Third eye, or third “I?” Please stand by as I butcher spirituality and neuroscience by shamelessly mixing them together.

The chakras (from the Sanskrit word for wheel) first showed up as our bodys’ spiritual energy hubs somewhere around the 6th century in the yoga Upanishads.

Since then, they’ve been shared and reinterpreted by a variety of different traditions, from Yogis to Buddhists to New Agers to Rock music groups.

Lots of different important and meaningful things can be said about any of those locations where the different flowery things sit. For instance, I am sure we’d get a different description of the red four petaled flower (the root chakra) from Ron Jeremy than we would from the current Catholic Pope.

For more about the origins of the chakras and their traditional interpretations, I have found this web site to be pretty helpful and informative.

A thing to note about the people who came up with the chakras is that they existed long before the modern system of science that is taught in the universities of today. We’ve got a whole new box of tools for empirically examining the body. The ancient wisdom traditions have left us a deep and powerful exploration of inward realms. Modern science has done one of the better jobs of anal retentively measuring and taking photographs and dissecting all of the things that are painfully obvious in the external world.

With that being said, there is one chakra in particular that I would like to say some hopefully meaningful things about.

With that I bring you the 6th chakra.

A.K.A. Ajna, the third eye. It is located slightly below the center of your forehead, dead center between your eyes.

Your brain can be divided into two hemispheres, split pretty much straight down the middle. In the center, there is one particularly notable feature about which much has been written. The corpus callosum.

Sorry Discordians, Falun Gong, New Agers, Hippin’ trippies, psychedelic psychenauts and whoever else is disappointed by the fact that I didn’t pick the pineal gland. There are many reasons why people find spiritual significance in the brain structure that may contain the psychedelic drug DMT and that helps us regulate our wake/sleep cycles.

That small, but quite notable gland I am saving for later as the Crown Chakra.

To get into more of the specific nuances of the left and right hemisphere, the introduction in this article by the pulitzer prize winning, split brain researching, science practicing guy Roger Sperry may prove helpful.

To give you a painfully general overview, I’d like to show you a neat and wacky picture.

Two different people’s finger prints start to look like they were made from the same cookie cutter in comparison to the varieties of neural wirings. I want to stay away from saying which part of the brain does what, because I think that would be better accomplished if you were to look up the most current neuroscience research. If that kind of thing gets you off.

Some very basic generalizations can be made though. For one, the left hemisphere tends to process things in sequential/analytical manner and the right in a spatial/synthetic way.

The important thing to understand is that inside each of our skulls, its almost as if there are two different people living there, with a completely different attitude and a completely different way of figuring things out. Since they are living in the same skull, they answer to the same name, and they share absolutely everything they own. How sweet!

The thing that connects the two hemispheres so that they can talk to each other and share their findings about playing with the strange puzzle called “existence” is the corpus callosum.

So if you have a left “I” and a right “I,” the sharing between the two through the corpus callosum gives rise to the third “I.”

Meditate on that! Or meditate on this!

Incredible get rich quick overnight with a skull full of subjective cash!

Would you love to have pockets full of little green pieces of paper with pictures of dead white men on them? How many do you want.

1 billion? 2 billion? A kazillion American dollars? A kazillion Euros? A googolplex of Yen?

Do you want the secret of the laws of attraction to make your pockets so absurdly fat that you get stuck in doorways?

Do you want to get a neck problem from the number of diamonds on your hip bling?

Well I am sorry. I can’t help you with that one. I probably have less of those green pieces of paper than you do.

I am in poverty, at least as far as it is defined economically.

When I met Amma on her visit through Seattle, she shared a story about a ship that was sinking because it had sprung a leak.

There was a banker on board that had a locked chest stuffed full of the finest riches imaginable. While everyone was escaping to get on the lifeboats, he went to his room to lug the massive chest along with him.

He went to the edge of the ship and the chest started sliding. He was so attached to it that he didn’t let go, and was dragged by its massive weight down into the ocean.

By the time he realized that he wasn’t going to save his precious booty, it was too late, and he drown while panicking his way back to the surface.

In the book “Galapagos” by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the economic system throughout the world crashes because, as Vonnegut puts it, “People slightly revised their opinions about the little green pieces of paper.”

Money is often thought of as an objective measure of what something should trade for, but when you go and have a miserable time at work for an hour, does it feel to you like that hour of your life was worth $7.95? Are you doing $6.55 worth of help to the planet when you are serving somebody coffee? Or when you are pumping gas for somebody’s SUV? Or how about is the world $5.85 more fun when you spent an hour stuffing advertisements into a newspaper? How about when you call people on the telephone at dinner time asking them if they want to donate money to saving the gay whales from nuclear proliferation? Are you doing $100,000 dollars worth of good to the planet when you are using your engineering skills to build better killing machines for the government that will be sold on the black market and used to commit genocide?

I wish to put forth a radical proposition that the value represented by cash has NOTHING to do with the values that we hold deep in our hearts. It has NOTHING to do with the long term survival of our species. It has NOTHING to do with the things that make us genuinely happy.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use money, or that it is inherently a bad concept. I’m just saying that it doesn’t have to work the way it does (or doesn’t) right now.

This country is full of young, able bodied, brilliant people who are working jobs that fuel the system that is accelerating into a deep depression. Not merely an economic depression, but also a deep seated depression of the spirit. As long as work doesn’t mean anything on a deep level, there is little joy in showing up for it.

I recently joined Americoprs. so that I get paid a small stipend to help struggling young students with reading. I know I’ll be dealing with lots of bureaucracy, but at the same time I feel that literacy is a need this country has. I will be helping make lives better by fulfilling that genuine need.

I wish I had more solutions to report than problems. There are programs out there that are working to revise money and what it means to us. One major example of that is the local currency system of Ithaca Hours that was started in Ithaca New York in 1991.

Money should change and morph to fit the whims of our dreams and aspirations and needs. We shouldn’t have to sacrafice our needs and dreams and aspirations to fit the whims of money.

If you hold true to what you value on the inside, you are wealthier than anybody with a barrel full of dollars. Especially when the dollar falls so low that it is more useful to wipe ones butt with than to pay for toilet paper.