Seventh Chakra - Our Spiritual Connection

Taken from Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss

The 7th chakra is our connection to our spiritual nature and our capacity to allow our spirituality to become an integral part of our physical lives and guide us. While our energy system it’s a whole is animated by our spirit, the 7th chakra is directly aligned to seek an intimate relationship with the divine. It is the chakra of prayer it is also our grace bank account, for the energy we amass through kind thoughts and actions and through acts of faith and prayer. It enables us to gain an intensity of internal awareness through meditation and prayer. The 7th chakra represents our connection to the transcendent dimension of life.

Location: top of head

Energy connection to the physical body : the 7th chakra is the entry point for the human life force, which pours endlessly into the human energy system, from the greater universe, from God or the Tao. This force nourishes the body, the mind and the spirit it distributes itself through the physical body and the lower 6 chakras, connecting the entire physical body to the 7th chakra. The energy and the 7th chakra influences that of the major body systems: the central nervous system, the muscular system and the skin.

Energy connection to the emotional mental body: the 7th chakra contains the energy that generates devotion, inspirational and prophetic thoughts, transcendent ideas and mystical connections.

Symbolic perceptual connection: the 7th chakra contains the purest form of the energy of grace or prana’s. This chakra warehouses the energy generated by prayer and meditation and safeguards our capacity for symbolic site. It is the energy centre for the spiritual insight, vision and intuition far beyond ordinary human consciousness. It is the mystical realm, a dimension of a conscious rapport with the divine.

Primary fears: relating to spiritual issues such as the dark night of the soul; Fears of spiritual abandonment, loss of identity and loss of connection with life and people around us.

Primary strength: faith in the presence of the divine and in all that faith represents within ones life, such as inner guidance, insight into healing and a quality of trust it’s eclipses ordinary human fears; Devotion.

Sephirot sacrament connection : but Sephira connected to the 7th chakra is Keter which means crown. Eastern spiritual tradition refer to the 7th chakra as the crown chakra. Keter represents nothingness, Energy from which physical manifestation begins. It is thought to be eternal, with no beginning or end. The Christian sacrament related to the 7th chakra is extreme unction or lost rights, the sacrament administered to the dying. Somebody, extreme unction is the process of retrieving ones spirit from the various corners of one’s life that still hold unfinished business, or releasing regrets that continue to pull at once consciousness, such as words that should have been spoken but were not, or words that should have not being spoken. Unfinished business would also include relationships we wish we had ended differently or paths we wished we had taken but did not. At the closure of our lives we consciously draw these memories to a final point, accepting the choices we made at the time and releasing the feeling that things could have or should have been otherwise. This is what it means to call one’s spirit back in order to leave this world and return to the spiritual dimension complete.

The final statement of Jesus, as he hung on the cross, may well have initiated this sacrament. He said to his mother and to his disciple John, woman, behold your son. John, behold your mother. Then turning his attention to God, Jesus said, forgive them, they know not what they do, and, it is finished. And to you I commit my spirit. These statements embody the conscious closure of one’s life and the preparation to return to an eternal spiritual identity.

From a different symbolic perspective, extreme action represents A ritual that should be a regular part of human life. At many points during our lives, we face a crossroads where we need to let a previous phase of life die. The less we hold on to the physical world, the more we position ourselves to access consciously the energy of Keter, or the crown chakra, a transcendent link to the divine.

Sacred truth: 7th chakra energy motivates us to seek an intimate connection to the divine in everything we do. This spiritual desire for connection is significantly different from the wish for connection to a religion. Religion, first of all, is a group experience whose main purpose is to protect the group, primarily from physical threats: disease, poverty, death, social crises and even war. Religion is rooted in first chakra energies. Spirituality, on the other hand, is an individual experience directed toward releasing fears of the physical world and pursuing a relationship to the divine. The sacred truth of this chakra is live in the present moment.

Seeking a personal spiritual connection shakes us to our core. Our conscious or unconscious prayer to come to know the divine directly goes something like this I no longer want to be protected within the group, nor do I desire to have a mediator filter my gardens for me. I now want you to move into my life directly and remove from my life any obstacle, be it a person, place or occupation, that interferes with my ability to form an intimate union with you. As master Eckhart to wrote in the soul is one with God, the ultimate aim of the Mystic is identity: God is love and he who is in love is in God and God in him.

In seeking union with the divine, we are asking to have all physical, psychological and emotional illusions removed from our lives. Once this process of removal begins, we awaken and internal voice of authority AT mediately begins to compete with every external authority in our lives, which can throw us into internal turmoil, or even spiritual schizophrenia.

One man, a social worker, contacted me because he had since the presence of angels around him. He had become overwhelmed with the feeling that he was really doing nothing at all to help the poor and desperate people who filled his working hours. I came home one night and I fell down on my knees and said to God, are you with these people at all? Can you hear their prayers? They need help and i feel so helpless. The next day, as I set with this one person, trying to help her cope with the struggles in her life, I saw an Angel next to her. This Angel was smiling. I was stunned. I continued to talk to her as if nothing unusual were going one, but i couldn’t contain this ridiculous sense of ecstasy that began to fill me up. I kept repeating to her, believe me, i know you’re going to be fine, and then she said, you know, I do believe, are honestly do comment and then she walked out smiling. I now see angels everywhere I wish I could tell everyone that they are surrounded by heaven. Before that experience I was in such despair. I had faith, but I was the head despair. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it isn’t. I just wanted to do more, from the bottom of my heart.

Spiritual awakening match has been written about the nature of the personal spiritual journey, but one of the first works remains one of the best known: the dark night of the soul, written in the 16th century by saint john of the cross. In this classic work the author articulated the stages of separation from the tribal or group mind, march terminology, that are necessary in order to form a fully conscious bond with the divine. At each stage come experiences of exquisite mystical transcendence as well as feelings of depression, madness, and extraordinary isolation known to ordinary human experience.

Within the Catholic tradition the work of Saint John of the cross to some extent gave permission to individuals to separate themselves from group religious experiences and seek personal spiritual development as life had become a way of transcending the ordinary religious parameters of understanding God to encounter the divine directly. In the centuries that followed, as Europeans encountered other cultures, it became clear that intense prayer, self exploration and self-discipline, led to mystical experiences in all cultures.

Lack official religious leaders, monasteries and ashrams contain the power of the divine within well guarded walls. People who reported having visions, hearing voices, experiencing unusually intense telepathic communication and hearing through prayer and touch simultaneously fostered to near starvation states, meditated for weeks at a time and fell into depressions that would have brought ordinary mortals to the brink of suicide. Observers, even those inside the monasteries, keep their distance from some of these Mystics, lest their eye of the divine blink in their direction. It was well known that few could endure direct contact with heaven.

In the 1960s the Vatican council two was a turning point in the western religious world. This gathering of the Roman Catholic hierarchy disbanded many centuries old traditions and initiated a new spiritual freedom for all, regardless of religious background. The word Catholic alone connotes universality of thought, a particularly potent symbol, considering that the roman catholic religion was the original christian church. Now, through vatican 2, this original power structure was transmitting a message of universal spiritual liberalism.

People around the world began to challenge the limits of their own religious traditions and explore the spiritual teachings of others. Woman sought ordination; Christians flocked to Zen Buddhist monestries and Hindu ashrams; Buddhists and Hindus sought Christian teachings; Religious leaders from eastern and western traditions held official meetings. Barriers between the east and the west were being broken, not only by rebellious lay people but also by scholars, such as the late trappist monk Thomas Merton, who in his classic work, the Asian journal of Thomas Merton, articulated the need to explore the mutual truths of Buddhism and Christianity.

For specially oriented individuals this new spiritual freedom marked turning point in their ability to know God, with revolutionary implications and paralleled since Martin Luther ‘s rebellion. As the unordained learned the skills required to interpret the deeper meaning of the scriptures, the education of late people weakened the role of the ordained or official religious leader. Symbolically the walls of the monasteries, which had long contained the most intense form of divine light, came tumbling down. Indeed in the 1950s, the Chinese invaded Tibet, forcing the Dalai Lama to flee his monastic home. While the exiling of the country’s spiritual leader has been among the most painful chapters of the Tibetan history, the teachings of the de la Loma and many other gifted teachers have entered and influenced the world’s spiritual communities. The divine light was released into the lives of countless Mystics without monasteries, lay people who embrace extraordinary spiritual teachings within the privacy of their personal lives.

This shift from religion to spirituality is not simply a cultural trend. It is an archetypal reorganization of our planetary community, which now has access to the universal truths available through symbolic site. Symbolic set includes a sixth sense of intuition, which senses the connection among all living energy systems.

In one of my workshops, a woman spoke about her connection to nature. Each day, as I prepare to work in my garden, I say a pray to invoke the assistance of spirits that are the guardians of nature and are sense immediately that these energetic beings or next to me. Had someone told me years ago that I would be saying things like this I would have said they were crazy. But eight years ago, after I witnessed an environmental disaster, I became overwhelmed with grief, and like any I had known in my life. I couldn’t release it. Then one afternoon, as I was walking through the woods, I heard a voice that sounded as if it were knee high. It said, help us. I whipped because I understood down to my soul that the nature Kingdom itself was talking to me. That evening I contacted my boss and turned in my resignation as a store manager. I never even gave a thought to how I would support myself. I simply had to follow that voice. I then said a prayer asking to be shown upon to help nature. Within two weeks a person I knew only casually at that time asked me if I had any interest in starting a business growing and selling herbs. That was the beginning of my life, as far as I’m concerned.

This intuitive sense of connection is moving us as a planet toward a holistic understanding of health and disease, of the environment and its biodiversity, and of social priorities for service and charity. This movement toward working as one world is an extension of the release of the divine light into the world. It seems as though humanity is under orders to mature spiritually to a level of holistic sight and service, and any number of paths of service to fill those orders have opened up to us.

One mystic who is working at a global political level to bring people and countries together and make the world a better place is Jim Garrison, 44, president of the Gorbachev foundation, president of the international foreign policy association, chairman and CEO of the Deomedes corporation. Jim is also a theologian who earned his doctorate in theology from Cambridge University. His accomplishments include inspiring Mikhail Gorbachev to start the Gorbachev foundation, creating a space bridge for American astronauts and formerly Soviet cosmonauts and originating the first global forum, a gathering where numerous world leaders such as George Bush, mocked Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev, meet with powerful voices of the spirit, such as Deepak Chopra and Tich Nhat Hanh, to discuss a new vision for our global society. Jim is a man filled by vision and the power of the human spirit.

Born in China, the child of American missionary parents, Jim describes his first spiritual experience this way: at age 5 I wandered into a Buddhist temple in a small village in Taiwan, where for the first time I saw a monk meditating. As I watched him, I noticed a flower crawling over his face and it captivated me because the monk did not twitch a muscle. The fly flew off his face and then returned and still the monk never moved. I realized that this man was in a different place. I sat in the temple and continued to watch him and all I could think was where is he?

Next Sunday, as my father was preaching during the service, I realised that i didn’t believe in what my father was preaching. I suddenly knew that the Orient was a treasure trove of truth and that the E was a culture that should be honoured, not converted. I was eventually sent to a Protestant boarding school and at age 7 I was beaten severely because I would not agree with what the missionaries were teaching about God. During that experience the image of that monk returned to my mind, reminding me of a place that we can go that is beyond time and space. That image helped me survive boarding school.

When I was 9, I became argumentative about theological issues. I remember coming to the defense of a Catholic girl named Jackie who was also a student at my boarding school. The other students told her that she was going to hell because she was Catholic and I said that no one who believes in God goes to hell. I said that it didn’t matter that she was a Catholic. Because of that I was put in solitary confinement for two weeks. Shortly afterward one of the Dome mothers gathered all the other children together in a room to give them candy. From the next room I heard her tell the children that they could have more candy if they would agree not to play with me until I accepted Christ. Again the image of the monk came into my mind, reminding me that there is a place beyond circumstance where you can go to survive the outside world.

Once I began to go to that place, I began to learn the virtues that when confronted by small mindedness, your task is to be part of the light, to protect others, to stand up to others whose ideas are negative. Out of that night came the notion of social justice that is now my life. I believe we are vessels through which spirit is working to accomplish tasks for the furthering of human development. That’s the only thing I’ve ever done with my life. I believe my spiritual life and work began because I refused to release the authenticity of the experience with that monk. Somehow, on that day that I saw him, I must have gone with him to that inner place. Since that time I have never returned to ordinary consciousness. I believe that sometimes we need to meditate, sometimes we need to pray and sometimes we need to face our challenges on the street, so to speak. Other times we have to adore creation and the multiplicity of divinity. This is the task of the human spirit.

Jim lives as a contemporary Mystic. As he gathered world leaders together at the first global forum, to thoughtfully consider the next phase of human development, he was a model of the full potential of the human spirit and the capacity of one person armed with faith to make a difference in healing this planet.