The Inner Anatomy
Glimpses of deep introspection.
Since childhood I have had an inward experience of “energy,” or consciousness, that is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t share it. Writing about it is like trying to describe one of the five senses — smell, for example — to an audience who may not have consciously experienced it. If you would, please imagine, for a moment, how you might go about describing smell to someone who can’t relate, or to a whole audience of people who may believe that the sense of smell doesn’t exist. Imagine that to them, perhaps, you’re making it up, or you’re delusional, given to fantasy or suggestion. How do you explain the sense of smell?
Generally, it’s easier not to. It’s easier just to live with a private “extra sense” that most others don’t consciously experience. But I know that everyone can start to realize this inner sense, and that it’s fundamental to deep meaning and connectedness. From experience, this inner awareness is much more essential even than any of the physical senses, and is worth describing even if it’s difficult for many to relate to. While it may be hard to understand at first glance, perhaps such description can serve as a brief guide or impulse to inner exploration, facilitating the way for others.
As I look inward, I feel energy — intense stimulation, and motion or vibration — centered in certain parts of the body. Over time I have learned that these places where the energy is centered do not correspond exactly to major parts of the nervous system or body. They do, however, correspond to Hindu diagrams of the chakras and the subtle body. At the very base of my spine, in my lower stomach, in my solar plexus, in my chest, in my throat, in my head, and on the very top of my head (sometimes a strange place for sensation, because it feels like it’s a bit above the top of my head), I perceive points from which consciousness emanates, like alpha cities on a map from which all roads radiate. If I observe these energetic centers, “moving into them” with my awareness, I “see” that they are shaped like funnels, or flowers. I can “look into them” endlessly, down the rabbit hole, as it were. They are like flowers blooming infinitely out of themselves — funnels that run inward ceaselessly. The center (which is boundless), I can perceive, is the core of my being and the source of inner life. When I look into it deeply, I feel more alive, and the world around me becomes more vivid, more present. There is an indescribably profound sense of vibrancy, peace, warmth and meaning in that center that could be called “the divine.”
The chakras themselves, or the “petals of the flower,” are a sort of energetic membrane. They reach out from that divine center. Because those chakras are centers or nodes of consciousness, they are the source of my perception and experience of the world. What I experience most readily in a normal, waking state tends to occur on the surface of the chakras — on the tips of the petals of the flowers, as it were. What is more obscure and unconscious in me (it’s a continuous spectrum) exists further into the chakras, closer to the center. So if I move inward with my awareness, directing my focus into those inner flowers, I encounter repressed or unconscious emotion.
That unconsciously held emotion presents itself as tears or twists in the energetic membrane, or inner “petals” of the chakras. As I meditate on them, bringing my awareness deeply into them, energy from the center of the chakras moves into the twists or tears, “mending” them. (I put many words in quotation marks because, given the lack of language we have to describe deep internal reality, I do what I can with general words that best approach inner perception.) The twists or tears are not physical but energetic — like distortions in an energy or magnetic field — and moving energy into them resolves them. This is, I sense, the real power of resolution in therapy : through speaking from these conflicted, deeper places in ourselves, we become conscious of them, and that consciousness itself acts upon them (whether or not we have any awareness of such subtle activity).
This is what I experience if I’m looking very attentively inward. If I don’t focus so intently, I experience all of these energetic distortions as emotions. I suspect that most people do have an inner awareness, but since we do not learn to explore and name inner objects with the same attention that we do the “external” world, we only experience them vaguely as emotions.
In some parts of the chakras there are deep twists. Some of them are so deep that when I focus on them, I feel that I am “sucked in.” Conscious awareness cannot resolve them easily, and constant attention is required. It feels like wading through a swamp. Inwardly, I am intending to resolve a deep depression in an energy field, but any energy I move into it is immediately absorbed and seems to have no meaningful effect (it does, though, just very subtly). Such deep distortions take lots of patience and working through — lots of energy to resolve. I sense in others that much of what is experienced as depression is some variation of this occurrence. There can be, genuinely, a deep energetic depression in the self that can, for a time, overwhelm conscious intent to resolve it.
Because the chakras are centers of perception, focusing intently on one or another also slightly shifts my “mode of perception,” or paradigm, if you will. This is basically impossible to describe, but sitting in the same place, I can perceive subtle differences (because I connect with different things) in the room around me as I observe from different chakras. Clearly, we are all experiencing subtly different realities (that change slightly with time), which I understand to be principally conditioned by the energetic formations within each of our chakras.
This notion of an “infinite funnel” that I perceive through inward attention is reflected in many spiritual traditions across the world. In Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, mandalas are a metaphysical symbol for the cosmos and a support for meditation (probably because the image parallels inner reality). In Christianity, the rose window is seen on many cathedrals, with its center representing Christ (or the divine), surrounded by saints and prophets (symbolically less profound or inwardly central than Christ). The Shamseh motif in Persian art represents a divine center out of which small circles or petals emanate, representing creatures in different proximity to divinity. The enso circle in zen symbolizes enlightenment. Many Native American cultures depict a “sacred circle” or “medicine wheel” whose center represents the Creator, and whose circumference represents various natural elements or directions.
More recently, Carl Jung brought the mandala to popularity in the Western world, writing about it often as a central symbol in psychological integration. “The mandala,” he wrote, “is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the Self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man.” (Memories, Dreams and Recollections, pp. 334–335.) As an image of the inner world, the mandala directs one to unconsciously connect with deeper, inward reality. “Most mandalas have an intuitive, irrational character and, through their symbolical content, exert a retroactive influence on the unconscious. They therefore possess a ‘magical’ significance, like icons, whose possible efficacy was never consciously felt by the patient.” (Jung, Mandala Symbolism, p. 77.)
Jung also noted that mandalas are spontaneously created, cross-culturally, by psyches seeking integration. “In view of the fact that all mandalas shown here were new and uninfluenced products, we are driven to the conclusion that there must be a transconscious disposition in every individual which is able to produce the same or very similar symbols at all times and in all places.” (Mandala Symbolism, p. 100.) And renowned Jungian psychologist Marie Louise von Franz wrote about the purpose of the mandala in reordering the psyche, and its creative power. “The mandala serves a conservative purpose — namely, to restore a previously existing order. But it also serves the creative purpose of giving expression and form to something that does not yet exist, something new and unique… The process is that of the ascending spiral, which grows upward while simultaneously returning again and again to the same point.” (Marie Louise von-Franz, Jung: Man and His Symbols, p. 225.) It seems that for those who don’t have a clear experience of this inward sense, the mandala, as a physical representation of inner objects, can serve as an entry point or impulse to (even unconscious) inner movement.
Beyond spiritual and psychological representation, the infinite sphere, with life as its center, is a form we see throughout nature. Flowers and trees are an obvious example, growing, dying, and regenerating from a central root. Spherical fruits or vegetables, like oranges or cabbages, grow from the center. Some shells spiral outward, as do some plants like aloe. Birds make nests, with ovular eggs kept and warmed in the center. The occurrences are endless when we start to think of them. Even in outer space, we see similar forms abound, like planets, stars, black holes, spiral galaxies and spiral magnetic fields. Certainly, a sphere seems to be some fundamental organizing principle in the universe, both within and without us (Blaise Pascal, the mathematician and philosopher, echoed the statement first made by an unknown author in the medieval Book of the 24 Philosophers, “nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”).
Of course, in a world that has acquired vast bodies of knowledge through empirical observation (the scientific method relies exclusively on the five senses for confirmation of hypotheses), central to the technologies of daily life, there can be discomfort reading claims of some “inner reality” that can’t be detected by today’s science. Even much of contemporary psychology, for example, has ceased to recognize, or at least direct its focus towards, such deep inner realms, as quantitative, “hard” data is increasingly favored. I certainly appreciate the power of the scientific method to enable the creation of so many useful technologies and to dispel a lot of ignorance and bigotry, and the honest observation revered by scientists is clearly invaluable.
That said, the empiricism (the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived by the physical senses) implicit in the scientific worldview is itself a bias, and a personal belief — one that deep, dispassionate, and continued observation of inward reality comes to dispel. It would be wonderful to see the birth of a world that reveres honest dispassion in both external and internal observation, and makes a sincere attempt to integrate and reconcile both visions of reality. As we find ourselves with so much knowledge of the world around us, there is still much to discover. We have only to open our minds to realize that there may be more to reality than our current collective paradigms are equipped to consider. In such a spirit of open-minded reflection, what might we find looking within?
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