Dear Subscribers,

Mail has slowed down a bit. It's hard to tell whether people are busy preparing for the holidays or hitting a wall with the material I have been posting, but I thought a little review might be useful. Mercury is direct now but Jupiter will still be retrograde for a few more days. To give this context, Mercury rules mini-bytes and Jupiter rules larger concepts, well, you might say articles versus books. The subjects I have been covering have, of course, been addressed in books, some of them very ancient and a few that are more New Age in texture. When the New Age was just rolling out, I was working in Asia so it didn't really hit me until I returned to Hawaii and found my old friends with new vocabularies and perspectives on life. Speaking for myself, I was trashed by the experiences I had had while working for the State Department so sitting cross-legged seemed like the only option at the time.

Like many people with the Moon in Sagittarius, I have a lot of discernment when it comes to teachers so most of the guru movement seemed a bit goofy to me. After my first crisis with the church when I was in my very early teens, I conjured up a slogan to steady me. Basically, the gist of it was that if we entrust the salvation of our souls to anyone, the least we should demand is that the guide or guru is enlightened and himself personally assured of bliss after death. If not, the whole idea of putting faith in another seems terribly risky to all that I value most. So, now for those who are flipping out, I want to reiterate the words of the Buddha:

"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense."

That goes for me also. I am sharing "perceptions" and they are as relevant as they seem to you to be and also as irrelevant as they seem, but in the spirit of the quickening explosion of truth, I am trying to seed a few thoughts so that when we are confronted by a plethora of deceptions, we will have a few ropes to grab. Keep in mind that under Uranus, the Truth does come out, but no one is forced to accept it the first time they hear it nor even the 20th or 50th time. Everyone adjusts his or her thinking at his or her own pace. It's really that simple.

This said, I have a terrible phobia revolving around using up all my allotted days only to find I have done no more than rediscover the wheel. To minimize that risk, I used to read everything I could find so that I had a good overview of my subject of inquiry. Then, I could compare ideas and test them and cherry pick the ones worth keeping. On the subject of the chakras, I did, in fact, read every book that was available in English in the 70s and perhaps even early 80s. Of course, there are lots more now and if you compare what people are saying, you will see plagiary and inconsistencies. In short, someone is wrong about certain details so if you are interested in the subject, it's up to you to decide whether or not to put your faith in anyone in particular. However, I am going to make a suggestion or two.

First, if someone makes a subject way too simple, they either don't know much or they are conning their audiences. Next, if you want access to higher consciousness before taking responsibility for mundane consciousness, you are probably going to swerve off the road at some point. Normally, I would not point fingers, but I am going to give you an example and then you decide for yourself.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7770222538868861415

This video excels in graphic imagery and it may even help some people to understand the chakras, but it's actually neither erudite nor particularly conceptually helpful. Still, a lot of effort went into the animation and sound, but it's shallow.

Let me start therefore with what we actually need to know about the chakras. First of all, they are part of the auric structure so the energies are moving in a vast space that is colored by universal energies that often as not are shared. Let me word that another way. You inhale and exhale so your incoming air is part of an immense space containing air, and the air you inhale has already passed through many nostrils and lungs before you feasted on this essential sustenance. You are potentially psychometrically connected to every other being who ever exhaled and you have an opportunity to serve others by taking air and detoxifying it. My Tibetan mentor used to explain that long before enlightenment, we could always practice goodness. One of the more advanced methods for this is to take in the pain and suffering, process it through your own physical and spiritual selves and exhale peace, benevolence, health, harmony, balance, justice, love, and beauty. If everyone on the Planet did this even once a day for 30 seconds, the world would probably change fast, but what we see everywhere is that people are rejecting their negativity and discharging it into universal space and this is slowing down the "ascension" process that many are seeking.

That process, as I suggested in a recent post, is a metaphysical process, not a physical one. We are already incarnate in all dimensions simultaneously so nothing has to change but our awareness. There are no other magic buttons.

So, now back to the video in question. The wits behind it interpreted the heart chakra as a place of personal love, a little less lusty than the second, but here's the rub: the three lower chakras are personal and the heart is a kind of gateway between the incarnate dimensions and the more subtle dimensions. Ideally, we would not stimulate the higher chakras without unfolding the virtues of the heart.

I have been unusually bold in the last few weeks, largely because I feel a time pressure to get things in order, but while speeding along, I realize that many people have not prepared for this transitional time so they are not ready much less eager. This is to be expected, but sandwiched between lots of philosophy, I have tried to give solid reasons for why the physical changes do not have to be cataclysmic, the main reason being that we already have a chakra system that allows us to move freely between dimensions because they are not "here" or "there" but rather pervasive and interpenetrating.

So back to the chakras. They are vortices for assimilating and distributing energy and like everything else in the created world, they have both magnetic and radiatory properties. When something is building, it has more magnetic energy because it needs to draw substance (or thought) to the structure being created. At a certain point, further attraction of matter to the creation would result in surfeit so the energy is redistributed and this is a radiatory process. The magnetic process is highly personal and therefore the will and determination of the person building the temple for his or her existence is paramount. The radiatory process is complicated by the fact that discharging energy that has been imprinted entails responsibility for what one puts into space. On a simple level, this is just Spiritual Civics 101. The Powers that Be are literally raining toxicity on everyone and everything because this makes the ascension into higher consciousness much more challenging. If we are bogged down with our issues, it is hard to feel compassionate towards others, but the most valued attribute of the heart is compassion. Some people believe that wisdom and compassion are two sides of the same essence. If so, then the Buddha taught the path to wisdom and the Christ taught compassion. Thus, we have had Great Teachers Who could lead us out of our black holes, but we have to put the teachings into practice.

The chakras are not fooled. They become balanced when their virtues are manifested. So, now back to something like DMT, which, for the record, I am not advocating, but I think it's important to pay attention to what people who have crossed the bridge report about what is on the other side of "here". I am not advocating DMT for the same reasons that Dr. Rick Strassman is cautious and this is that one can break into forbidden territory without having the balance needed to use the information, but none of those interviewed in the film exhibit negative consequences of daring to explore.

In any event, the chakras are interpenetrating our bodies and they work directly on the endocrine system which, in turn, secretes hormones that stimulate or inhibit not only physiological functioning but perceptions of basic realities such as danger, hunger, attraction, aversion, faith, trust, and so on and so forth. I am not being lazy, but merely underscoring that we can be totally happy and well-balanced until an incident occurs that throws us, and the way we experience these shifts is by a surge in energy in the chakra and then a change in blood chemistry due to the hormones that are secreted because of the stimulation from the chakra.

What I would like to do before wrapping up for this Sunday is to propose that the introduction of the concept of multiple personalities is more useful than many people seem to think. We craft our identities around something or other. I don't participate in any social networks, but those who do can study how people describe themselves. What information do we put out there first? We put our gender or age or religion or nationality or occupation or politics or something that we are using to explain who we are. Think about it. Someone sends a request for contact saying he is 26-year male looking for a connection and you can more or less assume he is cruising and his second chakra is spinning out of control. If he said, "I read your article and am fascinated that we share so many interests," the relationship stemming from that effort would be built in another chakra.

Personally, I think it's a very good exercise to define one's persona so that what we project serves our purposes and makes the correct impression on those who bump into that persona.

Lastly, there is a warning from Louisiana about neti pots. Please use pure water!

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/fatal-infections-linked-neti-pots/story?id=15170230

Many blessings,

Ingrid

Copyright by Ingrid Naiman 2011

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