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!
BRILLIANT!!!!
Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed reading this.
Blessings for this post. My past and my presence incumbine my future, I am fully aware now of the knowledge before me.
Interesting blog, I’ll leave just a little comment–
The practice of meditation is now thought to increase the size, and presumably therefore the functioning, of the corpus callosum.
Thank you for that Jakki. Have you ever seen the Youtube video of Ken Wilbur zeroing out his brainwaves and measuring it with an E.E.G.?
Outstanding!
Wow. That was creative. I could see you writing a book if you were more detailed. People would snap it up. And they even might read it!
I was thinking about making a chakra work book that would compile some fun exercizes from different spiritual traditions.
There might be a color book section and a page with a picture of each chakra and a couple of pages to write on where people can take their own notes based on their own direct observation of focusing on that part of their body.