[UA] American Chakra

[Matthew Rowan Norwood]

> So, if the U.S. has a heart, what's to stop it from developing six other
> macrocosmic chakras?  And if a major charge was carried along that route --
> along the route of the kundalini serpent -- what would happen?
>

Sounds like a major charge for an Odomancer, actually. The paths across
the land are the paths across our bodies/selves: this is a concept
developed by several of odomancy's spiritual ancestors, such as Chinese
geomancy/acupuncture, the European concept that the king _is_ the land,
etc. The "dragon lines" of feng shui are tied to the lines of energy
running through the human body in Taoist medicine, which is influenced
by the yogic tradition's chakras as they migrate from India to China
along with Buddhism.

An odomancer might be able to work along with an epideromancer to awaken
the kundalini of the country, or to awaken his own kundalini (gain a
major charge) by traveling along the "spinal column" of the nation,
facing appropriate challenges at each stage of enlightenment as each
chakra is awoken.

Note that the European occult tradition has a funny history with regard
to kundalini yoga: remember the bits in _Foucault's Pendulum_ where he
talks about the Templars being tried as homosexuals because of their
rituals to awaken the kundalini with "besso in posteriori" or whatever?
The quest to awaken the serpent begins in LA with a kiss on the ass...

Actually, the links between kundalini yoga and modern neuroscience have
always impressed me terribly. The more I study yoga, the more impressed
I am with ancient Hindu science. Those guys really managed to figure out
a lot about the autonomic nervous system, the sensorimotor cortex,
psychoacoustics and phonology. The map of the chakras manages to look
just like the sensorimotor cortex, starting at the top of the head and
ending with the anus/genitals. Of course, most other religions have the
same polarity between the head ("reason") and the anogenital region
("sex/filth") embedded in them, but they don't make it as explicit or
nonjudgemental as the yogis.

I wonder whether several schools might be able to get in on the
kundalini thing. Pornomancy is a reinvention of tantric self-denying
sex, which is a common tool for awakening the serpent that lives coiled
around your genitals. Epideromancy and odomancy have already been
mentioned... and I'm sure there are a million correspondences worked out
by new-agers with too much time on their hands between the chakras and
the planets/sephirot/tarot arcana/aeons/gods, which could be adapted to
a few UA archetypes.

On the other hand, it's probably a bad idea to use any of that
old-school crap. Might have worked 1200 years ago, but not any more.
That's what I love about UA: you have a license -- no, a responsibility
-- to shoot down new-age bullshit and old-school religion alike. I'm not
going to buy any of this kundalini nonsense until someone presents it in
a way that MTV-fed teenagers can dig.  That's my challenge to the list:
make this kundalini thread into something appropriate to UA.

Matt Norwood


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