Tantra IV - vii Cakras & Reality

A remaining question is whether cakras (or chakras) are a 'real' phenomenon or not. By real, do we mean that they can be scientifically, that is experimentally, validated? In fact, this is non-question because no inner experience, experience of consciousness reflecting upon itself in real time, can be validated by experimental or scientific method. Even brain scans tell us nothing in this respect. The question can be re-cast as whether the experience of cakras or the tool of cakras for instrumental purposes is real for the participant as part of a methodology for transformation.

Under this different definition of the real, something is real enough if it is felt as sufficiently real by the participant. We may even enter a new zone of 'reality', one sitting between the individual's felt experience (which may be dysfunctionally insane) and the experimentally evidenced reality of science (which contains no intrinsic meaning in itself until it is made use of). In this 'middling area', reality is just what is socially or culturally accepted by many people or even all people at a particular time as a valid description of their experience or tool for change. The efficacy of human sacrifice becomes real at this level even though science would indicate its absurdity and the individual who stood against it be labelled as insane or criminal.

The degree to which a thing experienced as real diverges from the empirical evidence of the senses or as mediated by science is the degree to which we conventionally consider an idea as more or less absurd. We can now develop a matrix of competing realities regardless of these claims of absurdity. Along one axis is the degree to which a feeling or a tool accords not merely with scientific materiality but is functional with that reality - that is, it effects ends within that reality. Along another axis is the degree to which something is felt to be real and permits the person to function as an integral self. Another axis represents social reality. I must emphasise the continuum aspect and that personal functionality or dysfunctionaliy is not matched necessarily by social functionality or dysfunctionality. We soon find ourselves with an extended set of possible realities which overlap and meld into one another at the margins.

• A: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world in the world with no functionality social or personal
• B: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world but socially functional and personally functional
• C: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world and socially functional but not personally functional
• D: Ideas that are reasonably false in the world and personally functional but not socially functional
• E: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world with no functionality social or personal
• F: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world but socially and personally functional
• G: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world and personally functional but not socially functional
• H: Ideas that are reasonably uncertain in the world and socially functional but not personally functional
• I: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world but with no functionality social or personal
• J: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world and are socially and personally functional
• K: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world and personally functional but not socially functional
• L: Ideas that are reasonably true in the world and socially functional but not personally functional.

There are two points to make here. The first is that functionality (the practical use value of the concept) is not the same as the truth value of a concept (except to people who find a use for truth values). The functionality arises out of personal happiness and security or desire or need or value or social commitment or order or value or whatever arises from within itself as society - or individual. The truth value of a concept (whether it stands up to scrutiny, reasonably speaking, as a description of the world) may also be irrelevant to functionality - a belief in fairies may be more functional to some anxious individuals and societies than bridge-building skills that are rooted in the laws of physics. There are facts about the world that impact not a jot on the world.

The reasonableness of a truth statement is important here because we need to withdraw from absolute scepticism in order to be able to say anything useful about a 'fact' and its relationship to functionality. A reasonably false statement about the world is that unicorns exist (though they may exist in the future through imaginative bio-engineering). A reasonably uncertain statement is that there is some kind of God who triggered the Big Bang - my belief that this is nonsense is just a belief so it becomes a reasonably uncertain idea. And a reasonably true statement is that a nuclear weapon can be created by the application of engineering in the context of demonstrable scientific laws.

Cakras are represented in the category of uncertain truths because, though they have no clear physical presence in the body, they are felt to be present by individuals, whether socially mediated or not, so the question quickly moves on to their social or individual functionality. The cakras are really a sub-set of other 'felt' uncertain truths - that of life force, vital energy, lines of energy transmission and so on. Vitalism is an uncertain truth that horrifies sceptical scientists and may reasonably be regarded as without scientific basis but it also represents a 'poetical' felt experience for many individuals with distinct functions (describing the otherwise indescribable sensations involved in the management of the body and as a tool for using the mind to manage perception and sensation in the process of individual transformation).

Whether it has a social functionality depends on the gaps left by other uncertainties - science may eliminate some or all uncertainties at some stage and remove the need for analogical thinking if it can effect the necessary transformations through rational acts based on reasonably true facts. Progress is largely about this process so the Taoist who imbibed mercury to extend his life into immortality was merely misguided a thousand years ago but would be an idiot today. Whether people who believe in cakras in a thousand years time will be classed as idiots is for the future but, today, an uncertain fact is a reasonable basis for human action where there are no reasonable facts and where there is a reasonable precautionary principle about possible harms (there appear to be no reasonably possible harms in relation to cakras other than the risk that radical believers in such matters might conceivably rely on the uncertain facts of the case not to go and see a doctor).

This is a long way around to saying that, whereas the cosmic consciousness feeling has been pointed out to be so uncertain as to be in danger of making the transforming individual dysfunctional in the world by offering an illusory explanation for experiences far more likely to be triggered by brain chemistry, our attitude to the cakras and vitalism as practical poetics should be different because they are not ends but means, the technology of transformation. This distinction between ends and means is critical. An illusory end will block transformation whereas any means that works, even if illusory or uncertain (so long as not demonstrably false or harmful) is real as 'technology' so long as the means do not slip into the status of being ends or become confused with the ends. This thinking is not so very distant from Chaos Magick admittedly but the point is that, in the condition of uncertainty where, in terms of the lack of reasonably true statements, and to quote Wittgenstein again, "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen", then poetics, analogical thinking and myth become important as the sole means of ordering uncertainty functionally.

The problem is that, once this is accepted, the individual functionality of myth and poetry becomes ossified by neurotics into religion, that is, it becomes shifted from individual to social functionality. I would argue in the strongest possible terms that social functionality should be based as much as possible and at all times on reasonably true facts - against ideology and religion - and myth and poetics and analogical thinking be left to the creative minds of the individual, the artist, the magician and the story teller. Standing guard against the intrusion of myth, poetics into public administration is the absolute defensive duty of all free men, just as standing against the intrusion of the public sphere into private fantasy and transformation must be resisted by all means necessary. The line between them, of course, is the territory of politics and a bloody territory it is too, but secularism on the one hand and libertarianism on the other need to be ever-watchful against the demand of priests and ideologues that society should be such-and-such and of public administrators solving their failures by imposing order on the home and the individual. In this sense, the darkest day in human history was the association of Constantine the Great with the Catholic Church.

Now we can return to the cakra within the tantric tradition. Here the mythology has a central energy centre and secondary sensory centres. The secondary sensory centres open out to materiality, the world outside ourselves. Of course, they are material tools for dealing with materiality but that is not how they are 'felt' by consciousness. The central energy centre is the sleeping core of the person - one might analogise here in terms of soul or unconscious if one wished - and it is this core that has to be transformed into something new, effectively a new way of ordering the world in order to be more individually functional. There is tension here between the habits of the senses and the actual nature of the core,

An analogy is given of taste and fruit. The pleasure of tasting a fruit in itself is not intense enough to trigger access to the core of the person. However, an attitude of mind towards the fruit could (theoretically) enable insights into the core. The insights could trigger the experience of which we have been writing throughout this series. It might be useful now to see that though a fruit doing this may be unlikely, the sexual act is less so. The process is seen as a reversal by which the senses draw in the world as it is experienced as raw material for the inner experience whose energy surges back through the body and into those sense organs from whence 'it transforms the world', that is transforms our perception of the world and, therefore, the world. Poetics are associated with imagery and art and so we have the meeting of two triangles [yogini and siddha] at completion of the act. Tantra also describes the experience in ways we can all understand in terms of a perfect union that meets at the heart. In the 'real world', the actual heart, though affected, is far from central to the act of sexual union but it is what is 'felt' of the silent working elsewhere in the world - functionally, the felt experience in the heart speaks for the experience as a whole. This is not romanticism but felt experience and so real.