Moses and Yoga

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta on an unknown date

Continued from part 1

The second cakra is Svādhiṣṭhāna, which is situated in the genital region. Svādhiṣṭhāna is so-called because it means “own abode”. It is called “own abode” because, as far as the living body as body is concerned, and our sense of separate selfhood is concerned, it is the source of the most intense sense of “I”. The male and the female genital organs embody the strongest sense of “I-ness” in us. Svādhiṣṭhāna represents the element Water. In Buddhist yoga we have a slight difference. Buddhist yoga tends to group Mūlādhāra and Svādhiṣṭhāna together as a single root centre, as a sacral plexus, not a separate pelvic and hypogastric plexus.

The third one is called Maṇipura, which means “lustrous as a gem”. Pura also means “fortress”, and this cakra represents Fire. It is concerned with the forces of physical and psychical transformation, all the processes of digestion, and so on. The commerce of the living process — that takes place inside here. It is usually associated with the navel. Sometimes it is called the Nābipādma — the navel lotus. There is a very profound significance to the navel, because the umbilical chord connects the infant before its birth from the navel to the mother. And through the navel every one of us in the world is connected right up to our remotest ancestry.

The next one is called Anāhata. Now here we come to something extremely interesting and significant. Anāhata means the place where the munis hear the sound which comes without striking two things together. The muni is the Holy One who is the Silent One. This does not mean that he never talks or utters any words. He speaks only when necessary, and only what is necessary. That is merely the physical aspect. Any one of us could with a little practice be part munis. But there is the profounder aspect. This silence is the silence of the Mind. It means the end of that incessant chatter that goes on in the brain despite ourselves, day and night. During the talk last April I tried to explain a little bit about the tremendous significance of this. So the muni is the Silent One in that sense far more than in the physical sense, and Anāhata is the cakra — the place where munis hear the sound which comes without striking two things together. One hears the sound of the Pulse of Life, of prāṇa. Whilst one is the embryo only, perhaps the first thing one becomes aware of inside the mother’s body is the sound of the beating of the mother’s heart, and that peculiar roaring sound which you hear if you dive into water, the sound of the circulation of the mother’s blood. That is on the physical level. There is another sound — the Pulse of Life itself. Indescribable. You must experience it for yourself, and it has no relationship, remember, to physical sound as we know it — as investigated by science. And physical sound reaches us through physical media, the air, any gaseous medium, any liquid medium, any solid medium. Sound does not travel through a vacuum. But strangely enough this sound is the sound whose medium, whose source, they declare is ākāśa as ether, not ākāśa as solid, liquid or gas. I am using the word which we used up to the end of the last century purely for convenience. There is no English word equivalent to it, so I have to use a word which is now disused in modern science, ether. So again one uses the word “hear”, but obviously one doesn’t hear with the physical ears in the usual physical way. This is another kind of hearing. Anāhata represents Air, but I often wonder whether they meant Air in the sense in which we use the word Air today — the gaseous state, as we know it scientifically. Or did it include what we used to call ether? I myself suspect it included that. Like the heart, Anāhata is concerned with respiration, and it is situated on the vertical, central axis of the body.

Continued in part 3, part 4 and part 5

Comments