The 6th Chakra the Power of the Mind

Taken from the Anatomy of Spirit by Caroline Myss

The 6th chakra involves our mental and reasoning abilities, and our psychological skill at evaluating our beliefs and attitudes. The mind chakra resonates to the energies of our psyches, our conscious and unconscious psychological forces. Within eastern spiritual literature, the 6th chakra is the third hi, the spiritual centre in which the interaction of mind and psyche can lead to intuitive sat and wisdom. This is the chakra of wisdom.

The challenges of the 6th chakra are opening the mind, developing an impersonal mind, retrieving ones power from artificial and false truths, learning to act on internal direction and discriminating between thoughts motivated by strength and those by fear and illusion.

Location centre of the forehead

Energy connection to the physical body: the brain and neurological system, pituitary and pineal glands, as well as the eyes, ears and nose.

Energy connection to the emotional body: the 6th chakra links us to our mental body, our intelligence and psychological characteristics. Our psychological characteristics are a combination of what we know and what we believe to be true, a unique combination of the facts, fears, personal experiences and memories that are active continually within our mental energy body.

Symbolic perceptual connection: the 6th chakra activates the lessons that lead us to wisdom. We achieve wisdom both through life experiences and by acquiring the discriminating perceptual ability of detachment. Symbolic site is partly learned detachment, a state of mind beyond the influences of the personal mind or beginner’s mind, that can lead to the power and insight of the impersonal or open mind.

Sephirot sacrament connection: the Sephira of Binah, representing divine understanding and there’s Sephira of Hockma, representing divine wisdom, or aligned to the 6th chakra. Banner is the room of the divine mother, who receives the seed for conception from Hockma, identified as the beginning. The unity of these two forces creates the lower sephirot. Binah end Hockma are symbolic of the universal truth that thought comes before form and that creation begins in the energy dimension.

Binah and Hockma find us to become conscious of that which we create, to use our mind fully as we command energy to become better. It is their perspective that bridges them to the Christian sacrament of ordination.

Symbolically ordination represents the task one is called to do in service to others from an archetypal perspective it is recognition from others that you have unique insight and wisdom that lead you to help others: as a mother, healer, teacher, athlete, or loyal friend. The priesthood, of course, is the role traditionally associated with the actual sacrament of ordination. Symbolically however, ordination is any experience or honour in which your community acknowledges that it benefits from your inner directed path of service as much as you do. This factor of mutual benefit identifies your ordained calling. The beauty of the symbolic meaning of ordination is that it honours the truth that each person is capable of making deeply significant contributions to the lives of others, not just through their profession but more important, through the quality of person they become. The sacrament of ordination symbolically seeks to recognise the contribution of our spirits to others lives far more than the contribution of our tasks.

And unwillingness to look within and excavate once fears; Fear of truth when one’s reason is clouded; Fear of sand, realistic judgment; Fear of relying on external council, of discipline; fear of one shadow sad and its attributes.

Primary strength: intellectual abilities and skills; Evaluation of conscience and unconscious insights; Receiving inspiration; Generating great acts of creativity and intuitive reasoning, emotional intelligence.

Sacred truth: the sacred truth of the 6th chakra is seek only the truth. It compels us to search continually for the difference between truth and illusion, the two forces present at every moment. Separating truth from illusion is more a task of the mind than of the brain. The brain commands the behaviour of our physical body, but the mind commands the behaviour of our energy body, which is our relationship to thought and perception. The brain is the physical instrument through which thought is transferred into action but perception and all that is associated with perception, such as becoming conscious, is a characteristic of the mind. In becoming conscious one is able to detach from subjective perceptions and see the truth or symbolic meaning in the situation. Detachment does not mean ceasing to care. It means stilling ones fear driven voices. One who has attained an inner posture of detachment there’s a sense of self so complete that external influences have no authority within his or her consciousness. Such clarity of mind in self is the essence of wisdom, one of the divine powers of the 6th chakra.

Applying detachment how does one apply detachment, in practical terms, to one’s life? Pete’s story shows one practical way of utilizing this skill. Pete contacted me to do a reading on himself during a serious personal crisis. His wife of 17 years had announced that she no longer loved him and wanted a divorce. Pete worse, understandably, devastated, as were their four children.

Adjusted it just for a moment he tried to see the situation from a detached point of view. I suspected his wife was redefining herself beyond the role of caretaker, a role in which she had been living for most of her life. As a child she had taking care of her younger siblings; She had married at 17 and been a mother for 18. Now at 40, she was waking up to herself and her own needs and was probably having an affair. I told Pete that his wife was likely terrified by what she was feeling and that if she had had a more therapeutic vocabulary, she might have been able to describe the new emotional energies she was experiencing rather than panicking at them. Her affair was her attempt to run away from what was happening inside her. She probably could not care less about the man she was involved with, even though she might not realise it at the time. She chose to have the affair because she could imagine no other way of leaving her husband and children. The option of seeking therapeutic health was not part of her culture and her thinking process.

I told Pete that, is difficult as it might be to accept, the fact was that his wife would have responded the same way at this point in her life no matter who her husband was, because she was going through a process of self discovery that had nothing to do with him. She did not know herself that she had entered a dark knight experience. Pete should work at not taking personally her acts of rejection and anger because, while he was certainly a target for her emotional anger, she was far more angry at her confusion than she was at him.

Which was able to absorb this information and work with it. Though he and his wife decided to divorce, he returned to a more impersonal way of viewing this crisis every time he felt himself sinking into the grief and hurt of the breakup of his family. Not long after our first conversation, he discovered that his wife had been having an affair with a friend of his and that it had indeed broken. He realized that his wife was not in love with the other man but was attempting to find an outlet for her own confusion. I told him that she would, more than likely, continue to try to solve your crisis by trying to find another mate, but it would never work. It’s relationship was destined to fail because finding another relationship and thereby becoming the caretaker again, was not the solution to her pain. Eventually she would be forced to go inside herself and work to heal the real source of her pain.

Becoming detached and conscious means getting certain perceptions from our minds into our bodies. It means merging with perceptions that are truth and living them so that V power becomes one and the same as our own energy.

Take, for instance, the truth change is constant. Mentally we can absorb that teaching with little difficulty. You’ve been changed occurs in our lives, when we notice we are aging, when people we love dare, or when relationships shift from being intimate and loving to distant, this truth terrorises us. We often need years to recover from some changes because we had hoped that it, whatever it was would remain the same. We knew all along that it would change, but we can’t help hoping that the energy of change will pass by this one part of our lives.

Even when change is constant feels like an enemy that has swept away a happy part of our lives, our lonely times will come to an end and a New Port of life will begin. The promise of change is constant is that new beginnings always follow closures. Consciousness is the ability to release the old and embrace the new with the awareness that all things end at the appropriate time and that all things begin at the appropriate time. The truth is difficult to learn to live with because human beings seek stability, the absence of change. Therefore becoming conscious means living fully in the present moment, knowing that no situation or person will be exactly the same tomorrow. As change does occur, we work to interpret it as a natural part of life and strive to flow with it, as the Tao Te teaching councils, and not against it. Trying to make things remain the same as useless as well as impossible. Our task is to contribute the best of our energy to every situation with the understanding that we influence, but do not control, what we will experience tomorrow.

Often, after I have lectured on detachment, my groups respond their detachment feels too cold and impersonal. But that is not an accurate perception of detachment. In one workshop I asked each participant to name a situation that they would find extremely threatening. One man said he would find it very difficult to return to his office and learn that the management had taken his responsibilities away from him. I told him to imagine that he was liberated from his attachments to his business and that he could create any options for himself that he wanted. I told him to visualise his business as no more than a drop of energy in his life rather than an ocean of energy and that an abundance of creative power was rushing through him. And then I told him to imagine that he walked into his office and learned that they had fired him. Now I said, how would you respond? He laughed and said, given the image of himself that he was holding in his mind at the moment, being fired wouldn’t matter to him at all. He would be just fine he said, because he would be able to attract himself his next place of employment.

That is the meaning of detachment: the realization that no one person or group of people can determine your life paths. Thus, when change comes into your life, it is because a larger dynamic is moving you along. It may look like a group of people conspired to have you removed from a job, but that is the illusion. If you choose to believe that illusion, it will hold you captive, maybe even for a laughter. But if it hadn’t been the right moment for you to move on, the conspiracy would not have been successful. That is the higher truth of this life change, and the symbolic site that accompanies detachment allows you to see it.

, none of us wakes up one morning and announces, I think I’ll become conscious today. We are drawn into a desire to stretch the parameters of our minds through the mysteries we encounter. All of as experience, and will continue to experience, relationships and events that cause us to reexamine our understanding of reality. The very design of our minds compels us to wonder why things are as they are, if only within our own personal confusion.

Danny asked for my help because he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He’s only request Was just help me figure out what I’m doing and thinking that I shouldn’t be doing or thinking anymore.

As I valuated Danny’s energy, I realized that he was a professional do gooder to everyone but himself. I asked him what he would like to be doing right now and he said, I’d like to leave my job in sales, move to the country, grandma owned food and work as a Carpenter. Within discussed the consequences of such a change he had made commitments to his company, he was an active part of a number of groups and his family, most of all, was comfortable in their lifestyle. All these relationships would end, being Danny said, for the longest time, I’ve had this idea that I want to think differently. I don’t want sales figures in my head. I want to think about other things, like nature. Of course, nature won’t pay the bills, so I’ve never really done anything about it. But I feel this calling to live my life differently. I have for a long time, only now I feel I need to follow this feeling. I replied that he was already filled with guidance. He should listen to it and by following his feelings, a new world would open up to him, one in which his health would thrive. Two months later Danny contacted me to tell me that his family was in favour of the move and that they were headed southwest to come next summer. He had never felt better he added, and he knew he would never again have a malignant growth in his body.

Danny was willing and able to dismantle his love as a salesman and embrace a new life. By letting go of his self perception and his occupation, he also let go of his idea that his power in the physical world was limited. But following his internal voice, he opened himself up to evaluating his internal reality: what is life about? What am I meant to do? What is important to learn? He was able to say, the outside world does not hold that much power over me. I choose to listen to my inside world.

This is how we become conscious, a mystery arises, we take action and another mystery follows. When we choose to stop that process, we enter a suspended state in which we drift further and further away from the life force stop the progression from personal to detached mind, however, can be very natural and easy. A woman named Corin, in one of my workshops, had been fired from three jobs in this in one year. She could not help but wonder if the source of the problem was something in her, she said. And once she had raised the question, she wanted to find the answer. After she took the time to get to know herself, she realised that she had been causing her own problems. She had had absolutely no interest in any of the three jobs. What she really wanted was a career change. That was a revelation. Current today is involved in many different activities and continues to discover new likes and dislikes, new ambitions and new fears with every new experience. For her, this is the natural progression of the conscious life. When she remembers the way she was before the light went on, she wonders how she ever made it through a day without thinking about the things that give her life meaning. The unconscious life is just that, unconscious. You aren’t even aware that you aren’t aware of anything. You just think about the basics of life, food, clothing, money. It never occurs due to wonder about for what purpose you were created. And then, once you ask that question, you can’t stop asking it again and again, it always leads to another truth.