A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (11 page)

Cakra III
, Maṇipūra
, “City of the Shining Jewel,” is located at the level of the navel. Here the energy turns to violence and its aim is to consume, to master, to turn the world into oneself and one’s own. The appropriate Occidental psychology would be the Adlerian of the “will to power”: for now even sex becomes an occasion, not of erotic experience, but of achievement, conquest, self-reassurance, and frequently, also, revenge.
⁶¹
 

The function of Cakra III is organizing your life, establishing a family, building a business, learning how to master the world in terms appropriate to your condition and place. Self maintenance, family maintenance. society maintenance, world maintenance—but maintenance in the sense of transformation: life is maintained, not in a petrified condition, but in a growth condition, as is a tree by the gardener that cultivates it.

All three of these lower cakras are of the modes of man’s living in the world in his naive state, outward turned: the modes of the lovers, the fighters, the builders, the accom-plishers. Joys and sorrows on these levels are functions of achievements in the world “out there,” what people think of one, what has been gained, what lost.
⁶²

These three cakras are of functions that we share with the other animals. They are also clinging to life, begetting, building nests, making their way. Popular religion works on these levels, and the individual living on these levels is ego-oriented and his action must be controlled by social law.

…a religion operating only on these levels, having little or nothing to do with the fostering of inward, mystical realizations, would hardly merit the name of religion at all. It would be little more than an adjunct to police authority, offering in addition to ethical rules and advice intangible consolations for life's losses and a promise of future rewards for social duties fulfilled.
⁶³
 

Cakra IV
,
Anāhata
, meaning “not hit,” is at the level of the heart. It is the beginning of the religious life, the awakening where the new life begins, and its name refers to the sound that is not made by any two things striking together. All the sounds that we hear are made by two things striking together. What would the sound be that is not made by two things striking together? It is the sound of the energy of which universe is a mani-festation. It is, therefore, antecedent to things.

The heart cakra, then, is the opening of the spirit-ual dimension: all is metaphoric of the mystery. Once you have got that point of all being metaphoric of the mystery, then these lower powers become spiritualized. The very doing of the things of the first three cakras become the realizations of Cakras V, VI, and VII.

When you reach the upper cakras,

you don’t do without the first three:

survival, sex, power.

You don’t destroy

the first three floors of a building

when you get to the fourth.

Cakra V
, called
Viśuddha
, “Purified,” is at the level of the larynx. This is the cakra of spiritual effort to hold back the animal system from which the energies come. One has gone through the lower cakras to get to here, but the pelvic cakras have not been rejected. They now have to be turned to a spiritual, rather than a merely physical, aim. Cakra V is commonly referred to by Tibetan images of deities standing on prostrate forms, putting down the merely physical with weapons and ferocity: the ferocity with which you have to handle yourself.

Cakra VI
,
Ājñā
, the lotus of “Command,” located between the eyebrows, is what we would call the cakra of heaven, the highest cakra in the world of incarnate forms. The forms of the pharaohs from Egypt show the Uraeus Serpent coming out of this point between the brows. When the
kuṇḍalinī
has reached this point, one beholds God. Any god you have been meditating on or have been taught to revere is the god that will be seen here. This is the highest obstacle for the complete yogi. As Ramakrishna says, “One is tempted to stay there tasting the juice.” It is so sweet, so blissful.

On the brink of illumination,

the old ways are very seductive

and liable to pull you back.

The Sufis have a wonderful image connected with Cakra VI. This is the story told by Hallaj: One night a moth sees a lamp, a burning flame enclosed in glass. It spends the whole night bumping against the glass, trying to become one with the flame. In the morning it returns to its friends in the morning and tells them of the beautiful thing it has seen. They say, “You don't look the better for it.” This is the condition of the yogi trying to break through. So it goes back the next night and, somehow or other, gets through. For an eternal instant it achieves its goal: it becomes the flame—
tat tvam asi
—”thou art that.” And so, here is the subject and here is the object—the Soul and God—between is a pane of glass. Remove the pane and there is neither subject nor object, because to have an object you have to have a subject.

The final barrier to enlightenment is the barrier that prevents you from becoming God. The pane of glass is a way of speaking about the dividing factor. Removing the glass suggests the annihilation of the veil of ignorance that keeps you from knowing God. Beholding God—God with characteristics—is the final whisp of ignorance. At this level you have to have a symbol, an experience because you are still holding the last whisp of you. I am beholding God. That’s the final barrier.

It is so sweet that one is reluctant to yield, but the ultimate yielding is the yielding of your own being. If you’re going to hang onto your soul, you can’t become one with God. You can’t even become one with your spouse. This is what has to be given up. I hear OM. I know God is ubiquitous. Divine energy is all around me. It is here. It is here. It is here.

When you come to fulfillment, you have come to that high point. The god’s name doesn’t matter, they are all included. The different gods are personifications of aspects of the total functioning. The ultimate thing is going past gods. Meister Eckhart said, “The ultimate leave-taking is the leaving of God for God.”
⁶⁴
That means leaving the folk idea of God—the ecclesiastical idea of God, what you’ve been taught of God—for that transcendent reference of which God is the metaphor. Where are you between two thoughts? Where is God between two Gods?

It’s a simple idea,yet we are so used to being taught something else that the words tend to block us instead of letting us through. Leaving God for God is, for me, a very vivid statement. Indian philosophy has no problem with this concept. When the
kuṇḍalinī
reaches Cakra VI, you see God: “
brahman
with characteristics.” At Cakra VII, you go past God and are in the transcendent: “
brahman
without characteristics.”

Cakra VII
,
Sahasrāra
, “Thousand Petalled,” is the lotus at the crown of the head. At this cakra there is no person to be conscious of God. There is only undifferentiated consciousness: the silence. When you hit Cakra VII, you are inert. It is a catatonic knockout, you might say, and you are reduced simply to a thing.

N
ow as I see it, if you come back down to the heart, to Cakra IV, where spiritual life begins, subject and object are together. Cakra I corresponds to VII. The inertia from Cakra I sets in when you have hit Cakra VII. Cakra II corresponds to VI. Cakra III corresponds to V. You are then able to take the war energy from Cakra III and practice self control in Cakra V. So you can bend things at Cakra IV.

For example, through the experiences of Cakra II, if they are of love, you are really experiencing the grace of God in Cakra VI. You transmute the lust energy of Cakra II into love. If there has been no experience of the discipline of Cakra V, you’ll never get an inkling of what it is you are to be experiencing through the physical. If in your physical love, you can realize that what you are touching is the grace of the divine in its proper form for you, this is a translation of the carnal adventure into the spiritual, without the loss of the carnal. The two are together. You are then beholding the god as in Cakra VI and experiencing the beloved as a manifestation of that divine power, that love which informs the world.

In the courtly love tradition, the woman had to test the man by holding him off until she was sure that it was not lust that was approaching her, but love, the gentle heart. That is the whole sense of courtly love. The same theme is later represented in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, where his love for Beatrice brings him to the throne of God. In his wonderful book of poems called
La Vita Nuov
a,
“The New Life
,” Dante describes how he looks at her, not with the eye of Cakra II, but with that of Cakra VI, as a manifestation of God’s love, and that carries him through the whole thing.

M
y wonderful friend, Heinrich Zimmer, my final guru, often said, “The best things cannot be told.” That is to say, you can’t talk about that which lies beyond the reach of words.

The second best are misunderstood, because they are your statements about that which cannot be told. They are misunderstood because the vocabulary of symbols that you have to use are thought to be references to historical events.

The third best is conversation, political life, economics, and all that. And that’s what we are usually dealing with: the first three cakras.

Zimmer loved to recount an amusing animal-fable from India. It tells of a tigress, pregnant and starving, who comes upon a little flock of goats and pounces on them with such energy that she brings about the birth of her little one and her own death.

The goats scatter, and when they come back to their grazing place, they find this just-born tiger and its dead mother. Having strong parental instincts, they adopt the tiger, and it grows up thinking it’s a goat. It learns to bleat. It learns to eat grass. And since grass doesn’t nourish it very well, it grows up to become a pretty miserable specimen of its species.

When the young tiger reaches adolescence, a large male tiger pounces on the flock, and the goats scatter. But this little fellow is a tiger, so he stands there. The big one looks at him in amazement and says, “Are you living here with these goats?” “Maaaaaa,” says the little tiger. Well, the old tiger is mortified, something like a father who comes home and finds his son with long hair. He swats him back and forth a couple of times, and the little thing just responds with these silly bleats and begins nibbling grass in embarrassment. So the big tiger brings him to a still pond.

Now, still water is a favorite Indian image to symbolize the idea of yoga. The first aphorism of yoga is: “Yoga is the intentional stopping of the spontaneous activity of the mind-stuff.” Our minds, which are in continual flux, are likened to the surface of a pond that’s blown by a wind. So the forms that we see, those of our own lives and the world around us, are simply flashing images that come and go in the field of time, but beneath all of them is the substantial form of forms. Bring the pond to a standstill, have the wind withdraw and the waters clear, and you’ll see, in stasis, the perfect image beneath all of these changing forms.

So this little fellow looks into the pond and sees his own face for the first time. The big tiger puts his face over and says, “You see, you’ve got a face like mine. You’re not a goat. You’re a tiger like me. Be like me.”

Now that’s guru stuff: I’ll give you my picture to wear, be like me. It’s the opposite to the individual way.

So the little one is getting that message; he’s picked up and taken to the tiger’s den, where there are the remains of a recently slaughtered gazelle. Taking a chunk of this bloody stuff, the big tiger says, “Open your face.” The little one backs away, “I’m a vegetarian.” “None of that nonsense,” says the big fellow, and he shoves a piece of meat down the little one’s throat. He gags on it. The text says, “As all do on true doctrine.”

But gagging on the true doctrine, he’s nevertheless getting it into his blood, into his nerves; it’s his proper food. It touches his proper nature. Spontaneously, he gives a tiger stretch, the first one. A little tiger roar comes out—Tiger Roar 101. The big one says, “There. Now you’ve got it. Now we go into the forest and eat tiger food.”

Vegetarianism

is the first turning away from life,

because life lives on lives.

Vegetarians are just eating

something that can’t run away.

Now, of course, the moral is that we are all tigers living here as goats. The right hand path, the sociological department, is interested in cultivating our goat-nature. Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you going to live with these goats?

Well, Jesus had something to say about this problem. In Matthew 7 he said, “Do not cast your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet and turn and tear you.”

The function

of the orthodox community

is to torture the mystic to death:

his goal.

You wear the outer garment of the law, behave as everyone else and wear the inner garment of the mystic way. Jesus also said that when you pray, you should go into your own room and close the door. When you go out, brush your hair. Don’t let them know. Otherwise, you’ll be a kook, something phony.

So that has to do with not letting people know where you are. But then comes the second problem: how do you live with these people? Do you know the answer? You know that they are all tigers. And you live with that aspect of their nature, and perhaps in your art you can let them know that they are tigers.

And that’s the revelation then. And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time. The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is. If you try to correct the sorrows, all you do is shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that? You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage, and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.