Yogic Vision, the Third Eye & the Inner Worlds of Consciousness
The modern mystification of subtle perception
Mention the third-eye (or ājñā cakra), as I did in my first post, and it is very likely that for many readers it will evoke all sorts of ideas. Ideas like seeing mystical visions, dream-like trances, or exposing oneself to spooky encounters with nefarious denizens of non-physical worlds. Or that playing with the third eye and the opening of subtle perception is some kind of sideshow; a distraction better left to new age types more interested in psychic abilities than the serious work of meditation, cultivating compassion, wisdom, or other enlightened qualities of mind. Either that, or the whole idea that there is such a thing as super-sensible experience is nonsense— if there is anything to meditative awareness, it is merely the absence of conceptual thought and that is all. Anything else is make-believe; atavisms of tribal myth, traditional culture or the blind faith of religion.
All of this could not be further from the truth. Of course, I do not expect the sceptical reader to simply believe me, nor accept at face value what follows. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the tasting. As I wrote in my previous post:
“While I am more than happy to engage in discussion, and through this Substack develop an archive of material, ultimately the approach is for those who wish to see for themselves and know for themselves.”
The Modern Imaginary
In that post I also alluded to the fact that for us as modern people living in the twenty-first century, the awakening of super-sensible perception is: “nothing less than the recovery of a whole dimension of human experience that has been lost to the modern imaginary.”
Let me start, then, by saying a little more about what I mean by the ‘modern imaginary’. It takes for granted that what we receive via the physical senses constitutes the domain of all experience. Even if one does not subscribe to this view and is willing to entertain the possibility of ‘non-physical’ experience, it is a notion that remains deeply embedded in the bedrock of our collective thoughtscape. The physical world is out there, and is the sole axis around which everything else must turn. No matter where we look the view is implicitly reinforced and mirrored back to us everywhere. Not only, for instance, in the predominance of the secular-materialist worldview in science, technology and health, but even in modern fiction and films which involve elements of fantasy and sci-fi.1
Concomitantly, fixated as we are on mental contents and labels, ‘the mind’ is spoken of as if an abstract self-enclosed container for thoughts and emotions. At best, non-physical experiences are regarded as a speculative possibility in need of scientific evidence (detectable by the technical extensions of our senses: instruments of physical measurement). More often than not, however, they are dismissed as non-existent myths that belong to the unscientific past. This attitude of mind is one of the hallmarks that underpin the disenchantment of the modern imaginary, which divides the world into natural/visible/rational versus supernatural/invisible/irrational. Experience is treated as something entirely explainable in terms of physiological or abstract mental processes, pretty much by default.
The division above has played a very big hand in fostering the mystification of the third-eye, or any experience considered to be beyond the sensory. As if there were an impenetrable membrane between physical experience and non-physical phenomena, and only though some extraordinary mystical ability or chance rupture between dimensions does one achieve access. The same mystification has also resulted in a reductive kind of trivialisation. Numerous yoga sites which purport to ‘explain’ the ājñā cakra (and cakras in general), pay only lip-service to it as the centre of ‘perception’ and ‘intuition’, telling us that it may be in need of ‘balancing’ or ‘aligning’, to fix headaches, correct endocrine problems, or achieve better sleep. What it amounts to is little more than comforting spiritual platitudes absent any real depth or genuine experiential know-how.
The Inner Worlds of Consciousness
A number of Sanskrit texts liken the human body to a many-gated city, all of which lead outside to the world afforded to us by the physical senses:
The eyes, nostrils and ears are pairs of gates situated in one place. The mouth, genitals and rectum are also different gates. Being placed into a body having these nine gates, the living entity acts externally in the material world and enjoys sense objects like form and taste.2
— Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 4.29.8
While this gives us a fairly concrete image of the ‘physical body’ and the ‘physical senses’ that we are familiar with, the inner worlds of consciousness are not by contrast an abstract mind-container with separate and distinct mental contents, as near-universally assumed in the modern imaginary. When the ancients observed the world, they didn’t experience the kind of absolute distinction between inner life and outer world that we reflexively assume is there now. The inner life of ‘the mind’ was just as much a living constituent of the whole cosmos. A cosmos of worlds, both sensible and super-sensible.
Yogic Vision & the Third-Eye
One can describe the inner worlds (or spaces) of consciousness as a tangibly felt domain of energetic forms, structures, qualities, and subtle presences corresponding in a very broad sense to the Sanskrit term: chidākāsha. Rather than the abstract empty space filled with distinct objects which (unwittingly) accompanies the modern imaginary’s externalised mental picture of our environmental surrounds, it is a living space through and through. If we take what is the most easily accessible layer of the subtle realms, that which corresponds to the prāṇamaya kośa in the yogic tradition, or “envelope made of life-force” as an example (equivalent to the qì of Chinese traditions), not only is it a tangible ‘body’ of somatic felt-qualities that belongs to our own subtle constitution, but as we attune to it we begin to notice that ambient prāṇic energies can be felt everywhere.
It is precisely this form of perception that awakens through the third-eye. As the subtle organ of super-sensible vision, its functioning can be understood as a portal or gateway. That is, in contrast to the nine gates of the body that externalise consciousness from the quote above, the third-eye is spoken of as the gateway that leads inside, opening instead upon inner worlds. As I mentioned in the previous post, the term ājñā can mean ‘master’ or ‘command’, thus we can also describe the third-eye as the organ of energy that functions like a ‘master switch’ or ‘command centre’ that activates the subtle energies of the body at large. It would be a mistake, then, to believe that if we are working with the third-eye, we are ignoring other centres of energy like the heart. Once we enter the portal of yogic vision, the heart is found from within. The inner worlds of consciousness lie (so to speak) behind, within, through, and beyond what we normally experience as the ‘physical world’.
Then & Now
The spiritual traditions from which we have received practices of meditation, yoga and other forms of spiritual contemplation, both eastern and western, come down to us from an epoch in which the knowledge of subtle experience was understood implicitly. Unlike now, it stood in no need of explanation. One did not ‘believe in’ super-sensible experience, just as we do not believe in electricity; nor must we become electricians to know of it. One of the unrecognised consequences of our current epoch, is that over time the modern mind has entrenched itself ever more deeply into the sensory domain. As a result our very subtle constitution has changed. Not only do we perceive ourselves and the world in a very different way compared to humanity in the past, when spiritual traditions refer to subtle realms of experience, such references have become completely inscrutable. As modern humans beholden to the modern imaginary, we are now comparatively impoverished.
Thus, despite the growing popularity of meditation today, it remains that our default starting point is one in which such implicit knowledge has largely been lost. If textual references to energies, inner worlds, and subtle presences are regarded at all, the tendency is the explain them in terms of psychological constructs — and, as the modern mindfulness movement is wont to do, turning Buddhism on its head — reporting such experience is commonly met with the advice not to become attached to the notion they are anything more than that. In the modern imaginary what the ordinary mind believes, always comes first. Similarly, out of goodwill or duty, we may have learnt to respect the non-secular ‘beliefs’ of traditional or indigenous societies, but in truth implicitly subscribe to a worldview that dismisses such beliefs as naive myths of the past, holding only cultural value. Where subtle experiences are acknowledged, they tend to be incidental or accidental. Often they are misunderstood or set aside in the name of holding to some prior philosophical commitment (like non-duality or no-self). There are times when this quite literally amounts to the shutting down of grace— closing oneself off from an appointment with the divine.
In short, confusion abounds.
A whole dimension of human experience and thereby human constitution, has in a very real sense become shrivelled and withered. At best only dimly perceived or accidentally encountered. This has created an enormous missing piece in our humanly-felt existential puzzle; a gaping amnesic hole in our everyday experience that we seem unconsciously driven to fill. Or forget by whatever means necessary. In other words, a recipe for psychological fragmentation. But while its loss has been to our detriment, it can be recovered anew. Everything we need lies within us, waiting for our return.
The current and long-running popularity of super hero films is a great example. See also the travesty of ‘the force’ in the prequels and recent iterations of the Star Wars saga.
A similar notion of the human body can be found in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Sutta Pitaka from the Buddhist Pali Canon, described in the "Vijaya Sutta (Sn 1.11)” as possessing the same “nine streams” which flow outwards, characterised vividly in entirely unwholesome terms!