Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

compassion. This chakra is considered the first of the higher centers—with love, everything in life resonates at a higher level. At this center we transform from the lower level of the love of power, to the higher level of the power of love. This chakra is considered the source of music, even though the next, the fifth, is the center of sound. The heart chakra also represents the power of music to transform and open the heart.
    Located in the throat area, the fifth chakra represents sound and communication across space. Clarity of speech and communication, writing, and poetry are qualities of this level of being. Sound carries unique qualities of feeling and information. A simple statement can communicate many levels and layers of information with differences in the tonal quality, pitch, volume, and modulation of sound. The sixth chakra is the center of consciousness. It is also called the third-eye center and corresponds to the frontal lobes of the brain and the mysterious pineal gland. This gland performs many known and unknown functions and can release hormones and neurochemicals during birth, death, and moments of intensity that unlock pathways in the brain, bringing mystical experience and transcendent perceptions. This chakra is the light center of awareness, thought, psychic power, and perception.
    The seventh chakra, which corresponds to the crown of the head, is also called the thousand-petaled lotus, which symbolizes infinite energy. It represents cosmic consciousness and the union of all polarities and the godhead. Some say this center is the source of the expression “seventh heaven.” This center is both a chakra and not a chakra: It is everything and nothing, unity and diversity, male and female, the union of god and goddess, the One. Seated in this chakra, the god Siva and the goddess Shakti exist in sexual union, representing both oneness and duality. This center connects us with all that is.
    Substantial evidence supports the theory that the universe is holographic. This means that in some way each part contains a pattern of the whole. Chakra theory, it turns out, corresponds to the patterningand play of energy in the physical universe. One of the first things we learn in the study of electronics is that electrical energy is in fact a polarity, a potential difference. A battery, for example, must have a positive pole containing a deficiency of electrons and a negative pole containing an excess of electrons. The stored power of the battery is the polarity, or potential, of the excess wanting to return to the deficiency. Matter and energy may represent the ultimate polarity. At the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, we have an enormous concentration of energy, most readily experienced as light. As this energy moves out from the galactic center, it “cools” or condenses into lower levels of vibration, creating all forms of matter along the way. Some of the steps in this movement are expressed in the patterning of matter graphed in the periodic table of the elements. Each step across the periodic table represents the incorporation of greater levels of energy into the atomic structure. In a similar way, each step up the chakra system represents a higher level of energy.

The Cosmic Polarity
    Matter is essentially energy condensed to the point of having a nucleus with protons and electrons. Einstein showed that matter and energy belong to one spectrum—that they are in fact one. They are the opposite poles of a polarity. His famous formula E = MC 2 proved that there is tremendous energy stored in matter. The amount of energy is equal to the mass of the matter multiplied by the constant speed of light squared. This explanation has shown that the energy from the Milky Way galactic center is stored in the matter that makes our Earth. Triggering the release of this energy with the atomic bomb is a dramatic demonstration of this law. The bomb releases the many forms of energy—heat, sound, waves, radiation, and light—that was bound up in the form of matter and reveals the whole spectrum along the continuum between the matter and energy poles.
    In Eastern philosophy, this cosmic polarity is represented by Siva and Shakti. Siva is the static masculine principle in the universe and Shakti is the active feminine principle. Shakti literally means energy. The dance between Siva and Shakti is said to create everything in the universe, which is, in fact, how all things are created by the interplay of