakra Four : Love and Balance
Chakra four, in the original tantric diagrams, is depicted as the intersection of two triangles-the downward pointing triangle of spirit descending into matter, and the upward dissolution of matter into spirit. At the level of the heart chakra these polarities are perfectly balanced, and indeed balance is one of the central attributes to the heart chakra.
Though we are still struggling through the power and domination issues of the third chakra, I believe the rise of Christianity was initially an attempt to get to the fourth chakra. Its philosophical emphasis (even if it often failed in practice) was upon love, unity, forgiveness, and surrender of personal will to a "higher" power-a Father God who still carried some of the attributes of the angry patriarchal thunder gods, but who also carried a softer, more loving side. The birth of Christ, said to be the son of God, symbolized the blending of the divine and the mortal, characteristic of the half-way point that the fourth chakra represents.
The unfortunate thing about Christianity is that it was unable to truly reflect a religion of balance, emerging as it did at a time of intense patriarchy, where the presiding paradigm was still founded upon the denial of the lower chakras, and with it, denial of the sacred values placed on the feminine, on wildness, the earth, sexuality, and personal responsibility. Still, Christianity stabilized the predominant Dynamic Masculine, whose initial rejection of the old ways had produced a kind of social chaos of many divergent factions warring and competing with each other.
This stabilization turned the dynamic masculine into the Static Masculine, whose
symbol is the cross, and whose emphasis is on stability through law and order. Thus the initial rejection of our basic nature is now regulated-it is no longer a reaction, but the permanent overvaluing of one part at the cost of another: light is good, dark is evil; male is powerful, female is weak; earth is transient and expendable, heaven is eternal and perfect. While this may produce the illusion of stability, it comes at the cost of intense repression, which is bound to surface wherever there is a weakness in the system. Thus the practice of love, balance, and forgiveness displayed miserable failures in the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch burnings, and even today in the vicious demonization of cultural differences that occurs in some of the more extreme forms of Christianity. The repression of sexuality has created its shadow side of rape and incest. The repression of the sacredness of Earth has created shadow materialism, resulting in rampant ecological destruction.
Nonetheless, the Christian era, with its relative stability, allowed yet another proliferation of culture in terms of technology and growth of consciousness. During this time we produced the printing press, the telephone, radio, television and computer-all opening up communication possibilities that are a prerequisite for any kind of global unity to emerge. In fact, the industrial revolution, which took the dominant male out of the home and carted him off to work each day, allowed the first resurgence of feminism-where women were out from under the man's thumb long enough to compare notes and begin realizing who they were. This took a few generations, but eventually produced the consciousness-raising groups of housewives in the sixties and the opportunities for education and work that are necessary for any equality of the sexes to take place.
To truly come to balance in the heart requires an equal mixing of raw libido energy coming up from the lower chakras and conscious awareness coming down from the upper chakras. In other words, wholeness requires higher consciousness, vision, and communication, balanced and integrated with personal will, emotion, and primal instincts. I believe that a true awakening in the heart could not occur during the Christian era, because we had not yet achieved proficiency in the upper chakras. This in combination with the denial of the lower chakras created a system very out of balance.
In this light, let's now look at the achievements of upper chakra development that make it finally possible to weave, in balance and wholeness, a true culture of the heart.
Chakra Five: Sound and Communication
Chakra Five represents the symbolic representation of meaning, known as communication, an essential vehicle for the expansion of consciousness. Communication can be seen as the glue of evolution, continuously evolving in complexity from the reproductive language of DNA, to the earliest mating calls of animals, to the emergence of human speech, the advent of writing, publishing, broadcasting, and now the Internet. Each of these quantum leaps in communication can be seen as an evolutionary leap in consciousness. Each increases the capacity of information to travel more rapidly. Each is a step in building global consciousness.
By embracing communication in all its guises, we continue to reach toward greater consciousness as we learn, change, adapt, and create. Through communication, the network of global consciousness that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to fifty years ago as the noosphere,9 now commonly called the global brain, is taking shape. The noosphere can be seen as an organ of consciousness, analogous to a global cerebral cortex, that is now growing out of the body of the planet, Gaia. The Internet is the clearest indication of this global brain, but the entire communication network is involved. It is indeed an evolutionary leap as potent to the evolution of global consciousness as the printing press was to the expansion of individual consciousness.
Chakra Six: Light and Intuition
A picture is worth a thousand words. With Chakra Six our method of portraying information jumps from the linear presentation of words on a page, or sound bites through time, to the holistic presentation of images in space. My words can only come to you sequentially, one at a time, but a picture enters through the eyes holistically, all at once. Through computer technology, mathematical equations can now be expressed as moving pictures, revealing dynamics of process that were previously hidden in piles of equations written on paper, giving birth to deeper understanding of chaos, complexity, and systems behavior. Pages on the World Wide Web can now include graphics and animation, as well as words. Books are sharing the market with videos and CD-ROMs, which provide a more rapid and whole brain way to absorb information. Television news comes to us in blasting images, letting us know more directly the realities of events across space and time-even as they are happening. The image is the message in television commercials, as creators adjust to their viewers' ability to use the "mute" button on their remote control and shut off sound altogether.
In the domain of spirituality, clairvoyance is making a comeback. New Age fairs are lined with booths of psychic readers who will intuit for you the unperceived patterns of your life and offer advice. The skill of creative visualization is employed by thousands as a means of bringing consciousness into manifestation, and in some quarters, intuition is even being admitted as a factor in scientific inquiry. A popular spiritual practice is to go on a "vision quest" for without a vision, how do we direct the course of our lives?
The ability to transmit images is indeed a quantum leap ahead of the communication of words, equal to previous jumps in communication technology. With images more can be communicated in less time, often with less ambiguity. Thinking in images, as a function of the right brain, is bringing a balance to the cognitive process of left brain logic which has dominated the collective consciousness over the last several centuries.
Chakra Seven: Thought and Consciousness
On a cultural level, chakra seven represents no less than the creation and functioning of the entire noosphere, the organization of information and consciousness itself on a planetary level. Is this global brain, with its infinitely vast network of unfolding information and awareness, not a metaphor for a collective thousand-petaled lotus, each petal a fractal point of connection to a larger matrix?
On the rational level, chakra seven is marked by the proliferation of knowledge and information, and on the mythic level, the increased interest in spirituality and consciousness expansion. The popularity of yoga and meditation, parapsychological research, mind-altering chemicals, and consciousness research is rapidly revealing consciousness to be the next frontier. Mind machines designed to alter the resonant frequencies of your brain waves initiating meditative states are increasing in sophistication and popularity. The creation of an information superhighway enables us to move consciousness around the globe at the speed of light. Computers, as the first instruments to extend the mind rather than just the body, can now take our consciousness beyond what is humanly possible, allowing vast increases of memory storage, computation ability, and creativity. As Al Gore has pointed out in Earth in the Balance10 we have so much information, that we now have exformation-piles of data stored in computer disks that have never been reviewed by a human mind. As we enter the new millennium, we are overwhelmed with the vast abundance of information and potential for conscious understanding.
Yet it is essential that our developing consciousness be grounded in the body and in the Earth, that it have roots in our biological reality. Our consciousness carries our mythic structure, our values and directions, and shapes the interpretations of all that we see and the patterns of all that we do. The wisdom of this consciousness is of utmost importance at this time. What kind of operating system do we want? Do we need to evolve our own consciousness further before we can even answer that question?
Certainly, as consciousness evolves, the structure of our paradigms will change with it. The information we send out through the global network can be information that inspires global change or information that incites violence and aggression, such as the violent movies, and media sensationalism that pollute our communication networks. This information must be based on both fact and vision, fee
ling and understanding, embodying the balance, characteristic of chakra four. Our new mythology needs to be a paradigm of wholeness, one that embraces and integrates each of the levels we have encountered. Now we can ask our final question:
Where Are We Going?
To "come of age in the heart" is to fall in love with the world once again. It is to operate from love rather than guilt, devotion rather than duty, to interact with the world from the heart rather than the solar plexus. In order to awaken to the age of the heart, the entire thrust of our emerging era needs to be one of balancing polarities and integrating diversity.
We have never had a prevailing mythology where archetypes of both genders relate to each other from a position of equal maturity and strength. Now that we have experienced the maternal Earth Goddess, with her diminutive Son/Lover, and the complementary elevation of the Father God with his submissive Daughter/Wife, we are finally ready to hold each of these archetypal components in a kind of integrated balance. Now we can embrace mature elements of male and female, allowing these forms to dance with each other with equal power, at last removing the archetypal incest and allowing the younger offspring to embody the natural unfolding of the future that is their birthright. From this Sacred Marriage emerges the archetype of the Divine Child, which may very well be the future itself.
But these are not the only elements that are crying for balance in this emerging age. Mind and body, individual and collective, freedom and responsibility, light and shadow, progress and conservation, work and pleasure are all struggling for acknowledgment as equal qualities in a paradigm of wholeness. As long as we value one more than the other, we will be a culture out of balance.
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