Mid 2005-2006

A chakra is a psychic energy center of the body. These are your connections to the astral plane of reality. Just as your ears can hear physical noises, the chakras are your sensory organs for astral feelings (such as the "white light" you might experience in certain situations). Once you learn how to pay attention to them, you can interpret what they tell you -- and you can put them to your use. Repeated use of the chakras will awaken siddhis, or powers ... If you were to draw an equilateral triangle between your eyebrows, the section of your brain two inches behind the top point would be the ajna chakra -- also known as your "Third Eye."
New Age texts, again, make references to the third eye seem worthlessly cliche. If you're daydreaming, they say, you're seeing with your third eye -- and this is most certainly not the case. The third eye is a remarkable organ, which occultists claim is capable of fully seeing the room you're in even while the other two eyes are closed. This can easily be mistaken as imagination, but the example cannot be made as strongly enough as in Roald Dahl's "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar" -- in which an Indian fakir has his head enclosed in a plaster cast and then rides down a busy street on a bicycle. Kids, don't try this at home!
If you've attuned yourself to using it, the third eye will become active when you need it -- for example, clearly seeing a ghost if one is in the room. Again, there is no effort needed to invoke this skill; it happens automatically. The exercises at the end of this chapter are intended to "wake up" this dormant [ability].

There is a fine line between New Age meditation and occult meditation. New Age books will train you to sit comfortably and clear your mind -- which is correct as far as occultists are concerned. But then they'll guide you through "visualizations" in which you imagine "white light surrounding you" and such. This can be correct, but the distinction must be drawn -- if you have to try to imagine it, it's not metaphysically real. This is also the case with chakras.

Section III Exercises
1. Reach [trance]. You'll know if you've reached it when you no longer remember who you are, the room around you seems like boundless space, and you've experienced a sort of slip into a deeper mindset (that last one is hard to explain... you'll know it when it happens). To truly awaken your senses, you'll have to do this at least once a day. A good quiet time to set aside for it is shortly before bed. Half an hour is usually sufficient.
2. If you tire of watching and waiting, or better yet, after reaching [trance]: Concentrate on your Third Eye. You know the general area it's in, so just focus on that while you watch and wait. Make sure to remain relaxed and not to wrinkle your forehead -- you want any feelings you experience to be metaphysical, not physical. After a bit of practice (again, one session a day is minimal) you should be able to feel pressure there. Try to make the pressure stronger....
3. If you can make the pressure so strong that it "pops" -- or, strangely enough, feels like a flower blooming -- then start reading up on kundalini, because you've got some real potential in that field.

While these exercises don't sound very exciting, they are quite important. This disciplines the mind and weakens the barrier between the two worlds. You have very little chance of completing the next chapter without this training.

A small bit of personal proof: Meeting my chakras
Shortly after going out-of-body for the first time, I noticed some strange feedback from certain parts of my body. The most prominent feedback came from the top of my head, from the "Crown" chakra. It seemed to serve no real purpose other than to work as a gauge for my fear. Have you ever seen those animated cartoons in which the main character gets so startled that he leaps higher than the ceiling will allow? Well, that was the feeling I kept getting from this chakra. It was as if my astral body was trying to leap right out of me, but kept hitting the roof. Any little thing would set it off. If someone burst into the room, thunk. If there was a loud noise, thunk. If I was riding in a vehicle and it swerved a little too sharply, thunk.
I had had no idea, before this, that chakras were anything more than a metaphorical point meant to concentrate on. The startling effect of the chakra wore off, eventually, but what remains is my personal belief in it.
-- Witchcraft From the Ground Up

In following the above tutorial, here's where I got stuck.
I thought that I was doing something wrong, when I began to feel a tingle in this third eye area whenever I did this meditation. It felt exactly like a stray wisp of hair, tickling my forehead. Since the witchcraft tutorial said not to frown, not to make the experience physical, I'd grumble about the stray hair, rub my forehead free of the sensation, pull my hair into a ponytail, and continue the meditation. Then I'd pull a headband on because, I thought, the ponytail must not have reached the wisps of the fringe. I still felt it. So, I shlopped on some styling gel on my hairline and stroked it all back. I still felt the tickle, so I'd stand in front of the mirror and try to meditate with my eyes open, keeping a blank mind while peering at the reflection of my forehead... and I'd still feel this tickle, but not see the physical cause of this sensation.

I considered that I sometimes get a twitch in my eyebrow, could it have been the same funkily pressured vein making this sensation? Could it have been a misfiring of nerve endings, very localized to that spot on my forehead? It can't have been the third eye-- the sensation was too strong, it was a physical sensation to me, and metaphysical sensations ought to feel different... shouldn’t they? Besides, the guide clearly stated that I should feel a pressure first. Not a tingle.
It took about a year for it to sink in that I'd succeeded. A year. Stuck myself, at this stage of psionic development, for about a year. Here's why:
Except for the tickle, there was really nothing dramatic. No ghostly or demonic apparitions, no Phoebe Halliwell style visions of the future, not even the flashes of white light that I've read could happen in people who have newly opened their third eye. Later in the tutorial, the "flower blooming" description of what a vortex of psychic energy feels like, was paired with "or an egg cracking open". Upon reading that, I thought, "Aww, but mine feels like a tickle of hair... or, a pencil being delicately traced over my forehead! That's nothing like the descriptions!" Being thoroughly a tropical creature myself, flowers blooming and pulling apart the shells of eggs did not invoke the concept of delicateness. That's no excuse, though, it was really just stupid of me. I was having an experience right then and there, and dismissed it over and again, only because it didn't go exactly according to the book.
On the other hand, if I didn't question this conclusion so much, I would be far less steadfast in my own conviction that chakras are anything more than a metaphorical point on which to concentrate. If, like a chat I'd read on Psipog but can't find now, a chakra is a construct like an embedded psiball... then, interesting! So psi constructs exist! I mean, I thought my psi ball was just my wrists stiffening, but it strikes me as a rather more complicated reach of suggestive powers, no matter how strong, to get those sensations in the Third Eye— ones that did not conform to what I expected.