Closing the Door To Lower Realms
When at the moment of death you enter the astral plane, you only are in the consciousness of the chakras that were most active within you during the later part of your lifetime and, accordingly, you function in one of the astral lokas until the impetus of these chakras is expended. It is the chakras that manufacture the bodies. It is not the body that manufactures the chakras. Since you have fourteen chakras, at least three are the most powerful in any one individual—for example, memory, will and cognition. Each chakra is a vast area of the mind, or a vast collective area of many, many different thought strata. Generally, most people who gather together socially, intellectually or spiritually are flowing through the same predominant chakra, or several of them collectively. Therefore, they are thinking alike and share the same perspective in looking at life.
The chakras exist as nerve ganglia that have a direct impact on organs in the physical body, as psychic nerve ganglia in the astral body and as spinning disks of consciousness in the body of the soul, ānandamaya kośa. The power to close off the lower chakras—to seal off the doorway at the lower end of the sushumṇā—exists only when the soul is presently incarnated in a physical body. All fourteen chakras, plus seven more above and within the sahasrāra, are always there. It is up to the individual to lift consciousness from one to another through right thought, right speech, right action, showing remorse for errors committed, performing regular sādhana, worship, pilgrimage and heeding other instructions the satguru or swāmī might offer for personal guidance. All this and more teaches the prāṇas of consciousness, and most importantly, individual awareness, the art of flowing up through the higher centers through the process of closing off the lower ones.
Spiritual unfoldment is not a process of awakening the higher chakras, but of closing the chakras below the mūlādhāra. Once this happens, the aspirant’s consciousness slowly expands into the higher chakras, which are always there. The only thing that keeps the lower chakras closed is regular sādhana, japa, worship and working within oneself. This is demonstrated by the fact that even great yogīs and ṛishis who have awakened into the higher chakras continue to do more and more sādhana. They are constantly working to keep the forces flowing through the higher centers so that the lower ones do not claim their awareness.
Now, all of this perhaps seems very complex and esoteric. But these are aspects of our nature that we use every day. We use our arms and hands every day without thinking. If we study the physiology of the hands, we encounter layer after layer of intricate interrelationships of tissues, cells, plasma. We examine the engineering of the structural system of bones and joints, the energy transmission of the muscular system, the biochemistry of growth and healing, the biophysics of nerve action and reaction. Suddenly a simple and natural part of human life, the function of the hands, seems complex. Similarly, we use the various functions of consciousness, the chakras, every day without even thinking about them. But now we are studying them in their depths to gain a more mature understanding of their nature.
Actually, there are more chakras above and within the sahasrāra. Buddhist literature cites thirty-two chakras above. Āgamic Hindu tradition cites seven levels of the rarefied dimensions of Paranāda, the first tattva, as chanted daily by hundreds of thousands of priests during pūjā in temples all over the world. Their names are: vyāpinī, vyomāṅga, anantā, anāthā, anāśṛitā, samanā and unmanā. I have experienced these higher chakras or nāḍīs, as they are in this subtle region, as conglomerates of nāḍīs. These force centers are not exactly chakras, as they are not connected to any organ or part of the physical body. They are chakras or nāḍīs of the body of the soul, which when developed as a result of many, many, many Paraśiva experiences, slowly descend into the mental and astral bodies. The mental body becomes permanently different in its philosophical outlook, and the astral body begins to absorb and be transformed by the golden body, or svarṇaśarīra.