The term CHAKRA is lifted directly into Western languages from the Sanskrit of ancient India.
In its original meaning it signified “wheel,” but more precisely the “turning” of anything that turns or revolves. Thus, in ancient India, it also signified a cycle, a period of duration, in which the wheel of time turns once. It also referred to horizon, as being circular or of a wheel-form.
CHAKRA also refers to certain centers of the body having to do with energy, which are said to collect streams of energy of different kinds.
In ancient India, the energy was referred to as PRANA. That term is derived from the Sanskrit PRA, a prefix meaning “before,” and AN, a verb meaning “to breathe, to blow, and to live.”
PRANA is therefore usually translated as “life,” or as the “Life Principle,” but it has a more technical description as “the psycho-electrical veil or psycho-electrical field manifesting in the individual as vitality.”
As to the numbers and different kinds of pranic energy, various Asian sages have indicated them as three, others as five, some as seven or twelve, and one writer gave the number as thirteen.
The most important distinction regarding the pranic energies is that they do not entirely originate or belong to the biological body or to its own energetic fields, but belong more to the natural pranic energy reservoirs of the planet (or as some indicate, of the cosmos.)
However, the pranic energies are “breathed in” as life-currents, or vital fluids, to the body systems via energetic apertures in the body’s energetic aura, and, according to clairvoyant sensing, are perceived as a turning wheels, i.e., as the CHAKRAS.
In the largest sense probable, CHAKRA could refer to any turning that collects energy, or into which or through which energy flows to or out of. So it could include such objects as galaxies, black holes, and the little whirlpools one sees as water goes into a drain. It is the flowing of the energy that sets up the turning.
However, in its most Westernized sense, chakra refers to certain major energy centers of the human body, of which seven are commonly enumerated, although there are many more lesser, but equally important ones.
In any event, chakras are etheric energetic functions that “work” in accord with collecting and distributing the number of vital fluids inflowing and exhaling with regard to the Life Principle manifesting as a physical-electric body.
CLAIRVOYANT PERCEPTION OF THE CHAKRAS
Although achieved clairvoyants sometimes specify ten major chakras, three of these are usually avoided, leaving seven that are usually referred to.
The seven are positioned in the bio-body energy fields at the crown of the head, between the eyebrows, at the throat, the heart, the spleen, the solar plexus, the base of the spine.
As might be suspected by now, the three chakras usually avoided have intense sexual implications.
Thus, most sources indicate that “The three remaining chakras are situated in the lower part of the pelvis and normally are not used” for the reason that these are connected to the astral world of “sexual magic” into which it is better not to make treks and fool around.
THE KUNDALINI ENERGY CHAKRAS
In the larger picture, all of the usually avoided chakras are directly associated to Kundalini energy.
This is defined as a “cosmic energy latent in the human organism responsible for sexual activity and also conditions of higher consciousness.” And so here FINALLY is a traditional link between formats of sexual energy and formats of higher consciousness.
The difficulty in integrating ALL of the above factors is that if one wishes to obtain “higher consciousness,” then it would seem that ALL of the chakras have to become activated—including the three avoided ones.
While it is true that higher intelligence can be obtained by “working with” only the seven best known chakras, obtaining “higher consciousness” as distinct from mere higher intelligence is another matter.
Higher consciousness, it is said, is achieved only via some kind of Kundalini awakening.
THE LOCATIONS OF THE SEXUALIZING CHAKRAS
The locations of the three avoided chakras are not merely in the “pelvic region.”
In both males and females, one of them is directly on the pubic mound, the second is in the cleft between the physical sex apparatus and the anus.
The third avoided chakra is admitted as existing in some sources, but without specification as to where it is located.
Depending on the degree or level of one’s clairvoyance or lucidity, different layers or dimensions of the entangled manifestation become apparent. Different aspects of the aura or energy field become visible, and a large variety of different kinds and sizes of chakras become exposed.
It would seem, then, that the existence of the seven chakras is more easily perceived by a form of clairvoyance that is “turned on” more easily than other more complex clairvoyant formats.
However, this does not at all detract from the considerable importance of the seven chakras most usually perceived. The only meaning here is that they are most easily seen, and thus most frequently reported.
If the aura or energy field is a multidimensional affair, then it is reasonable to expect that there are different dimensional forms of clairvoyance and/or lucidity. However, if lucidity is taken as a super form of clairvoyance, then perceptual elaboration would be greater in the lucidity state.
THE CHAKRAS ELABORATED VIA THEOSOPHY
As to written sources concerning the aura and the chakras, there is no getting around the fact that the indomitable and quite prolific Elder Brother of Theosophy, Charles Webster Leadbeater, put his descriptive stamp on them quite vividly.
Among his numerous contributions in this regard, in 1895 he published THE AURA: AN ENQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE LUMINOUS MIST SEEN ABOUT HUMAN AND OTHER BEINGS.
Between 1895 and 1925, he published at least six other books along these lines, each addressing different and more complex issues.
Then, in 1927, he published THE CHAKRAS: A RECORD OF CLAIRVOYANT OBSERVATIONS—and which has been reprinted about every eight years since.
This is a quite wonderful and vibrant book, and the seven major chakras are colorfully illustrated, albeit in idealized ways.
It should be noted that the major seven can look quite different from individual to individual.
ENERGIES DENSE ENOUGH TO BE VISIBLE
Leadbeater first indicates that ordinary men have to confine their attention to that part of the body which “is dense enough to be visible to the eye.” Therefore, most of them are probably unaware of the existence of a type of matter which is invisible, though still physical.
In quite straightforward English, Leadbeater indicates that the invisible parts constitute the “vehicle” through which “flow the streams of vitality which keep the body alive,” and without them “the ego,” among other misfortunes, “could make no use of the cells of his brain.”
As to the chakras, or “force centers” as he also calls them, these are “points of connection” via which vitality energy from different “planes” flows from one “vehicle” of man to another.
“Anyone,” says Leadbeater, “who possesses a slight degree of clairvoyance may easily see them in the etheric double, where they show themselves as saucer-like depressions or vortices in its surface.”
He goes on to describe that when the force centers are “quite undeveloped, “they appear as small circles, perhaps two inches in diameter “glowing dully in the ordinary man.”
If awakened, vivified and developed, they “are seen as blazing, coruscating whirlpools, much increased in size, and resembling miniature suns.”
All of these “wheels are perpetually rotating, and into the hub or open mouth of each a force from the higher world is always flowing—a manifestation of the life-stream issuing from . . . what we call the primary force.”
Leadbeater ALSO addresses such issues as the arousing of Kundalini, the awakening of the etheric chakras, various kinds of Yoga, a topic entitled “casual clairvoyance,” dangers of “premature awakening,” and spontaneous awakening of Kundalini.
All sources considered, Leadbeater’s book on the chakras is quite wonderful, concise, and exemplary of invisible consistencies with earlier Eastern sources.
It does NOT, however, include discussions of the three “pelvic” chakras.