Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
So, let’s begin. Namaste. So I’m in my villa in Sri Lanka on working vacation, and I’d like to talk about consciousness and the different cakras.
So, you know, we have quite a background of looking into consciousness and its different aspects, and especially its development and how we attain enlightenment. So looking at consciousness from the point of view of the cakras is very enlightening, because we have seven cakras; and we can’t pretend that we don’t have all those seven cakras.
So when people try to approach spiritual life and they want to confine it to the upper cakras only, they get in trouble because then they have to deny part of themselves that’s just as real—or unreal, because the division of the Self into seven is itself illusory. What to speak of the existence of the individual self itself? Words. Anyway, I’d like to talk a little bit about these views that we get through the seven cakras, starting with the sex cakra.
The sex cakra evaluates and measures everything by whether or not or how much it contributes to its lusty desires. So when we see someone, there’s an immediate calculation, how would this person be in bed? We could call this crotch-consciousness. Men have a saying for it, “thinking with the small head.” So that head is very dumb. And if we follow the promptings and urgings of the sex center, we always get ourselves in trouble.
Isn’t that everybody’s experience? It always leads to difficulty. Why? Because we’re prioritizing one cakra over all the others. And it happens to be the most stupid one. So that only leads to problems.
Then there’s the energy cakra, the Dan-tien as the Chinese call it. This cakra measures everything by effort. How much effort will it be to do this or to do that? And how much of my energy budget would I have to invest? And so on. These kind of thoughts.
So the energy cakra is a more sophisticated awareness, and it’s better at strategizing and, like I said, budgeting the energy to achieve different outcomes. So by means of the energy cakra, we can calculate or even predict how much energy it’s going to cost to accomplish our goals.
Then there’s the movement cakra. And the movement cakra measures everything by the harmony or the rhythm of movements. Drumming comes from the movement cakra. And the people who are into drumming, well, among musicians, drummers are always known as being kind of dumb, right? But without the drummer, everybody loses the beat. So drummer is very important; but the drummer is limited.
See, the first three cakras—sex, energy, and movement—are kind of like the animal. They’re the animalistic part of the human being. So, you know, other animals like dogs and cats and like that, they are only the first three *cakras. They don’t have much in the way of emotions, and very little in the way of cognition. And their expression is also very limited.
They are conscious. They definitely are conscious, but that consciousness can only express itself through the functions of what in a human being are the first three cakras. So the first three cakras are the animalistic part of the human being. They’re absolutely necessary for maintaining the body. I mean, after all, the Kuṇḍalinī-śakti resides in the mūlādhāra-cakra. This is given in the scriptures.
Why is She there? Because She is the life energy, and the life is procreated through the sex center. So this Goddess, who is the one who breathes for us when we’re asleep and who regulates the metabolism and appetite and digestion and elimination, all of the very necessary functions of the body, so that we don’t have to. We can be free to do higher human things.
And what are they? Well, let’s look at the heart cakra. The heart cakra, of course, deals with emotion. So the heart cakra measures everything, comparing it to what we might call the other cakras. Ideal emotion. Everybody has a core emotion and this is called the ādi-rasa.
And it has to do with love, sex, and affection. But it also has to do with how one sees oneself in the world, what role one is playing. And, of course, the Vedic culture divides the human society into four occupational divisions:
Well, varṇas is the proper word. So we see these four kinds of people everywhere. Actually, the śūdras are more than 95%—well these days probably more like 99%—of the population. And, of course, in Western society the whole thing is just skewed by the materialism. So even people with Brahminical capacity wind up doing mundane things, like business administration.
Everybody’s getting dragged down the org chart. This is the problem. And it’s because of the lack of awareness of the transcendental nature of consciousness. But we’ll get to consciousness in a minute.
The next one is the throat cakra. Now the throat cakra is how we express ourselves. And it is a center of conflict between the heart cakra and the forehead cakra, the ajñā-cakra, the intellect. So the intellect wants to express itself through the throat cakra and so does the heart. So who’s going to win? There’s always a struggle there.
And the next one, the ajñā-cakra, is the seat of the intellect, intelligence, cognition, awareness. So this is how we evolve our ideas. And, of course, when we finally get to meditation, this is how we implement that concentration on a transcendental object.
And what is that transcendental object? Well, that is found in the crown cakra. And the crown cakra is the center of consciousness, awareness, and, of course, reality, Self-realization. So when we can really understand the function of these seven cakras, we understand that we are at every moment acting through one or more of them. We can’t avoid it because this is our existence.
So just like the people who are into the lower three cakras suffer because they reject and neglect the functions of the higher cakras, the people who are into religion and philosophy and stuff like that suffer and are limited by their rejection of the lower cakras. You see, nobody is taking the human being as a whole. Everyone is pretending to be something only partial.
But that doesn’t make it so. You see, so the religious people and the materialists are both simply partial, and that’s why neither one can defeat the other. And they argue back and forth, and it’s interminable; it’ll never end. The only people who are actually victorious are the transcendentalists, the real transcendentalists, because they accept the human being as a whole.
Yes, we have these animal desires and needs. If we don’t eat, how can we meditate? If we don’t take care of the body nicely, how can we function to do all the other higher things? So this is why too much austerity or too much thinking are bad for us. Really, the center of our being is the heart. The heart has to be happy. The heart has to be pleased.
And how does that happen? When we pursue the taste, rasa that is dear to our heart. And of course that’s a very elaborate subject matter; but briefly there are five major rasas, and they are neutrality, servitorship, friendship, parenthood, and conjugal love. So these five rasas are constantly at play within the heart. And of course, one of them is going to be our favorite. Everybody has their favorite. Some people are just like natural friends, or natural parents, or in the case of many people, the center of emotional life is their love life.
But we find that actually many people are happy when they’re in a position of servitude. They don’t have to think about what to do. It’s easy life. So there are a lot of people who are in that service mood. And then there are the people who are detached, neutral, you know, the monks and the meditators and people like that. They’re trying to attain neutrality, equanimity, like that.
So these different rasas are the ideal that the heart holds dear. And this is the way we achieve happiness, by acting out the roles of these rasas, the ones that we hold most favored in our hearts.
So this is the thing. At every moment, these seven cakras and their different views of life are vying for attention. They’re different needs, and they’re often conflicting needs. So this is the problem of life, that there are all these views happening all the time within consciousness.
And we have to choose, or we think we choose—actually it’s destiny—but we have to choose between one and another because sometimes they’re in conflict. So the way to handle this, of course, is to step back, step back from the body, view the seven cakras as co-equal.
They’re all important; every one of them has important needs that cannot be denied without compromising our energy and our existence in some way. So our approach, the Dharmasāra approach, is to practice the yogas that support and develop these cakras more or less simultaneously.
Obviously, if there’s a conflict of interest between the different cakras, we can’t do them all at the same time. But what we can do is allot a portion of our time and energy to taking care of each of them, so that none of them are neglected.
That’s the important point. Over time, over years, months and years of time, we want to make sure that all the cakras get their due, and there are different seasons in life when development of the different cakras is more or less appropriate. We have to take that into account too.
For example, fully developing the sex cakra is best done in youth, the late teens and early twenties. If we miss that opportunity, then it becomes more and more difficult later on to correct any imbalance in the sex cakra. So that should be done early.
And then, developing meditation and so on like that generally comes later on in life, but the habits that support it should be developed as early as possible so that the meditation doesn’t become lost, doesn’t become crowded out by other competing desires; and especially so that we realize very early in life and plan for the inevitable retreat from life that comes at the end of life, and develop the habit of meditation so that we have someplace to go.
We have to know or develop or realize our destiny in the next life, and very early on start to plan for that, start to make a boat to carry us across the river of death, the Virāja River and take us to the other side.
What is the other side? The next body, the next life, the next existence. So once we take care of all these things, see the animal needs faith in something higher.
You know, just like a dog. A dog needs a master and if he’s not a member of a dog pack, he looks to a human master. So the dog needs somebody to tell him what to do, otherwise he’s just confused and lost.
So similarly, the lower cakras need the heart cakra to give them a religion, to give them a deity, a faith, a direction. Now of course, the ajñā-cakra, the mind is full of doubts. That’s mind for you, you know.
So the mind is going to say, “Ah, this religion, this God stuff, you know, this is all just an illusion. You’re just imagining it, you know,” and like that.
But the heart needs to be or have a deity. The heart needs to have a rasa, a love, a mood, a center to direct its faith and its love. Otherwise, the heart feels lost. You see?
And so of course, the crown cakra knows that actually none of this is real. None of this exists at all. It’s simply a dream.
So these different cakras have to be allowed to be in their own space and given the things they need in order to flourish. So it’s okay that we can have a religion. In other words, we can have a heart, a love towards a deity and then give that religion to our lower cakras to keep them happy.
And at the same time, we can have a healthy skepticism in our intellect and try to meditate on emptiness and these kind of things because that’s what’s good for the mind. And finally, the realization that we are nothing but pure awareness.
This is the crown cakra. This is the perfection of life. This is Self-realization. So we have to take care of all these cakras in a balanced way. And that is the secret of success of the Dharmasār Method.