Sex, Porn and the Return of the Divine Feminine

What is a woman?  Is the Divine Feminine only in women?  What is sex, as an act?  What is porn?  Why should we care?  What does Love have to do with any of this?

As a man, I have definite views.   As a 72 year-old man, father of five, with multiple marriages and relationships, I also have definite experiences of all this.  As a social scientist, recognizing the world is both matter and spirit, I have studied on this, and formed a quite definite philosophy or way of thinking about all of this.  My business card, after retirement, reads: social philosopher ... and occasional fool.

I wrote a poem a few months ago.  I was surprised, for when I wrote it I got up in the early hours of the day - a time when I am usually more "randy", left my girl friend in bed, sat at my computer and began to type what became: The Mystery of Lust.  Here it is in printed words, and here it is read as a video on my Youtube Channel: "the foolish philosopher".

Poetic thinking is often a wonder.  As a sometimes poet and a practiced philosopher, where thinking wanders in different circumstances of life is often mysterious.  Many are the surprises.  Thoughts come that were never there before.  Self-knowledge of the own mind reveals that we create the new thoughts during an act of thinking that is often perceptual.  There is a science here which is both moral and artistic.  What I wrote was at that time new understanding and knowledge, - created and recorded while at the same time perceiving with the thinking.  A former teacher of mine (Carl Stegmann), called this art: clair-thinking, meaning a new kind of perceptual clairvoyance, which was no longer tied to the older visionary "seeing", but was rather a natural product of thinking experienced in its highest modern potential.

the image above is from my Underworld Temple, in my basement ... the objects in the foreground rest on an altar/mantle above the hearth/fireplace there -
these objects are symbolic representations that arose, not through a contemplation of pure ideas, but through the artistic and aestheic elements already resident in my thinking

The Holy Mother can be experienced/perceived in the Root of the World.  Classical English goddess religions recognized this realm as the Underworld - or the Realm of Faerie.  The "dark" of the world of human material and spiritual existence is ruled by the Mother, with a circle of companions, in a Golden Realm on the otherside of what Rudolf Steiner called the Nine Inner Spheres of the Earth - the realm of the fallen light, fallen chemical, fallen life ethers, where arises electricity and magnetism for example.  Here is some verse with which I began my book: The Mystery of Evil in the Light of the Sermon on the Mount:

In the moist dark of the Earth,
ancient sacred powers rest and then pour forth.
The Mother lives there in a circle with the wise,
and all that is of earthly dark or wrong
bows before Shes which cannot themselves be tamed.
She lives and rules there, the true Mistress of the
Uncreated, the Formless,
from which the Son of Light Itself was/is born,
out of Intercourse with the Father, who
then gave Himself  in seed to All,
so that each part has as its secret/sacred heart a piece
of Him and Her
This the very Stars sing in remembered Glory.
But still She seeks for unity,  throughout Eternity - to be
folded once more in the Arms of Her Lover/Our Father,
bringing Peace to all just by Her presence.
That is the Promise ... that all the seeds -
all the Children - would once more come to rest
in the Holy Womb of the Mother,
wrapped about with the Arms of Grace of the Father,
holding and surrounding All, forever and ever and ever.
Amen

A look again, at the symbol/picture above my altar/mantle, will show the Mother, holding the Son (a section of a larger work: Raphael's Madonna), surrounded by a starry field based on the Zodiac.  The other symbols we will look at later, as they are drawn forth from an examination of the thinking/perceptual knowledge exposed during the writing of the poem: "The Mystery of Lust".  This experience of the writing of that poem begins with me surrendering to the feelings of lust, which I am near to each morning on awakening (the "randy" element).  I explore the feelings, and render them into words as I explore them.  The classical metaphor is to view such as layers of an onion, but my view is that this is actually the layers of the inner earth, seen during a descent into the power of lust. 

About the "inner earth": We make a conceptual mistake if we think here in three dimension, such as the  typical layered onion metaphor provides.  Inner, in the true sense, is like our own inwardness - where we go when we study the "territory" of the mind, as it presents itself to us via thinking, feeling and impulses of will.  These are "interior" experiences, but not akin to a spacial three dimensional world.  We are transcending the three dimensions, passing through a realm of pure space, which is two dimensional - the imagination, and then into a timeless and spacesless realm which is one dimensional, but actually not in "space" or "time" at all.  A pure geometric "point" has no spacial existence. 

When the modern physicist imagines a place where gravity becomes near absolute (the so-called "black hole"), he accidentally stumbles on the transition out of our matter based universe and into the purely spiritual realms, which are timeless and spaceless.  This is the realm of the uncreated and unformed, and from that point of view the Big Bang does make sense, for during the moment of Fiat Lux (let there be light), the Creation does begin to occupy space and time.  Before that, however, we have the first words of Genisis in the Old Testament: 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

God, in this sense, was both Masculine (the Father) and Feminine (the Mother), such that they acted together (verse one) by first separating into Heaven and Earth, with the Father living among the  realms behind the stars, and the Mother living in the "deep" or the spiritual origin of "earthness".   As we examine the "feeling" of "lust", expressed in the poem, we will drawn near to the secrets hidden right inside our own nature, on a path Rudolf Steiner tried to describe in his work Anthroposophy - a fragment.

The Path we are then about to take, in a more didactic form, is through the feelings with which I began the poem.  What was discovered on this path was something hidden in the feelings - something in their depth, which consciousness can only discover by paying careful attention over time to the more and more subtle nature of the feelings.  Under the gaze of our thinking, these "feelings" flower - what is in the beginning more dream-like becomes instead more conscious and more clear.  This happens because the human being is the microcosm, as against the macrocosm - that is the whole Universe.  We are the little universe which is an analogue of the great Universe, so in our "feelings" we can discover insight into the depths of the whole.  But ... only by remaining with these feelings and riding them as it were into their secrets which lie actually in plain (in)sight.

So I began [comments added, which were not in the original poem, are in brackets]:

In the dark of deep night

I want to have her

to own her body

to possess it

[Here I accept my "Lust", my hunger, yet continue to describe its characteristics without judging them ....]

I want to become engorged

and penetrate every orifice,

and I want, I used to suspect, to sin

I need to dominate

to control

to satisfy any sexual hunger

I don’t always want to romance

or to be gentle

or tender

or slow

or careful

what is most worst

is this Hunger

this Lust

this near unfathomable need

includes wanting her to give in to me

completely of her own free will

[Lust is an urge rooted in what is sometimes called: a lower chakra.  The soul has seven energy centers, and those below the heart are seldom explored, especially in Anthroposophy, which wants to most always pay homage to the higher impulses.  The lower impulses are not dealt with, except indirectly.  Yet, they have always been the cause of much religious poetry about desire, such as "The Song of Solomon".  The key to this exploration remains staying with the feelings, without judging them ... and a point to be noted here is that the American Soul is particularly suited to the spiritual scientific  study of the lower chakras.  This is because America, geographically, is the most spiritually dense and materialistic realm on the surface of the Earth Sphere, as understood in a spiritual sense.  Everywhere when we investigate America, as a realm of soul and spirit in the Threefold World, we find a necessity to deal with the dark - with the Underworld.  The classic example of this is the origin and meaning of the creation of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which began here in 1933, - which is a spiritual Path via the dark and into the roots of the dark:

The first stage of this threefold total process is surrender.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol -- that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

The Path to the Mother is through surrender, and this spiritual reality expresses itself everywhere in human existence .... to return to the poem:]

I need her surrender

her submission

her yin to my yang

I need her to want to be dominated

and hungered for

in all the raw ways possible

everything I can ask

she must choose to give

yet, this is not about debasement

how can Lust debase what is freely given?

nor is it about power

I want no power over her at all

for I too want to surrender

to give into the Lust

to embrace the untempered Hunger

yet not be there, in that dark seeming place

of raw Lust

- alone

[Lust experienced this Way is a bit scary - our culture fears and dislikes much here, and we are social beings and thus often the prisoners of social expectations ...]

I want, need, her company

in the dark deeps of the night

when the Hunger is aroused

Not only that I want her to urge

me on

take me she must say

have me she must say

possess me

own me

she is to open to me

to spread her arms and her legs

and lay back

and tell me to penetrate her

devour her

my hungry mouth

everywhere

or she turns herself over

and demands

I go into her

from behind

[This is also a journey of confession.  I can't write the poem and pretend not to have what are generally described culturally as carnal or "base desires" ...]

the Lust

must burn through both of us

taking away all inhibitions

all resistance

for in this burning the Lust is pure some way ...

how can that be?

[Now I come to a cusp - I've accepted the seeming dark or base element of desire, and sought not to judge it, but to find the mystery there hidden in the lower chakras - how can my perception that the Lust is somehow pure be justified?  What am I now sensing with my thinking/perceiving as it descends into the realm of pure desire - into the depths of "the hunger"?]

a primal power of the creation is appearing

a need for uniting that overcomes all reluctance

where the resisting mind fades away

and even the body itself surrenders

to all sensation both inner and outer

to all urgent demand

to plant the seed

within her

to plow her

and plunder her

and shower her

[Here we have glimmer of something, a hint appears ... the power of Lust is felt - what is the nature of that "power"?]

nor is this a gesture of animalness

this is the urge for pure generation

for combining egg and seed

electric and magnetic and atomic

is this desire, this Lust, this Hunger

this is not sin in fact

but something holy

something divine

we are making something together ...

[The more I let my consciousness linger in this thinking/perceptual/sense of the "primal power" underlying Lust, the more the true nature of this "power" expands and reveals itself ... a kind of spiritual intercourse is happening between my I's will (intention and attention) and the realm of personal microcosmic "feeling", which itself resonates in harmony with the macrocosmic world]

we are making a new body

a new avatar

for a new person

to inhabit

for the fire of the Lust comes

also from outside us

from the spirit of the child who needs and wants

a physical body in which to be born

there are three of us here now 

we two, male and female

past and present

making a beginning place

a first iteration of a house

meant to become a temple

for the mystery of the future-other

the one who can’t come from their star

and descend into

incarnation

[The basic meaning of the power is made more clear now - for there is another involved ... it is not just my Lust and her Lust, but the Lust of a third ...]

until we surrender to its Lust

for earthly life

that flows over and around us

penetrating us

this Other-Hunger wants to

have us

to own us

to possess us

and needs us to submit to

he/she/it

the gate into physical life

is through Lust,

through the overriding

all consuming

Hunger of the spirit to

be in flesh

[We seem to be at the bottom of the meaning of desire, but not yet quite ... something more demands expression ...]

Even the Gods knew this, for the poet sang:

"And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us"

[The deep secret experienced ... God wanted to be Flesh too!  Months later this this insight expanded, when coupled with some other experienced ideas here: 

The Creator became human and then went through the gate of death, because He could not ask of us something He could not himself do - namely be human.  Many people believe falsely that the Passion is something we did to Christ.  It is not.  The Passion is the mirror image of something humans do to themselves as a result of the Fall into Matter.  Christ follows us in living out this Passion.  It is our Passion for material existence that He imitates.] 

Is not each child to be born

its own spirit/word?

[Christ is one of us ... we are kin to Him ... but this awakens a sense of Christianity, which is a religion that is not necessarily Christ endowed ...]

no wonder St. Paul

feared the power of the Hunger

the freedom of the physical earthly body

to surrender to the non-earthly spirit

to submit to the needs of the body

seemed to him to give up his power and freedom,

not realizing that nothing that exists

is outside of Gods’ Love, in all their holy glory

so then did the Church too

born in Paul’s confusion

Lust was a power

they sought to control but could not

so they stole it for a time,

from nuns  and monks

and made little fake temples they

called monasteries and nunneries,

but which were not true temples

for their purpose was to possess

the Lust,

to transmute and transform it and

to own its generative and creative powers thus changed

for the Church itself

without the captured primal passions of the Religious,

the Church had no moral heart

[I had known this, in a way for a long time, but only when I had penetrated to the depths of the generative power itself, could I then see what spirit possessed the Catholic (universal) Religion, under the influence of the Roman Church ...]

the primal Hunger of life to begat life

was given no room for its natural expression,

and in the end this coerced celibacy

could not defeat the holy and sacred

nature of Lust for Life,

yet by the Church’s capture was so deformed and transmuted

it became in some a true source of evil

masked as love

the Church also sought to confine

procreation to the marriage bed

but Lust was not to be bound

or controlled there either

when the spirit needed to incarnate in matter

it came, regardless of authorities

lost in fear or the need to dominate

which is why men and women came sometimes to fear it

to fear to surrender to it,

and began to name something holy

and so powerful a sin

[Lust became lost for a time ... not necessarily forgotten, but lost ...]

but the old goddess religions knew this power,

knew the significance of generation

celebrated it,

and embraced it

[Yet, there are consequences even in our time, for the error at the founding of the Roman Church propagated itself through the ages ...]

we moderns think to call the priestesses

and priests of the holy arts of Lust

temple prostitutes

and from our warped time and point of view

made of Lust and raw desire

something wrong

[Now my "in"sight becomes deep enough to see the consequences throughout Western Civilization of our loss, via the Roman Church, of the knowledge and acceptance of the generative powers ... in point of fact the scale of these consequences are wider than mere Christianity ...]

when the patriarchs took social control

thousands of years ago, and manufactured

the monotheistic religions dominated by

male gods

then did maleness through fear of the generative spirit,

fear of Lust,

and its threefold partnership:

male, female and incarnating child

introduced then all the horrible distortions

of holy human sexuality 

that we call porn

or abortions

or contraception

or genital mutilation

[Ignorance here is not bliss!  Distrust of the generative spirit - the loss of the Mysteries of the Divine Feminine is costly ...]

Oh, the Churches tried,

the religions tried

the male dominated priesthoods tried

but the primal powers of creation

were not theirs to possess

Lust belongs to itself,

and we can only surrender to it

and submit in wonder

and in awe

when in freedom the male and the female

through arts of mutual provocation and intoxication

let in the Hunger

of the incarnating spirit

seeking a body in which to enter into earthly existence

so it can rush earthward headlong from its star

toward the stage of life

this world, and the needed company of

we billions

so as to dance and sing

and play

[Something very simple had disappeared from our self understanding of what it means to be human - something fundamental as well, when we forgot the meaning of the generative power ...]

while He reminds us gently of this truth of innocence ...

lest ye become again as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven

for Lust is adult play of the highest sort

a surrender to the world of sensation

which is also part of the Creation

We were not made to suffer

to resist the impulses for pleasure and joy

why else do we sing and dance in the temples

and shout and praise

[The confusions of the partriarchical monotheistic religions deny us a great deal we need to know ...]

the body is a temple,

lent to us by acts of Lust,

we are all from a father and a mother

we are all from our own star

seemingly hellbent to enter into the earth existence

to enter into the deeps of the body

but being not yet perfect

we descend partial and often lame

of soul

[Bereft of a truth we need, we suffer ... the presumed split between spirit and body festers ...]

the Hunger of the spirit

for incarnation in the avatar

temple of the physical body

includes the need to learn

to master self

to become something more

so we want to temper Lust and

hope that at its root it is Love,

which as a truth is surely divinely real

for the divine does not create in error ...

ever

[And a truth/secret long guarded keeps civilizations from appreciating what it means to be human ... a situation that will not be long tolerated]

even we humans do not error in the sense of sin,

we only make the mistakes of the unlearned,

the not yet wise ...

so the Lust and the Hunger

the joining of male and female

and child to be

in the generative act of procreation

is such a primal power that it cannot

and will not be confined by human

religious hectoring, which is too much Beam

and almost no Mote at all

[Thus begins the hate of women, the mistrust of what they alone bear as so easily aspects of the Divine Feminine, and even Mary, the Mother of God can only be seen in a small niche off to the side, while the broken Christ is Hung in the Front of the Church, and the Crucifixion without the Resurrection dominates for a time ...]

the Divine Mystery knows not rules

so why would it decree we adhere

to laws and commandments

an act the patriarchs of the monotheistic

religions decreed a sin in their twisted lust

for power and domination

over women

[The crime of men now exposed ... in its spiritual depths, although the sisterhood of women has known it for a very long time ...]

jealous of women’s power

to carry the child’s growing temple in their womb

and to be naturally a principle source of love

for this incarnating spirit-child during its whole life

these old men lorded their self-loved pain

over women, repressing them, for millennia

[A situation that cannot be accepted, however, ...]

but the spirit cannot be repressed

cannot be stilled, 

so today, in our Age

Lust bursts forth its chains and

women will not accept control of their

bodies, their temples

for their instinct is sure that something holy

is at risk,

and the twisted lusts of men for domination

must be fought ...

[The consequences of the dismissal of the Divine Feminine by the male dominated patriarchical monotheistic religions is too awful to be allowed to continue ...]

or all of us, male and female and child

will be ruined,

and hate of the temple of the body

will be thus fostered,

and hate of the independence of the spirit

will be thus fostered ...

and the modern World of we-billions

drowns in the raging seas of Karma

such that

a civilization must Fall to make room

for the next one

[Finally, the Greatest Secret is discovered ... with the perception that the idea of the generative power confined by the idea of raw Lust, has really cost us a true sense of the meaning of Eros Itself ...]

the Goddess religions honored the Father God,

but the godless monotheistic religions dishonored

the Mother God,

thus founding Western Civilization on a great Lie,

one so great that the Lord of the Dance Himself

had to come and die on a Cross

to lead us all toward Redemption

the Redemption of Eros,

the true name

of Lust and the Hunger for unity

of the primal power of generation 

to overcome separation

and help us seek a World made whole

and Holy once more

[But all confusion is not allowed to lead only to error - every evil is turned to good, and spiritual meaning can be found even in the loss of the right idea of Eros ...]

yet, why then abortion and porn

and genital dis-figuration and rape

and all the other crimes against women?

Because the ever and again incarnating spirit

voyaging  the ages and times from past to present

and into future - this reincarnating spirit, going from

one physical body avatar to another ...

learns only through strife and struggle

so that in our Age, we are faced

in the most direst of ways with

deep questions of moral confusion ...

[The Wheel of Time turns, the Divine Feminine begins to return, and human understanding gains even greater gifts than before ...]

the Lust and the Hunger, once managed

through social do’s and don’ts are now

ours alone to discipline ... and we will

only learn their mastery by trial and error

and through the alchemy of ups and downs

and choices ...

we are to be personally responsible for

what Eros, what Lust and the Hunger -

what the generative power of the creation -

does in our lives ...

these are our choices, and no religion

or any science can deny our freedom to determine

and rule them by ourselves ...

the gravitas of life is ours now to know ...

a great gift, in a mystery dance often

only captured in verse and song:

an “Amazing Grace” for all.

"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see."

[The poem ends, as it must, but not everything that could be said, could be said ...

Western Civilization, born in the time of anti-goddess urges for the domination of women by a male patriarchy, is dying.  As this "Western" civilization currently  dominates the world, so do other civilizations too have to Fall.  East, Center, West, North and South ... when the air comes out of one too-old Way of "seeing" the world, social life must change.  But something waits in the wings - the Divine Feminine returns - Eros returns. 

More and more women come to political power.  The resistance of the Roman Church to women priests crumbles.  The urge of human beings to emotionally merge, regardless of the nature of their sexual equipment, will not be denied.  For Eros is a form of Love.  Everywhere we look at modern social conditions we see the struggle for the Divine Feminine to emerge from It's prisons.  The feminist movement in America and elsewhere is an upswell from the deeps of this return.  It is a great Tide in the social life of humanity, which having receeded for a time, returns with great force.  Yet, this force is not itself raw power like out of the masculine "gun" in war, but of amelioration.  Women compromise, they do not compete.   They adjust and bend.  This is something soothing, and settling, the way a woman touches the forehead of a suffering child and calms its out of control passion.  This war-less soothing amelioration of human suffering is the Tide of the return of the Divine Feminine.

Love has Four Faces.  Selfless human Love; nurturing touching/holding Love; comradeship or sharing Love; and, erotic and sensual Love.  The ancient Greeks named the first Agape, the second, Storge, the third Phileo, and the last Eros.  The four faces form a natural Cross, for the Cross is not meant to mean only the crucifixion.  There doesn't have to be a dead and suffering body on the Cross in a Church.  A bodiless Cross can be a valid symbol of the Resurrection.

selfless human love (agape)

nurturing love (storge)       +       comradeship (phileo*)

sensual and erotic love (eros)

*brotherly and sisterly love

The Cross symbology reveals that there is to Love a heavenly form (agape) and and earthly form (eros).  The former is of the Father, the latter is of the Mother.  Recall from the beginning of this "essay": Genisis in the Old Testament: 1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  God, in this sense, was both Masculine (the Father) and Feminine (the Mother), thus they acted together (verse one) by first separating into Heaven and Earth, with the Father living among the  realms behind the stars, and the Mother living in the "deep" or the spiritual origin of "earthness".

Nurturing Love and Comradeship are social arts of Love.  The Cross has a vertical - an upward and a downward gesture, which is meant more for individuals, while the we (or community) impulse is found more in the horizontal.  Not all spiritual Paths belong to the Father - that is they do not all have to be idealistic and pure.  One can Fall, and live on the lower vertical.  When we "hit bottom", as expressed in the work of Alcoholics Anonymous, we are "caught" by the Mother as captured in the Art of the Pieta.  This too is a spiritual Path - the path through the Underworld.

This all can lead us toward an understanding of the meaning of the individual biography, now and into the future.  But that work of the Living Christ - in the Now - is a whole other Tale: The Art of God: an actual theory of Everything.

Certain other objects rest on the mantle/altar in my Underworld Temple.  A candle, a flute and a vase.  I did not put them there for any other reason then that my artistic/aesthetic sense saw the need for them to be present.  It is only later when I seek to "understand" what lay hidden in this aesthetic, that I could write/describe the (in)sights of the next paragraph ...

The matches on the left and the tiny Buddha on the right are related to the object to which they are next.  The flute, with the eagle on it, represents the dance and the vision our own "I" possesses ,and which we can unfold if we light the candle of our spirit, - something Rudolf Steiner called: the Christ Impulse.  At the same time we need to keep in mind that the vase is empty.  Consciousness must be empty for anything new to appear.  If we have "fixed" ideas, such as what Lust is and means, we do not live properly inside our souls.  We need to be "poor in spirit", that is empty of thoughts, by constantly letting them die into a new becoming.  Thoughts arise, for we create them.  But they do not serve us well if we cling to them - as if they were the Eternal itself.  Traditions in religions and science and art are dead things - the Past blocking the Gate in the Present into the Future.  We need to let the past of thought fade away, and make space inside the empty vase of the mind for new thoughts to arise.

This is the Law of Earthly Life - of the Mother.  You do not have to be "female" to practice it.  It is also, essential, to keep in mind that in our Age - the Age of the search for the True and the Good, social forces, which at one time determined moral behavior, are fading away.  Yes they linger, where some demand of others an unthinking adherence to traditions (religious, scientific and otherwise), but the reality is that if we observe the individual biography, as it unfolds, the "I" clearly seeks freedom from outer social rule, and wants more and more to self-determine what it thinks (the True), but also what is right (the Good).  This is a global process on a massive scale, and unfolds first in one place and then later in others.  It does not happen simultaneously everywhere.

It is into this new context that the Return of the Divine Feminine is manifesting in full support of these changes.  We are not recreating the old goddess religions, but helping each individual to have their own religion, science and art.  The Mother releases us from our spiritual adolescence and into our spiritual adulthood.  That is why the old goddesss religions had to go away for a time - to free human beings through an excess of the paternal impulses. 

Yet, there is social dissonance.  Conflict in such a situation is unavoidable.  Christ said: not peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34 et seq).  To appreciate how this works we have to recognize that the outer social existence is merely a Stage Setting, and the real dramas take place in the own soul - in the inwardness of human beings.  When we understand how outer conflict creates inner development and growth, then we will see/think the World as a Whole.

an important addendum ...

The seed for these next thoughts arose during a conversation with another person about some of these ideas.  None of this is meant to be definitive - that is the reader doesn't have to buy into any of it.  Rather the point is to direct the reader's thinking-attention in certain directions - that is toward their own inwardness instead of the sense world, concerning which they should ultimately form their own concepts/ideas ...

The seven chakras are an integrated system - they are not separate and individual, but form a whole.  Their traditional names in certain representations: the Crown Chakra; the Eyebrow Chakra; the Throat Chakra; the Heart Chakra; the Solar Plexus Chakra; the Reproductive (or generational) Chakra; and, the Base Chakra. 

There are in this system (or arrangement) three more obvious threefoldnesses - or three subsystems of a sort.  Threefoldness is an important concept needed for understanding how complex systems function together.  The heart is the center of two polarities: crown, eyebrow, and throat above, and solar plexus, reproductive, and base below.  The eyebrow is the center of the "above" system, with crown above and throat below; while the generational is the center of the "below" system with solar plexus above and base below.

Each "polarity" is a kind of mirror of the other, with the three above the heart more heavenly in nature (more conscious to the "I"), and the three below more earthly in nature (less conscious to the "I").  In each subsystem the same rule of relationship applies: the crown is more "heavenly" and the throat more "earthly"; while the solar plexus is more "heavenly" and the base more "earthly".  As a consequence there is a relationship between the centers of the subsystems - that is between the way the eyebrow chakra functions and the generative chakra functions - each metaphorically the "heart" of that subsystem,

Within the eyebrow chakra, from the standpoint of our human personal experience, that is where mental pictures and other inner picturing such as via the "imagination" takes place.  This is a spiritually "generative" activity - this creating of mental pictures and the use of the "imagination".  Lust, or better represented - Eros - i.e. the generative power in the lower or earthly sense, often becomes inwardly linked in the soul with the power of fantasy - for example we have: sexual fantasies. 

The solar plexus, where bodily movement is "generated", is also where "dance" arises.  But first, to better appreciate this, we need to borrow from Tomberg an image of "two eyes", one over the other, that he uses in several ways.  Keep in mind that we are "looking" at this from the inside out.  For example, close your eyes and make an image - any kind will do.  Where in the spacial sense of your bodily organization does this picture arise?  That "where" is what our eyebrow chakra looks like from the "inside".

This two-eyed seeing is the natural cooperation the crown and the eyebrow centers.  Tomberg is trying to get us to realize that in our inner "picturing" these two "eyes" cooperate - and experientially we can observe this meditatively.  When we truly think (that is when we "generate" thoughts), we actually engage in a kind of perceptual seeing which is double natured in a way.  We attend most easily to the eyebrow function, especially when we consciously create an "image" as a "spiritual" exercise.  But the "crown" is open to the spiritual world in a way - it is a kind of receiver or antenna.  So when thinking serves "others" (or the Thou), the "wind" or "spirit" unites with our thinking via the crown or antenna function.  Our thinking-perception becomes a cooperative "art" - two "eyes", one above the other. 

In "dance" we think with the limbs - in the sense of their function as an extension of the "will" into the physical world.  This thinking with the limbs (in dance) is two-eyed like the mirrored above with the crown and the eyebrow function.  Dance in this sense is also a mirror of what we might conceive of as the "play" of the imagination, most obvious in fantasy, yet more disciplined in Goethe's work on exact pictorial fantasy that stood behind his development/perception of what lived in the manifestations of the "plant".

"Dance" and sexual intercourse are the most obvious expression of this two-eyed lower chakra functional interrelationship.  For example, a few of those who dance with partners speak of "dance" as making love in the vertical.  In addition all we have to do is recall all that we have seen of different kinds of "dances" over the years of various cultures, and of the importance of dance as an aspect of  ritual.  In America - to continue the example, when "rock 'n roll" arose African based sexual rhythms combined with tin-pan alley romantic love songs, and Elvis Presley led the change in the nature of popular dancing among whites, so as to include overtly erotic movements.

Armies "march".  Protesters march.  Limb expressions are basic, and when the child learns to stand and then walk and then run, the soul is manifesting more and more of the lower chakra powers, all hopefully directed by the upper chakra powers or capacities.

At the same time, in thinking we use the term "grasp" as a metaphor for when we "understand" an idea or concept.  Thinking contains a lot of limb-like functions, and in The New Mystery of Thinking we strive to appreciate in practice the twofold nature of the "will-in-thinking" in sense of the "attention" (that which we think concerning) and the "intention" or why we think - that is: what is our purpose or what is the riddle that drives us.

Now in the upper pole (crown, eyebrow, and throat), we also have the function of the phenomena of sub-vocalizing.  Some people can't "read" without almost reading aloud, and reading/thinking does involve a movement of the lower pole (the throat center) of the upper threefoldness in the sense of what we experience as "discursive thinking".  Certain meditative practices involve the inner repetition of words, so that this near-silent inner-wording guides the two-eyed function of the eyebrow and crown centers in a certain direction.  Some of the "power" for this comes from the fact that the throat center is nearest the heart, and that thought/concept should led us to also contemplate the significance of the solar plexus center also being nearest the heart.

Again, close your eyes and talk to yourself inwardly and silently in the way you sometimes think.  Where in your bodily organization does this inner wording take place?

The point of all this discussion is to direct the reader's mental activity in the sense of realizing that the study of the chakras, or seven soul functional centers, can be carried out by thinking itself, if it just contemplates normal human behavior as well as what we experience directly ourselves within our own souls.  No atavistic visual clairvoyance is needed.  We just need to think carefully about our own nature, and how that is also a universal representation of all of human nature and ultimately of all of human social life.  Everything is interconnected, or as Emerson puts it - the mind forms rays of relationship between all objects of experience.

The reader is invited to make their own observations, for that activity is then the surest way to better appreciate just how much we can ourselves "know" through thinking.  Sit quietly.  Let go of all outside inputs.   Only pay attention to the field of consciousness that is the totality of our experience while at rest in a chair.  Our feet hurt, our back is not properly relaxed, a finger itches.  Engage in making inner pictures and speaking mantras.  Notice where in the total field of our consciousness these experiences take place.  The soul and spirit are right in front of us all the time - we just have to attend to them, keeping in mind that the act of attending is itself a spiritual act.]