(esoteric / exoteric 14)


             Undoubtedly, my teacher’s absorption emerged directly out of his yoga practice. But his realization apparently centered from the first on his knowledge as a physician, as a practicing endocrinologist, neurosurgeon and psychiatrist, that is to say, in the direct knowledge of the body and its instrumentality. From here, we could say that he ‘fell back’ into the tradition in which he was born and raised, his positions at major hospitals in Baltimore and New York suggesting the range of his acclimation to the western environment.
             His absorption was intense and final. In the last years before he died, crippled and aphasic with heart attacks and strokes, he still illuminated the room. But in the early years after the change, he wrote a text in which he suggested that the first chakra was aligned with sexuality. Later, when he was teaching the seven kundalini chakras out of the Arthur Avalon texts, if my memory is accurate, he corrected this on being questioned by a student.
             The visible intensity of his absorption always evoked a sense of finality in me, as if he should know all. But his insistence on deriving English radicals, like Sanskrit, from pure sound values always stood between us. Vedic Sanskrit, being meditated for the purpose, radiates value in the sound, based in the premise of an evaluative correlation between sound and the body. But language is a collective enterprise, the only valid ethnicity; and English presupposes the force of the radical, its purely linguistic history.
             But because of that endless luminosity to my Eye, it took me years to recognize how my teacher and the teachers who visited him were growing and changing, as well as the practical nature of their visits.

             Traditionally, of course, kundalini Tantra argues for seven principle centers, the first and seventh – beginning from the base of the ‘spine’ – below and above the body, respectively. In the traditional imagery or iconography, multiple symbols represent each center. In modern interpretations, correlations with the endocrine system have become commonplace, to which my teacher’s texts undoubtedly add a certain force. But the recognition that the first and seventh ‘stand outside’ the body poses an appropriate dilemma. Esoteric systems of varying historicity add three or even a second set of seven ‘centers’ above. And within the formal Tantric description itself, the ‘downward’ nature of the first chakra is self-evident. It is identified with the Earth as the essentially empirically ‘other’, the earth defining instance.
             The traditional kundalini description as we now have it assimilates the five elements to the first five chakras. And, undoubtedly, the downward nature of the lowest body defining experience suggests that the ‘first’ chakra is ‘earth’. And, if we assume the ambivalence of sexuality – which, of course, we naturally do, both by gender itself and otherwise – then the second chakra would seem to be ‘flux’ or ‘water’. And, again, there is a mirroring aspect to sexuality. But what we are seeing is a derived tradition for the elements. The gradual appearance of an appropriate number of elements – corresponding, during the historic development of Upanishad, with the sequential development of the elements in Greek philosophy – suffices as proof for me. And while the Indian tradition utilizes the description with great versatility and suggestiveness, the base tradition remains the Greek. And, in the Greek tradition, as we have said, the radical separative force is precisely contained within the elements.
             The Greeks undoubtedly never received any equivalent of the Upanishadic tradition, namely, that all the gods are in the body. But there is no question that the Greeks understood the elemental description as comprehensive.
             What is appropriate in the Sanskrit tradition is that the separation itself is defined by a doublet of ‘centers’. The first and fifth element – involving the Earth / Aether separation finally posited by Aristotle – each renders into a doublet: in each case, one ‘within’ the body and the other only ‘within’ insofar as the cogency of the body itself is also the separation.

             Here we have the peculiar potency of the separation as the key to the psychological understanding of inference and analysis, and a proper understanding of the dialectical nature which is not only ‘thought’ but also ‘experience’.