The Man Who Saw Chakras - Charles Leadbetter And The Map Of The Invisible Body

When the 7th center is awakened, the man is able, by passing through it, to leave his body in full consciousness and also to return to it without the usual break, so that his consciousness will be continuous through night and day. No gap at sleep, and he means this literally, no gap at death. That's the offer. Welcome to the Reality Revolution. Today we're going to talk about the man who could see chakras, the man behind much of what we know about chakras. You know this picture. You've seen it on a studio wall, on the back of a book, on an app that wanted $11 a month. Somewhere along the way, somebody told you it was ancient. Thousands of years old, handed down. It has an author. His name was Charles Webster Leadbeater. He was English. He was a former Anglican priest. He published this book in 1927 when he was 73 years old, with 10 color plates painted to his instruction, and it is the single most influential book about chakras ever written in the English language. And nobody talks about it. Here's the part that surprised me. His chart is not the chart that we're using. There's no sacral chakra in his system. His 2nd center is the spleen. His heart chakra is gold, not green. His navel is red shot through with green, not yellow. His brow doesn't have 2 petals, it has 96. So before we go any further, let me plainly say where I'm standing. I don't know Whether this man saw what he said he saw. Neither do you. We live in a fog on this stuff. It's the law of confusion in this density. That's the condition. That's the deal. And anybody who tells you they got it nailed down is selling something. But I do know is that a great many people across a great many years have gone looking and have come back describing something recognizably like this. Leadbeater was born in Stockport in 1854 and ordained into the Church of England. He was a curate in Hampshire, an ordinary, unremarkable clergyman with an interest in astronomy and a quiet dissatisfaction with the answers he was given from the pulpit. Then, in 1883, he read a book called The Occult World by Alfred Percy Sinnett, which claimed that there existed in the world certain men of vastly advanced development who could be corresponded with. He joined the Theosophical Society. He met Helena Blavatsky. And in 1884, he did something a Victorian curate did not do. He resigned his living, sailed for India, and spent the remaining 50 years of his life saying that he had learned to see things the rest of us can't. Now, that is a claim, and you should hold it loosely. But notice how he handles it. He does not ask you to accept it on his authority. He asks you to consider a much smaller and much harder to argue with proposition. He states, it is one of the commonest of our mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive. He wrote that in 1902, and in 1902 it was a fresh idea because Röntgen had found X-rays only 7 years earlier, and physics had just finished demonstrating there was A great deal of reality flying through the room that nobody could see. He uses that constantly. His favorite image for it is this, saying, the vibrations by which we see and hear are only like 2 tiny groups of a few strings selected from an enormous harp of practically infinite extent. 2 clusters of strings on an infinite harp. That's you. That's your whole sensory world. His claim is simply that the number of strings you respond to can be increased, that it is a development, not a miracle, and that it happens to some people naturally and can be trained in others. He says a master gave him a method, that he practiced it for 42 days, and that it opened. And here is the thing that made me willing to spend a month on these books. For a man supposedly credulous about everything, He is astonishingly hard on his own faculty. He wrote an entire volume cataloging the ways clairvoyance goes wrong. He notes that he once read a number in the astral light as 931 when it was, in fact, 139 reversed, like handwriting in a mirror. He warns his own students: Occultism is the apotheosis of common sense. It is an admirable rule never to hunt about for an occult explanation of anything when a plain and obvious physical one is available. The Theosophical Society had a standing rule that nothing resulting on the vision of one person alone could go into its books. Everything had to be confirmed independently, and Leadbeater says the Masters deliberately paired investigators of radically different types— an early homemade attempt at controlling for bias. He was wrong about plenty. He said so himself in print repeatedly, correcting his own earlier books and politely correcting Blavatsky, and once admitting he could attach no meaning whatsoever to something she'd written while declining to conclude she was mistaken. He described his life's work as a laboratory notebook, not a scripture. When somebody asked why the Society published books that later needed correcting, he said, If we had waited until we attained Adeptship. It is true that our books would have been perfect, but then, you see, would all have had to wait 1,000 years or so for them. So I'm going to stop here, because if I walk you further into this man's system without telling you certain things about him, you would entirely be right to be annoyed with me when you found out later. And you would find out later, so let's do that now. In 1906, the leadership of the Theosophical Society was informed that Leadbeater had given explicit sexual advice to boys in his care— advice about a certain solitary practice. He admitted it. I want to be precise, because this is where these conversations go soft. This is not an allegation. I'm not going to call it one. He admitted giving the advice, and he defended it. He argued that adults negligently avoid the subject, and that great harm follows from the silence. An advisory board convened in London that May under Colonel Olcott. Leadbeater resigned. Olcott died the following year. Annie Besant was elected president in his place. Several national sections voted for Leadbeater's readmission, and in 1908 she brought him back, publicly calling the original proceedings a travesty of justice. The only book-length scholarly biography, The Elder Brother, 1982, and followed it with a doctoral thesis running past 1,100 pages, working from the documentary record till it concluded that the pattern was broader and longer-running than the advice-only account allows. England, India, Australia across decades. A press campaign and a police investigation in New South Wales revisited the matter in the early '20s. No charges were ever brought anywhere. He was never convicted of anything. Now, I read his book for my channel many years ago on the chakras and several others that he wrote on clairvoyance. He's an amazing writer, and I had no idea of this, and I never shared those recordings because of this. But I still feel like I should share this information with you because the information is important and it's not entirely written by Ledbetter. So that's the record stated as fairly as I know. I'm not going to prosecute him and I'm not going to defend him. I wasn't there. I don't know the full details. It wasn't a small thing inside his own world. His readmission, not the original affair, caused the largest split in Theosophy, and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, the German section, split because of it. Coming from the Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming, if you've ever wondered why there was this split that happened It's because of this. There's a second thing for our purposes that matters more than the first. Tolett also established that Leadbeater's account of his own life does not survive checking. He shaved 7 years off his age, claiming to have been born in 1847. He invented a period living in Brazil, and he invented a younger brother, Gerald, who he said had been murdered in front of him. No such brother appears in any record. There was no Gerald. Hold those things apart for a second, because they genuinely are different problems, and they do different work. The first is a moral question. It's grave. It's documented. It's also, strictly speaking, separate from whether anything in this book is true. It's not me being slippery. It's how every serious scholar of material handles it, and how we handle findings in every other field. A thing is either so or it's not. And Who happened to notice it doesn't change that. If the man who first described the water cycle turned out to be a monster, the rain would keep working the same way. The second problem is different. The second one should genuinely change how you listen, because Leadbeater's entire method is testimony. He's not handing you proof you can check on paper. He's not running an experiment you can repeat in your kitchen. He is saying, I looked and this is what was there. And with testimony, unlike with proof, you cannot separate the witness from the evidence. The witness is the evidence, which means that a man who invented a murdered brother is a man who has demonstrated in a documented instance that he is capable of constructing a vivid, detailed, emotionally compelling account of something that did not happen. You have to carry that onto every page that I cover. So why am I still here? Why are we doing this? 3 reasons. I've actually thought about this. The first is that you don't get to opt out. The material is already in the water. It's on the studio wall. It's in the app. You're seeing it all the time. You're seeing these pictures of chakras. It's in the book somebody gave you. It's been for 100 years, mostly with his name filed off it. Refusing to say the name doesn't remove the influence. It just makes the influence invisible. If a chart is shaping how millions of people understand their own bodies, the identity of whoever drew it— isn't gossip. It's the single most relevant fact about it. The second is he's unusually checkable for a mystic. He didn't trade in atmosphere. He counted 4 petals, 10 petals, 96 petals. He's the one that counted the petals on the chakras. He named colors precisely enough to be caught out, and he was caught out quietly by his own successors who changed them. He contradicted the ancient Sanskrit books. Wherever what he reported didn't match. Which is a strange move for a man manufacturing credibility. The easy play would have been to agree with them. And he told his readers over and over to reach for the boring explanation first. I quoted him a moment ago saying the Society's early books were imperfect and would need correcting, and they published anyway. That's not somebody trying to shut down your skepticism. That's That's a man handing you the eraser. And the third reason is the one I find persuasive. A great many people before him and after him, in traditions that had never heard his name, have gone looking and come back describing something recognizably like this. Not identical, recognizable. That doesn't prove anything, and I'm not going to pretend it does, because this is exactly the point where these conversations usually cheat. People can converge on an error, and human nervous systems are similar enough They might well produce a similar experience, but it does mean that whatever he was pointing at didn't originate with him and doesn't stand or fall with him. He walked into a conversation that had been running a very long time before he got there, and he kept it running after he left. So here's where that leaves us. We're in the dark, all of us. You, me, him. Nobody gets certainty on these questions. It's the law of confusion. This material is trying to answer And anybody offering you certainty is telling you something about themselves rather than about reality. I can see chakras, and the reason I was compelled by this book is that I can see something very similar to him. My belief is the colors change on a regular basis. That's why he was reporting different colors. But I'm seeing the petals when I open my inner eye and look at chakras. I see this, and then I saw his drawings and his descriptions, and I felt it to be compelling. A very compelling description of the way energy centers work. The honest way to hold this is hold these maps loosely, test them against your own experience, keep what survives, and refuse to let any of them harden into scripture, which is precisely what he told his own students to do. He treated his life's work as a laboratory notebook, not a revelation. A notebook with corrections written in the margin in his own hand. For 50 years. So that's what we're talking about. We take him seriously because there's something here worth taking seriously, and we don't take him on faith because he hasn't earned that, because he didn't ask for it. So let's go look at what he actually says is inside of you to deepen our understanding of the chakras. Before the chakras, the thing they live on, Ledbetter says that Interpenetrating your physical body, and extending very slightly beyond it, is a second body made of a finer grade of physical material. He calls it the etheric double. He describes it like this: Clearly visible to the clairvoyant as a mass of faintly luminous violet-gray mist interpenetrating the denser part of the body and extending very slightly beyond it. Not a soul or spirit, On his account, this is still physical matter, just finer than the kind you can weigh, and it has 2 jobs. The first is plumbing— it carries life force that keeps the body alive. The second is it's a bridge, explaining, without it as a bridge to convey undulations of thought and feeling from the astral to the visible, denser physical matter, the ego could make no use of the cells of his brain. What you are, the actual you, which he places on a subtler plane, cannot operate your brain directly. It needs a transformer. The etheric double is the transformer. That gives him an answer to a question people have been asking forever. On his account, you leave your body every night, not as an achievement, automatically, unavoidably, every single person, every single night. You are fully conscious out there. You remember all your previous nights and all your intervening days while you're here. So why don't you know anything about it? Because the bridge isn't built. There's a layer of compressed matter he calls the etheric web sitting between the two, and it does not let the traffic through. And he calls it a merciful provision, not a wall you're meant to smash, a door with a lock on it put there on purpose until you're ready. Which brings us to the 7 places where the bridge could be built. The Sanskrit word for chakra means wheel. Leadbetter's definition is unglamorous and precise. It is worth having exactly. The chakra, or force center, is a point of connection at which energy flows from one vehicle or body of a man to another. A point of connection, a port, somewhere the traffic crosses between one of your bodies And the next. Now, 3 things about them that almost every retelling gets wrong. They are not inside you. A series of wheel-like vortices which exist in the surface of the etheric double of man. In the surface. Not buried in your spine. Not floating in the middle of your chest. They sit on the skin of that luminous mist, like whirlpool on the skin of a river. He describes them as saucer-shaped depressions, or the bell of a flower. A morning glory is his image, with the stalk rooted back into the spine or a nerve plexus, and the mouth of the flower opening outward at the surface. The petals are not decoration. They're an interference pattern. This is the most elegant idea in the book. And nobody talks about it. All these wheels are perpetually rotating, and into the hub or open mouth of each force from the higher world is always flowing a manifestation of the life stream issuing from the 2nd aspect of the Solar Logos, which we call the primary force. Force comes in at right angles through the hub. It turns, it spreads out sideways across the surface of the vortex, and as it spreads, it breaks into a certain number of radiating undulations, like the spokes of a wheel or the ribs of a fan. That's it. That's the whole mechanism. The lotus with 4 petals has 4 radiations. The lotus with 16 petals has 16. The petals aren't symbolic and they aren't anatomical. They're a standing wave. And the count is just a function of how the force distributes that particular center. Each one shimmers with its own dominant color, he says, like mother-of-pearl. They're not organs. They are tuners. He is careful about this, and almost every popular version gets it backwards. The centers, therefore, he says, cannot be described as organs in the ordinary sense of the word, since it is not through them that man sees or hears As he does through the eyes and ears, yet it is upon their vivification that the power of exercising these astral senses depends. You don't see out of your brow chakra the way you see out of your eyes. The astral body has no eyes at all. Its particles are circulating too fast for any of them to specialize into an organ. What the chakra does is make the whole body responsive to a band of vibration it wasn't responsive to before. Which produces one of his strangest and most matter-of-fact throwaway lines out there: a man sees equally well the objects behind him, above him, and beneath him without needing to turn his head. And there's one more thing the brow center does which is odd enough that I want to give it to you before we get to the list. He says a developed brow center, or the third eye, can project a small flexible tube of etheric matter out from the forehead I'll quote him exactly because paraphrasing it would be a kindness he didn't ask for. It resembles, he says, a microscopic snake with an eye at the end of it. The eye at the tip expands or contracts to match whatever you're examining. Point it at something small and it stops down. Point it at something large and it opens out, which he says is the real mechanism behind the old Indian siddhi. Of making yourself large or small at will. Not a change in your body, a change in your aperture. And then he does the thing he does constantly. He turns around and claims a piece of ancient iconography is a literal drawing of a fact. The serpent on the pharaoh's headdress rearing up out of the middle of the forehead, exactly where the brow center sits. Somebody, he says, saw one. You can take that as a revelation or As a man pattern matching enthusiastically across thousands of years. And I don't know which, but notice the shape of the claim. It's specific enough to be wrong. Most claims in this genre aren't. And that's the difference between a person whose centers are asleep and a person whose centers are awake. He gives you a number and an image. When quite undeveloped, they appear as small circles about 2 inches in diameter, glowing dully In the ordinary man, but when awakened and vivified, as they are seen as blazing, coruscating whirlpools much increased in size. And in the earlier text, more precisely, the centers themselves, which have gradually grown from a diameter of about 2 inches to the size of an ordinary saucer, are blazing and coruscating like miniature suns. 2 inches To a saucer, a dull glow to a miniature sun. Here they are as he gives them. Watch what happens. 1, the root, muladhara, base of the spine. 4 radiations arranged in a cross, which he notes is why it's so often drawn as one, fiery orange-red. This is where the sleeping fire lives, and we'll come back to that. 2, the spleen. Not the sacral, not the low belly, the spleen up under your left ribs. Six radiations, and it's the one center in a system that isn't like the others at all because it isn't a receiver; it's a power station. He does not have a sacral center. He knows the Indian texts describe one; he leaves it out. Now three is the navel, Manipura. Ten radiations, and the color is a curious blending, he says, of various shades of red. Though there is also a great deal of green in it. Red and green, not yellow. 4. The heart, Anahata, 12 radiations. And he says the 4th center at the heart is also of a glowing golden color. Gold, warm, molten gold. His heart chakra is gold. 5. The throat, Vishuddha, 16 radiations. This one gets his best sentence in the whole chapter. There's a good deal of blue in it, but its general effect is silvery and gleaming, with a kind of suggestion of moonlight upon rippling water. 6 is the brow. Ajna. And here his method shows itself completely. The Sanskrit books call it the two-petaled lotus. Ledbetter says yes, because it looks like two halves, but each half has 40 8 radiations in it. 96. One half predominantly rose with a lot of yellow in it, the other kind of purplishly blue. 7 is the crown, Sahasrara, the thousand-petaled lotus. He counts 960 in the outer ring and then finds something no one else describes: a second whirlpool inside the first, a sort of subsidiary whirlpool of gleaming white flushed with gold in its heart. a minor activity which has 12 undulations of its own. And in a fully developed adept, he says, the crown does something none of the others do: it turns inside out. Instead of a depression, it becomes a raised dome, a veritable crown of glory standing up off the head. That, he says, is what the halo is. That's what the strange bump on the top of the Buddha's head is. Somebody saw it and drew it. There's a detail buried in here that most people skip. Ledbetter says there are 2 types of human being wired differently. In most people, the astral counterparts of the 6th and 7th centers both converge on the pituitary body, which is therefore the only direct link between your physical brain and anything above it. That's the standard configuration. That's probably you. In a second type, the 7th center bends over and coincides with the pineal gland instead, opening a line that runs straight through that bypasses the ordinary astral route altogether. Then he says this: It was for this type that Madame Blavatsky was writing when she laid such emphasis on awakening of that organ. Blavatsky, the founder of his movement, the woman whose books brought him into all this, made the pineal gland central. Ledbetter looked. And reports that for most people it isn't the relevant organ at all. He does not say she was wrong. He says she was writing for a minority, and that her readers have been generalizing a special case. A correction dressed as an explanation. And that's as far as he ever goes with her. You'll watch him do it throughout his whole literature. Never, she got it wrong. Always, here's the narrower case in which she was right. Make of that what you like. Intellectual honesty under institutional constraint, or a man protecting a franchise, or both. If you ever wondered why pineal gland as third eye is everywhere while Leadbeater's own answer is essentially unknown, this is the fork in the road. Now, this is the man who gave us the modern chakra system, which makes what he says next remarkable. He says having active chakras does not make you a good person. Their development, he says, seems to me to have no more connection with morality than has the development of the biceps. And he says he checked. I have certainly met with persons in whom some of the centers were in full activity, though the moral development was by no means exceptionally high, whereas in other persons of high spirituality and the noblest possible morality, the centers were not yet vitalized at all. Saints with dark chakras, scoundrels lit up like a switchboard. The founder of the whole system telling you the chart is not the scorecard. So where does the energy come from? Not from the chakras. Ledbetter is running 3 completely separate forces through you, and keeping them apart is the key to the whole book. The primary force we've met, it comes from above, enters each hub, makes the petals. The second is vitality, prana, and this one comes from the sun. And it behaves, he says, unlike anything else in physics— enters the atom from within along with the force that holds that atom together, instead of acting upon it entirely from without, as do those other varieties of force which we call light, heat, or electricity. Sunlight pours prana into individual physical atoms. These atoms glow, and they group themselves into sets of 7. He calls the result a vitality globule. And says you can see them on a bright day as tiny points of light darting about in the air. Vitality is thus clearly sevenfold in its constitution, he says. And then the spleen chakra does its job. It draws in the globule and breaks it apart. Devoted to the specialization, subdivision, and dispersion of the vitality which comes to us from the sun, that vitality is poured out again from it in 6 horizontal streams. The 7th variety being drawn into the hub of the wheel. 6 colored rays, each going somewhat specific. Violet-blue flashes up to the throat and splits. Light blue stays at the throat. Dark blue and violet go up to the brow and crown. Yellow goes to the heart and then out through the blood. Green floods the abdomen, liver, kidneys, digestion. Rose runs everywhere along the nerves. Orange-red drops to the base of the spine. And now go back and look at his colors again. The root is orange-red, and orange-red is the ray sent to it. The heart is gold, and yellow is the ray sent to it. The throat is silvery blue, violet-blue ray. The navel has green in it, green ray. It will be noticed, he says, that in the case of every one of these centers, a similar correspondence with the color of its vitality may be seen. His colors are not arbitrary. And they are not a rainbow. They are a circuit of diagrams. Each center is the color of the fuel it burns. And one practical consequence, because he always has one: what we call nervousness, he says, is the rose ray running short. The nerves are starving. He's fairly blunt about the remedy: sunlight, fresh air, sleep before midnight, and if you can manage it, sit under a pine tree. Stay with the plumbing one more minute because Because the last stage is where the whole system quietly leaks out into the modern world. Once the prana is drawn out of them, he says, the atoms are empty, spent, and the body expels them through the pores, the breath, the excretions, which gives him a mechanism for something everybody has felt and nobody can name. You know how a room that's been closed up with people in it feels used— not smelly, used— like the air has been Through somebody. On his account, that's exactly what happened. It's full of discharged atoms with nothing left in them. Same explanation for why sunlight matters, why a sick room feels the way it does, and why washing is, in his phase, more an occult than hygienic necessity. And then he takes the consequential step: if health is just adequate intake plus unobstructed distribution, then illness is a distribution failure. Something blocked or something starved. And if that's true, a person carrying surplus vitality ought to be able to push some of it into a person running short. That's his account of mesmerism and magnetic healing. It's why he says a healthy person can leave a depleted one feeling better just by being in the room, and why the reverse is also true, which is the less comfortable half. Every modern energy healing modality you can name Reiki, therapeutic touch, pranic healing— the whole industry is downstream of this. Not loosely, structurally. A subtle body with energy budget centers that can be blocked or open. A practitioner transferring surplus into a deficient client. That picture is here, laid out as a plumbing diagram. It wasn't founding a therapy. He thought he was filling a field report. There is a 3rd force, and he treats it completely different from the other 2. He says, as we know it, this serpent fire, called in Sanskrit Kundalini, is the manifestation on the physical plane of one of the great world forces, one of the powers of the Logos. Not from the sun, not from above, from the earth beneath, coiled and asleep at the base of the spine. It is in very truth like liquid fire as it rushes through the body and the courses through which it ought To move is a spiral one, like the coils of a serpent. 2 things before we go. He's careful about both. First, it is not electricity, it is not vitality, and it cannot be converted into ether. The 3 forces run through the same body and never interchange. To make the point, he produces one of the flatly strangest sentences in the whole book. I've seen as much as a million and a quarter volts of electricity put into a human body, he says. But even this enormous display of power had no effect whatever upon the serpent fire. A million and a quarter volts. He mentions it the way you'd mention just checking a fuse. That's either a man who's been somewhere very unusual or a man entirely comfortable saying things after the last half hour. You know we have to hold both. Second, the road it travels. Three channels. And if you've spent time in a yoga room, you know the words. Chishumna. Up the center of the spine. Ida, left. Pingala, right. The fire rushes to the centers in that spiral, and somewhere on the way comes what he calls the marriage of the forces— the primary force descending from above meeting the serpent fire climbing from below. The meeting is the event. That's the whole apparatus. He says it exists in 7 layers, and that in an ordinary person only the outermost is Stirring quietly, benignly, doing its work. He also says something quietly devastating about that. Because of the layering, a student can be absolutely convinced he has succeeded when all he's done is ruffle the surface. And when it works, when it goes up in order correctly, each center it passes wakes, and each waking center drags a faculty down out of the invisible world into your ordinary waking consciousness. The navel, a vague sense of atmospheres, of whether a person or place is safe without knowing why. The spleen, you start remembering your nights. Heart, you feel what other people feel, sometimes to the point of reproducing their aches in your own body. Throat, clairaudience. Brow, clairvoyance. And the crown, he says, when the 7th center is awakened, the man is able, by passing through it, to leave his body in full consciousness And also to return to it without the usual break, so that his consciousness will be continuous through night and day. No gap at sleep, and he means this literally, no gap at death. That's the offer. Now here's what he does with it. There is indeed most serious peril in awakening the higher aspects of this furious energy in a man before he has gained strength to control it, before he has acquired the purity of life and thought which alone can make it safe. He also says one very common effect of rousing it prematurely, meaning the Kundalini fire, is that it rushes downwards in the body instead of upwards, and thus excites the most undesirable passions, excites them and intensifies their effects to such a degree that it becomes absolutely impossible for the man to resist them because a force has been brought into play In whose presence he is as helpless as a swimmer before the jaws of a shark. He goes on to say such men become satyrs, monsters of depravity, because they are in the grasp of a force which is out of all proportion to the ordinary human power of resistance. And it does not only go down, it goes sideways into the mind. He explains it intensifies everything in man's nature, and it reaches the lower and evil qualities more readily than the good. It would produce abnormal and satanic pride, which is quite inconceivable to the ordinary man. And then, having spent an entire book building the map, having counted every petal, named every ray, he stops, stating, I have specially and intentionally refrained from explaining how this arousing is to be done, or mentioning the order in which the force, when aroused, should be passed these various centers, for that should by no means be attempted except at the express suggestion of a master. To experiment with it without understanding it is far more dangerous than it would be for a child to play with nitroglycerin. He knew how. He says a master taught him. He wrote it down for nobody. And he closes with a line from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. that he clearly loved. It gives liberation to yogis and bondage to fools. He even anticipates the excuse. Students, he says, so often seem to think that some special exception to the laws of nature will be made in their case, that some special intervention of Providence will save them from the consequences of their folly. Assuredly, nothing of that sort will happen. So one last thing. If the heart was gold, and his second center was the spleen. Where did this come from? Not from the Sanskrit text, classical source Ledbetter himself was working against. The Sat Chakra Nirupana, 16th century, brought into English by John Woodruff in 1919, assigns colors by element and deity, not by spectrum. Its root is crimson, its heart is vermilion, its solar plexus is the blue of lotus. There is no rainbow in it. There is never going to be because a 7-color spectrum is a post-Newtonian idea that was not available to a 16th-century author. Now I have to tell you about the last chapter of the chakra book because it's the most consequential. Chapter 5 was written roughly 2 decades after the rest of the material. Here's why it matters. Ledbetter described what he says he saw first, 1910, in the inner life. He read the Sanskrit tantric literature afterwards. Once Descent English translations existed, Woodroffe's Serpent Power only appeared in 1919. Chapter 5 is him sitting down with the classical texts and comparing them against his own notes. The traditional method runs one way: you receive a transmission, you study, you practice, and your experience is measured against the tradition. Leadbeater ran it backwards. He looked, he wrote it down, and then the ancient books turned up and disagreed with him. The brow has 2 petals, not 96. There's a center at the genitals. The heart is vermilion. He did not conclude he had made a mistake. He concluded the books were an imperfect record of the thing he had seen directly. That's the inversion. That's the whole story. In chapter 5, the Sanskrit forces stop being the authority and become the data. Once you see that move, you understand how the West got the system it has. The 7-slot chart isn't a translation of the Indian tradition, it's a correction of it. Offered by a man who believed he was in a position to correct it. Whether he was, I can't settle for you. I can only share my own interpersonal experiences. When I see the chakra, it's multiple colors undulating. I see multiple colors moving through. There is not a fixed color. So the rainbow isn't classical, and it's not Leadbeater. It's a third thing, and it arrives later, assembled over about 50 years by 20th century color therapists who slid the visible spectrum and the endocrine glands onto the frame he built, popularized by counterculture by Christopher Hills in '77 and settled into its final form by an Anodea Judith in 1987. Kurt Leland, who traced the whole chain in his book Rainbow Body, has a good phrase for what happened: source amnesia. Which leaves Ledbetter in a stranger position than either his fans or critics usually put him in. He did not invent the chakras. He did not color them the way you were taught. But he is the reason we count them at 7, the reason we name them in English, the reason they are drawn as a vertical stack of colored discs on a chart at all, and the reason anybody in the West thinks of them as a single connected system. He built the frame. Somebody else poured the rainbow in. Now, I have seen the colors of the rainbow. Sometimes I wondered if I'm being influenced by my understandings and descriptions of it, but I have definitely seen Blue at the throat, green in the heart. I've seen orange in the sacral, and I have seen the sacral, unlike he did. Here's what I'll say for him. He counted, he measured, he gave numbers you could check him on. He described colors precisely in his own. And when he came to the one part of it that could actually hurt somebody, the one chapter would have sold the most copies, he put the pen down. None of which cancels what I told you earlier about him. I'm not offering you a trade where the counting buys off the record. A man can be a careful observer and a serious moral failure. I think there are records throughout history where someone comes along with really powerful metaphysical information, and then we find out their character is shaded, and we disregard the information We downplay it, although the information that's revealed is amazing. In some cases, I believe it's purposeful. Like, we are provided information that's really important that can help us on a spiritual level, and that person is purposely disregarded and their character is undermined so that we would not get that information. That's why we still need to talk about it. I want to talk to you about why we think the chakras are the way they are. Now, in the Law of One system, they call them rays, and they use the same color code system. There are a number of systems. There's a 12-chakra system. There are infinite different energy center systems that are discussed. What do you see? I want your observations in the comments. What colors do you see, and how do these chakras interact in your energy body? He explains, it is one of the commonest of our mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive. We cannot perceive the unseen world in the way we wish we could. I believe over time with science we will begin to see these things. Now, I have another episode called Thoughts Are Living Things, and I barely made reference to Leadbeater But I describe his work with Ani Bassant where they describe what thoughts look like, what depressed thoughts look like, or angry thoughts look like, and if they're selfish or non-selfish thoughts. I think you'll find that fascinating because their observations of what thoughts actually look like are really, really fascinating. And that is another area that I think he brought to us. So make sure to check that episode out. The one thing is clear experientially For myself is that these energy centers play a critical role in our awakening, in our ascension, in our transformation of consciousness as we move into this New Earth. And understanding them is obviously a fundamental element of our awakening. So all I'm doing is try to teach you about reality creation, and these centers play a role in that. And understanding them relates directly to where you're at in consciousness, because the level of awakening, the, the level an energy center is working, can indicate the level of consciousness that you're at. And the more I work with people, as I see people— many people don't even have their roots awakened. When I look at most people, their root chakras are closed. And as I see people's chakras be awakened with my own inner eye, I see fundamental changes In the way that they're able to adapt and create their reality. So there's something here. And as we live in this world of confusion, things like this can give us some clues. If you have additional information, please share it in the comments. I'd love to know. Now, before I go, I want to invite you to join the Reality Revolution community. The link's in the description at skool.com, spelled S-K-O-O-L.com/realityrevolution. We have weekly group coaching sessions. You can catch my live events streamed live through my group. There are some amazing people there working together to achieve their goals and create their own realities, and I would love it if you could join us. I'm sending all my light, all my love to everyone listening, and welcome to the Reality Revolution.