Ken Wilber is the author of The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything, among other books. In this essay, first published in John Warren White’s Kundalini, Evolution, and Enlightenment, he asks the intriguing question: Are the chakras real? Approaching this subject through Freudian theory and the question of true self-realization, he defines chakras as “knots.” Wilber questions the experience of transcendental bliss, identity, and the Oedipal project. He then answers the question: How does kundalini yoga seek to “untie” these knots or chakras?
The ordinary human body, as Freud has extensively documented, is under sway of a well-organized tyranny—a tyranny imposed by a separate-self sense in flight from death and in flight from loving unity with the world of phenomena. Under these circumstances, the self does not consciously participate in the light and life of the Adi-Buddha, the Godhead, the Brahman, and is forced to retreat instead to the pale substitute of mental and symbolic forms, with a corresponding de-forma-tion of the body. Hence, the being-consciousness-bliss of one’s formless self is distorted and constricted, and under this tyranny appears in the restricted forms known as the chakras.
It is for this reason that the chakras are properly referred to by the terms granthi (knots) and sankhocha (contraction). In the Chandogya Upanishad we read, “In acquiring the traditional doctrine there is release from all knots.” And in the Mundaka Upanishad, “He, verily, who knows that Supreme Brahman, becomes very Brahman. Liberated from the knots of the heart, he becomes immortal.” Likewise, according to the Surangama Sutra, Sakyamuni Buddha explains liberation as the final dissolution of the “knots we have tied in the essential unity of our own Mind.”
And yet, strictly speaking, final liberation, being the timeless and therefore eternal condition of all worlds and selves, is not so much the result of the action of untying these knots, but rather the tacit acknowledgment that these knots do not, and cannot, obstruct ultimate consciousness. Liberation, in short, is not the actual untying of these knots, but the silent admission that they are already untied. Herein lies the key to the paradox of the chakras: they are ultimately dissolved in the realization that they need not be dissolved.
Finally, therefore, the chakras are not real—in the sense that they do not pose a barrier to self-realization, nor do they constitute mandatory stages in an upward climb to liberation. In the last analysis, there are no stages in eternity—nor any ladder to the infinite that does not begin with the infinite. That the chakras in themselves are not real is the conclusion of most of the great sages, siddhas, mystics, and masters, such as Krishnamurti, Sri Ramana Maharshi, Shankara, Bubba Free John, and virtually all Ch’an and Zen masters. To quote but one, the illustrious Sri Ramana Maharshi: “Do not waste time meditating on chakras, nadis, padmas, or mantras of deities, or anything else of the kind. The six subtle centers (chakras) are merely mental pictures and are meant for beginners in yoga.”
And yet—and this is the point to which much of our discussion must be directed—the chakras do appear real to the separate self who constructs these knots in his flight both from death and from a prior unity with all manifestation. The flight from death generates time, while the flight from unity generates space. Now, the self-created world of time-and-space is, by all accounts, the world of samsara, the ropes of our own bondage and suffering, and the chakras are but the knots in these binding ropes of misery. There are an enormous number of descriptions and explanations for the genesis of these knots in awareness, given, from several different angles, by the major metaphysical traditions. There are, to name some, the sefiroth of the Kabbalah, the vijnanas of the Yogacara, the kosas of the Vedanta, the hierarchies of the neo-Confucians, the kuei-hou intervals of the Taoists, the transmutation series of the Alchemists, and the energetics of the tantras. All of these deal, in one way or another, with the apparent hierarchy of knots man has tied in his consciousness. But there is secreted in the works of Freud (and eloquently explained by the likes of Brown, Marcuse, and Lacan) an explanation—in the most rudimentary form—of the evolution of the chakra knots, an explanation that might be better suited to a Western readership, and therefore one I will briefly outline.
The infant, according to psychoanalytic observations, is under sway of “polymorphous perversity” and moved solely by the Pleasure Principle, which means that the child lives in a noncorrupted, blissful, and erotic unity with all of nature. For all practical purposes, its awareness is transpersonal, timeless, and spaceless. Very simply, its world is one of transcendent bliss, and for this reason alone Freud was quite right in announcing, much to the horror of his contemporaries, that children have a richer, more extensive, and more satisfying sex life than adults; for the infant takes equal erotic and blissful delight in all organs, surfaces, and activities of the body, and thus his entire cosmos is one of bliss, while the normal adult finds exuberance and bliss, if at all, in only one specific and narrowed region of the body—the genitals. Genital bliss can thus only be viewed, in comparison with the body’s natural possibilities, as a constriction, a restriction, a cramp, a knot. Now it is not so much genital sexuality that comprises this knot, but rather the restriction of bliss to only one specific region of the body, excluding all others. This restriction of transcendent bliss is thus normal, but not natural. It is but one peculiar arrangement, out of infinite possibilities.
How, then, comes this unnatural restriction of man’s potential participation in transcendent bliss? According to the last formulations of Freud—which, alas, are carefully scrubbed out of all modern psychiatric texts—this restriction is engineered by a separate-self sense in flight from death and from loving unity with all objects; for the infant’s earliest “identity” is literally with the cosmos itself—a type of immature “cosmic consciousness.” He cannot distinguish his world from his actions upon it; nor differentiate self from other, subject from object, inside from outside. He knows nothing of the illusions of space nor of time, and thus, as Jung constantly emphasized, lives in a transpersonal and supraindividual world.
But as the infant learns to construct an irreducible barrier between self and other, between inside and outside, he forfeits his loving and blissful at-one-ness with the cosmos and centers his identity instead on his personal organism. He shifts from a Supreme Identity with the All to a personal identity confined to the boundaries of his skin. Thus Freud’s famous dictum: “The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling that embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.”
This shift in identity carries with it a host of unforeseen ramifications, for, identified almost exclusively with the personal organism, the infant is faced, for the first time, with the imminent fear of death. He suffers anxiety, and “anxiety is the ego’s incapacity to accept death.” Since he has identified his once transcendent self exclusively with his organism, the death of that organism seems to be an utter annihilation of his very self, a total subtraction that he cannot bear.
The infant, therefore, arrives at a fantasy solution to this illusory problem of death—a solution that eventually culminates in what is known as the Oedipal project. Now the Oedipal project is only secondarily the wish to sexually possess the mother and kill the father, for the infant’s primary aim in the Oedipal situation is to abolish death by becoming the father of himself. He imagines, in his infantile fantasy, that he can gain a type of immortality by conceiving himself. As strange as this sounds, remember that even a typical adult will feel he can in some ways cheat death by leaving behind progeny, something of himself that will “survive death.” Conceiving a child thus seems at least to touch immortality, and even more so to the infant’s untutored fantasy.
The infant, therefore, attempts in fantasy to conceive himself, to become his own parent and thus assuage the anxiety that death presents to him. And by the time of the Oedipal project, the child’s fantasies have centered around the genital area, as common sense and the analysis of children as well as adults disclose. But more significantly, the libido of the infant has also concentrated in the genital area, by and large to the exclusion of all other bodily regions. Now libido does not mean sexual, genital pleasure. Libido, in its undiluted form, is simply that capacity for overall bodily pleasure, for transcendent bliss, and in the earliest years of infancy it is distributed equally throughout all bodily organs, surfaces, and activities. The infant participates in transcendent bliss through any area or activity of his body.
But under the Oedipal project, this libido is concentrated in the genital region alone, driven there by the fantasies of overcoming death by uniting bodily with the mother. The libido is no longer democratically available to the entire body, but is now tyrannized by a single region. And the fate of this tyranny is sealed by what is known as the castration complex, for this complex—whose intricacies we need not detail here—smashes to pieces the Oedipal project, but leaves the genital organization of the libido intact. The Oedipal project continues its aims in other forms of fantasy, but the body itself remains deformed, with its libido, its transcendent bliss, diluted and restricted to only one particular area of the body. The body, in short, is left crippled with the constrictions and knots of infantile wishes. The ego becomes the dominant element in consciousness, and the genital the dominant element of the body and world.
And so it comes about that the normal adult’s only access to transcendent bliss and ecstasy is through genital sexual release, a drastic and morbid reduction of the delight he enjoyed as a child. As Norman O. Brown put it, in infancy a person tastes the fruit of the tree of life, and he knows that it is good ... and he never forgets. This is why Freud ultimately, unlike Ferenczi, Fenichel, Reich, and others, did not see full genital release as a cure for neuroses, because even the genital act itself is a necessary source of conflict, since full and unobstructed bliss is frustrated by its unnecessary restriction to a single, tyrannizing region of the body. But again I must emphasize that the “tyranny of genital organization” results not so much from genitality itself, but from the restriction of bliss to this region alone.
Now notice that with this restriction of transcendent bliss to the genital area, we arrive at. the first major chakra![1] And notice also the path that original consciousness-bliss has taken in order to arrive at this first major knot: from a blissful, transcendent, timeless, and therefore eternal unity with all of manifestation, to a partial, fragmented, and abysmally restricted ego awareness stealing what bliss it can from a genital tyranny. From a cosmic body to a personal body—indeed, only a region of a personal body! This is the normal, but not natural, state of affairs for the ordinary person, and this is the state of affairs that kundalini yoga seeks to reverse.
It should be obvious, even from our brief and popularized Freudian discussion, that the processes that culminate in egoic awareness and exclusive genitality do not constitute a single event or a single step from a cosmic body to a deformed personal one. There are numerous intermediate stages, levels of identification, and bands of awareness that range in gradients from the Supreme Identity to egoic fantasy, forming what amounts to an apparent hierarchy of knots or chakras, each progressively “lower” knot being more restrictive and exclusive than its predecessor, with the entire process finally culminating in egoic-genital tyranny.
Kundalini yoga therefore wisely proceeds to reverse this tyranny of awareness and bliss step by careful step, untying the knots in what it sees as roughly the reverse of the order in which they were tied, until finally the chakras themselves lie dissolved—that is, fully “opened”—and transcendent bliss is returned to its prior and unobstructed condition, a condition essentially similar to the polymorphous freedom of the infant but now transmitted through a matured and fully developed personality. So we must emphatically point out that this process is not one of regression but of involution, a return to the Source and not to childhood. On the contrary, it is normal adult genital organization that is supported by regressive fantasies of an Oedipal nature that attempt to avoid death and secure an ersatz immortality. On the other hand, to live in transcendent bliss, timeless and eternal, is to yank every conceivable support from under the Oedipal complex, because it means tasting again, in a mature and developed form, the fruit of the Tree of Life.
The aim of kundalini yoga, therefore, is to free transcendent bliss (ananda) from its dilutions and restrictions, and to recognize it as boundless, oceanic, without limits in time or space. Each dissolving of a knot, each “opening” of a chakra, represents—and actually feels like—a return of transcendent bliss to a more oceanic and unobstructed state. And this fact leads to what first seems the most puzzling aspect of the chakras: their apparent localization in specific areas of the body. Even Ramana Maharshi—who otherwise discounted the reality of the chakras as far as spiritual sadhana was concerned—acknowledged that specific areas of the body seem best to contain the different degrees of “freed up” bliss. That certain feelings are best contained in specific areas of the body does not seem a fantastic proposal. For example, the genitals of a normal adult contain sexual bliss better than the feet, and in like manner, other types or degrees of feelings, vibrations, and energies seem to be best contained in other regions of the body, localizing around specific organs, surfaces, nerve ganglia, or muscle groups. Thus the “gut region” seems to contain “vital” or life-force bliss, and actually feels so to one who works through that chakra. So also, the heart-chest region seems best to contain and even radiate loving bliss; the head region, intellectual bliss; and the sahasrara, final ascending and transcendent bliss.
As we shall presently see, it is not necessary for liberation that consciousness-bliss travels through these particular centers outlined by kundalini theory. It is just that it might, especially if someone concentrates on the appropriate areas and in the appropriate sequence prescribed by kundalini yoga. In this connection, I don’t think we need be confused by the reported fact that concentrating on a specific region-chakra, along with certain visualizations, can evoke the appropriate feeling and energy best contained by that specific region. Close your eyes, concentrate on the genital region, visualize two people making sensuous love, and see if an appropriate feeling and energy isn’t evoked! Thus, at the other end of the pole, Ramana could say, “If one concentrates on the sahasrara there is no doubt that the ecstasy of samadhi ensues.” The localization of the chakras, in general, seems to be one of their more self-evident features.
In this regard, it is not surprising that bioenergetics, the school of psychotherapy most alive to bodily feelings and energies, even in just their personal and nontranscendent forms, maintains that different feelings and cognitions are “located,” or best contained in, certain well-defined segments of the body: one feels stability and groundedness in the legs and feet (and not, for instance, in the chin!); orgasmic ecstasy in the genitals; joy-vitality-laughter in the gut; openness-affirmation-love in the chest; intellectioninsight in the eyes and head; and spirituality at the crown—a formulation essentially identical to that of the kundalini model, but without, of course, the latter’s eye to the degrees of progressive transcendence accompanying these energies, nor their increasingly “subtle” character.
So I don’t think there is anything mysterious about the location of the chakras. They are “there;” they are “real,” because (1) you can feel certain states or modifications of bliss and awareness at each major chakra, and (2) these feelings or energies just aren’t appropriate to other areas of the body, as, for example, you cannot ordinarily feel an orgasm in your knee.
This, then, is the basis of the chakra system as presented in terms of feelings, vibrations, or energetics (prana, chi, ruh, ki). These energetics exist, they are “real,” or rather, they are as real as any other feelings of joy or terror or excitement, and they take as their terminals specific centers, organs, muscle groups, nerve ganglia, or, as some maintain, endocrine glands. The most significant point, however, is not the localization of the chakras, but the modes of consciousness that take these regions as an appropriate outlet.
The chakras are located at specific areas or organs, but they are not identical to those areas. It is for this reason that kundalini yoga maintains that these centers deal primarily with the “subtle body,” which is to say, with states of awareness and bliss that no longer recognize the conventional and illusory boundaries between the organism and the environment, and thus could hardly be localized finally in one or the other. It is just that, in the period of transition from a personal body to a cosmic one, the individual carries for some time the old and exclusive references to his isolated and personal body, and thus his insights might tend to take, as their physical correlates, certain terminals in the body. And as for the enlightened sages, even they walk on their feet, eat with their mouths, love with their hearts, and procreate with their genitals. These “localizations” hardly seem a mysterious affair. In other words, for the sage these localized centers remain, not as knots, but as appropriate and functional nodes of energy.
Thus far we have seen that the chakras represent both certain stages in a type of spiritual growth (steps in the freeing up of transcendent bliss) as well as certain locations of energies in the body. The usual controversy over the existence of the chakras—“Are they real?”—seems based on nothing other than an attempt to pit one of these characteristics of the chakras against the other. Thus, those who maintain that the chakras are purely metaphorical deny they have any “physical correlates” in the body, since this seems to drag spirit into the dirty realm of matter. This is an unnecessary concern, however, for spirit and matter have never been separated. On the other hand, those who claim that the chakras are purely physical—that is, identical to nerve plexes instead of associated with them—fall instantly into the Fallacy of Simple Location, a favorite pastime of physiologists, and thus have the utmost difficulty in theoretically extracting a transcendent state of consciousness out of an endocrine gland.
I have tried to suggest that these two views are complementary. The fact that the chakras are symbolic does not prevent their association with particular regions of the body, and the fact that they may be more appropriately experienced in certain regions of the body does not rob them of their transcendent symbolism.
The chakras, as we have seen, are predominantly concerned with the apparent hierarchy of energetics—with vibrations, feelings, vital force, and bliss. Naturally, not all spiritual systems or disciplines emphasize this aspect of higher states of consciousness, preferring instead to emphasize, and work through, the equivalent hierarchies of insight, or absorption, or ontological world view, or cosmology, or awareness—all of which are perfectly valid. The Hindu points out that saguna Brahman is “characterized” by absolute being, consciousness, and bliss, and some spiritual systems and practices simply emphasize, and thus develop, one of these equivalent characteristics and its manifestations over the others. Thus the tantras deal with the samsaric hierarchy of knots in predominantly energetic terms and states; the Kabbalah works with the cosmological and ontological aspects; the Buddhists emphasize awareness and insight. These are all roughly equivalent expressions of a central truth: In the apparent world, “existence is graded, and with it, cognition,” and, we would add, energetics and vibratory bliss. As far as spiritual practice is concerned, all of these honorable traditions point to a progressive dissolution of the constricting knots we have tied in our own consciousness.
To return to kundalini specifically: Many investigators, having some familiarity with Freud’s work on sublimation, assume that kundalini yoga consists in the progressive sublimation or “forcing upward” of genital sexual energy. Further, some have proposed that laboratory studies would confirm this hypothesis, and that here we would finally have the pulling of the religious rabbit out of the laboratory hat. Being a biochemist by training, I am wholly in sympathy with any experimental thrust in this direction, even though we will then be faced with an extremely difficult dilemma should physiological tests show that certain neurological or hormonal changes do in fact occur as meditation proceeds through the chakras to higher states of consciousness. The dilemma: Is the higher consciousness the result of chemical changes or the cause of them? If the latter, then physiological changes are totally irrelevant to spiritual pursuits.
But this physiological line of reasoning has led some people to conclude that the energy of higher consciousness can be explained in terms of sublimated, genital sexual energy. Aside from the fact that genital sexuality cannot in theory be sublimated (the pregenital organizations alone provide the reservoir of libido that drives sublimations), I think the conclusion is precisely reversed. As I have tried to explain, genital sexuality is a constriction and a restriction of higher consciousness, and this is the state of affairs that kundalini yoga seeks to reverse. It thus appears, to an ordinary onlooker or researcher, that sexual energy is transmuting into higher states of consciousness—but it’s really just the opposite. The higher consciousness is being freed from its chronic constrictions in “lower”—that is, limited and bounded—modes of awareness and energetics. God-consciousness is not sublimated sexuality; sexuality is repressed God-consciousness.
All in all, I think we can fairly conclude that each chakra represents both an appropriate center in the body and a particular stage in a type of spiritual growth. I say “type of spiritual growth” because there is much evidence in the orthodox traditions themselves (especially Tibetan Buddhism) that suggests that kundalini yoga is a valid but partial approach to even the energetics of higher consciousness, tending to ignore—with its exclusive emphasis on the ascending kundalini current—the equally important “descending” currents. Further, even the Hindu generally concedes that, except at its very summit, kundalini shakti is a phenomenon of the subtle body only. Hatha yoga addresses the gross body, and kundalini the subtle body, but it is jnana yoga that deals with the underlying reality of the causal body. Jnana yoga of Vedanta, Dzogchen and mahamudra of Vajrayana, chih-kuan and shikantaza of Zen—these simply investigate, through present awareness, any knot that arises in consciousness, and, finding void of self-nature, are relieved of the burden of untying it.
Thus we return to the paradox with which we began this article—the chakras do appear to exist, and the chakras are knots. But the knots are illusory. Nothing binds us from the very start, but until we understand this, everything appears to. Nevertheless, kundalini theory, with its penetrating understanding of these shadowy knots themselves, offers sound, wise, and powerful advice on how to see through them, so that one may finally awaken, as if from a dream, to discover that the cosmos is one’s body, and the sun one’s solar self.