The subtle body
Kundalini, the chakras and the nadis: the map of an anatomy no dissection finds, as the Sanskrit sources actually draw it.
The subtle body is the tradition’s account of an anatomy that no dissection has ever found. It maps channels, nadis, along which a vital breath is said to travel. It maps centres, chakras, where those channels knot. And it maps a coiled power, kundalini, held sleeping at the base of the spine until practice wakes it.
Almost everything the modern world believes about that map was assembled in the twentieth century, a good deal of it in the West. Seven discs up the spine, each a colour of the rainbow, each wired to a gland and a mood: that arrangement is barely a hundred years old, and most of it reached English through Arthur Avalon’s The Serpent Power in 1919.
The Sanskrit sources describe something older and considerably stranger. The number of centres varies from text to text. The colours are not the colours of the rainbow. The purpose is liberation, and wellbeing is not the point.
These pages hold the classical material and the modern overlay clearly apart, and say plainly which is which. The full treatment is in The Coiled Power.