| The Chakras of the Infosphere Exploring the Chakras as Communications Centers by Steven Vedro Over the millennia, mystics have found reflections of the chakras in all kinds of metaphors: different animals, colors, sound frequencies. In today's world, where the planet's thoughts are instantaneously moved through electromagnetic frequencies to satellites 23,000 miles in space, and via pulses of light traveling through fiber optics cables, a new set of chakra metaphors have made themselves available: the chakras of our Infosphere. I believe that our all-encompassing electronic communications web is both a reflection of human creative consciousness, and it is also a field through which consciousness moves. Each form of the global Infosphere resonates with a different aspect of our chakra system. Each carries the light and shadow of the human spirit, and each offers us a mirror to our personal and cultural liberation. Each of our chakras, in turn, has a communications function: facing outward they modulate our energetic relations with others, and when facing inwards, they are the information repositories that hold the old wounds that keep us from experiencing the full pulse of our aliveness. Using meditations based on metaphors of the telecommunications systems we use every day, we can begin to clear and revitalize these energy transponders, opening our awareness to the full spectrum of signals we are constantly sending and receiving -- to others and to ourselves. The First Chakra: Being and Nothingness The yoga tradition tells us that we are constantly sending energetic broadcasts announcing our presence, and listening for a reply. These pulses radiate from our first -- or root -- chakra, in simple pulses of "aliveness." The first chakra operates in pure binary code, reflecting the work of boundary setting: separation and distinction, from potential to a specificity, from darkness to Light, from off to on, from zero to one. Its focus is on our earth-bound physical identity: our right to be secure on the physical plane, to be here, and to receive life's riches. When this chakra is blocked, we never feel safe, we fear boundaries, we look for security in outside things -- money, power, "stuff." When open and grounded in the earth itself, this chakra sends out our individual call sign, our claim to be here on Earth, our declaration to the world and to God, just as Abraham did: Hineini, Hee Nay Nee, I am here, fully present, ready to be seen. What are the core "wireless" metaphors for our global first chakra? We start with basic "on-off" signaling. For the dots and dashes -- the precursors of the binary codes of the digital age -- to be decoded, there needs to be clear boundaries between the ON and the OFF state, between activity and rest, being and nothingness. Just as digital technologies require a clear ground state, so too does our first chakra. Recognizing our first chakra need for grounding, holding steady the container of our being is the first step towards opening our inner communications pathways. Without a solid connection to our here and now, when disconnected from our physical self, our energetic receiving antenna has no place to send the incoming messages. We become overloaded, hypersensitive to signals from the outside, unsure of our own truths. When poor physical, mental or spiritual health compromises our first chakra, when we lose our sense of being "grounded," we start drifting off of our assigned frequencies. Without our connection to the resting state, to the earth and to our physical bodies, all of the "spiritual" signals we seek to send (or are straining to receive), are likely to be lost in a cloud of static. The Second Chakra: Reach Out and Touch Someone If our first chakra holds our Here I Am message, the second chakra is the place that holds our need to engage with those that respond. It is from this center that we draw the energy that fuels our search for connection. This is the transponder of attraction, the place of creativity. From this chakra, we radiate our oceanic drive for dissolving union with another, seeking to "reach out and touch someone." It is the place of innocence, and the place of seduction and entanglement, sexuality and guilt. The communications technology reflecting the light and the dark of the second chakra is the telephone. Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media that "the phone is a participant form that demands a partner, with all the intensity of electric polarity." This quality of intense longing permeates both the social history and our current use of the telephone. Our relation with the telephone reflects the second chakra drive to be in trusting relationships. We use our phones to make contact with our loved ones, to feel safe sharing our dreams. We put phones in our homes, cars, pockets and purses to tell ourselves that we are indeed reachable, that we are not alone. Holding "clean" connections is the challenge of the second chakra. When repressed or blocked, this center becomes polarized, drawing to us all the people and all the emotional situations that we are trying so hard to avoid. Its shadow fuels the energies of seduction and entanglement, sexuality and guilt. Under stress, the second chakra calls out to anyone: obsessive talking, enmeshment with others, and poor boundaries are some of the signs of a wounded second chakra. This is the place of our inner telephones -- the ones with long cords, and the little wireless devices that beep at all the wrong times! An over-stimulated second chakra promotes a kind of selfishness -- emotional needs become more important that anything else. The person with excessive second chakra energy needs to be connected at all times. They have a hard time recognizing appropriate boundaries. In an environment saturated with cell towers on every hill, it is no surprise that everyone appears to be walking around talking into thin air! Looking at telephones as holders of intense second chakra energy allows us to ask about the quality of our personal and spiritual relationships. Every time we pick up a telephone -- wired or wireless -- we are given a chance to reflect on our connections to others. Are these "cords of connection" open and acknowledged, or are they built on the power of secrets and seduction? Are they addictive or compulsive? Or are they numb, closed or guarded? Do our inner phones beep at all times of night? Do we approach each other from our hearts or from second chakra needs? Telephone technology has brought us instant re-dial. Do we pause before leaping into relationship? Do we use our inner "caller-ID" to screen those who tickle our second chakra receptors? The Third Chakra: Becoming a Clear Channel Broadcaster I believe that the work of the third chakra -- our center of power, of will, of our inner fire -- is reflected back to us by the medium of radio: an electronic mirror of personal and of community power, of dreams and mythic realities, of shame and of belonging: a virtual place where speech predominates. McLuhan called radio a tribal drum: a subliminal echo chamber of magical power to touch remote and forgotten chords. This is the medium of the leader and followers, of group identity, the voice that challenges us to consider issues of power and legitimacy. While supplanted by television as the dominant mass entertainment medium, radio continues to reflect the dance of power on a cultural level. Getting access to the radio is still an important acknowledgement of any group's social status, and of the coming of age of new communities. Talk radio -- the marriage of the intimacy of the telephone with the power of broadcasting, has created a new genre where various experts validate the power of their listeners. It is the medium of the personality: the "shock-jock" at the microphone, the talk-show host, the love expert and the financial guru. How we respond to these radio-borne stimuli takes us to the door of our third chakra. From this place we must ask ourselves, whose talk shows are we listening to? Are we feeding ourselves messages of autonomy and mastery, or are we "cruising the dial" looking for outside advisors, gurus, and opinion leaders? Are we sending our signals in full rich multi-channel stereo, or are we endlessly "looping" our sampled music fragments, finding our identity by expropriating and mimicking the tunes of others? When we are not in balance, fearful, uncertain of our first or second chakra connections, this center's signal output devolves to a distorted "boom-box" assault, its receptive qualities too easily remote-controlled by someone else's opinions; the loudest signal, full of distortion, is the only one we can hear. We can mistake radiated power for mastery, volume for fidelity. Only by constant attention to the messages we send to ourselves and to others from our inner radio station can we truly become clear channel broadcasters. The Fourth Chakra: The Compassionate Eye, the Seductive Heart of Television Esoteric teachings tell us that it is from the heart center that we begin to understand that whatever is happening outside of ourselves is also happening inside -- that the face of the "other" is also in truth, our own reflection. These heart chakra qualities are reflected for us in the flickering hearth of television. As the electric media of the heart center, television is not so much an extension of our sight, but as McLuhan understood, our sense of touch. Television is a medium of the close-up, of personal stories. Television has introduced us to the lives of those we held outside of our comfort zone -- by class, gender, color, language, tribe or nation. The great moments of video journalism -- the fire hoses and police dogs attacking civil rights workers in Selma and Birmingham, the faces of hungry children, victims of hurricane, flood, war or famine -- are all about bringing us in close emotional contact with other beings that share our world. Sesame Street and Star Trek are ongoing narratives of television's heart-softening magic, connecting us with other families and other cultures, those from different neighborhoods, and from far-off imagined galaxies. Television also reflects the shadow side of the heart center. It is a teacher of compassion, but also an addictive seducer and beguiler. Television feeds the illusion that our planet's deep grief can be filled by the material plane. Like an ever-escalating, but never successful, attempt to mend a broken-heart, it feeds us a world of pseudo-choice, of emotional voyeurism and dreams of material possessions -- a place where the self is defined wholly by want, wish and the capacity to consume. While we must indeed focus our efforts on healing television's assault on our consciousness, we also have a parallel opportunity to use television as a yoga practice. Instead of dismissing the "idiot box," we can use it as a tool: a mirror of the best of our humanity, and our displaced grief. If we are sufficiently grounded in the lower chakras, we open our hearts to all that television puts before us, using our TV viewing as a way to practice compassion without enmeshment. The Fifth Chakra: Life on the Web The body's fifth esoteric communications center is located in the throat. This is the place of the dialog with higher truth -- true speaking, true seeing, and true hearing. Its core work is that of communications itself, and its demon is falsehood. A strong throat chakra allows us to speak the truth to the lies that often surround us. A traumatized fifth chakra hides behind artifice and a false self. The telecommunications technology holding the light and dark of this chakra, offering us a newest of metaphors for doing our consciousness work around truth-telling, is the web of overlapping voices, multiple truths and shifting realities that is the Internet. On the web, we find ourselves in the center of a communications matrix that has erased the line between sender and receiver, between ownership and piracy, and between fact and fiction. On the positive side, the World Wide Web has given the most powerless and invisible victims of human rights abuse and government tyranny a voice. It has allowed formerly ignored or suppressed communities to find each other and claim their place in the spectrum of human communications. It has allowed us to create communities based on our unique interests, no matter how personal - or idiosyncratic. On the darker side, the Internet has given equal voice to those that preach hatred, sell false versions of history, and profit from our most base desires. It has made "instant pundits" out of rumormongers. It has created subcultures for every pornographic fetish. It has elevated copyright theft into a "right" for a new generation of young people. Let's not forget the god of communications -- Hermes -- also is known as a thief and trickster. The challenge of the Internet is not about access to information, but how not to drown in a vast sea of raw information abundance. Not "how can we control this technology," rather it is "how can we learn to find the truth in a world of unfiltered signals?" Our inability to know whether the person in the "chat room" is really who they say they are, the ease of access to questionable sites, and our fears of credit-card fraud whenever we make a purchase online have all brought the issue of "truth on the internet" to public consciousness. Our language reflects the challenge of discovering that our truth may not be shared: words like alias, proxy, virus, and firewall -- all play on the question of identity and security. Surfing the Internet puts us in direct contact with many of the unpleasant truths of humankind. Because it cannot effectively be censored, it forces us to ask the hard question of "what is the truth when everyone can speak?" It drags us into hard places, covers us with "Spam," puts us into situations where we must make our own values clear and public, forcing us to examine and defend our own core beliefs. It requires us to teach ourselves the power of discernment. As we contemplate a world of internet-like connections, our ability to be in truth becomes our strongest stabilizing power. Self-righteousness and guilt, manipulation or defensiveness, are no longer workable strategies in a world where we are all interconnected on the same global web. Our only "defense" in this situation is radical honesty, for on some level everyone already knows both our light and our shadow. Consciously observing the words we speak and the filters we put on incoming signals must become part of our daily awareness practice. Only when we are centered in our truth, clear of vanity and of false modesty, can we express who we are in the here and now, and not be trapped into the endless recycling of our karmic life stories. The Sixth Chakra: Seeing with Higher Definition The sixth chakra -- the mystical "third eye" -- resides in the center of the forehead, connecting to the pituitary gland located just behind the brow. This "master gland" controls the intellectual and emotional body processes. It is at the sixth center that the lessons of all of the lower chakras (of the enlightened physical body) converge into the path of wisdom. It is from here that the seeker's eyes are opened to the "big picture." This is the place where he or she is called to look beyond the surface truth, beyond their limited definitions of reality, to see the divine plan. The telecommunications projection of the sixth chakra has not yet been fully formed. We can see its outlines however, in the blending of television and the Internet, of video and computing, represented by high-definition digital video compression. Each of these words carries both technical information and important Sixth Chakra metaphors. High Definition TV will bring into our homes panoramic wide-screen images of incredible resolution and clarity, with double the scanning lines and a screen one-third wider than our current sets. As wide-screen viewers, we will see more, and have to take full responsibility for what we choose to see. Digital video compression is what makes the richness of digital cameras, videogames, DV discs and HD-TV possible. And this technology is based on tricking the brain to see more than is actually being sent. The core concept behind digital signal processing is sending not a representation of reality, but a set of codes that allow another device to recreate its copy of reality. Like our DNA, digital coding is an instruction set using a relatively small set of commands to build complex edifices. The core metaphors of digital TV can be approached as an externalization of the sixth chakra work of "deep seeing." Unlike standard television, which draws us in to the inner space of intimate stories, HD-TV asks us to step back and see the "big picture." Its interactive features invite us to look beyond the surface reality. This is a technology that challenges us to expand our vision in both breadth and depth. Our society is moving from analog to digital ways of knowing: from thinking about images, to the pixels that make them up. Is it no wonder that the political issues of the new century center around control over these coding algorithms -- in the world of biotechnology, cloning and genetically modified organisms, and in the world of politics, control over expanded citizen surveillance and the creation of huge "anti-terrorism" databases. DTV metaphorically challenges us in both dimensions. It asks us to explore our "point of view." It also asks us to take a closer look at the once hidden details in our visual field -- and metaphorically, on the shadows, the blurred lines and comfortable beliefs that support our concepts of personal reality. The Seventh Chakra: Always on Connectivity! The seventh energy center is the place of our link to the Divine. Represented by artists as the halo or aura of golden light around the world's great saints and masters, it can be visualized as ball of light above the physical crown of the head. This is the great junction point: where our physical template meets the energetic realms of possibility, where the activated pineal gland marries the pituitary in the third ventricle of the brain. This is the place where prayer radiates outward, and where we tap into the universal force of Creation -- the light grid that surrounds us all. Very few seekers ever reach the heights of this unity consciousness. This is the state of total immersion in the Godhead; the place enlightened souls and master teachers. At this place, a person not only sees the "big picture" of creation, but also becomes a joyful partner in the creation process itself. Opening the crown becomes less about our own consciousness, but (in Anodea Judith's words), about expanding our operating system so that it can embrace a larger portion of the universal field of consciousness. When this center is blocked, we are subject to crises of faith and confusion over our values: deep depression and chronic exhaustion. When prematurely opened (by drugs or mystical practices gone awry), we may experience extreme sensitivities to the physical environment -- light itself becomes our enemy. When anchored by the heart and grounded to the earth, the seventh chakra channels the mystical connection to our powers of intuition, clairvoyance, energetic healing, and grace. The Information Age metaphor for this always on, always connected, relationship with the infinite, is the emerging technology called "PerC" -- the wireless linking of portable computers and "smart personal objects" to each other and to the Internet to create a world of pervasive computing. Using small portions of the radio spectrum, Wi-Fi technology promises to create new networks that bring intelligence to everyday devices. The New York Times recently reported on the growing use of wireless transmitting chips embedded in consumer items -- allowing manufacturers and retailers to know how many pairs of pants of a specific size and color are on the shelves. Soon we will have alarm clocks that display the traffic news, toasters that burn weather symbols into our bagels, and refrigerators that page us to buy more milk on the way home. PerC will extend cyberspace to the "real" space of our houses and shopping malls, to our appliances, clothing, and body parts. We will move through space awash in radio signals traveling between our (first chakra reflectors of) Radio Frequency Identity (RFID) tags, smart appliances and Global Positioning Satellite receivers. We will be awash in networks of miniaturized, wirelessly interconnected, sensing, processing, actuating computing elements embedded in the physical world. As we move into this universally connected space, we will need to be very grounded to deal effectively with the power of always being connected, of having all of our requests filled -- a world of "always on" technology, a place of no escape is a nightmare vision. A Crown Chakra that is open to every astral entity, every node of intelligence on the energetic light grid, is also a door open to the dark Matrix, an invitation to madness. In a world where every data device is intelligent, and is electronically connected to every other device, we are being shown a model of the Infosphere itself. We can give up our power and allow the shadow to rule: creating a false virtual world where nature and love are replaced by computer simulations. Or we can embrace the extension of our outered nervous systems into a new space, moving to a more active relationship with the data elements our technology has made truly visible. Steven Vedro will lead an all-day workshop on "Full Chakra Communications" on August 7 in Madison, Wisc., using the communications metaphors along with guided visualization, meditation and movement, as a doorway to opening the full radiance of each chakra's communications potential. Program fee: $80. For more information, contact him at (608) 258-9390 or srvconsult@charter.net. Steven Vedro, M.A., is a graduate of the Inner Focus School for Advanced Energy Healing (www.innerfocus.org) and the Possibilities DNA Vocational Program (www.possibilitiesdna.com), and is an initiated New Warrior in the Mankind Project (www.mpk.org). He works as a communications technology consultant to schools, universities, and educational television stations. Steven is committed to the work of helping us reconnect to the earth, to our higher selves, to our Spirit, and offers weekend workshops on using the metaphors of communications to align and empower the chakras. He can be reached at srvconsult@charter.net. Copyright © 2002 Steven Ray Vedro |
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Aug 2004 |
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