Hinduism and Psychology

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Everyone has some experience with the astral plane, whether or not they are aware that such is what it is when experiencing it. It is tied to dreams and drugs, and is our capacity for an ecstatic trance.

Astral projection is our first encounter with the weird, a plane separate from the raw material plane of survival. If it is sufficiently deep, we wallow in the abyss, terrified. The way out of the Abyss is through the root chakra: our fear, caused by our astral movements, blocks us from grounding ourselves sufficiently. Those who cannot of their own volition escape to the first wheel are madly paranoid, and may require medicinal intervention.

The next chakra wheel is the capacity for pleasure. It is known as the "sacral chakra", and is blocked by feelings of guilt. These feelings of guilt make it difficult to live in a pleasure-seeking utilitarian mode. When one opens the sacral chakra, one experiences greater emotional range, and a deeper sense of connection with others.

There are parallels to yoga psychology in the West. For instance, the five stages of grief mirror the seven stages of chakra development, and Maslow's hierarchy also shows growth toward a particular end. It's difficult not to know in theory what the highest level of yoga practice is, even for a beginner. A person can understand the highest principles of non-attachment yet still not have a complete understanding. It takes a lot of development to go from student to yogi.

The top of the ladder, rather than hide it, should be recognized at the beginning. The goal of opening chakras is to awake one to the infinite. It is the loss of all attachment; a state of enlightenment if you will. From the base of the ladder it may seem magical, but it is anything but. To be falsely enlightened is, however, insanity. The deeper one sinks into false enlightenment, the more lost one becomes.

Certainly, this is to say that there are more than one states that are commonly referred to as enlightenment, and that all but one of these merits the title. Someone who is lost before opening the first chakra, that is to say someone who has never experienced any astral states (through drugs, meditation, or dreaming) lives in an incomprehensible world of schizophrenia. Likewise, someone who has never unblocked the second chakra wheel is trapped in a world bereft of pleasure. Medically, it is known as depression. It is easier to escape from depression than it is from schizophrenia, but it requires a careful re-examining of one's fundamental assumptions about one's relationship to the world.

Of course, there is a world of difference between academically grasping the problems that lead to depression and so forth, and falling between the cracks into a deep understanding. Someone who visits depression from an astral plane is tortured by their thoughts. Someone who passively thinks about, say, suicide, may as well have never experienced suicidal thoughts. There is something of a tragic hero in a man or woman who takes on the challenge of opening as many chakra wheels as possible, including the painful ones.

Unlike the second and first chakras, the third "solar plexus" chakra is active. It is where we choose the life we want to live, and where we build up the confidence to express our will in personally meaningful ways. It is where you recognize that we are all different and that the best life is one of balance, whatever that means to ourselves. It is blocked by shame.

The fourth, "heart", is an awareness of others and our interconnectedness. Love guides us through out lives. What prevents love from flowing through our lives is grief. One must be able to let love go to find new love. Here the goal of balance is in the foreground..

The last three chakras are less physical and more spiritual. The throat chakra expresses truth, and is blocked by lies. One has fully left the dark night of the soul and joined the human plane. The brow chakra expresse insight and is blocked by illusions. And the final chakra is the crown chakra: pure cosmic awareness, blocked by earthly attachments.

As far as I remember there were a couple hundred chakra systems in the East and those who reviewed them and decided to bring them back to the west (Arthur Avalon, the Theosophic Society, etc.) decided on one particular seven-chakra system and my best guess would be because it was the easiest tie-in to the seven alchemical metals or planets of western mysticism. Similarly salt/sulfur/mercury ruffly correlate to tamas/rajas/sattva gunas.

I think the best thing to remember about any of these systems, eastern or western, is that they're mnemonic systems that a person builds for the sake of taking objective conscious and making a bridge that can translate into subconscious parlance for the sake of washing information across that threshold at will or opening the dream world to waking examination and utility (not to mention amplify their self-placebo significantly). Sometimes I think the simpler they are the better but at a minimum you have to be able to house a sensible worldview in a collection of archetypal symbols and be able to manipulate those symbols once you've bonded with them for deep and novel experiences.

IMHO there are a lot of practical reasons to do it; even if you don't believe in non-corporeal energies, astral bodies, etc.. there's still a lot going on in the brain, especially thinking of the richness of pageantry that we can see in dreams, that suggests - if not the opening of the 32nd path of Tau toward Yesod, at least that our nervous systems have a lot more in reserve and perhaps an explorable universe unto themselves the likes of which exploring and currating/tidying can utterly transform our lives for the better.

One of the reasons I've been posting a lot of Jordan Peterson videos lately - I think he really has things nailed in terms of our understanding of culture and information. He spoke in one interview, in very simplified terms for brevity's sake, of Jung's analysis of alchemy fundamentally being the desire of the given mystic or proto-chemist to essentially work with information or test the kinds of information that were loaded into the raw materials around them existing in nature. He does a really good job IMHO of pointing out how we hit some considerable and arbitrary brick walls after the Enlightenment/Industrial revolution through the Newtonian outlook on life. He's really suggesting that we look back into Heidegger's criticism of subject/object dualism and try to make better use of both the storehouses of pre-conscious knowledge built up in everything from traditional religious texts to those written by the mystics up through the more thoughtful existentialists and try really evaluating truth from the subjective outward where we have to admit we still have a terrible grip on what 'objects' (supposedly outside of ourselves) really amount to.

To me occult work is really just that - building scaffolding to get to ideas that the general mundane world wouldn't allow you access to. I think our culture will be a lot better off when they realize that the 'woo' is optional and really a personal choice to either accept or reject. If we're up against a wall where we'll be destroying ourselves and the planet with our current commercialism and nihilism we need some productive direction to go in and I think we're best off reexamining the ground we've tread to see how we can recalibrate attitudes, expectations, social pressures, etc.. and I think the only way to do that which doesn't go harshly punitive is for there be more of a cultural push for people to turn toward and respect internal competencies - ie. set the template for society to prize deeper and clearer thinkers as well as a declared and upfront goal ever-increasing integrity throughout the course of one's life. Even if our culture will always need pissing contests for procreative selection we're really better off turning those back inward as well - we've got too much leverage over nature at this point to survive externalizing it through how big your Hummer is, how big a yacht you own, how often you fly to the tropics based on how deep you're rolling, etc., etc.. True, that particular heirarchy might not fully disappear but we won't survive it being the only game or even the primary game in town.