Cognition and Divine Love
With the spiritual will aroused, awareness flows quite naturally into the anahata chakra, the heart center, governing the faculties of direct cognition or comprehension. Connected to the cardiac plexus, this chakra is often referred to as "the lotus of the heart." Its twelve "petals" imply that the faculty of cognition can be expressed in twelve distinct ways or through as many masks or personae. Its color is a smoky green. Man usually awakens into this region of cognition around age twenty-one to twenty-six. Life for seekers in this chakra is different than for others. It is in anahata, literally "unstruck sound," that the aspirant attains his mountaintop consciousness. Instead of viewing life in its partial segments, like seeing just the side of the mountain, he raises his consciousness to a pinnacle from which an objective and comprehensive cognition of the entirety is the natural conclusion. Uninvolved in the seemingly fractured parts, he is able to look through it all and understand--as though he were looking into a box and seeing the inside, the outside, the top and the bottom all at the same time. It looks transparent to him and he is able to encompass the totality in one instantaneous flash of direct cognition. He knows in that split second all there is to know about a subject and yet would find it difficult to verbalize that vast knowing. Various highly endowed psychics are prone to utilize this force center, for such spiritual powers as healing are manifested here.
People with the anahata chakra awakened are generally well-balanced, content and self-contained. More often than not, their intellect is highly developed and their reasoning keen. The subtle refinement of their nature makes them extremely intuitive, and what is left of the base instincts and emotions is easily resolved though their powers of intellect. It is important that the serious aspirant gain enough control of his forces and karmas to remain stabilized at the heart center. This should be home base to him, and he should rarely or never fall below anahata in consciousness. Only after years of sadhana and transmutation of the sexual fluids can this be attained, but it must be attained and awareness must settle here firmly before further unfoldment is sought.
Universal or divine love is the faculty expressed by the next center, called the vishuddha chakra. This center is associated with the pharyngeal plexus in the throat and possesses sixteen "petals" or attributes. Whereas the first two centers are predominantly odic force in nature and the third and fourth are mixtures of odic force and a little actinic force, vishuddha is almost a purely actinic force structure. On a percentage scale, we could say that the energies here are eighty percent actinic and only twenty percent odic. Whenever people feel filled with inexpressible love and devotion to all mankind, all creatures large and small, they are vibrating within vishuddha. In this state there is no consciousness of a physical body, no consciousness of being a person with emotions, no consciousness of thoughts. They are just being the light or being fully aware of themselves as actinic force flowing through all form. They see light throughout the entirety of their body, even if standing in a darkened room. This light is produced in the ajna chakra above through the friction occurring between the odic and actinic forces and perceived through the divine sight of the third eye. The sense of "I," of ego, is dissolved in the intensity of this inner light, and a great bliss permeates the nerve system as the truth of the oneness of the universe is fully and powerfully realized. Vishuddha means "sheer purity." This center is associated with blue, the color of divine love.
The jnani who has awakened this center is able for the first time to withdraw awareness totally into the spine, into the sushumna current. Now he begins experiencing the real spiritual being. Even at this point he may hold a concept of himself as an outer being, as distinct from the inner being he seeks. But as he becomes stronger and stronger in his new-found love, he realizes that the inner being is nothing but the reality of himself. And as he watches as the outer being fades, he realizes that it was born in time and memory patterns, put together through the forces of reason and sustained for a limited period through the forces of will. The outer shell dissolves and he lives in the blissful inner consciousness that knows only light, love and immortality. SSS
