The Chakra of the Whole Body

Barred owl at Crawford Pond

Union, Maine Sept. 2021

Let’s speak for a moment again about why one needs to care about one's inner sensation and begin to develop a new relationship with it.

Our inner parts are arranged in a hierarchy. Let’s speak allegorically as though we were looking at one of those chakra diagrams with a vertical line down the center of the human body that has little dots on it.

Now forget about the dots for a minute and just imagine that there is a top, a middle, and a bottom. The top is the intellect; the middle is the feeling; the bottom is the sensation. The sensation is the anchor, the foundation upon which the entire structure rests. If it's not firm, everything above it flops around, back-and-forth. The center of the building has no feet under it to stabilize it; the top is top-heavy and drags the building back-and-forth in one direction or another. No foundation, no structure. The hierarchy is disrupted and my whole being flops around like a fish with no water to swim in.

The moment the sensation is present, the foundation is put right and life flows into it in the way it was meant to. Sensation receives life objectively, without interference from the mind, which wants to color everything it encounters. If sensation is deep and comprehensive and permanent, then — only then — the mind can begin to engage with it in a new and more constructive way. This is part of what I mean when I speak of organic sensation.

Once this process begins, it's possible, over time, to deposit enough finer material from the perception of being to create a magnetic attraction to feeling, and feeling is drawn naturally to this material. I don’t speak of emotions here, I speak of feeling, which is a finer quality.

Once enough work has been done, real feeling occasionally arrives and one sees the world as it is, which is an entirely different world than the one that one usually sees. It is also, paradoxically, exactly the same world; only feeling reveals truths about it that are not available to sensation or the intellect when working on their own. Let me just say that very high things can be seen with relative ease, almost effortlessly, under the right conditions.

Return for a moment to the little diagram of the person with the seven chakras. There's a certain truth to this and there's a certain truth to the whole teaching about chakras; but it has been trivialized and marketed and illustrated too much for anyone to understand it organically, as is absolutely necessary. So better leave it alone. The interesting thing is that the seven chakras, like the notes on Gurdjieff’s enneagram, are actually a single whole thing, a comprehensive and unified system of which each chakra is only a single note. When the hierarchy of the inner structure re-acquires its foundation and the parts begin to work normally, it's a step in the direction of that unified system.

At the point where real feeling enters in its whole state and with all of its ability, one does not open a single chakra. (In fact, of course, if a chakra opens it's best it do so most naturally and without my interference, simply because conditions for it are correct. But that’s another discussion.) With real feeling the chakra of the whole body, the entire system, can open, and for a moment a much higher influence can enter. 

This can’t take place all the time, because, like ordinary flowers, the blossoming should only take place for a moment—at which point Being is fertilized. Then it all ends; and it is time to do the work that grows new seeds for the benefit of Being.

This is actually happening mechanically and without our participation all the time, which has something to do with the biblical parable about the seeds that fell in many different places, some in barren ground and some where they could grow effectively.

I think I'll leave it at that for this morning. It’s enough to think about for one day.

with warm regards,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.