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Chakras by Tradition and Sephiroth

Kellhuss

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Specifically, Chakras differ in form, number, and meaning depending on if the tradition is Hindu or tantric Buddhist. Then there is the GD / Regardie Middle Pillar ritual. The Wester Tradition is highly syncretic, and a lot of meditations and practices don't bother to specify which tradition they are based on, meaning we just get generic 'energy centre' talk or a lot of baked in assumptions. Does anyone have any specific means of distinguishing my meditation / activity type? There's urgent need for some delineation here in contemporary Western use.
 

Yazata

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Does anyone have any specific means of distinguishing my meditation / activity type?
I think that would be you?
Regardie's Middle Pillar book does have a chapter on chakras if I'm not misremembering it. Last week I was reading a bit in John Woodroffe's book (which apparently was the first to introduce the chakras to the West - or the first translation of the system) and he gives 9 centers but the seventh is a really two.. so that would make 10.
If you read one thing here and another there and are incapable of distilling something out of it yourself you can only go with one book / system and follow that. Different styles = different truths. Personally I hate the term chakra and do treat them as planetary / energy centers, 4 or 7 depending on the ritual I'm doing.
 

Kellhuss

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I think that would be you?
Regardie's Middle Pillar book does have a chapter on chakras if I'm not misremembering it. Last week I was reading a bit in John Woodroffe's book (which apparently was the first to introduce the chakras to the West - or the first translation of the system) and he gives 9 centers but the seventh is a really two.. so that would make 10.
If you read one thing here and another there and are incapable of distilling something out of it yourself you can only go with one book / system and follow that. Different styles = different truths. Personally I hate the term chakra and do treat them as planetary / energy centers, 4 or 7 depending on the ritual I'm doing.
It’s a typo; I meant ‘by’.

Looks like you were rendered incapable by a preposition.

The notion that the literature of chakras and their differentiation by religious traditions over time is a case of ‘different styles = different truths’ is a good example of the confusion I’m talking about.
 

HoldAll

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There's urgent need for some delineation here in contemporary Western use.

I don't think so. Those are all different systems, and even within those systems opinions differ. The early Jewish Kabbalists often disagreed amongst each other, e.g. how to map the human body to the Tree of Life - the standard model which after Luria slowly emerged has Netzach & Hod as the right and left leg respectively (so has Dion Fortune btw), so attributing it to Manipura would be something of a stretch. There was also the debate whether the Supernal Triad should be projected onto the physical body at all because these sephiroth were already half-transcendent (and there goes Ajna… or does it?). Some rabbis didn't even include Keter on the Tree because they equated it with Eyn Sof and put Da'at on top instead. I read somewhere that many Hindu gurus categorically refuse to talk about Sahasrara, which would correspond to that Keter/Eyn Sof opinion, so that fits. A crown is something you put on your head, it's not part of your head itself.

What the Western Tradition should have learned from the chaos magic paradigm is to employ syncretism selectively, not in the old theosophical/universalist way. For example, I still desperatly cling to the idea that Manipura arises from the tension between Netzach and Hod but have recently learned how dead wrong the attribution of the seven classical planets to the sephiroth from a classic Jewish Kabbalist standpoint was, so I ditched it. Netzach isn't at all like Venus, Hod is nothing like Mercury, so learning more about those sephiroth from these old rabbis while ignoring the traditional Western Qabbalist correspondences is the way to go for me and might teach me more about the chakras as well.

Another example: I would put the Hara between Muladhara and Svadhisthana but refuse to equate it with Yesod despite the obvious 'foundation' meaning, it just feels wrong to me. I think insisting on artificial uniformity will result in even more confusion than a highly individualized understanding. We're talking about mysticism, after all, so a bit of fuzziness should'nt unsettle us here.
 

Kellhuss

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I don't think so. Those are all different systems, and even within those systems opinions differ. The early Jewish Kabbalists often disagreed amongst each other, e.g. how to map the human body to the Tree of Life - the standard model which after Luria slowly emerged has Netzach & Hod as the right and left leg respectively (so has Dion Fortune btw), so attributing it to Manipura would be something of a stretch. There was also the debate whether the Supernal Triad should be projected onto the physical body at all because these sephiroth were already half-transcendent (and there goes Ajna… or does it?). Some rabbis didn't even include Keter on the Tree because they equated it with Eyn Sof and put Da'at on top instead. I read somewhere that many Hindu gurus categorically refuse to talk about Sahasrara, which would correspond to that Keter/Eyn Sof opinion, so that fits. A crown is something you put on your head, it's not part of your head itself.

What the Western Tradition should have learned from the chaos magic paradigm is to employ syncretism selectively, not in the old theosophical/universalist way. For example, I still desperatly cling to the idea that Manipura arises from the tension between Netzach and Hod but have recently learned how dead wrong the attribution of the seven classical planets to the sephiroth from a classic Jewish Kabbalist standpoint was, so I ditched it. Netzach isn't at all like Venus, Hod is nothing like Mercury, so learning more about those sephiroth from these old rabbis while ignoring the traditional Western Qabbalist correspondences is the way to go for me and might teach me more about the chakras as well.

Another example: I would put the Hara between Muladhara and Svadhisthana but refuse to equate it with Yesod despite the obvious 'foundation' meaning, it just feels wrong to me. I think insisting on artificial uniformity will result in even more confusion than a highly individualized understanding. We're talking about mysticism, after all, so a bit of fuzziness should'nt unsettle us here.
So… delineation is required then? As in, clearly mark the boundaries between traditions?
 

HoldAll

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So… delineation is required then? As in, clearly mark the boundaries between traditions?
Not necessarily. I would argue for taking a thorough look at the traditions and try to understand them (in isolation, if you will) before syncretizing them. The old approach was to focus mostly on the commonalities ("All religions are one!" type of thing) and ignore all the differences, e.g. wide variations in afterlife doctrines. I think we should know exactly what we're syncretizing and always be aware that we're syncretizing in the first place instead of taking the universalist approach where sources matter less than the syncretized end result.
 
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