Have We Forgotten The True History Of The Chakras?

Most of us learned that the chakras are an ancient yogic system, but what if that story isn’t quite true? In this talk, I take you down the rabbit hole that completely changed how I understand chakras. We'll deep dive into the forgotten history of the modern Western chakra system from early Tantric philosophy to Theosophy, Carl Jung, and the New Age movement. You’ll learn how a mix of Western psychology, color theory, and mysticism transformed a centuries-old meditation map into today’s popular seven-chakra rainbow model.

Together, we’ll explore: How Western thinkers and energy-healing culture shaped the modern chakra system's evolution. What Sanskrit scholars reveal about the original Tantric practices. How source amnesia nearly re-wrote history.

This talk is for yoga teachers, philosophy students, and really anyone who's ever felt like the chakra system didn't quite add up. Get ready because this conversation will change how you see yoga history forever.

Transcript

Welcome to this talk on the history of the modern western chakra system.

I am your host Adriene Jarrett and I wanted to share this with you because it's something I rarely hear discussed,

Yet I think it is important for us to understand as yoga teachers and spiritual seekers,

Since this system is so commonly discussed within the yoga or healing ecosystems.

Because the thing is most of us learned that the chakras are an ancient yogic system,

But that story isn't actually quite true.

So in this talk I take you down the rabbit hole that completely changed how I understand the chakras and what started with a simple class planning for my yin series turned into a deep dive into the forgotten history of the modern western chakra system.

We'll journey from early tantric philosophy to theosophy,

Cao yang,

And the new age movement.

You'll learn how a mix of western psychology,

Colour theory,

And mysticism transformed a centuries-old meditation map into today's popular 7 chakra rainbow model.

And together we'll explore why the modern chakra system isn't as ancient as it seems,

How western thinkers and energy healing culture has shaped its evolution,

What Sanskrit scholars reveal about the original tantric practices,

And how source amnesia changed modern yoga chakra philosophy and what we can do to reconnect with it.

So this episode is perfect for yoga teachers,

Philosophy students,

Spiritual seekers,

Really anyone who's ever heard of the chakra system and is interested in how it works and where it comes from.

So the biggest myth about the mainstream 7 chakra rainbow system that we all know,

We find it absolutely everywhere,

Search on Pinterest,

Search on Google,

This is what's up.

We can picture the 7 chakras,

They all have different colours attached to them,

And emotions,

And all of this kind of thing.

The biggest myth about this is that it is not actually an ancient yogic system.

And I was kind of relieved to be honest,

Because something about the chakras and the way they're listed just didn't quite resonate with me.

Like I understand it,

But something didn't quite land and I always just figured it was because I am quite scientific and they just didn't feel scientific enough for me,

Even though I believe in like the subtle body and energy,

Just like having these sort of permanent fixtures and this is where this emotion always is.

I don't know,

It just didn't quite fit for me.

And it just felt a little bit more new age than like ancient,

And it didn't quite seem to fit with some of the other philosophies for me.

So while I knew of course that there was a lot of like modern interpretations into the chakras,

I didn't realise how that it was actually an entirely new age theory,

Pretty much,

And wasn't really rooted in that much yogic philosophy at all.

So to explain this and what I mean and what I'm talking about,

I'm going to go over a bit of a rundown on the history of the modern chakra interpretations as we commonly know them,

And then I'm going to break down a few of these common misconceptions in a little bit more detail.

So from what I've gathered,

Chakras are primarily derived from the tantric lineage.

So chakras are a thing in yogic philosophy,

This part's not all made up.

The tantric lineage had its golden age from 600 to 1300 CE,

So this is about 1425 to 725 years ago.

However,

There seems to be some earlier references to chakras,

And it's possibly much older than that,

Because as we know,

Yoga was an oral system before it was written.

However,

Our modern interpretations do not come from this era.

They come from a Sanskrit text called the,

And bear with me,

I apologize if I absolutely destroy any of the Sanskrit pronunciations,

It is on one of my to-do lists to learn these a lot better,

But it's this text called Sat Chakra Nirupana,

Written by Pranandana Yati in 1577,

Which in itself is already considered quite late amongst Indic scholars,

Because it is quite far out of that golden age of the tantric system,

Which ended around 1300,

And this was written in about 1577.

It's also important to note here that many of these different texts have been lost to time and destroyed or hidden,

There have been various invasions from the Muslims and then much later on the British,

So today we only have a fraction of the original texts remaining,

And even from that,

Only a very small fraction have been translated into English.

One source I was reading was Christopher Tompkins saying about 10% have been translated into English.

So that's kind of the ancient history,

And that's as much detail that I will go into,

We'll be looking more at the modern history today.

Then in 1918,

Jumped forward quite a few centuries,

A man by the name of John Woodroffe,

Under the pseudonym of Arthur Avalon,

Translated the Sat Chakra Nirupana into a very famous book,

The Serpent Power,

And I should rephrase that,

So he only translated one chapter of this larger text,

And that became The Serpent Power,

And this gained a lot of popularity,

Especially amongst occultists were really popular at the time,

And spiritualism,

But has more recently been said to be quite a flawed translation,

And there were a lot of misunderstandings that he had in there.

We can't entirely blame him though,

This is a very complicated language to be trying to translate,

And he's kind of like the first translator and person that attempted to do this work,

But he didn't get it quite right,

And this book,

The Serpent Power,

Is our main source where it all starts for our current understanding of the chakra system.

So another key player in this new age chakra movement is Madame Blavatsky.

She was a key person within the occultist movement at the time,

She was a medium,

Mystic,

And also co-founder of the Theosophical Society in 1875.

I will explain a little bit more about who these guys are,

Because we are going to hear about them again.

So the Theosophical Society is a religious slash spiritual slash philosophical society,

And theosophy,

As described by the Australian chapter,

Is the spiritual heritage of all humanity which has been in existence from ancient times,

And may be thought of as the essence of the great religions and philosophies of the world.

So basically their goal was to bring in and explore a wide range of philosophies and religions and theories and spiritualism from across the world for all of humanity.

Madame Blavatsky,

She was also a key player in bringing in and popularizing a lot of the eastern philosophies into Europe and into America at the time,

And in 1879 to 1885 she actually lived in India to go and learn the chakra system,

Where she was apparently welcomed,

Mostly at the time people weren't that interested in it,

Like there was a lot of colonization of India,

But she went there and said I want to learn,

And they welcomed her in.

Now Madame Blavatsky,

According to several sources,

Then said this is great,

I'm going to improve on it,

And it seems that she played a role in connecting the chakras with nerves and organs and this kind of thing,

But we'll go into more of that a little bit later.

Next in the history of the development of the modern chakras,

We have Charles Leadbeater.

He was a clairvoyant and another member of the Theosophical Society,

And he wrote the book Chakras,

A Monograph in 1927.

He discusses using clairvoyance to see the chakras,

He says the chakras,

Or force centers,

Are points of connection at which energy flows from one vehicle or body of a man to another.

Anyone who possesses a slight degree of clairvoyance may easily see them in the etheric double,

Where they show themselves as saucer-like depressions or vortices in its surface.

It's quite undeveloped,

They appear as small circles about two inches in diameter,

Glowing dully in the ordinary man,

But when awakened and vivified,

They are seen as blazing,

Cruscating whirlpools,

Much increased in size and resembling miniature suns.

So that was his take on the chakras.

Now we also have the Theosophist,

Iva Berg Witten.

She was an aura painter,

Poet,

Spiritual leader,

And her work was actually recorded into the written form by her protege,

Ronald T.

Hunt,

So she often didn't write any books herself.

One of her most notable works is the lecture notes,

What Colour Means to You.

She was really into colour theory and therapy.

And so here she links the seven rays,

Which is a Theosophist concept,

To rainbows,

Chakras,

Musical notes,

And gems.

Now Iva's work forms the basis of a lot of our modern colour and crystal healing theory.

Also,

Interestingly,

Part of the reason that colour theory took off in the 1930s was the development of colour films,

And more specifically the release of The Wizard of Oz in 1939,

Which,

Although this wasn't the first colour film,

It used technicolour's three strip process and really imbued colour as a storytelling tool in a really revolutionary way,

And this caught a lot of people's attention,

And just colour was amazing the world at the time.

Okay,

So now we're going to jump forward again in time,

But this time only a few decades,

To the 1970s,

And this is where we really start to see the chakras overlaid with the rainbow taking off.

So we have two key players here.

First,

We have Dr Christopher Hills in his book Nuclear Evolution,

And so he uses the rainbows and overlays that on.

And then there's also Dr Ken Ditchwald,

Hopefully I've said that right.

He published Body Mind,

A synthesis of eastern and western approaches to self-awareness,

Health,

And personal growth.

This was in 1977.

He also published an article,

Which was July to August 1977,

Issue of a yoga journal titled Body Mind and the Evolution to Cosmic Consciousness.

And this is where a lot of what we are taught about the chakras has come together.

So Ditchwald consolidated the rainbow colours with the psychological associations and the endocrine gland connections.

And Leland,

Who wrote about all of this history,

Describes this as the birth year of the complete modern yoga chakra system we know today.

So before Ken,

These elements existed separately,

And after Ken,

They were packaged as a unified system that quickly became the way that we teach the chakras.

If you have studied chakras on modern psychology in any depth,

You have probably heard of Carl Jung.

So how does he fit into all of this?

And this is where it gets a little bit confusing,

So bear with me.

Carl Jung did give a kundalini seminar in 1932.

However,

Those notes weren't actually published in English until 1996.

So that is 64 years after the modern chakra psychology system has already formed and was being spread throughout western yoga studios.

So the chakra system that we know today wasn't actually following Jung's specific teachings on kundalini,

But it was using his general theories about the developmental stages and archetypes to form what we know as the emotional side of the chakras.

This came about because Carl Jung,

Two German Indologists,

So this is Heinrich Zimmer and Friedrich Spielberg,

And also the American mythologist Joseph Campbell,

Were all inspired by Arthur Avalon,

The serpent power.

That's our guy at the beginning that translated that first chapter of the text.

So they were all circulating in similar intellectual circles at the time.

They were sharing ideas.

Spielberg inspired Michael Murphy to go study under Sri Aurobindo.

Murphy then went on to found the very famous Esalen Institute in Big Sur,

California.

And this place here became the birthplace of human potential movement,

And it was an melting pot in the 60s and 70s for new age,

Hippie,

LSD,

Counterculture,

Philosophy,

And it had a lot of famous visitors,

It still does today,

And thought leaders at the time,

Such as Ram Dass and also Abraham Maslow,

Which I have talked about on this podcast before,

Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

We can see that fitting into a lot of this chakra work as well.

The Esalen Institute still runs today.

It is also where our man,

The father of modern chakra theory,

Ken Ditchwald,

Lived as a body worker.

So he was being exposed to a lot of different thought leaders,

Kind of melting pot of ideas going around,

Which would have included Carl Hung's general theories about developmental stages and archetypes.

Not his specific chakra work though,

Most likely.

So it was more his general theories and psychologies that were imbued into the chakra system as we know it today,

Rather than his specific research and ideas on chakras and kundalini.

Hung himself is translated to say tantrism,

And in particular kundalini yoga,

Is an exceedingly complicated symbolical system which no one can understand unless he has been initiated into it and has at least made special studies in this field.

He also goes on to say the West,

With its bad habit of wanting to believe on the one hand,

And its highly developed scientific and philosophical critique on the other,

Finds itself in a real dilemma.

Either it falls into the trap of faith and swallows concepts like prana,

Atman,

Chakra,

Samadhi,

Etc.

Without giving them a thought,

Or its scientific critique repudiates them,

One and all,

As pure mysticism.

The split in the Western mind therefore makes it impossible at the outset for the intentions of yoga to be realized in any inadequate way.

I thought that was an interesting quote.

So now we're going to jump forward a little bit.

In the 80s we now see Anadeya Judith expand and consolidate and popularize this new age chakra work even further.

And in the next few decades we see various yoga teachers and new age energy healers and spiritualists continue to share these findings and these teachings.

So from all of this,

As you can see,

The mainstream seven chakra system with the rainbow that we are all familiar with only has pretty loose ties to any kind of traditional or ancient tantric yoga texts.

It's pretty much based on the work of Ken Ditchwold.

Now I want to be clear here that I don't think that this necessarily negates the modern chakra system that most if not all of us in the West are taught about how the chakras work.

I can see how the work of people like Anadeya Judith and Carl Jung have created what can be a really helpful system for moving through our emotions and challenges.

And I know a lot of people have found these really helpful.

I've definitely found use with them myself through their work.

But I think it's just important and that it's more widely known that this seven chakra system isn't particularly rooted in ancient yogic philosophy.

Often it's kind of shared in this way that it has this really ancient grounding which gives it some validity and trust alongside it.

But that's not really there.

And again,

Not that the modern system doesn't have some beautiful healing benefits.

It's just that we've kind of forgotten where it all comes from.

So I think that it's important that if we hold the position of being a steward to pass on knowledge that we know where it came from and that we're transparent that these are more new age ideas and they're not particularly rooted in this ancient philosophy.

Again,

That's not to say they're wrong.

We just don't want to mislead anyone to think that these teachings are something that they're not.

And we don't let source amnesia basically rewrite history.

So I'm a yin yoga teacher myself as I mentioned.

It's well known that yin yoga was first created in the 70s by Paul Zink and then further refined and popularized by Paul Greely and Sarah Powers in 1980 and 1990s.

And it's based on a mix of ancient teachings and like modern anatomy effectively.

So I have no problem with new ideas and practices.

I just think the importance here lies in the transparency of where everything's coming from.

I know people have not done this on purpose.

That itself I think is a really interesting part of the story that I want to talk about a little bit more later in the episode.

But for now I wanted to give you a brief overview of seven of the common misconceptions of the chakras we can pull from this history lesson and just unpack these a little bit more.

Misconception number one.

There are only seven chakras.

This one to be honest I knew to some degree.

I remember in my teacher training at the start I was taught that there are these seven primary chakras and then we have lots of other minor chakras throughout our body.

But even this isn't quite true either.

So the seven primary chakras part isn't actually referenced in any of the ancient yogic texts.

Bearing in mind we have only translated a small portion of them but from those that we've translated none of them talk about seven chakras.

Different schools or lineages had different numbers of chakras.

There are references to four,

Five,

Six,

Nine,

Ten,

Twelve,

Sixteen,

Twenty one,

More depending on the different practices.

There isn't actually a seven which is really interesting.

And the number seven in the modern chakra system comes from this book again The Serpent Power by Arthur Avalon who even he didn't describe seven.

He described six plus one so six plus sahasrara the crown chakra which technically is outside of the body.

So even in this earlier mistranslation we don't see seven.

We see the discussions of the six plus one.

However I did come across one reference for a system that is a six plus one and this is an 11th century text around 1000 CE.

So it does fit into the golden age for tantra but this is not the text that Arthur Avalon translated.

So it all gets very confusing and interesting very quickly.

So one thing that is very consistent however throughout all of these chakras whether it's four,

Five,

Six,

Seven,

Nine,

However many,

There seems to be this consistency that we have three centers of the body.

We have this lower belly sort of sexual center then we have around the area the heart center and then we have the crown.

But other than that pretty much everything else is varied.

It's also interesting to note that for the lower chakra center it's often thought dangerous to work with this area because it's sort of not necessarily taboo but that's like the animalistic they're just raw emotions if you like that might be dangerous to work through.

But I'm not sure exactly where that came from in the ancient texts but it was a discussion that came up a couple times.

While researching this one of the questions that came up over and over again was like which one is it?

Which is this right system?

How many chakras really are there?

A lot of people were asking this when it came up that there are multiple different systems and there really isn't a right or wrong answer.

They are all just different lineages and people worked with whichever one they were given effectively and I'm still kind of wrapping my head around this because it does require unlearning the way that we've been commonly thought to think about the chakras.

And this is crucial this is like the fundamental difference between these more traditional texts and our modern western understanding.

In modern western chakra ideology we tend to think of the chakras as like fixed energetic points or wheels like almost like energetic organs that we all naturally have and they're just kind of like sitting there in our energetic bodies or like in our physical body somewhere whether we're aware of them or not.

We all have them like we all have a liver and a spleen and supposedly we have these seven chakras in these exact locations.

But that's not what the traditional texts describe like at all.

The classical texts present chakras as what scholars call prescriptive meditation templates whereas our modern western theory kind of sees it as descriptive anatomy.

So that's not how they saw it.

So basically what this means is that the chakras are instructions for a practice that you do they're not descriptions of something that already exists.

They are focal points for meditation that when you use them you actively install them into the energetic body through practicing this focus meditation itself.

So we don't have chakras we create our own chakras with our minds through the act of visualization and meditation.

In the words of the Sanskrit scholar Harish the main purpose of any chakra system was to function as a template for niyasa which means the installation of mantras and deity energies at specific points of the subtle body.

Think about that shift for a moment.

It's not that you were born with chakras and then they get blocked and they need clearing.

It's that through a meditation practice you're intentionally creating these energetic structures as tools for transformation.

This is why the energetic body in classical texts is described as fluid.

It is interacting with and connecting the body and mind rather than being like a fixed map with chakras permanently located in specific spots of our body.

And this is exactly why different systems could work with four chakras or five chakras or six chakras or twelve chakras.

They were creating different meditation maps depending on what their practice was trying to achieve.

So one of the most common systems that we've explored is like a five part chakra system and this relates to the elements.

It's not quite translated as earth,

Water,

Fire,

Wind,

Ether or space.

Most indigenous or just most cultures around the world have some kind of four or five element system that they work with.

Other chakra meditations worked with specific deities and through this meditative process as Harish said you install the deity into that section.

So when we understand the chakras in this way suddenly it makes complete sense that there can be so many different systems and that there is no one single way to do it.

There's no one right answer.

There's not this many chakras.

Basically different traditions created different templates for different purposes.

Okay misconception number two.

Each chakra has an element and a bija mantra connected to it.

So I just mentioned the five elements.

So in the modern chakra system we have a bija or a seed mantra connected to each chakra in a fixed system.

However these seed mantras so we've got lang,

Vam,

Ram,

Yam and ham they are actually connected to the elements.

So they're not connected to chakras they're connected to the elements.

Lam connects to the earth element.

Vam connects to water.

Ram connects to fire.

Yam connects to wind or air and ham connects to space.

So these aren't fixed to certain places in our body like the modern chakra system outlines.

Instead we can work with these elements throughout our energetic body.

So for example in our modern system we connect yam which connects to the element of wind and air to our heart chakra.

But maybe you are all over the place in your love life and that aspect of your heart feels unsettled.

So do you really want to add more air and lightness and freedom to your heart energy?

Maybe it would be more appropriate to work with earth and instead install earth into your heart chakra.

So it would be better for you to work with lam in relation to your heart chakra.

But if you're following the modern system you are always working with lam for your root chakra.

So the bija mantras these seed mantras aren't necessarily like a modern construct but how we've been using them is.

Basically what has happened is this five element system has been laid on top of this seven point chakra system and then they've added om and then silence to flesh it out a little bit.

So it doesn't quite make sense anyway.

That one's really interesting.

So misconception number three and this is a short one for you.

So each chakra is linked to a color of the rainbow.

We've already talked about this and where these modern colors come from.

But I wanted to add that while the idea of the rainbow is new as some tantric texts do discuss connections to colors but for example it might be like red gold red gold.

It's not like this rainbow effect but sometimes as well chakras can have multiple colors within them.

So the idea of a chakra with color is true just not how how we've been doing it with this perfect rainbow and in the western system.

So misconception number four is that chakras have fixed psychological or emotional associations.

Now this one does require some nuance so stick with me here.

So in the modern system each chakra has very specific psychological themes attached to it.

We get this from Carl Jung.

We've we've talked about this a little bit.

So for example the root chakra deals with survival and safety and family issues.

The sacral chakra governs sexuality and creativity.

The solar plexus is about personal power and esteem.

The heart chakra is connected to our love and relationships and so on.

Our third chakra,

Our voice,

Our third eye etc.

And this entire psychological framework comes from western psychology layered onto the chakra system in the 60s and 70s and then again popularized by Anadad Judith as we went through earlier.

However as Harish explains traditional texts don't prescribe these areas fixed psychological associations but here is the nuance to it.

These classical texts do tend to place chakras at points where human beings naturally experience emotional and or spiritual energy.

So like the heart area,

The throat,

The pelvis.

These are places that we naturally feel things in our body.

We all know that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you get bad news or that tight feeling in your chest when you're anxious or maybe you get like a lump in your throat when you're holding back tears or or something you you can't say something that you need to.

These aren't just metaphors like we genuinely experience sensations in these areas.

This is our mind body energetic connection.

But this isn't because like chakras exist there and are like waiting for us to discover them.

Instead it seems that these locations were chosen as useful focal points for the meditation practice of nyasa which is as we mentioned like installing the mantra,

The elements or the deities into that area.

So the texts seem to work with the natural human experience by choosing the body locations that already had this emotional significance.

But there is a big difference between saying like we'll place a meditation focal point at the heart because people naturally feel things there versus like the heart chakra is already governing love and compassion and it's like blocked then you have relationship problems.

So as Harish explains,

In most of the original Sanskrit sources we are not being taught about the way things are.

We are being given a specific yogic practice.

We are to visualize a subtle object made of colored light shaped like a lotus or a spinning wheel at a specific point in the body and then activate mantra syllables in it for a specific purpose.

So the practice wasn't about like diagnosing which chakra is blocked based on your psychological issues.

It was about installing specific energies at specific points for specific meditation purposes that varied by lineage and practice.

There is however one exception to this.

So the ten chakra system in a 16th century text translated a jewel mine of teachings on music by Sangha Deva does connect specific emotional and mental states but to the individual petals of each lotus chakra,

Not to the chakra as a whole having like one psychological theme.

Even this exception is still quite different from our modern like root chakra survival issues framework where something's a theme.

It seems that the emotions attached to each petal didn't seem to make up one common theme that you were focusing on.

Misconception number five.

So chakras correlate with nerves,

Organs,

And endocrine glands.

And this seems to have been a western addition,

Possibly purely for the need to make something like solid and real.

If we go back to Carl Klung's quote that I mentioned earlier with the western mind kind of struggles with these things.

Whereas in the original texts chakras were like purely energetic and then they're often like connected or this bridge between the physical and mental bodies but we implanted them as we've discussed.

But a big player in this who I didn't mention earlier who was sort of responsible for adding these ideas in,

I have no idea how to say her name to be honest.

It's C-A-J-Z-O-R-A-N Kajzoran Ali aka Amber Stein and she was a yoga teacher from Iowa who taught in France and the US.

She flipped between them and in 1928 she wrote Divine Posture Influence Upon Endocrine Glands which was quite pioneering work in this area but was largely forgotten.

This is why the endocrine chakra sort of connection is often misattributed to later sources.

But Leland describes Amber as a mysterious mystic who married an Indian swami who actually turned out to be from Trinidad and I would just love to learn more about this woman.

I searched a bit but I couldn't find much,

Only references to Leland's work and directly to her book.

She sounds like she would have been fun.

So that was a game back in 1928 so around the around the 30s when a lot of the other work was coming out as well.

Okay so misconception number six is that Kundalini is dormant at the base of the spine.

This was another one I've always struggled with,

The idea that Kundalini is this dormant serpent coiled at the base of your spine just waiting to be awakened and raised through the chakra system.

I think it was just a little bit too esoteric for me.

This sleeping story again originates from our friend Arthur Avalon in the 1918 The Serpent Power,

Surprise surprise,

And this part is marked as quite a big mistranslation on his part.

I still don't understand it entirely so I am going to turn to Christopher Tompkins.

He is a Harvard and Berkeley Sanskrit scholar whose PhD research focuses on Kundalini origins.

He has been reconstructing what original tantric sources actually say through his collection of over 24 000 manuscript pages from Kashmir and most of these have never been translated into English.

He's doing some really cool work,

Definitely check him out.

There'll be links in the show notes.

Here's what Tompkins has discovered.

So Kundalini was understood as the actualizing shape of resonance in the navel or the heart region,

A spiraling vibrational pattern,

Not a dormant entity waiting at your tailbone.

It's like this coiled power referred to its spiraling nature like a spring or a wave,

Not dormant or sleeping.

And so we get the snake coming in as imagery from this the spiralized pattern.

And the actual practice for working with Kundalini was something called uttara or utterance or elevation and this involved prolonged utterance of seed syllables raised through the central channel.

And according to Tompkins this practice was lost to us by the late 19th century and he's currently working to reconstruct it from medieval manuscripts.

It's basically a lot of sort of chanting and breath work involved to not wake up your Kundalini but you can like draw it up through to your third eye chakra as I understand it.

So in classical tantric understanding Kundalini was represented as Shaktipata,

The descent of divine power.

So it's not something that you need to awaken.

The goal was more to pierce the chakras to ascend to a higher consciousness,

Transcending what's called granthas or energetic knots.

And these texts describe like breaking through brahma,

Devara,

The skull door and using the language of liberation,

Not like wellness or balance.

I've got a quote here from one of his videos to help explain this.

So he says,

When we hear the word Kundalini we often think about a dormant snake or something like that,

That has to be awakened at the base of the spine.

As my research overwhelmingly shows,

This is a total distortion engaged by some late hatha yoga manual seeking to basically remove the shakti and the mantra practice from this original householder based life affirming practice that engaged the subtle body as the microcosm of the universe.

Kundalini then in its original source and the tantras represented by the scroll is that condensed coiled up power of universal consciousness,

Your own highest awakened self is that contracted or drawn into or embraced you might say,

Into still points of focus by our concentration.

So that the condensed energy itself has the power to break through and stuck blockages in the subtle body,

Particularly in the range of the head in between the eyebrows.

So Kundalini isn't sleeping at your tailbone,

Waiting for you to practice yoga at a level that wakes it up.

It is the spirally padding of consciousness that is constantly there,

Primarily around the sort of heart navel region.

And then when it is properly engaged through typically a mantra practice and breath work,

You can help it pierce through these limitations in consciousness.

I've got a link for one of his videos that explains this that I think is worth watching.

There is also some discussions because like these practices were for the householder,

For everyone,

Especially with tantra.

And that is maybe over the years,

They've potentially been attempted to suppress because they were about empowering everyone.

So it wasn't necessarily just something for the elite.

This was a practice that anyone could do to reach higher states of consciousness.

So misconception number seven,

Chakras need balancing and clearing.

So I think the last part sort of established this a little bit as well,

But this is just isn't part of the traditional text.

And again,

I don't want to be misunderstood in that these ideas are completely false or wrong in any way.

I can see how they can be very practical and very helpful.

But when we look at the chakras from a yogic philosophy lens,

From what has been translated,

Then they're not understood in this way of needing balancing or clearing.

It's this piercing the chakras in order to break through and ascend that higher consciousness,

But not to balance or clear.

So this also makes sense when we think of them as being something that we're actively imbuing onto our energetic bodies through meditation rather than something that already exists.

This has the air of some kind of like weird big yoga,

As my dad would say,

Conspiracy theory.

But Curt Leland,

A lecturer for the Theosophical Society who has documented this history in his book,

Rainbow Body,

After having questions himself when he started looking into this work and he was like,

Where does this actually come from?

He says the evolution of the Western chakra system was an unintentional collaboration between esoterics,

Clairvoyants,

Energy healers,

Scholars of Indology,

Psychologists,

The mythologist Joseph Campbell,

Psychologists,

And Indian yogis.

So it has not necessarily been at all intentional.

There are a lot of complex elements going on here with the history and just the way people work and different cultures work that we haven't explored here.

And I don't really have the space or expertise to do so necessarily.

And it would just be super easy to blanket blame cultural appropriation,

But I don't think that would be really fair or it's quite that simple.

So don't get me wrong,

I'm not saying that I think cultural appropriation isn't real or problematic.

I am saying that I think it's an overly simplistic argument for a grander discussion on the behaviors and interactions between humans and different cultures.

So in this specific instance,

There is definitely a lot of miscommunication and mistranslation of ideas and cultural differences,

But they've further been perpetrated by source amnesia,

Which is basically when people forget where the information came from and someone references someone else as factual and then it just spirals.

We can uncover cases of this through all areas.

So for example,

One that came to mind for me,

If you've listened for a while you may know my background lies in ecology and biology.

So here in New Zealand,

There was a paper written that basically indicates monogamy among oyster catchers.

Monogamy means that the male and the female mate for life effectively,

They don't find other partners.

And oyster catchers are like these black on black or sometimes different species,

Some of them are black and white,

Birds with long red beaks and they both pretty much look the same.

So there is really not much,

If any,

Sexual dimorphism within oyster catchers,

Which means the males and females look the same.

So this quote unquote fact has been referenced throughout New Zealand bird literature since the 70s when this paper came out,

Because anyone just looking,

They don't have time to go out and band a bunch of birds.

They found this paper that says it and it's like,

Perfect,

I'll write that on my paper and I've got this solid scientific reference that I can then back up the statement.

So my mom's friend several years ago,

She was studying them for,

I believe her PhD,

Might've been a master's,

But I'm pretty sure it was her PhD.

And she found that they weren't actually monogamous at all.

And they did pair during the mating season,

But then the next year they didn't come back to their same pair.

They found a new pair.

No one had banded them before.

It seems that someone just had the idea that basically,

Well,

They look the same and I keep seeing them together and they're always paired up.

So they're monogamous and it probably sounds like a nice idea that they'd be not monogamous.

No one actually had any information to dispute it.

So it stuck,

It carried on.

And to this day,

You will still see people referencing that they are monogamous birds from this earlier paper.

I feel like a similar thing happened with the chakras here.

There's a few issues at play.

The first thing is that there are very limited English translations of tantric texts.

As we can see from the history,

A lot of people have drawn from the serpent power as their reference,

Which unfortunately has flaws.

It's not entirely wrong,

But there are some misinterpretations there,

But it's kind of also all they had at the time.

We also can't entirely blame poor old John for his mistranslations either,

Because Sanskrit is not exactly easy to translate.

It's not like just moving from English to Spanish,

For example.

And even then we often get massive inconsistencies just because the language can't necessarily explain something equivalently.

Sanskrit is particularly tricky though,

Because of its decline in use.

Some people call it a dead language.

This isn't quite right,

Because it is still used today.

No one speaks it as their first language,

However,

And it's the oldest language in the world.

It has naturally evolved over time.

So when you look at the earliest Sanskrit texts versus like the betas,

For example,

Versus some of the later ones,

They're going to be a little bit different.

There are different dialects of it,

And it naturally became like Hindi,

Bengali,

Marathi.

They're all derived from Sanskrit.

So it's had a long time to evolve.

So it's not like there's just this one language that we can translate.

Even if you look at like Shakespearean English versus modern day English,

They can be quite different alone,

And that's only a few hundred years versus like thousands of years.

On top of those differences,

Sanskrit texts are apparently riddled with codes,

And you need to do a lot of cross-referencing between chapters of texts and different scrolls and even within the text to understand what is going on and get an accurate translation.

And as I mentioned,

Arthur Avalon in The Serpent's Power,

He only translated one chapter.

So there's possibly some reasons why he missed things there.

Some say that the codes are to protect it from those who haven't been initiated in,

And so they're kept within the lineage,

And then of course lineages could get lost if you've got something going from the keepers to the library.

We're going to be losing some information and just that loss of humans effectively.

But I also wonder,

And this is just me purely speculating,

That it was also potentially to protect it from the invasions over the years rather than just from everyone that wasn't initiated in.

So from around 1000 CE,

We start to see a lot of Muslim invasions into the region.

So that could be you're codifying something to protect your knowledge from people that would otherwise destroy it,

And maybe if they didn't understand it,

They're not going to destroy it.

But that's just speculation on my behalf.

That's a bit of a theory.

And then the other problem is even today,

100 years or so after the serpent's power,

We still have very limited scholars researching and translating these texts.

And as I'm sure you can imagine,

It must take a very special kind of skill and immense dedication and interest in the topic to dedicate your life effectively to doing this work.

So I'm very grateful to those people who have done this for the rest of us.

So unfortunately,

The answer as well isn't as simple as going to India and learning from Indian teachers,

Because a lot of these ideas from the modern chakra system have been seeded back and forth between Western societies and India.

The real chakra workers may be still out there and alive,

But a lot of it has been lost or hidden or blended over the last century or so since the Golden Age of Tantra,

Which ended over 700 years ago.

So there's been morphs of this throughout time as it's passed down through generations,

And then also with these ideas back and forth from the Western civilizations to India today.

What's next?

Well,

I want to finish by saying I don't think this means we need to throw out the modern chakra system.

I think it has value and it has a place.

What's important is that as spiritual seekers or guides or teachers,

That we understand where this information comes from and that we are able to have open and transparent conversations about it so we don't either mislead others unintentionally.

But additionally to that,

We don't allow source amnesia to effectively rewrite history,

Especially in this digital age where algorithms play such a critical role in our available knowledge,

And it is so easy for the truth or even just alternative ideas to get buried underneath what is popular.

To learn more on this topic,

The primary references I use to put this talk together include Kurt Leland,

Author of The Rainbow Body,

A history of the Western chakra system from Blavatsky to Brennan,

And also work from Sanskrit scholars Christopher Wallace,

Aka Harish,

And Christopher Tompkins.

If you found this interesting or you have any feedback or comments,

Please leave a note below.

I hope you found learning about the history of the modern chakra system valuable and thank you so much for spending this time with me here today.