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294 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
phasis on the purification of character and mastering of desire, by restraining consciousness from being attracted to the sensory and material world. The development of high moral character is the essential ingredient in yoga’s way of raising consciousness.
THE CHAKRAS
It is thought that by disciplined moral observances, physical postures and exercises, breath-control exercises, or pranayam (the breath of life), focusing inward, chanting mantras or holy sounds, meditation on spiritual symbols and inner experiences, and devotional practices, an individual can liberate his kundalini. As it ascends, certain areas along the spine, called chakras, are in turn awakened by it and become centers of organized energy systems. These centers serve as contact points between inner and outer energies (Stanford physicist William Tiller calls them transducers) and determine the quality of consciousness by regulating the individual’s development on all levels, including biological, emotional, mental, moral and spiritual.
While the chakras have been written about by Hindu yogis for thousands of years, more recently mystics and clairvoyants in the West have claimed to be able to see these energy force fields—located not in the physical, but the etheric body, thought to exist coincident with its physical counterpart. This energy system has also been receiving attention from noted scientists like Dr. Tiller. He includes the chakras in his scientific model of how the human body evolves in response to the radiation of energy and information from the environment. He refers to the etheric body as the “negative space time frame body” and sees each of the bodies acting as a “tuned circuit” in which one may tap energy from the cosmos or communicate with another aspect of self. In Breakthrough to Creativity, Dr. Shafica Karagulla, Los Angeles neuropsychiatrist, describes in fascinating detail the chakras as seen by “sensitives” with whom she has worked— people with highly developed sensory or extrasensory powers.
As mentioned above, kundalini is an energy distinct from either primary life force or prana (vitality). Leadbeater likens the difference between prana and kundalini as follows:
Kundalini is a terrific burning fire of the underworld. This fiery power, as it is called in The Voice of the Silence, is in very truth