What are you looking for?
Anāhata
Anāhata
Anahata, the heart chakra in the middle of the chest, is the center of love, feelings, connection, relationships, associations, cooperation, and compassion. It is also the center of meditation, devotion and prayer. The word Anahata means “unstruck sound,” implying that its sound is completely inner-a silent sound. The thymus gland and the cardio-pulmonary plexus are associated here. The traditional color of the fourth chakra is green. An alternate color is deep red.10Its symbols are vayu, the blue circle of elemental air, and the blue hexagram or six-pointed star. This center is the bridge between the more physical energies of the first three chakras, and the transcendent energies of the final three centers. Disorders of the heart and lungs fall under the realm of the fourth chakra.
location: Heart
Element: Air
Color: Green
Issues: Compassion, optimism/pessimism
Areas of Body: Heart, lungs, shoulders, arm
Balanced: Unconditional love
Excessively open: Co-dependent love
Blocked: Withdrawal from love, fear of being wounded
Archetype: Healer
Negative Archetype: Actor
Demon: Grief
Psychology of Kundalini Yoga [2]
We understand more or less what Manipura means psychologically, but now we come to the great leap, Anahata. What follows psychologically after you have fallen into hell? When you have come into the whirlpool of passions, of instincts, of desires and so on, what follows after?
The diaphragm would correspond to the surface of the earth, and apparently, in getting into Anahata we reach the condition where we are lifted up from the earth. So at the diaphragm you cross the threshold from the visible tangible things to the almost invisible intangible things. And these invisible things in Anahata are the psychical things, for this is the region of what is called feeling and mind. The heart is characteristic of feeling, and the air is characteristic of thought. It is the breath-being; therefore one has always identified the soul and thought with breath.
In Anahata, the sun rises above the horizon. Yes, you rise above the horizon according to Egyptian symbolism. If you are identical with the sun, you rise above the horizon with the sun ship and travel over the heavens. The sun is superior power. If you are an appendix of the Pharaoh, the sun can lift you up to almost a divine position. And the contact with the sun in Manipura lifts you up off your feet into the sphere above the earth. The wind also can do it, because in primitive beliefs the spirit is a kind of wind.
We find the symbolism for that in this center. In Anahata you behold the Purusha, a small figure that is the divine self, namely, that which is not identical with mere causality, mere nature, a mere release of energy that runs down blindly with no purpose. People lose themselves completely in their emotions and deplete themselves, and finally they are burned to bits and nothing remains—just a heap of ashes, that is all. The same thing occurs in lunacy: people get into a certain state and cannot get out of it. They burn up in their emotions and explode. There is a possibility that one detaches from it, however, and when a man discovers this, he really becomes a man. Through Manipura he is in the womb of nature, extraordinarily automatic; it is merely a process. But in Anahata a new thing comes up, the possibility of lifting himself above the emotional happenings and beholding them. He discovers the Purusha in his heart, the thumbling, “Smaller than small, and greater than great.” In the center of Anahata there is again åiva in the form of the li ́ga, and the small flame means the first germlike appearance of the self.
This process describes the beginning of individuation in psychological terms. It is the withdrawal from the emotions; you are no longer identical with them. If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. So in Anahata individuation begins. But here again, you are likely to get inflation. Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange. There- fore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego. The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection. For the ego is always far down in Muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something up above in the fourth story, in Anahata, and that is the self.
We are allowed to behold only the Purusha, to behold his feet up there. But we are not the Purusha; that is a symbol that expresses the impersonal process. The self is something exceedingly impersonal, exceedingly objective. If you function in your self you are not yourself—that is what you feel. You have to do it as if you were a stranger: you will buy as if you did not buy; you will sell as if you did not sell. Or, as St. Paul expresses it, “But it is not I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the Purusha.
All the primitive tribes that are on a somewhat higher level of civilization usually have discovered Anahata. That is, they begin to reason, and to judge; they are no longer quite wild. They have elaborate ceremonies—the more primitive they are the more elaborate are the ceremonies. They need them in order to prevent Manipura psychology. They have invented all sorts of things, magic circles, forms for the palavers, for the intercourse of people; all those peculiar ceremonials are special psychological techniques to prevent an explosion of Manipura.
References
[1]. Charles Webster Leadbeater, Annotations by Kurt Leland, The Chakras, (Wheaton, Ill: The Theosophical Publishing House, 2013), p. 1- 5 [2]. Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini; Lectures on Kundalini.