It occurred to me after I hit post yesterday that I didn’t explain the title. Most people are familiar with the term from Hindu mysticism, which posits that we have energy “centers” at key points in our body. I’m an agnostic on that, although I do often feel what feels like energy going through my forehead. There is no need, in my view, to make a firm decision either way, so I don’t.
The root, though, as I understand it, is the Sanskritic word for discus, or wheel. It is intended to connote something round which spins.
I think this is a useful metaphor for all human social systems. I view the individual personality, for example, as a sort of smoke or water “chakra”. It is a system in motion with attributes. “Joe”, for example, is a system in motion that is mostly “brown”, with flecks both of grey and white. One can imagine standing in the stream of this “smoke” or water–something that spreads and contracts imprecisely–and feeling, seeing, smelling, and hearing differing sounds, but in patterns. Certain combinations recur regularly, certain tendencies and systemic habits recur not quite at regular intervals, but regularly. This is the “essence” of Joe.
This is a metaphor for the chaotic system, in which the system is non-linear, and formally complex, but nonetheless when someone says “you know how Joe IS”, we generally know what they are talking about. There may be things about Joe we don’t know, which would radically alter our opinion about him, but in his interactions with us, we see what things he tends to like doing, his opinions about sports and politics and religion, his work ethic, how he treats the opposite sex, and children, and the elderly, and minorities. We create really a set of data points, such as a comment he made many years ago, and insert it into our narrative about who Joe “is”.
Now, no formally complex system can ever be reduced to a box. They don’t fit in boxes, unless the box is so large that individual nuance is lost. Joe is an American. That can mean a lot of things.
The difference between judgement and prejudice is “have you tried to stand in that stream?” Have you tried to proverbially walk in his shoes? Formally chaotic systems have points of recurrence, called “strange attractors”. When you look at a visual plot of some them–here are some examples–what I am intending so say is that if you understood “Joe” perfectly, that is what he would look like. He would be a form which was multi-dimensional and–what they can’t capture here–in motion, such that the lines in movement–really, the gases, since there are no lines involved–would drift towards and away from their supposed bounds regularly, but not so much that you couldn’t discern the basic structure.
In my view, your qualitative structure–your “strange attractor” self–is a function of the principles by which you choose to live your life. Everyone chooses something. Some choose self indulgence, or self importance, or power, or love, or friendship, or duty. Everyone chooses a combination of values, which are valued differently at different times. Normally there is a relative hierarchy–such as country above family above self. Such hierarchies, with respect to who people “really” are, are only expressed through action, not words.
As has been said by some wit, most people have two reasons for what they do: the stated one, and the real one.
Chakras exist on all qualitative levels. They vary is size. There are family dynamics–the Smiths are happy, the Jones are dysfunctional (another favorite quote of mine is that the only normal family is the one you don’t know very well)–church dynamics, corporate dynamics, sports team dynamics, communist dynamics, State dynamics, national dynamics, regional dynamics, and perhaps even global dynamics. Western philosophical ideas have permeated most of the world. All African nations that are not working towards Sharia are targeting roughly Western forms of government. The Chinese have based their nation on a combination of what most would call Marxism, and free enterprise. As a practice, of course, trade is scarcely Western, but as an economic ideology, it is. Most all nations previously practiced something like what I call Mercantilism, where insiders get the sweetheart deals, and competition outside the literal market is forbidden.
Chakra is thus a descriptive term. I also use it in the sense of what I have elsewhere called a Qualitative Tumbler, as something projected “out there” (Captain quotation mark today) that provokes qualitative change in the system so “attacked”. A friend of mine was telling me about a drill they did in, I think, Scuba School, where two men got one snorkel, and were only allowed to breathe one at a time, which meant they had to cooperate, and keep their cool. They held on to one another via a Roman handshake, such that this theoretically would have worked in the dark. Once they got it down, they were attacked my instructers, who tried both to tear them apart, and to make them panic. Not pleasant, but panicking in a surf zone in enemy territory would be yet more ugly.
Whether we realize it or not, most of us progress alone in intermittent conditions of understanding and confusion. The world is in constant change, and one scarcely needs to look far to find people interpreting the world through outdated lenses, as seen, for example, in those for whom FDR is a hero, and the Vietnam War a tragic mistake (more on that in a moment).
Two men together are more sturdy than each would be alone. Let me posit symbolically, then, that your “partner” is a deep seated, principled committment to learning the real truth of a situation, to the extent you can. As you are attacked, you will fare better over time, than someone who is overwhelmed, and lets go.
Let us posit that your committment, instead, is to another actual person. Let us say that person wants you to go somewhere else, and uses the tumbling of the tides or instructors to gradually ease both of you far, far away. In what we call a trackless ocean, for the sake of clear symbolism, you have no means of fighting this.
Let us further say that your goal is to reach the shore, where the shore is meaningful personal growth. If you attach yourself to a principle, then despite the pummelling of the sea, you can gradually make your way to the shore. If you attach yourself to a person, then if they are loving, and care about you, then they, too will stabilize and guide you (guru literally means “heavy”, and I have often thought the image to be conveyed was something like a ballast in a boat, or an anchor in a storm). If they have other ideas, you will find yourself far at sea.
In the end, you have to decide, and in the end even the decision as to who to trust has to be a peronal one. Perception, always, is personal, even if people choose to walk in lockstep with others.
This is an analogy that needs some work, but the main image I want to convey is a system in motion, being impacted by a stream of different motion, which sets it off course, at least briefly, and sometimes permanently.
I was thinking this morning about the first encounter of school children with what we might term American “Imperfectionism”, which is the doctrine that since some people seem to be claiming we are perfect, and we aren’t (slavery, Jim Crow, slaughter of Indians, etc.), then we are bad. This is a stupid doctrine, taught by stupid people, but a casual reading of history readily shows that stupidity has wings.
The first time kids watch “Roots”, for example, they are permanently molded in ways which some players in our current political landscape are careful to use. And at that moment, a sort of qualitative horizon opens up, which says that if we are capable of that, what else are we capable of? Maybe it’s Americans that are the bad ones, and everyone else the good ones. Particularly if just kids remain ignorant of the history of everyone else, this is a standpoint which can be lasting. This is a result of a qualitative tumbler, or Chakra.
As I have said often, if we judge ourselves by our own stated standards, we fall far short. If we judge ourselves in comparison to the objective history of every other nation on the Earth, we fare exceedingly well. We truly are exceptional.