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Cakras/Centres

Conscious centres and sources of all the dynamic powers of our being organising their action through the plexuses and arranged in an ascending series from the lowest physical to the highest mind centre and spiritual centre called the thousand-petalled lotus where ascending Nature, the Serpent Power of the Tantrics, meets the Brahman and is liberated into the Divine Being. These centres are closed or half-closed within us and have to be opened before their full potentiality can be manifested in our physical nature : but once they are opened and completely active, no limit can easily be set to the development of their potencies and the total transformation to be possible. Technically lotuses or circles, cakra, and which rise in an ascending scale to the summit where there is the thousand-petalled lotus from which all the mental and vital energy flows. Each of these lotuses is the centre and the storing-house of its own particular system of psychological powers, energies and operations,—each system corresponding to a plane of our psychological existence,—and these flow out and return in the stream of the pranic energies as they course through the nāḍīs.

Chakras

The thousand-petalled (head) lotus—Chakra or centre of the higher will and knowledge

The lotus in the forehead—Will, vision, mental dynamism

The lotus in the throat—Expression—external mind

The lotus of the heart—Emotion, dynamic vital feeling (behind the heart is the seat of the psychic being)

The lotus of the navel—Higher vital

The lotus of the abdomen—Lower vital

The lotus at the end of the spine (Muladhara)—Physical consciousness

Consciousness

The faculty of being aware of anything through identification. The Divine Consciousness is not only aware but knows and effects. To be aware of a vibration, for instance, does not mean that you know everything about it.

Consciousness is not only power of awareness of self and things, it is or has also a dynamic and creative energy. It can determine its own reactions or abstain from reactions; it can not only answer to forces, but create or put out from itself forces.

Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range. There are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious, -supramental or overmental and submental ranges.