Nature’s Two Basic Forces
There are two basic forces in the universe, which you can look up in the dictionary. One is called odic force. The other is actinic force. Odic force is magnetic force. Odic force is the force of collective energies that make things—trees, chairs, tables, houses, the physical body. Odic force is of the material world—dense and heavy. The aura around the physical body and the forces of nature which govern much of man’s life on Earth are odic force.
Actinic force is your pure life force coming from the central source deep within, out through the nerve system. But as soon as this pure life force begins to mingle with the astral atoms and the physical body atoms, it turns to odic force. The study of these two forces can give you a great awakening—two primal forces.
The sahasrāra chakra, the ājñā chakra, the viśuddha chakra—the top three, the head and throat centers—are primarily actinic force centers of rarefied inner consciousness within the superconscious itself. The anāhata chakra, the heart center, which allows us to look out into the external world and within to the internal areas, is primarily a mixture of actinic force and odic force. It’s called actinodic. It’s a mixture of these two forces. However, the lower three chakras—maṇipūra, svādhishṭhāna and mūlādhāra—are primarily odic force chakras. They are the forces that make up what we call the world.
The iḍā and piṅgalā forces are basically odic forces. So, therefore, when the odic force is withdrawn back into the sushumṇā, back into its actinic substance, we completely lose awareness of the external world. That is how we enter meditation, by withdrawing the odic forces. The prāṇa is the in-between. It is the actinodic force that flows in and through odic and actinic forces. It is the binder of these two forces.
But it’s easier to relate to the word odic and the word actinic and compare these two forces, because you can feel them through your physical body. Lift your arm. The movement of the spirit within is actinic force, and all the rest that happens is odic force, including the arm itself, the vibrations around the arm. They’re all odic force. The mixture of what is going on is actinodic force, which is the closest, in looking at it in this way, that we come to prāṇa.
When we are in actinic force and we are aware of it, we have harmony, we have peace in all aspects of our external life. Everything goes right and everyone sees eye to eye and finds points of agreement, one with another. There’s no argument, and there’s no confusion. However, when we become conscious in and awareness is flowing through the odic force realms, awareness actually thinks it is odic force. Then we have inharmonious conditions to live in. No one sees eye to eye, one with another. There’s argument, and there is contention.
Look at these chakras as vast fields of collective related and interrelated thought realms, like vast cities, and look at awareness as the traveler through these chakras. When you are flowing awareness through one of these vast energy fields of actinodic force or actinic force, with these thought or perceptive layers within it, you think a certain way as you hit each of these strata of thought. Think of it in that way. As you travel through, the nerve ganglia within the spinal cord are registering all this and bringing what you are experiencing into your immediate consciousness. You become aware of it through the nerve ganglia within the spine.
Through a mixture of actinic and odic force, willpower and awareness motivate the travels through these layers of the mind. When the nerve force does begin to register when you’re in a certain chakra, it begins to vibrate, and it throws off color and it throws off sound, and then, within you, you do see these disc-like wheels spinning. I have experienced that. I have seen them, and they’re just like they are represented in the picture books, but much more vivid. They have sounds—in fact, they’re quite noisy—because color and sound and energy are all the same thing in the inner realms, and that is how they have produced these images that you see in books on mysticism and occultism. However, they are greater than that. They are great energy fields in the inner man, and they flow. They are what make up people. The physical body has a connection to each one of these seven chakras, though you may not be aware of all of them—you may only be aware in one of them or two of them—and that is the way you think.