From the sahasrara chakra at the crown of the head, Divinity descends to the Ajna chakra, located in the centre of the brain, behind the junction of the eyebrows. Here the soul makes its entry into the physical body through the negative pole, the medulla oblongata, of the ajna chakra. It is here that the individual soul has come into existence, distinct from God.
The individual soul God is the Supreme Being undivided and unrelated to creation, and yet the same God is also made up of an infinite number of individual shining souls. Just as there is a boundless ocean of water behind each and every wave, similarly the Supreme Consciousness is behind each and every individual consciousness.
The one Supreme Consciousness has extended Itself from Its eternal pure-mind state to appear as innumerable individual souls living in a temporal universe of forms. God is in the heart and soul of every being.
And yet God remains undivided: the Supreme Being never loses Itself by becoming many. Just as water can be taken from the ocean and divided into numerous cups, without losing its quality of water, similarly, the ocean of God’s presence behind the wave of your consciousness always retains its original nature.
The soul has not forgotten God, but there is a separation, a duality. As the soul descends from (Oa chakra in the astral spine, to the fifth centre, Vissudha chakra, at the level of the throat, the soul is no longer in conscious union with God. The soul still feels God’s presence; there is still an intensity of feeling for God but it is not very clear. The soul continues its journey downward in the spine to the level of the heart, anahata chakra. At this level of the descent, the soul has awareness of God but the intensity of feeling for God has lessened.
The soul comes to rest
God is still within the heart and soul of the individual being as it descends through the chalcras, but as it descends further below the three highest chalcras, the soul’s awareness becomes more and more obscured. Below the level of the heart the soul enters the next centre at the navel, manipura cholera.
Here identification with the body-mind-ego is beginning to take effect, and the awareness of God is fading. The soul then passes deeper downward in the spine through the svadhisthana cholera, becoming more entangled in bondage to matter.
Finally, the soul reaches the lowest centre at the base of the spine, muladhara chakra. In this last stage of the downward journey through the chakras the soul comes to rest. Now the soul has become more aware and identified with gross matter, with the material form of the body-mind and a separate ego-personality, making it bound, conditioned and dependent in a world of objects, names and forms; in a world of duality. Clothed in the physical form, the individual soul has forgotten its real identity and true divine nature and so has also forgotten God. The primal life-force known as kundalini that brought the soul down in its descent through the chakras now lies latent at the base of the spine.
THE ASCENT
Now if we made our home or remained at the level of these lower centres of consciousness, the soul would essentially be conscious only of eating, sleeping and procreation. A human being functioning only from these lower planes of consciousness is behaving essentially like an animal. The soul’s real nature is divine, and the aim of human existence is to realise this divine nature: that you are Sat-chit-ananda (Ever-Existing, Ever-Conscious, Ever-New Bliss). It is bliss or joy that we seek, because joy is our true nature. Everybody will eventually awaken to some degree to that divine Consciousness present in their lives. As souls we may turn to God, or as the Self we may turn within to our own identity; in both we experience the one Light, the one Pure Consciousness.
Wilber pointed out that Plato also saw the full cycle: he traced the outflowing of the One through god into the world of Forms and into human minds, then bodies, then matter. He also traced the return journey of the soul from its infatuation with the material realm through the mental realm of Forms to a spiritual immersion in the One.
However, his descending vision became associated with the dark shadows of the cave. As a result, the ascending vision became the goal of Western civilization: up and away from the flesh toward spirit; up and away from the world toward heaven. Aristotle, Augustine, Hegel, Schopenhauer, de Chardin, Novalis, Coleridge, and others perpetuated that bias, with devastating long-range consequences: the devaluation of nature, the body, and the feminine.
The ascending and descending paths also appear in microcosm in us in our kundalini, a subtle energy that is imagined in Tannic yoga and Oriental medicine as a serpent coiled at the base of the spine, which ascends to the top of the head with meditation practice. As it rises, the kundalini opens the seven charkas, which are energy vortices that attract life force from its source.
At each level, the chakra acts as an interface between individual awareness and the energy frequencies of that level.
As kundalini energy is activated and chakras open, the individual incorporates ever-higher frequencies into the self, as it identifies with each level and is transformed by it. Yoga masters have mapped the progress of energy up from primitive stages in the lower chakras to reunion with its divine source in the highest or crown chakra.
The heart is the center of our being and our most comprehensive cognitive faculty. The eye of the heart sees more truly than our ego-based intellect and emotions. With such a heart, true surrender, and true happiness and well-being, become possible.
In the fire of the third chakra you burned away the false beliefs holding you back, and in the process you forged your very being into an empty vessel ready to receive the divine gift of your soul vows. This gift will arrive here in the fourth chakra, the chakra of the heart. This is a most interesting chakra.
It is the chakra at the center of your spiritual being, with three energy fields below and three above. Yoga teachers often describe the three lower chakras as linking us to our humanity and gathering the energy flowing up from mother earth, while the three higher chakras connect us to our divinity and receive the energy flowing down from the heavens and gathering them together in the heart.
That dual energy flow is illustrated in the ancient Hindu symbol of the fourth chakra: two overlapping triangles. Harish Johari explains the symbolism of the two triangles in Chakras: “One points upward symbolizing Shiva, the male principle.
The other triangle points downward and symbolizes Shakti, the female principle. The star represents the balance that is attained when these two principles are joined in harmony.”
In Wheels of Life, Anodea Judith puts it this way: “The triangles represent the descent of spirit into the body and the ascent of matter rising to meet spirit.” Today we often call the overlapping triangles symbol the Star of David, but in its pre Judaic origins, it symbolized the sacred marriage of the divine feminine and divine masculine. In her discussion of the fourth chakra in Anatomy of the Spirit, Caroline Myss expands our understanding of this ancient archetype of the sacred marriage into a modern archetype of true partnership that begins with the partnership with the self: “The symbolic meaning of the sacrament of Marriage is that one must be in union with one’s own personality and spirit first.”
This is a perfect description of what happens in the fourth chakra and throughout the rest of your soul vows adventure. At the center of your spiritual heart, you know—and you know that you know—that you are the beloved of the Divine. This is the great romance—the first romance—the romance of soul and Spirit, lover and Beloved. In this great romance your soul vows are your very own sacred, mystical marriage vows, heard and felt in your sacred, mystical heart.
Scientists at the Institute of Heartmath discovered that the heart generates an electromagnetic field 5000 thousands of times stronger than the field of the brain. Your heart is a finely tuned organ of spiritual intelligence and discernment, and this fourth-chakra soul vows exploration is the perfect time to learn how to really use it.
