Lecture 4
Psychology and Kundalini: Lecture 4
The Symbol
The word symbol, “comes from the Greek word symballein, to throw together.” You can imagine how this would appear. Within an image are, “a heap of material thrown together; we could translate the word symbol as something viewed as a totality or the vision of things brought to a whole.”
For those familiar with Gestalt theory, “a symbol then is a living Gestalt (form) - the sum of a highly complex set of facts which our intellect cannot master conceptually, and which therefore cannot be expressed in any other way other than by the use of an image.”
As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This is the power of an image. It widens your scope, from the micro to the macro, to combine a set of “highly complex facts” together to create a symbol.
This is exactly what the chakras represent, “they symbolize highly complex psychic facts which at the present moment we could not possibly express except in images.”
Psychologically, “the chakras are of great value; the psyche is something so highly complicated, so vast in extent, and so rich in elements unknown to us, and its aspects overlap and interweave with one another in such an amazing degree, that we always turn to symbols in order to try to represent what we know about it.”
This approach to the psyche needs to be viewed with a sense of wholeness as, “any theory about it would be premature because it would become entangled with particularities and would lose sight of the totality we set out to envisage.”
Before we continue into the psychological symbolism of the chakras, it is important to highlight a few more terms to bring it all together.
Sthūla and Sūksma (EGO and Non-EGO)
If you remember back to the second lecture, there was a short section discussing the personal and impersonal experiences which occur in our reality. One is person, EGO, subjective, or also know as sthūla. Opposite from this subjective experience of reality is the objective, non-EGO, “divine”, or sūksma aspect. They are two seperate viewpoints to reality (or consciousness).
Think about where you view consciousness on your body. Most in the West would point to their head.
Jung remarks, “most are living in the upper centers, our consciousness is localized in our heads. We are the lords of nature; in our consciousness we sit enthroned on high and look down upon nature and animals. To us, ‘animals’ means bestial, what should really seem above us seems to be below us. Therefore, we ‘go down’ into svādhisthāna (unconscious) or ‘fall into’ mūlādhāra (emotions).”
Therefore, “we can say that humanity in general has reached the level of anahāta; all cultures create suprapersonal values as a thinker whose ideas show an activity that is independent of the events of daily life could say he or she is in the visuddha or ajna center.”
BUT, think about it, this is from the sthūla scope of reality. In the personal, it seems we are in the higher centers.
Jung takes it further, “we think that because our consciousness and the collective suprapersonal culture in which we live are in the anahāta center, we are there in all respects; being identified with the conscious, we do not see that there exists something outside it and that this something is not above but below.'“
How does one now look at things from a suprapersonal, sūksma lens?
“Through culture, we get intuition of the other than personal psychological possibilities because the suprapersonal appears in it.”
If we take culture, we can see that this collective can be combined and applied to the chakra system.
“Therefore we can experience and demonstrate the various centers as they appear in the life of the individual, or in the evolution of humanity.”
Western Psychological Symbolism of the Chakras
“We (in the West) begin in the head; we identify with our eyes and our consciousness: quite detached and objective we survey the world. This is ajna. But we cannot linger forever in the pure spheres of detached observation, we must bring our thoughts into reality. We voice them and trust them to the air. When we clothe our knowledge in words, we are in the region of the visuddha (throat chakra). But as soon as we say something that is especially difficult, we have a throbbing heart and the anahāta center is activated. Another step further, when for example a dispute with someone starts up, when we are irritable and angry and get beside ourselves, then we are in manipūra (gut chakra). If we still go lower, the situation becomes impossible because the body begins to speak.”
Next, a conclusion to the series.
