Subtle-energy practice

The Chinese line: three treasures, one field, one orbit

Jing, qi, shen — essence, vital breath, spirit. They are called treasures because they are spent and can be conserved, and the whole discipline is a long argument about how.

The dantian, the “elixir field”, is the lower belly as the place the practice returns to, with a middle and an upper field above it.

The microcosmic orbit is the circulation of attention and light up one channel and down the other. It is the basic exercise of the internal alchemy line, and the version most Western readers meet has been systematised for teaching rather than handed down within a lineage — which is a difference worth knowing, not a disqualification.

Stillness has its own method: sitting in forgetfulness, a Daoist practice of letting the contents go rather than building something up.

The Indian line: sheaths, channels, coils

The five sheaths run from the food body through the breath body, the mind body and the wisdom body to the bliss body. They are the tradition’s version of levels, and they are not the material’s densities.

The nadis — the two side channels and the central one — and the centres along the central channel. Pranayama works the breath in order to work the channels.

The seven-colour chart most of us have seen is largely a twentieth-century synthesis, Theosophical in origin, rather than a classical diagram. Classical descriptions vary in the number, position and function of the centres, so a reader who wants the tradition should read the sources rather than the chart.

Kundalini is the coiled energy at the base and its rising. In the tantric lines the aim is not power and not phenomena: it is union, and the phenomena are treated as milestones that are also detours.

The material’s own anatomy: the seven bodies

Asked, in 47.8, whether the familiar esoteric list — physical, etheric, emotional, astral, mental — is the right one, Ra answers with a different cut: seven bodies keyed to the rays, "the number seven repeated from the macrocosm to the microcosm in structure and experience". The enumeration is worth having in full, because it is the material’s own subtle anatomy and most of it is unlike the chart most readers arrive with.

The red-ray body is the chemical body — and not the body you wear, but "the unconstructed material of the body, the elemental body without form", the elements a healing can work on directly. The orange-ray body is the physical body complex before self-awareness: the body as it forms without the inhabitant, the body in the womb before the mind/spirit enters. The yellow-ray body is the physical vehicle you inhabit now, the one that experiences catalyst. So the "physical body" of the popular charts is three bodies in this system, at three grades of the descent into matter.

Above the vehicle the vocabulary changes again. The green-ray body is the lighter, life-dense body that séance phenomena show — the astral body of some teachings, though Ra notes others misapply "etheric" to it. The blue-ray body is the light body, named devachanic, and Ra points directly at the Indian writings here: there are many types of devachanic body, and the sutras explored them. The indigo-ray body Ra claims for its own school: the etheric, the gateway body, where "form is substance" and the body shows only as light moulding itself as it desires — the body a healer works through. The violet-ray body is complete: what another tradition calls the Buddha body, within which lies "a sense of wholeness which is extremely close to unity with all that there is".

This is where the Chinese and Indian maps above meet the material without dissolving into it. The sheaths of Vedanta and the dantian work of the internal arts describe real grades of the descent; the rays name the same grades by function — element, form, vehicle, heart, light, gateway, totality. The correspondence a reader came here for is real, and it is a correspondence of function, not of names: at 47.8 Ra warns the naming will confuse, because every school labels the subtle bodies differently. The charts disagree about words; the descent itself has one structure.

Where it touches this material

The vocabulary overlaps and the systems do not, and the material says which one it is using. Ra calls its own structures energy centres, and where the questioners said “chakra” he takes the word without taking the system — at 17.44 the phrase is the reader’s own, used for the reader’s benefit. The serpent is named at 93.22 as a symbol of what some call the kundalini, referred back to earlier material.

What the material supplies is not a technique but a description of what the centres are for. At 15.9 the whole picture is given in three sentences: love becomes light and streams in according to a web of points or nexi of entrance; the individual, like the planet, is a web of electromagnetic energy fields with those nexi; and in a balanced individual each centre is balanced and functioning brightly and fully. At 15.12 each centre is named in turn along with what its blockage looks like in a life — personal eccentricities at the orange ray, power and manipulation at the yellow, difficulty expressing compassion at the green. At 40.4 Ra adds the observation that matters most to anyone working with these systems: each centre has a variable speed of rotation, and once the necessary centres are activated to the minimum, what matters is the harmony and balance between them.

And the material declines to teach the method. At 15.13 it is asked whether exercises may be published, answers that what has already been given is a good beginning, and then says why it will go no further: the seeker must be allowed to enlighten itself, or the exchange becomes an imbalance in free will. That is why this page describes two traditions instead of prescribing a practice, and it is not modesty. It is the first distortion of the whole cosmology applied to advice.

What it is not

A way to accumulate power or phenomena, and not interchangeable with the rays. A reader who has practised the microcosmic orbit has trained the body’s structure; that is not the same as balancing the green ray, which the material describes as a review of a life, done in the mind. The two can inform each other. They cannot stand in for each other, and the Middle Pillar exchange above shows the same mistake arriving from the other direction.