UKH

I had an extraordinary experience with this last year and i wondered if anyone else on here has.
I must add that up until that point i thought they were some hippy mumbo jumbo but now i know at least one of them is 100% fact. 

I'm the same mind as your old view point, but I think that within these theories there might be elements of truth, that poking/aligning something or other can do something beneficial to the body. 

What happened to you?

Is aligning your chakras the same as getting your ducks in a row?

I have a relative who paid stupid money to see a guru in India. Strangely enough this guru is adamant his way of life allows him to live in peace and prosperity. 

I don't know anything about aligning them tbh, who was the guru was it Sahdguru? 

Yep I agree Tim total new age hippy mumbo jumbo obscure nonsense, until one day one of mine opened during a meditation with my partner on a sunny day looking at the sunlight dancing on the waves of the sea down Helensburgh way.

It blew me away, I didn't know what was going on, why it happened or how to stop it but i didn't want to stop it tbh. 

I guess it comes down to what one interprets as chakras opening to mean, whether it's an epiphany or a 'sense of rapture within the moment', or feeling especially at peace. If thinking of them as chackra being opened leads to some kind of emotional health, that's got to be a good thing whatever it relates to, probably so long as one doesn't go off on a hippy tangent and start using crystals to cure measles, and what have you.

I'm from an engineer and teacher as parents, and I seem to be rather 'But what does it mean, what is it, and how does it work?' to do with this kind of thing, and can wonder at my hippy friends a little bit.

I guess sometimes it can be helpful not to think so specifically, and go with the process and see what happens a little bit, keep in mind that it might be this or that, but whatever it is it feels good, that it's about adopting a mental frame of reference to get to a certain point.

Sounds familiar. 

Probably just gamma and beta particles from faslane. 

Good one !
Really good actually because it was like a tunnel -roughly the diameter of a fist -of something indescribable streaming through you from the back and out through you from the front at the centre of my body at the level of the heart.
 

Listen i know exactly what you mean by doubting me as that is a good thing and i would do exactly the same thing if anyone told me that they experienced this. Inside I would roll my eyes and go "Yeah sure you did", but tell them the same as you did to me there that if it helps you thats good and blah de blah (Which is kind and caring).
I didn't know why it happened and it hasn't happened since yet i am someone who even ages afterwards was thinking "What was that ? "as i didn't believe in chakras or anything so i thought its definately not that. So i seached the internet and the nearest thing i could see to it was a picture of Jesus with lines eminating from his heart and i though thats like it but i didn't think of chakras.
Then i was told by a very experienced meditator of the Tibetan school that it was my heart chakra opening up. His description was good but not exactly what i experienced but then i found others online who got EXACTLY the same experience i did with EXACTLY the same incredibly powerful feelings and insights and they said it was the heart chakra.

And now i know that what i formerly thought was bunkum is a fact.

That sounds cool. I wasn't doubting you, more saying that because it can't be 'defined' as such, doesn't stop it being a helpful way of thinking or helpful frame of reference towards experiencing that. 

I've noticed that scientifically minded people don't quite seem able to define what love and hate are, myself included. Even when people aren't touching, one can feel a welcoming warmth from others, or a hate which actually makes one feel ill at ease, which sets me wondering about things like 'human energy' as it might be called. Beyond trying to cultivate compassionate thoughts, towards having a better 'human energy', there's not so very far one can go in speculating, but I find it thought provoking.

"Cool" ? it was like the best feeling you ever had x infinity.

Yes i think it is this either positive or negative energy that you intuitively pick up on when you are a person who is more open to picking up on these feelings an will pick up on anger etc quicker. For example i was not very aware of feelings in my body before i started doing meditaion practice as i always was in my head. I didn't look inward to see how different situations and experiences affected me internally like a knotted up feeling inside or a slight shaking or whatever. But since i started i look inside all the time to see what is going on. 

The strange physical experience i had was only a part of the experience and a very secondary part to the insights and knowledge that was laid out through this opening which you could say is an opening to your true self and what we truly are.

But it made you feel very vulnerable to and i remember thinking at the time that my awareness was not in my head at all but it was if my consciousness and awareness was soley in my heart area and i thought how am i going to function and do things when my awareness isn't in my head but at the same time keep this strange experience going ? I didn't want this to stop and could have lived happily in that state for the rest of my life but i knew i had to get my awareness back into my head to do work for example. 

So does anyone else have any experience of these things that they can share? I'd love to hear any. 

I used to enjoy listening to Chakra Khan, if that helps...

Only if she opened up a consciousness centre in your body with her funky music. Is there a disco chakra? I don't know.

Seriously though apparently certain music can help to open these centres especially Tibetan singing bowls. I don't know I've never tried them. 

My transcendental experiences are always born of something that his invoked exhaustion. 

Nothing else comes close for me. 

youtube.com/watch?v=RdHGt88vbMw&  for tuning your heart chakra . 

Some interesting diagrams & info on this site . . 

https://www.secretenergy.com/illustrations/   And when you've mastered it all you'll be able to hum your way up some of the hardest of routes !  Guaranteed ( or your money back ) .   

Yes that singular background frequency in those sounds in the clip is very similar to auditory effects after a while during meditation, when the mind chatter is becoming less and sounds start to break up.

Climbing is like a kind of meditation isn't it? The mindfulness of movement and balance, weighing up the changing conditions/rock/route, great focus, perhaps breathing, feeling at one with the rock, great concentration on all of the above, stoppi g the mind from mindless distractions and being out in beautiful natural places that are quiet and contemplative. 

I think from what experienced people say is that experiencing some form of things not going so well for you at a given time, could be temporary, like a collection of things that happen to go wrong at the same time or bigger matters. Some degree of suffering apparently can be a catalyst or a means to push you into spiritual experiences or on a path to searching for answers, as without much suffering you will not question existence and what it is unless you have retained this from an early age perhaps. 

TBH just sounds like you were in a beautiful (ish- Helensburgh ;p) place with people you love doing something you enjoy. I've had plenty of 'moments of clarity' at such times.

Or perhaps many sports in general, eating up the miles cycling, swimming etc.. 

We've evolved over millions of years and pretty much within a generation millions have found themselves spending nearly their entire day staring at screens, barely moving. 

You rarely hear the generally active worker, a trade person's, outdoor worker, creative person etc.. say yeah life was so hectic and stressful until I discovered the inner me through mindfullnes etc.. stereotyping a little I know. 

Perhaps when people experience their special moment it's actually called just being truly relaxed. Right place, right company, no stress factors. 

You've climbed a great multi pitch and left all the garbage of mon to Fri behind and you sit on the top bringing the 2nd up the last pitch. You can apply this to numerous different sports and activities. 

It's not that yoga, mindfulness is special. Most people are just really shit at organising hectic lives and never leave time for themselves (yes not always their fault or choice). The fact that people pay others to tell them how to relax or de-clutter their lives or home is just staggering(imho).

Ps. You might detect a hint of scepticism. 

Yes I have had far too many of those to mention either having spent practically most of my free time since an early age in wild nature doing outdoor activities. 

I have also had many experiences during meditation which I have been doing on and off for 20 years as well as the highs and lows of life.

This however was like nothing and I mean nothing I have ever experienced before and is exactly as I describe it- an opening up, strong forces flowing through you at a localised area of the heart, overwhelming feelings of unconditional love for everything accompanied with knowing we are all one, everything and everyone and feeling your awareness is not in your head anymore but in this area.

When it happens you are like "WTF is that? what is going on here??" its not a normal feeling of happiness, contentment, satisfaction or peace it is a very specific physical experience. Imagine how that would feel and if you have ever experienced anything remotely like that, if you had you would be like yeah yeah I know what happened to you and it is like nothing else. 

Definitely. 

I have to disagree and agree there. For one most ordinary workers don't even know what mindfulness means and give you a weird look when you mention meditation, in fact I can recall one guy who thought it was a form of masturbation!! this I have experienced in the many places I have work through 34 years work experience and everywhere even today fellow workers give me a strange look when I tell them about meditation. It's more of a middle class thing for example there is only one person out of 130 I work with that I can talk about mindfulness meditation with and he is a senior manager whose wife does it, not one single other worker knows anything about it. One even has a tattoo, one of those sleeve things with Buddha on it a massive one but doesn't know the first thing about him. 

You can have all the money and possessions in the world and still be unhappy, you can manage your life well and get a multipitch in every weekend and still be unhappy, there can be a million reasons for that, sometimes it's the constant chasing, doing that can lead to feelings of dissatisfaction, sometimes it's FOMO or baggage from trauma or whatever. 

Yes and that is the feeling of being relaxed which I know very well as it is the basis /starting point to every meditation I do twice a day. 

Which is totally healthy and I would be disappointed if you or others were not but there comes a time when scepticism turns into non-scepticism when presented with sound reasoning and someone who seems genuine. 

I mean I would make myself look like a right numpty if I came on here to face the collective intelligence of the great and good climbers of Britain if I was not 100% genuine and trustworthy in this matter. 

Genuine belief is not the same as evidence based proof or facts. But in the big scheme of things if you are happy then that's all that really matters. 

Thanks and that is a good message you send out but how can you prove such a thing as I stated?

I don't know if you can tbh and I know that before it happened to me I would have laughed at someone if they told me about chakras,in a kind way but I would have rejected it outright, total dismissal.Nope sorry hippy mumbo jumbo. 

But its not, it happened to me just as I described it. 

Although I suppose unconditional love could be measured and it is obvious we are all connected as that which is life, but when some channel opens and presents this true knowledge to you it is deeply profound and permanently life changing 

Flashback probably.

Chemical and electrical analysis of the body. 

Can all animals experience it, just people? Why us? There is nothing in science that as yet suggests us as a species are any more important. How advanced does a species need to be, a cat sitting in the sun, an ant, an ameoba... if they can't, at which evolutionary point did we gain something that allows it to happen. If so what do we have. 

Or it is all a figment of our very imaginative and creative brains, which is probably the one adaption that makes us distinct from pretty much all other lifeforms we know of. 

There are a few not entirely solved human body mysteries like the 700 or so neurons in the heart. But if this was a fact it would point towards brain power and imagination, rather than a physical event. 

It is a bit like ghosts, fairies, goblins etc.. my lack of belief will prevent me seeing them!! 

Lol

Flashbacks don't work like that as they can't give you an experience you have never had before. You are showing your inexperience there Eric. 

I think it was Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges who first wrote about using the mind like a lens to focus rays of attention ! 

Adam Grant a young Professor at Penn University arrived at a formula early in his academic career     ,  High-Quality work produced =

                               (Time spent) X (Intensity of focus)  . 

This to me is a form of meditation . I am convinced that most would do this instinctively when necessary ( or at least I would hope so ) . 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote  .   .   "  You have to understand the present moment correctly and then master it ! "   this stays with me and helps me often .

" The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant . We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift . " 

 Al Einstein . 

As for opening your chakras and tuning them via meditation or other means I think can be a very subjective goal which may or may not have the desired results . It's an interesting subject which for some can become an obsession . I think it's easy to avoid certain things with distractions when staying focused is key .  

Happy humming . . .  8o)  

Between someone whose heart chakra was opened and one whose was closed yes interesting. 

Because I had an experience of which the only explanation is the conclusion I reached after much searching does not mean I now know that a cat gets it to (which I doubt would be the case) as I think it probably is only confined to maybe larger mammals but tbh with you I have no way of knowing the answer to that. Edit:Animals etc are taken over by hormones during much of their lives I THINK possibly we may be born with this chakra fully opened or may die with it fully opened if we are fortunate but that is purely speculation . When the hormones die off as we age we are freer to experience spiritual matters although young people do experience this to. There are many variables some of which I have touched on throughout this thread. 

We are more aware than a tree or a dog which is a very crucial difference and is not imagination. We have the ability to strip away our layers to our essence using meditation techniques and to directly experience what is left, I think a well fed happy dog doesn't have that ability. 

That sounds like a consciousness centre in the heart area,i have read that we have a consciousness centre in our gut as well. 

How would that apply to what happened to me though? I definitely rejected any silly Notion of chakras since the first moment I heard of them a long time ago and when it happened to me it didn't occur that it was that, all I knew was what happened and the need to find out what on earth it was.

So if I didn't believe in them and then it happened it was not down to me being open to believe in them as I didn't believe in them. 

You imply that humans and or other large mammals are special? Why? Species have evolved from common ancestors etc.. what changed? 

You are taking me into territory I don't know about as I pointed out so anything I say about that is just my mind thinking. 

Or that it's like other religions, a human construct? 

I think the great people through the ages that speak of love, compassion, unity etc from these sacred places within ourselves have in many cases been used by empires as a moral underpinning of why they are the empire you should follow/obey. Not only have their messages been turned upside down but have been rendered meaningless and hypocritical by the religious movements that hold them as prophets.

This doesn't apply in all cases but in most. 

The true spirituality is lost in place of blind allegiance to a religion in name only based on conflicting old empires. 

The ego/mind is using the non ego true self to further itself. But that is not our true selves and hence why we have so much conflicts and trouble. 

I've had some interesting experiences when meditating, but ultimately these are just transitory experiences. It doesn't really matter if they are "real" or not. The only thing that really matters is how you go on to think, feel and act (and dare I say "grow"?) in response to these experiences. Do they make you a more generous, wise, loving, selfless person? If not, they're just another thing to get attached to.

How do you know it's true? Who decides? Another human brain. 

Our true selves...  we debate with ourselves in our thought processes constantly, good and bad decisions, pros and cons of a route choice etc.  Who is right, which thought process is the true you?

True self, another human construct where we try to convince ourselves we are fully in control? 

There are fleeting unusual experiences when you meditate at the beginning for some people like unusual noises or feelings that I have heard about and there are profound states of being as you will maybe know when you get more experienced. Yes to carry this being present in this same state with you throughout the day in all situations is the goal. 

Good insight there which I have been warned about before but is intuitive with experience or non-experience (you know what I mean 🙂) and yes this experience was permanently life changing for me. At that time I had not been practicing for a year or so after it happened I have been practicing twice every day with one 2 hour meditation everyday. I have changed in many ways, all positive, not through what I learned that day but what it showed me and then the learning since then which shows me what I was shown but in a different way through long and frequent meditation sessions. Although I had been meditating for 19 years prior to that on and off, sometimes as intensely as I do now. 

No it comes from non-mind, that which can observe the mind and knows it is not the mind. 

That which can observe all the chatter of the mind and let it go, pure awareness. 

No its what is there behind all the layers of conditioning and ego/mind. 

I was not a big fan in the beginning but I must say that her single 'Hips don't lie ' is rather catchy

Wherever was my favourite. 

And Chakra Ummuna has done his best to disrupt the Labour Party 

I don't know, you come on here and claim that Stalin is the greatest leader the world has ever seen and the USSR, followed by China the greatest countries so you've got plenty of form for looking like a right numpty.

Why (honestly, with a bit of reflection) do you think you had the experience, rather than me, or someone who's more sceptical about the reality of chakras?

You say you were sceptical before the experience, but you've said very openly on here before how you believe in the ultimate reality of everything being one, and stuff. It's not really *that* sceptical about an eastern/unscientific view of humanity and the universe...

Edit: the reason I ask is that by posting your experience on here, you're very much actively inviting this kind of question - I'm not just seeking to undermine what you're saying about your own experience (which of course I know nothing of, I can only talk about stuff that is 'out there' applying equally to everyone).

I find that dancing to certain kinds of reggae or dub reggae tunes, either to a live band or a large sound system can be transcendental, it seems to need to be a certain timing which lets me feel like I'm 'moving through' the music, and if left undisturbed by friends speaking to me I can go into a different frame of mind. If somebody interacts with me 'the bubble gets popped' and I'm back to reality again.

Edit: Obviously, I don't begrudge friends wanting to interact.

Edit 2: If negative emotions are bad for the health, are people who dislike wholly positive posts doing themselves a disservice? It seems plausible, and it wouldn't be a good thing.

OK a much bigger numpty then 🙂

You couldn't get more skeptical about chakras and auras and all that than me, I don't believe in ghosts or psychics or any of that stuff. 

Yes you are correct Buddhist philosophy etc resonated with me since I was 16 and first encountered it. Chakras I always thought were some Hindu thing or to do with hippies not Buddhism, I thought this right up until after my experience last year when I was told no they are acknowledged in Buddhism to. 

I am happy to invite this question Jon as I am 100% genuine about this and would not dream of coming on here to be eaten Alive by the UKC intelligencia if I was not I can assure you. 

It is very healthy to question everything so some folk may object to the statement in the OP or the person or the subject who knows but what I do know is that it is cool to dislike positive things if that is where you are at. 

I think you can get more sceptical, by believing in the scientific world view. I think that the scientific world view results in the belief that any experience anyone has requires no explanation other than "their brain did it", unless there are observable causal relationships with things in the outside world. So, things in dreams don't need an explanation other than "brain did it" and things that are just a feeling don't need an explanation other than "brain did it" but things which involve the outside world affecting more than one person in the same (or related) ways are better explained with reference to theories about the outside world. Chakras are a theory about the outside world - it's not just you that got them, it's sort of anatomical/physiological theory. But in what observable way do they effect the outside world, so that the best explanation supports their existence rather than wiping them out of reality with "brain did it", like the bus journey in my dream, or the overwhelming feeling of impending doom I get when I've got a bad hangover?

I think your answer might involve the idea that there isn't a distinction between the internal world of consciousness and the outside world. Which is kind of OK I suppose, it's not plainly false, but it does seem to me to reject the entire of science/rationalism. And once you're at that point, there isn't really much of a conversation to be had, because we're following different rules about what a meaningful answer to a question is. If I have to follow the rules of reason, but you can say whatever you like, then we can't really talk, because to each of us it just sounds like the other one is talking gibberish.

The sceptical, rational explanation for all (quasi-)religious experiences is "brain did it". The answers that invoke stuff out of ancient texts are religious explanations, by definition: they are not rational.

(And you can get more sceptical still if you like and go the whole Descarte/Berkeley hog and doubt that there's anything out there at all - there's nothing wrong with that argument except that it ends the discussion, and every possible discussion too for good measure.)

I don't doubt your sincerity for a second. I just think your explanation for your experience isn't rational, it's religious.

To say brain did it is correct but what the mind/ego is doing when saying brain did it is saying don't go down that road because it is determental to the mind/ego. It's the perfect opt out for the chattering ego.

These ancient sages say there is a consciousness centre in the heart, Summo above said there are 700 neurons in the heart we don't know why. Could it be that the explanation is that consciousness can move from your brain via links to this other centre of consciousness in say the heart?

I don't know its just a shot in the dark from my rational mind. 

Why would it happen to me? It's not just me as I have found out it has happened to many others and I have no idea why tbh. One chap I seen talking about on the Internet stated certain constants being a degree of suffering /hardship etc and being around someone you love dearly and possibly being out in nature. They were all ticks for me but I don't think it is as simple as that and I really honestly don't know why or how it happened. I've been looking for these answers since. 

But just because you want it to correlate, doesn't make it a scientifically proven fact. 

The neurons in the sa node of your heart might be entirely focused on keeping it pumping if the brain was momentarily incapacited etc.  That doesn't of course make my theory true just because I thought of that either. 

Religion is belief without proof. You have found religion.

Agreed I had never heard of those 700 neurons until you pointed it out. As I said it was a shot in the dark using my logic because there can and must be a scientific reason for this and that could be the answer or not.

Tbh I don't care if it "correlates"  or not why would I? I have said I don't know the whys about it many times but I do know what happened though 100%.

How? I haven't said I believed that these neurons were the cause I stated could they be? Which is not believing they are. 

It's not about correlation, but the absence of evidence.

Do you dream? I'll presume yes. Are all dreams real events? No. If you day dream when awake when you can imagine what ever you want based on what you already know. So for years you've had an interest in something, then suddenly you feel r think you've experienced it, not a surprise really? 

I like your clarity of explanation.

I know nothing at all about Chakras but from what I've gleaned from this thread it seems like it falls into the category of Knowledge Illusion. This is a class of explanations for events that are fundamentally not verifiable in any way that can genuinely be shared between people, but which people nonetheless often find useful in their coming to terms with the unknowns (and unknowables) both in the world around them and in their internal feelings or experiences,.

Clearly the whole God thing is in this category but so too are things you wouldn't normally think of as mystical, such as the multiverse theory of quantum mechanics.

"I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange."

Wallace Stevens

Hi

But you must see i didn't have an interest in chakras in fact I dismissed them completely when I was a teenager, stuck in the pile marked nonsense with ghosts and other supernatural claptrap. The reason I was inclined from an early age to the Buddha statements that rang true for me, were 1) No god/gods in the sky 2) Compassion for all forms of life 3) Non violence. That was it.

Which is what you are doing now.

(sorry I thought I'd give you some of your cheekiness back) 🙂

I don't do day dreaming I do concentrated mindfulness meditation they are not related in any way shape or form. 

How?

You deliberately try to either think or not think of something. One part of your brain is telling another part what to do, or not do. You can of course give it flowery words like stripping away layers, finding my inner self etc.. But at the end of the day you are simply concentrating on a given task. Be it meditation or the crux move of a route. 

Hi

How does that work when you get people from all over the world who experience this same thing yet they don't know each other or even know what a chakra is or even like me completely dismissed them on first sight when I was a kid? 

So being less vague what was I "coming to terms with", in your opinion? And what were these "unknowns" that I was not sure of?

And why would it have to take the form it did rather than just the normal realization?

That explanation reminds me of a meandering climb that is not natural or direct but is convoluted and isn't a real route. If you get what I mean,ye know? 

Day dreaming is when your mind wanders and isn't in the present moment. Meditation and facing a crux move is pure concentration on the moment and being fully present in the now, you know what I mean.

Edit: just off nightshift so zeds for me now. 

Your experience may sound like that of others who attribute it to Chakras, thus reinforcing your opinion that you may have found a/the genuine explanation for it, but people here seem to think it also sounds like that of others who attribute it to other things, and thus other genuine explanations. It isn't agreeing on the nature of the experience that isn't verifiable and shareable, it's agreeing on the explanation for them.

People seem to have a really hard time accepting unknowability, and the stronger the emotional experience, it seems the greater the desire to believe in a presented explanation of the fundamentally unknowable.

If it helps you to believe in your Chakras explanation, I can't see it hurting anyone else for you to do so as long as such things are kept as internal constructs and don't start to affect the outside world in a way that 'requires' belief or conformance, since that would be to repeat the folly of organised religion.

There is no "consciousness centre" in the heart. Easiest proof: Patients / experimental animals with mechanical hearts (usually as a preparation for a transplant), also, heart transplants as such. 

The "ancient sages" were wrong, but then again, that is not unique, they believed in all kinds of bizarre stuff.

It is tempting to speculate which development Western thought could have taken if a different school of Greek philosophy had won out, say, Anaximander rather Aristotle and Plato.

There was nothing fundamentally lacking that would have made it impossible to start the scientific revolution 2ky earlier.

CB

The common thought seems to be that cardiac neurons link to the brain. It doesn't function independently etc.. There are cases where heart transplant patients claim to have inherited traits, dis/likes of some foods afterwards that correlate with the donor. None proven. It could be just wishful thinking from a no doubt very grateful and relieved person. Our brains are still pretty mysterious. 

So you are saying that because some people (who have never experienced it) on here have wrote that it could be something else then you think that means it isn't what I ( who did experience it) experienced and because I cannot show some proof of this means for them they cannot accept the conclusion I have reached? 

The matter of proof is what it is as I have stated before, I cannot prove it nor do I have any need to. All I am left to do as far as this experience goes is to relate it as it happened thereby showing that I was 100% sceptic on this then boomf, (so far) it is the only explanation in town for what happened. 

I have stated before of my total disbelief in such matters as chakras  then I experience what I did, just as I related on here, I still didn't think it was chakras, I only knew it definitely was by deduction when I seen others relate exactly the same descriptions as I experienced just a couple of days ago online. So I have read not one single explanation anywhere, especially on here that is anywhere near what I actually experienced that day but you tell me because some people on here can't believe it means it was a chakra opening (even though they have never experienced anything remotely like it) and can't tell me what it was then that means it isn't? So I am faced with rejecting the only plausible and logical explanation because a few people don't want to think it could be true. 

At the moment it is unknown not unknowable as I don't know if any proper studies into this have been made or will be made in the future when we possibly learn more knowledge.My experience for most others is atm however unknowable.

I for one could not believe in something like chakras as TO ME it is grouped in or associated with other supernatural stuff that I also refuse to believe in. Even if I seen a ghost I would think it to be my imagination playing tricks at night or in the half-light or if I was drowsy, over stressed or even having some temporary psychotic episode possibly . Unless I went up to it and it stayed there and I could actually study and look at this thing then I would think of one of the other scienced based reasons I stated but this experience I had lasted for around 30 minutes and only stopped gradually, when I deliberately started to move away and was just as I related. It didn't leave me psychologically any different in how I functioned, thought and felt than before it happened or when I was experiencing it But it did leave a powerful message and a need to explain what had just happened. 

It is the ONLY explanation out there so it's not that it helps me or doesn't it's just all there is. It would fit better into what I previously thought if it were not the chakra explanation but so far nothing other than that is remotely like what happened, but the chakra opening up fits it perfectly. And I didn't even know anything about this chakra experience of others ie. That it/them (I don't know if there are other chakras as I only experienced one) can open up and such like. 

I agree. Its just one extraordinary experience but not something I would keep quiet about either. 

That doesn't mean there could not be but we can function without it. The heart is on the left side of the spinal column but this felt more as if it was from the centre, right on the spine centre line but level in height to the heart. That detracts from saying it could be neurons if those neurons are only in the heart. 

OK that was a sweeping generalisation by me so I deserve one back. Not all were right many were right and many were wrong but one's who spread messages of love, compassion and peace do so from a place of true wisdom which cannot be wrong. 

Whoa, you seem defensive. Take a breath.

I'm not saying what you claim above. What I'm saying is that you have clearly experienced a sensation that is extremely similar to that which others have experienced and which they appear to have attributed to Chakras. There may well be convincing evidence for the former but I'd respectfully suggest that evidence for the latter is simply non-existent, to the point of which calling it Chakras is effectively just giving the experience a name to facilitate dialogue between those who may wish to discuss it.

I'm not trying to diminish the experience in any way - it sounds wonderful - but the claimed explanation for it just sounds entirely fabricated, and inevitably so due to its inherent quality of unknowability.

Placing anything you "feel" in your body relative to your heart is extremely tricky and unreliable, as there is intensive crosstalk between different sensory pathways where the neurons are switched over as they enter the spinal cord. Our evolutionary wiring simply is a bit shit....

This can cause real problems, e.g. when pain indicating the onset of a heart attack is perceived to come from the left arm instead! Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why heart attacks in women are treated less rapidly than in men: Women are both tougher, and tend to mislocate the pain more.

Also, you can easily imagine that you "feel" things, even if you know that they are wrong: I regularly do a breathing exercise to get my pulse down and relax after judo training. Sitting on the mat I visualize the air streaming through the nose into my skull, up behind my eyes, down the back of my skull and neck to my lower back, up the front of my belly to the throat and out through the mouth. Physiologically impossible, of course, but it definitely "feels" very convincing!

This kind of self delusion (in this case deliberate!) is of course much easier if you do not know beforehand that your experience is unreliable. In fact, I would ascribe the vast majority of spiritual experiences to an evolutionary bias towards our brain trying to make sense of things even if the sensory input and/or our internal monitoring is conflicting or defective (e.g. out of body experiences, voice perception during prayer,...).

CB

Or alternatively, your mind reacted to some stimulus, or a combination of stimuli, in that moment and created the experience for you. I've seen Derren Brown induce similar feelings/ reactions in people by psychological means.

"This however was like nothing and I mean nothing I have ever experienced before and is exactly as I describe it- an opening up, strong forces flowing through you at a localised area of the heart, overwhelming feelings of unconditional love for everything accompanied with knowing we are all one, everything and everyone and feeling your awareness is not in your head anymore but in this area." Those are pretty well the exact feelings that Derren Brown "induced" in a professed atheist a few years ago....but he did it in a church, and rather than "opening her chakra" the subject described it as "Jesus coming into my heart"

IMO, "something intense happened, therefore chakras are real" is a hell of a leap.

Apologies. You are correct I was feeling a little defensive. 

Your first paragraph I agree with but in your second you say the explanation sounds fabricated so I would ask you what other explanation there is when a great many people get it it, experience the exact same thing and have done for over 1000 years and experienced meditators say it is a consciousness centre.

As I pointed out because we don't know doesn't mean we won't gain knowledge to prove it in the future but denying what is the truth to those who have experienced it because they cannot provide actual proof themselves, and is dismissed as just a sensation or indigestion(a pal) by those who have not is disappointing. 

Interesting comment about this hypnotist but completely different to my experience, ie no one guiding me, no idea about others experience with chakras, not even an idea that you can open these things up at all.

Perhaps that hypnotist did actually open hers up though and she not knowing what it was and possibly being  a Christian thought it must be Jesus. I don't know anything about that so cannot say.

What I do know is what happened to me.

Not at all as it fits perfectly to what everyone who has experienced it describes. 

If I were to claim the experience was caused by a friendly fairy buffalo on Jupiter with a bad cough you would have precisely the same evidence for that explanation as you have now for Chakras. Of course things seem far more credible if other people are already convinced, and even more so if that's been the case for a very long time.

I'm not trying to say you should stop thinking you've found an important truth; I'm merely pointing out that there is, and cannot be, any genuine evidence for it.

Have you had a spiritual experience ?

Imagining things is not what mindfulness meditation is unless you are using visualisation techniques which I have never done. So what you doesn't really apply you know  ? 

Because there is none doesn't mean there is none it can mean no one has looked or don't have the necessary technology yet. 

True in some cases, potentially this one. Get back to me when they do. Until then I'm sticking with the fairy buffalo from Jupiter explanation.

It is good that I/ego gets payback here for my own flippant and dismissive attitude to others when it comes to this and similar matters. What you just said is exactly what I would have said to anyone who presented me with chakras such fancies before and I have been saying dismissive things to people for yonks about this.

So nothing learned and still no one else who has any experience if such matters. 

For flippant/dismissive please read healthily sceptical unless or until there's actually some justification for belief.

The reasons you may have had for being dismissive of unsupported claims to knowledge in the past are still just as valid as ever, and will continue to be so regardless of how many such experiences you have and how many people attribute such incredible experiences to Chakras, to divine contact, or to mind-altering buffalo fairies on Jupiter.

I don't see much point in continuing this as I'm clearly not going to start believing in what appears to be mumbo jumbo simply because someone on the internet was convinced it was true, and now that you are fully convinced you've gained a non-verifiable truth you're unlikely to start questioning it using the ordinary tools of rationality. So I'll bid you goodnight.

To call the profound experiences of people mumbo-jumbo and the equivalent of what was it a? pink buffalo from Jupiter 🙂 is payback for me for doing the same to others so cheers, not in a sarcastic way but in a good way, I'm sure one day you will get the same flippant dismissal back on you with something you consider to be very important and meaningful yourself.I just hope your ego is weak enough to cope with it fine, all the best. 

I don't think it's an opt out. I think that on deep consideration starting with 'how do we know anything' and going via 'what is the best explanation?', 'brain did it, no need for chakras' is the most likely thing to be true. I don't believe that quietening the chattering ego (a worthwhile goal I think) would change what knowledge is and how we get it.

I think consciousness is produced by a completely not-understood way that the nervous system operates. Given that we have no theory of how we are conscious in the most banal states, I think it's a bit early to start theorising about very rare experiences. We might find some "neural correlate" of your experience if you jump into an fMRI scanner and have it again, on demand - but that wouldn't really provide much more of an explanation than 'brain did it [by increased activity in areas x and y while z was quiet]'.

By far the best theory of all conscious experiences is that they result (somehow - not known) from a specific pattern of neural activity. In most of our waking lives that pattern of neural activity is influenced by information about the outside world coming in through the senses. I don't believe that there are other ways, not involving the senses reacting to light, sound, chemicals, pressure, etc, that we can learn anything about the outside world. There just isn't another way for information about the outside world to go into our consciousness: something carrying the information has to cause the neurons to fire in a certain way. Religious experiences seem to require some way for something outside the brain (like god, or spiritual chi energy or whatever) to interact with the brain through some mechanism outside the laws of physics.

I guess it's tempting to try to squeeze your preferred god or chi or whatever into the gap that exists in our understanding of consciousness, if you're really keen on god and/or chi. But that doesn't make it a good explanation for any conscious experience.

Perhaps one day you will try meditation and persevere with it as that is really the only way you can gain the spiritual experiences I am referring to. When as you pointed out you calm the incessant monkey mind/egos chatter and stay there then go beyond the senses and bodily sensations which you can do then you are left with pure consciousness, pure awareness and from here great wisdom becomes apparent. Not how to build a complex machine but insights into what we are and what we are not and how to make things better for everyone and yourself. 

The ego/mind becomes redundant and would rather kill the host than have that state of affairs hence why our minds throw up all these resistances to everything that is no-mind. Do you know what I mean? 

And an MRI correct me if I'm wrong just scans the brain so in light of this topic it could be useless for checking the heart area. 

When you are pure consciousness where do you get information from (in sitting meditation)? 

No spiritual experience is not from outside but by being inside. 

No temptation required just experience and lots of hours meditating, it all comes to you, people all over the place get it and I don't mean blind belief I mean real knowledge insights realization from practise. 

My point was how easily you can misattribute sensory feedback from your body, even if you know it to be wrong. How much easier, if you either do not know or do not want to know that it is so!

Anyway, the spiritual experiences (used in the widest sense) as such are real, in that they are truly experienced by the person. One does not even have to take the word of the practitioners for this, as this has been unambiguously demonstrated by fMRI on "professionals", e.g. Christian nuns and Buddhist monks in deep prayer/meditation. In case of the nuns, activation of language processing centres was observed whenever they reported afterwards to have been in two way communication with god, precisely as if they had been talking to some other person (minus the motor output, of course). What this does not show, though, is that this presumed external input is not brain derived as well. 

To be a bit unfair, all these experiences are as real or not as the stars you see in front of your eyes after being punched in the head, the flickering aura of a migraine, or the voices experienced by some paranoid schizophrenics. All are perceived as external input, but in all case clearly wrongly so.

With respect to the idea of chakras, I would therefore argue that attributing some concentration or flow of some ill defined "energy" to certain regions of the body similarly reflects an ability to focus on internal sensory feedback to an extent that is sufficient to generate "true" perceptions. That this is reproducible, giving rise to long standing spiritual traditions, actually argues for the hypothesis that the source is internal: We are, after all, all wired in a similar way. 

More generally, I would argue that the claims of various branches of Hinduism with respect to our internal organization and especially the organization of the outside world are simply wrong. Again, the proof is in the pudding: There is not a single piece of technology or discovery about the RWOT* that has been derived from predictions made from spiritual or esoteric models of the world.

In the West, the corresponding failure of the Christian and classic world models to be predictive has led to the Renaissance, rationalism, and technology 500 years ago.

Apparently, though, humans tend to have a need to fill the resulting gaps.

CB

*Real World Out There

There a lot of different groups(flavours of religion, mind readers and the others of that ilk) that have been tested under laboratory conditions and not once (that I've read ) has anything been proven. They've all blamed some other factor for the test not proving anything and unsurprisingly refuse to under go another test. 

Even things like the Turin shroud which they allowed be tested and when it was said to be 500 or whatever years old, they claimed that a repair or patch had been tested and refused another test. 

There is just some will to believe in humans, optimism and an unwillingness (in some) to accept we won't ever understand everything and we aren't really any more special than other animals. 

I've often felt a presence when lying on the bed for 5mins to see what my true rested pulse is. Then I open my eyes and realise it's the Kids, cat, dog... not letting me have 5 mins peace. 

Ps. It's fine to belief in something, but don't expect everyone else to believe in something void of evidence too.

Well, the brain of a fruit fly has 100,000 neurons, so a consciousness centre in the heart area is highly unlikely.

The gut is more interesting.  Estimates on the number of neurons there ranges from 400-600 million, which is about three rat brains worth.  I'd be extremely wary of attributing consciousness to it, though.

We usually take a fly brain to have 250,000 neurons, but this is a good point! 700 neurons is two nematodes (tiny roundworms) worth, and they are indeed not very conscious.

While our gut most likely will not have consciousness on its own, its contents may influence the one of the brain: Some highly interesting papers from earlier this year claim e.g. that mood is highly regulated by our gut microbiome and its metabolite profile. Having the wrong bacteria may actually cause depression!

CB

My gut has produced breathtaking sculptural output which has real artistic integrity and so I believe it requires consciousness and deep humanity in its creator.

But opinions differ on conceptual art, and most people would view it as a pile of crap.

Please try and understand what I was saying, rather than dogmatically sticking to the "I know what happened to me...because....stuff" formula that people who jump to conclusions usually follow.

Derren Brown wasn't "hypnotising" this woman at all, he was using a combination of location, subliminal suggestion and an understanding of human psychology to push the subject into a direction whereby her own mind created this super-intense feeling/ experience. He was doing it in this instance to show that the "spiritual revelations" that people claim to have at evangelical meetings can be induced in even avowed atheists if they're subjected (or subject themselves) to certain stimuli.

She wasn't a Christian, she was an atheist....but interpreted the experience in a "Christian" way because of the location, even though she was dismissive of Christianity. In your case, I'd suggest that your mind created this experience without external guidance, due to location and stimuli, and that because you're into meditation/ mindfulness and had heard of (but were dismissive of, as she was of religion), chakras you interpreted it as a "chakra opening".

How do you know it fits "perfectly" with what "everyone" who has experienced it describes? The people who describe such an experience as a "chakra opening" are obviously those who are aware of the idea of chakras. Other people with different backgrounds might well describe the same brain construct as "Jesus coming into my heart" or "Communing with Allah" or whatever. It's interesting that people who have near death experiences usually describe those in terms of their own social backgrounds...."moving towards a light" for Judaeo-Christians, for example...and we have quite a lot of insight/ research into such experiences which indicates strongly that what is seen/ felt is simply the brain's way of coping with its "shutdown process" rather than anything real.

Again, you're jumping to a huge conclusion on the basis of something you experienced for which the most likely explanation is that it's something your own brain constructed to "explain" a particular combination of stimuli.

Hi

Your post (which is very well written) deals with stating that certain profound states do not come from outside the body but I having been saying this all along so why tell me what I have been clearly stating since the beginning of this thread.

At no point have I stated that anything comes from outside but what I have repeatedly stated is that all meditation is looking Inward. 

Hi i think you will admit your grouping there is so vague as to render it a bit meaningless.And what that has to do with what I am talking about I don't really know tbh. 

Animals are very special though just as we are and all life is, we are incredible. 

Don't get me wrong I don't "believe", anything without first hand experience of it. I'm a Marxist-Leninist scientific socialism and all that and a very sceptical person when it comes to these matters. 

This thread was created to ask if anyone else has experienced this not to convince people into believing something they have not experienced although to make other fellow sceptics like myself see that extraordinary experiences can happen even to a sceptic. 

Cheers, that puts that shot in the dark to bed then but could there be different sizes or more important/developed neurons than others is a neuron a neuron? 

I'm not I'm asking that is all as I have read about it. 

No i suggested a highway that would link areas that consciousness could be taken down to within the body linking the brain, heart and gut. But certainly not seperate consciousnesses from each other. 

But maybe they could have separate attributes. 

Thanks and I hope that you could please realize that I am putting a lot of time into this thread and not just submitting one reply. Last night I was trying to reply to you everyone else, make the dinner for my family etc, get ready for work and go to work so forgive me for not going into big essay like replies sometimes. It's not that I can't it's that I don't have the time that night as well as skim reading replies, digesting them and then answering them all I may miss the odd point whilst doing so. 

First I have stated this repeatedly so I will do so again : I did not think it was anything to do with a chakra at the time or afterwards until informed by someone experienced that it could be, still unconvinced I had to do detective work to find others experiences, I found some that were bang on exactly as I had experienced in every way and every detail with nothing added or taken away, then logically this was now the only answer for this. 

Are they? Was I? No I wasn't. 

I didn't know what a chakra was never mind whether one could be opened or not so how does that fit in? And I most certainly didn't believe anything like that could be true. I have also stated this 3 times upthread so why are you not reading what I write but telling me your theory which is not what happened? 

Yes obviously. 

I think death experiences (of which I know only what I have read) are quite similar through all cultures from seeing dead relatives, looking down on the scene from above to various light/lights. 

I would logically think that everything and I mean everything has a scientific reason behind it but that for some matters we don't have either a) the reasoning yet or b) the science yet to understand them so some dictate what happened and others reject it because its not there to be measured or sensed by them, yet. 

I don't believe in frigging ghosts and clairvoyancy or even chakras but I did have a real experience in which the only logical explanation do far has been that it was some dormant part of me that got activated. Not from outside or by magic but from inside using the brain to focus attention on pure consciousness and stripping away everything else which let to this completely new experience I didn't know of, expect or look for and which some folk call a heart chakra which is just a fancy name for a place in your body where this experience is perceived. 

PS. Sorry about the tone I'm just getting a wee bit weary of repeating myself over and over and over again thanks. 

I don't really want to get involved in this again because I'm not convinced you're genuinely considering the responses you're getting, but just one question for you to try to convince me:

What gives you the opinion that your Chakras explanation for your experience is any more "logical" than my fairy buffalo from Jupiter explanation?

Too late to edit

Should have read - is a neuron like all other neurons ? 

Hi, So you wrote

The experience I had was as real as say love or higher states in meditation practice and happened in my body not anywhere else and was not caused by A. N. Other. Does that help you out?Also how was I already convinced? 

Sorry if you feel that, I'm doing my best tbh but no explanation on here comes close to explaining what happened to me. 

I appreciate you trying, but you don't seem to be grasping the argument against your position. Nobody is claiming your experience or your feeling are not very much real. What we are doubting is the explanation you've latched on to to explain it, as it appears to have no more basis in observable reality than any other random explanation we can come up with.

May I respectfully suggest that if you're seeking an explanation that makes logical sense, in the complete absence of verifiable reference points upon which to base the logical inferences, you may be being overly optimistic.

OK so it happened  it happened to many others with exactly the same experience. So older yogis have done drawings that show the location that matches the experience of it and so does their descriptions of what happens .They have also after spending their entire lives 24/7 looking inside and with that knowledge gained through generations passed on through many lineages and schools making probably thousands of years worth of work on this,which isn't nothing. Reached these conclusions. 

So I am not latching on, I am looking for logical reasons to explain a profound experience. 

But I do have verifiable reference points which are the combined experiences of many people, myself included. 

Ok, at least I tried.

I have some limited experience with meditation, which I view as a way to understand better what my consciousness is like. I don't doubt that experienced meditators deliberately change what their consciousness is like, specifically they experience what you describe as "pure awareness" or what others might call "ego loss".

Many people feel they gain great insight through this experience, but all those who experience "pure awareness/ego loss" do so within a cultural context. There is a rich Buddhist context which many people learn about in the process of learning meditation, but the experience is, as I understand from secular meditators, perfectly compatible with the scientific view of the human being as a complex machine. You can have profound insights through meditation, which support rather than oppose the view that everything we experience is a result of patterns of neural firing, and this is something we evolved purely for the sake of life. And by 'life' I mean self-replicating molecules of DNA and the biological structures that house them.

Not quite. I think that the ego/mind/self exists in its normal form because it's a brilliant tool for getting us around the place, interacting socially, and replicating DNA. It is however, an illusion meaning it's just a construct within consicousness and it can be dismantled with the practice of meditation (or a sufficient dose of psilocybin etc. in the right setting). So while I think it might be fascinating to dismantle the ego/self, and there might be great benefits, I don't think that the ego/self is something to be struggled against. Knowing more about it, and how it's not quite what it seems, is surely useful though.

Maybe you could sit differently in it so it scanned your heart? But I don't think it would show up much. If I feel something somewhere in my body, really I feel it in consciousness. Consciousness doesn't have a location (although this sounds suspiciously dualistic I think it's correct), but it does contain a map of the body onto which we map nerve signals like pain so we know which toe we've just stubbed.

I'm saying that insights that come from meditation are insights about your own consciousness. Claims about the contents of your own consciousness can be justified with experiences in meditation. But you can't get information about the cosmos, or anatomy/physiology that way: claims about these things need to be justified by information that anyone can access, because they make claims about things that we can all access. 

Yep spot on!

I put that reply to you together last night during a 15 minute tea break before getting back to work, it was hurried and not well put but everything you said above is basically the same as I know. 

Thanks for your efforts I appreciate it. 

Meditation is known to cause changes in brain activity, in particular theta wave activity, which seems to be associated with reconciling experiences. So it's not really surprising that mediation sometimes causes moments of what seem to be pure lucidity. Whether it's actually any more lucid than non-meditative thinking is open to debate.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100319210631.htm

Have you seen Haidinger's brush? Have you seen it outside? If yes to either - how long have you seen it for?

No I'd never heard of it. 

Haidinger's brush is there all day long in front of your eyes. It's there every time you look at the sky, every time you look at a screen, all day long. What does it say to your senses, and your interpretation of what they convey - that there's been something in front of your very eyes for your entire life, that you couldn't even see?
It certainly doesn't say that your senses and your interpretation of them are infallible. Your brain sees what it wants to see. Or more classically - you see the world not as it is, but as you are.

"Tibetan singing bowls"? Intriguing. Are they bowls that actually sing, or bowls that you sing into, or bowls that make a singing sound when you ding them with a spoon? [If the first I'd like to eat my cornflakes out of one]

That reminds me of Zen school teachings because what is "You" or I that sees these things?

The Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki stated "There is no you to say 'I'. What we call 'I' is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale"

"When we practice Zen there is no you and there is no zazen. When you bow, there is no Buddha and no you. One complete bowing takes place, that is all. This is Nirvana. When Buddha transmitted our practice to Maha Kashyapa, he just picked up a flower with a smile. Only Maha Kashyapa understood what he meant ;no one else understood ". 

Yes they do in fact sing but are very rare since they are made from alloying two metals called Tonguesten and Alujolsenium to make something called Pavrotyibdumen and it sings like hell all the time in fact you need to lock them away in a soundproof cupboard as it get annoying after a while.