The Chakras

Chakra is the Sanskrit word for a wheel, and like the English word it rolls into bigger meanings. We speak of the wheel of fate; a Buddhist calls the Buddha's first sermon the turning of the wheel of the Law.

Leadbeater narrows it to one very particular use. For him a chakra is one of a series of wheel-like vortices spinning in the surface of something he calls the etheric double.

Notice what he does not say. He does not say a chakra is the heart, a gland or a knot of nerves, and he does not say it is only a symbol. He says it is a thing that turns, in a layer of you that ordinary eyes miss, and this little book is built on taking that claim literally.

Before the wheels make sense, he turns an everyday habit of speech upside down. We say a person has a soul, as if the body were the real self and the soul a kind of captive balloon floating above it, tied on somehow.

He calls that exactly backwards: “Man is a soul and owns a body.” Several bodies, in fact. Besides the one you can see, there are finer ones through which you feel and think.

Once you picture a person as a stack of vehicles rather than a lump of flesh with a vapour attached, a question follows on its own. If there are several bodies, where do they meet, and how does anything pass from one to the next? The chakras are his answer.

The layer the chakras live in is not ghostly, in his scheme. The etheric double is still physical, though invisible: the finest grade of the body's own matter, too subtle for the doctors of his day to see, so they never studied it.

To clairvoyant sight it looks like a faintly luminous violet-grey mist, soaking through the dense body and reaching very slightly beyond the skin.

It has two jobs. The streams of vitality that keep you alive flow through it, and it is the bridge that carries thought and feeling down into the matter of the brain. Without that bridge, he says, the real person could make no use of the brain at all. His later editors added a warning: this “etheric” has nothing to do with the aether of physics.

In Leadbeater's scheme, what is the etheric double?

• An invisible but still physical layer soaking through the body✓Correct answer
• The aether of physics, through which light waves travel
• A poetic name for the nerves and their network of plexuses
• A body of emotion that floats above the physical one

He calls it the invisible part of the physical body, a violet-grey mist that interpenetrates the dense body and extends just past it. The emotional body is a separate, finer vehicle, and his editors expressly warn against confusing “etheric” with the aether of physics.

Now the definition itself. The chakras are points of connection between bodies: places where energy flows from one of a person's vehicles into another. They are the hinges of that whole stack.

And they are not buried inside the organs. They show at the surface of the etheric double, which projects a little beyond the outline of the flesh, so he describes them as saucer-like hollows or whirlpools in that surface.

He admits that we loosely say a chakra corresponds to the heart or the spleen, and he lets the shorthand stand. But the shorthand is not the picture. The heart chakra is a whirl in the etheric surface over the heart, not a part of the heart, and he keeps the two carefully apart.

Leadbeater places each chakra inside a physical organ, so the heart chakra is located in the heart itself.

False✓Correct answer

False. He grants that people loosely match chakras to organs, but says they actually appear at the surface of the etheric double, which projects slightly beyond the dense body. Each is a vortex over a region, not something inside an organ.