Can you make a new chakra ?

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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/22/15 8:39 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/22/15 8:39 PM

Can you make a new chakra ?

Posts: 396 Join Date: 9/23/14 Recent Posts
Let's say I'm the dark yogi Swami Johnananda, and I run a cult ashram. Devotees never leave the ashram and contact with the outside world is strictly regulated. I teach the children of my devotees that there is an important and powerful chakra on their left elbow, and set them to meditate on it from a young age, six hours a day. Also let's say I teach them that the kundalini channel goes through the left elbow too on it's way to the crown.

Will they grow up feeling and seeing all the things in this elbow chakra that you would in any other ?

Is the subtle energy system based on anything but cultural expectation and the power of suggestion ?
neko, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 2:43 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 2:43 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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Gordo . .:
Qu1. If they develop awareness of the subtle body they will see the truth, if their experience is just a head trip they will be fools, and fooled.
Qu2. No. Edit. To clarify, the subtle energy system is not based on cultural expectation or power of suggestion.
Suggest. You need to meditate and know this for yourself.


This is actually one of the very few questions that have been asked here that can be answered with a scientific experiment. It is a pity that you dismiss it so easily. I, for one, would suspect that it is entirely possible to convince people that there is a chakra in the left elbow, and would be very curious to see someone attempt it.
John Wilde, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 3:29 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 3:29 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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John:
Let's say I'm the dark yogi Swami Johnananda, and I run a cult ashram. Devotees never leave the ashram and contact with the outside world is strictly regulated. I teach the children of my devotees that there is an important and powerful chakra on their left elbow, and set them to meditate on it from a young age, six hours a day. Also let's say I teach them that the kundalini channel goes through the left elbow too on it's way to the crown.

Will they grow up feeling and seeing all the things in this elbow chakra that you would in any other ?


Dunno.... but one thing's for sure: they'll grow up saying they do.
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cian, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 6:57 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 6:46 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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The following is some idea-play to stimulate possible lines of enquiry.  call it 'green hat' stuff, if you're a de bono fan ;) ... here goes:

Is the subtle energy system based on anything but cultural expectation and the power of suggestion ?

i think this is a really good question.  
Qu2. No. Edit. To clarify, the subtle energy system is not based on cultural expectation or power of suggestion.
Suggest. You need to meditate and know this for yourself.



My suggestion to John would be to suspend the intellectual investigation, and go in there and have a look for himself. It does not take any prior knowledge of the basic chakra system to find it. Its just there.


I find this a really unsatisfactory answer.  You may be right Gordo, but you seem to have a lot of certainty and I'm not seeing the ground for that certainty in what you wrote, nor in my own meditative experiences of the chakras as very real things that are 'just there'.  
In a sense, cultural expectations and the power of suggestion are also very real things, and their creations can be seen to really be 'just there'. 

As neko says this could be answered with a scientific experiment.  And it needn't necessarily be a cruel dark-yogi-elbow-chakra experiment.  

Hypothetical experiments might go like this:
1 Grow up never having heard of any of the various subtle energy systems that different cultures have independently come up with. Do explorative meditation to see if you can find these independently yourself and map them!  
Great idea but we may never find a suitable canditate for it.  
Hence there may be a certain extent to which the OP question can never really be asked thanks to a weird Heisenbergian uncertainty loop.

We could however say that this experiment has already been done many times, just as collaborative efforts, by the various cultures who've come up with subtle energy systems.  

We can then study these various systems and compare and contrast them.  
Some may say "they are all different! eg the yogis found 7 main energy centres and the taoists only found 3. clearly they're all just making it up or using cultural expectation and the power of suggestion!"
others may say "they are all the same! eg the tops and bottoms of each dan tien plus their centres make up the 7 chakras; they are all discovering the exact same truths but emphasising it in different ways! It seems the territory is to some extent "real" but different cartographers will emphasise different things in their mapmaking.  You could have one landscape and some maps of it will show the rivers and mountains, some will show political borders, etc. but all the time the landscape is "just there" "
(i'm not claiming any accuracy here, this is just for example)

But altogether I want to conclude from this that the subtle energy systems are always at least to some extent created by cultural expectations and the power of suggestion.  ie my own personal way of perceiving it is based on how I've learnt to do so based on the tradition I'm in etc.  
But the underlying deeper deep deep level of the actual reality of it is is the same across the board?!  <-- and does that sentence mean anything?  Is there any fundamental line between my perception of things and the things themselves?  Do we need to ask these kinds of bothersome questions?


Another possible experiment:
basically the one john mentioned.  invent a new chakra, anywhere inside or outside the body. work on being able to feel it, explore it, open it, feed it, learn from it.  this is not a cruel experiment. i'd be willing to do this, just probably not gonna invest the time at the moment (any volunteers!?)  

I'd be very surprised if the effects aren't very surprising! emoticon

My total guess based on nothing:  If you do this work, that new chakra will be "just there".  you will have made it real.  
After all a visualisation is phenomenologically 'real'.

Plus I think we're gonna have to tredge up a whole nightmare of epistemological as well as phenomenological mumbo jumbo ("what can we really KNOW?!" in a dull dry philosophical sense and "what is really REAL?!" in a dull dry philosophical sense) in order to get to the level of certainty that Gordo seems to me to be claiming.

OR

we'd better yet say, "suspend the intellectual investigation, and go in there and have a look for [one]self."  haha, oh dear, I've come full circle.
 
This is why I flunked philosophy in uni!

but my point, if i have one, is there's lots of fun to be had in the question, as well as possibly a deeper level of sensitivity of one's own subtle energy system one can come to from having a more refined (less certain) understanding of what it actually is.  


passing the ball,
cian
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 8:45 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 8:45 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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Cruel experiment
I know. Sounds like the schools I went to in the UK.
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:00 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:00 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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1 Grow up never having heard of any of the various subtle energy systems that different cultures have independently come up with. Do explorative meditation to see if you can find these independently yourself and map them!  
Now you mention it - pretty easy to get people who have never meditated and see if they come up with them without being told about them.
Yogies found 7 main energy centres and the taoists only found three
I always found that a bit unsettling.

What about these ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpersonal_chakras
I've read energy healing books about the ultra cosmic 8th chakra. So are some people going round feeling energy in these - or convinced they are ?

Maybe I'll try and invent myself a new chakra.

What if I invented one in someone else and told them I could energise it with distant prana/qi powers ?
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:05 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:05 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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Gordo . .:
There are minor chakras throughout the body and eventually kundalini could access all areas.
Certainly one could convince someone that pigs can fly, given the right conditions.
In the case of this experiment, once the subject or subjects are able to experience the object directly, up to and behold a certain threshold they will no longer be fooled.
My suggestion to John would be to suspend the intellectual investigation, and go in there and have a look for himself. It does not take any prior knowledge of the basic chakra system to find it. Its just there.
There are variations of experience, and some people get more of a samatha experience. So miss out on the energy system, but get other treats instead.
Getting past the head is win-win. IMO.
P.S. Cruel experiment.

I have. I've felt or seen something in all the right areas. I would lean towards them being aspects of our physiology, but can't seem to find much scientific proof so wonder if it's just power of expectation.

I would have thought it would be quite easy to study from a physiology standpoint, now that people have started scanning meditators and wotnot.

So if there are any good independent science papers, point me at them please (not just ones sponsored by the Maharishi or whatever).
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:12 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:12 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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Gordo . .:
Jesuit college in Australia for me. They tried to imbed a few things into my psyche.

 9am a hymn about miracles. 10pm a lesson on evolution. Confused ? You will be.
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:25 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 9:18 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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neko:
Gordo . .:
Qu1. If they develop awareness of the subtle body they will see the truth, if their experience is just a head trip they will be fools, and fooled.
Qu2. No. Edit. To clarify, the subtle energy system is not based on cultural expectation or power of suggestion.
Suggest. You need to meditate and know this for yourself.


This is actually one of the very few questions that have been asked here that can be answered with a scientific experiment. It is a pity that you dismiss it so easily. I, for one, would suspect that it is entirely possible to convince people that there is a chakra in the left elbow, and would be very curious to see someone attempt it.

7 is old skool.



I think these are the ones that the Pleiadians fiddle with when they are energising your DNA. Or something. Elon Musk has opened all 14 of his.
neko, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 10:41 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 10:41 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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John
7 is old skool. 



I think these are the ones that the Pleiadians fiddle with when they are energising your DNA. Or something. Elon Musk has opened all 14 of his.
"Brow Chakra (Indigo)".

Indigo is a bulletproof indicator that someone is bullshitting you (or themself). The only reason indigo is one of the "colours of the rainbow" is because Newton wanted to impose some crackpotty correspondence between the "seven" colours of the rainbow and the seven notes of the western musical scale.
Vasily Andreev, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 12:16 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 12:16 PM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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Why do you think Elon Musk has opened all 14?
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 5:33 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 5:33 PM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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Vasily Andreev:
Why do you think Elon Musk has opened all 14?
Ask the Pleiadians.
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 6:19 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/23/15 6:19 PM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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How would you design a study for that ?

Something like

a - 30 men and 30 women, screened so you have people who have not meditated/chanted/whatever and have no previous knowledge of chakras

b - 3 groups - 10 told to meditate on chakras, 10 told to meditate on a candle flame, control group told to just sit there or read. Instructions given via sealed envelope/blind etc to avoid subtle cues from excited experimenters.

c - questionnaire - what did you feel ? Did you feel anything in specific places (without using suggestive language) ?

Doesn't sound difficult, really.
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Stick Man, modified 9 Years ago at 6/24/15 1:33 AM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/24/15 1:32 AM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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I made a new thread for this, but - as the brain doesn't seem to have any feelings, why do people claim to feel chakras located in the brain ?
Why would tingling between the eyebrows indicate somthing going on in the brain ? It may be closely related, but the tingling isn't the feeling of something actually in the brain, it has to be located outside. So would that be blood vessels that feed the relevant area ? Same with the 7th which is supposed to be the pituitary.
In fact the pituitary is closer to the third eye area than the pineal so why have these associations even been made ?
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cian, modified 9 Years ago at 6/26/15 7:57 PM
Created 9 Years ago at 6/25/15 2:20 PM

RE: Can you make a new chakra ?

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John:
I have. I've felt or seen something in all the right areas. I would lean towards them being aspects of our physiology, but can't seem to find much scientific proof so wonder if it's just power of expectation.


Here's a physiological link I noticed recently but have never heard mentioned anywhere...


the strongest points of our spine are at the centres of each curve (the connections between one curved area of the spine to another are often referred to as the 'weak links' of the spine) 
add an under-y curve at the bottom for muladhara, the kyphosis of the skull is ajna and the over-y curve at the top is sahasrara.

Boom. The chakras correspond to areas of biomechanical strength in our bodies.  
(Edit: Among many other things, of course)

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