It has now been twenty-five years since I first discovered the word chakra. At that time I rarely found the word in an index or card catalog, yet there are now countless references and scores of New Age books on the subject, not to mention tuning forks, colored candles, incenses, t-shirts, and the usual paraphernalia that embellish any archetypal theme awakening in the collective consciousness. While I am duly flattered by those who credit the first edition of this book as seminal in that trend, I believe it is instead part of a larger cultural thirst for models of integration and wholeness. In short, the Chakra System is an idea whose time has come.
As we begin the third millennium of the current era, we are facing a time unparalleled in human development. Our history books have shown us that the systems we use to organize our lives have an enormous effect on our collective reality. This knowledge makes it imperative to innovate systems that serve us intelligently. As we pass through this particular cusp in history, we must build bridges between past and future, not only creating models that fit new realities, but continually updating old models to keep them viable in a rapidly changing culture. If the Chakra System is going to be meaningful in the twenty-first century, it must reflect the underlying fabric that has always existed, while still having the flexibility to be relevant to the demands of modern life. The ancients created a profound system. We can now marry its wisdom with modern information about the natural world, the body, and the psyche to create an even more effective system.
When I first injected chakra theory with such ideas as grounding, or proposed the idea of a downward current of consciousness, some were skeptical. Most interpretations of the chakras focused on transcending our physical reality, portraying it as inferior or degenerate. Life is suffering, we are told, and the transcendent planes are its antidote. If life is suffering and transcendence the antidote, the logic of this equation implies that transcendence is counter to life itself—a view that I seriously question in this book.
I do not believe that we need to sacrifice our zest for life and its enjoyment in order to advance spiritually. Nor do I see spirituality as antithetical to worldly existence, or that spiritual growth requires intense domination and control of our innate biological natures, hence of life itself. I believe this is part of a control paradigm, appropriate to a former age but inappropriate to the current challenges of our time. These challenges require models of integration rather than domination.
Since the early eighties, when I first wrote this book, the collective paradigm has shifted considerably. Emphasis on reclaiming the body and acknowledging the sacredness of Earth has increased exponentially, along with a recognition that matter has an innate spiritual value. We have learned that repression of natural forces creates unpleasant side effects and shadow energies. Ignoring the body creates illness. Devaluing the Earth creates ecological crisis. Repressed sexuality can explode in rape and incest.
It is now time to reclaim what we have lost and integrate it with new frontiers. It becomes both a personal and a cultural imperative to reweave the disparate concepts of East and West, spirit and matter, mind and body. As Marion Woodman said, “Matter without spirit is a corpse. Spirit without matter is a ghost.”1 Both describe something that is dead.
The Tantric philosophies, from which the chakras emerge, are a philosophy of weaving. Their many threads weave a tapestry of reality that is both complex and elegant. Tantra is a philosophy that is both pro-life and pro-spiritual. It weaves spirit and matter back into its original whole, yet continues to move that whole along its spiral of evolution.
It is at this time that we finally have the privilege to weave the knowledge of ancient and modern civilization into an elegant map for the evolutionary journey of consciousness. This book represents a map to that journey. Consider it the user’s guide to the chakras. I suspect there will be many more editions, by many more authors in the future, but this is the current update from my perspective.
So what’s different in this edition? It contains more references to the Tantric teachings, as I have had more time to study them, though I have still tried to keep my words as Western and non-esoteric as possible. I have also revised and shortened it a bit, as so many have told me they felt intimidated by the size of the previous version. Eliminated was the ongoing political rhetoric so important to me in my twenties. Now, in my mid-forties, though my spiritual politics still hold, I prefer to let a system speak for itself. Some of the science has also been updated, as even our models for matter are rapidly changing.
I have tried to retain the original metaphysical flavor of this book, and keep it distinct from my subsequent books. The Sevenfold Journey: Reclaiming Mind, Body, and Spirit through the Chakras (written with Selene Vega, 1993) is the workbook that contains the “practice” to this book’s “theory.” It features the daily exercises, both mental and physical, that support personal progress through the Chakra System. My third book, Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self, is a look at the psychology of the chakras, their developmental progression, the traumas and abuses that happen to us at each chakra level, and how to heal them. It weaves Western psychology and somatic therapies into the Eastern system of the chakras.
The book you now hold describes the underlying metaphysical theory behind the Chakra System. More than just an assemblage of energy centers located in the body, the chakras reveal a profound mapping of universal principles, intricately nested within each other as progressively transcendent planes of reality. The levels of consciousness that the chakras represent are doorways into these various planes. As these planes are embedded within each other, none can be eliminated from the system and still have it hold together theoretically or experientially. I do not believe that we would be given a system of seven chakras to merely discard the lower three.
This book looks at both outer and inner realities. It looks at the Chakra System as a profound system for spiritual growth, as well as a diagram of the sacred architecture in which we are embedded—the larger structure that holds us. If we are indeed “fashioned in the image of God,” I believe the sacred architecture found in nature is the blueprint for our internal structures as well, both in the body and the psyche. When the bridge is made between our inner and outer worlds, they become seamlessly one, and inner growth is no longer antithetical to outer work in the world. Therefore this book uses many models that are scientific in nature, as a way of illustrating ancient wisdom with modern metaphors.
Tantric scholars and Kundalini gurus often draw a distinction between the chakras as witnessed through Kundalini experiences and the Westernized model of the chakras as a “personal growth system.” Some claim that this distinction is so great that there is no meaningful relationship between the two, using either one to deny the validity of the other. There is without a doubt a marked difference, for example, between having an insight or vision (sixth chakra association) and experiencing the overwhelming inner luminescence associated with a Kundalini awakening. Yet I do not see these experiences as unrelated but existing on a continuum.
I firmly believe that clearing the chakras through understanding their nature, practicing related exercises, and using visualization and meditation, prepares the way for a spiritual opening that is apt to be less tumultuous than is so often the case for Kundalini awakenings. I believe this Westernization is an important step for speaking to the Western mind in a way that is harmonious with the circumstances in which we live, rather than antithetical to it. It gives us a context in which these experiences can occur.
Likewise, there are many who say that the chakras, as vortices in the subtle body, have nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body or the central nerve ganglia emanating from the spinal column, and that a spiritual awakening is not a somatic experience. Because an experience is not entirely somatic does not mean that its somatic aspect is negated. Anyone who has witnessed or experienced the physical sensations and spontaneous movements (kriyas) that are typical of a Kundalini awakening cannot deny that there is a somatic component. I believe this view is just more evidence of the divorce between spirit and body that I find to be the primary illusion from which we must awaken.
A man from India came to one of my workshops and told me that he had to come all the way to America to learn about chakras, because it was so esoteric in India that it was “secret knowledge,” barred from anyone with a family and a job. I see “grounding” the chakras as allowing the material to be more accessible to more people. While Eastern gurus might warn that this is dangerous, I have found through my twenty-five years of working with the system that this common sense approach enables many to transform their lives without the dangerous and ungrounded symptoms so often associated with Kundalini. Far from diluting the spiritual base from which the chakras are rooted, this approach enlarges it.
Take your time reading this book. There is much to ponder. Let the chakras become a lens through which you can look at your life and world. The journey is rich and colorful. Let the Rainbow Bridge of the soul unfold before you as you walk your path.
—December, 1998
1. Lecture given at the “Fabric of the Future” conference, November 7, 1998, Palo Alto, CA.