Ajna: The Command

Above the throat, between the eyebrows, the map changes character entirely. Below this point, every centre was the seat of an element: earth, water, fire, air, ether, climbing from gross to subtle. At the sixth gate the elements are gone. There is no element here. There is only mind.

The text calls it Ajna. The word means command.

Why the command

The name is the first clue to what this centre is. Ajna is the order, the authority, the command, and the tradition reads it in two joined senses. It is the place where the command of the guru is received, the inner point at which the teacher’s transmission lands, which is why the previous volume’s insistence on the guru returns here as architecture: the whole ascent is guided from a teacher’s command, and the command is received at this gate. And it is the centre of manas and buddhi, the mind and the higher intellect, the faculty that commands the lower instrument of the body. The third eye is the eye of the mind, the seat of inner sight.

What the text describes

The Sat-chakra-nirupana gives ajna only two petals, the fewest of any centre, a lotus white as the moon, bearing two white letters. After the sixteen vowels of the throat, the sudden austerity of two petals is deliberate. The proliferation of the lower centres, the four and six and ten and twelve and sixteen, gives way near the summit to simplicity. The mind, gathered to a point, needs little.

The seed-syllable is OM, the Pranava, called in the text the first seed of the Vedas, the primordial sound. And within the centre the text describes the visual unfolding of OM itself: the syllable, then a crescent, then a point, the bindu, then nada, subtle sound, the stages by which the audible dissolves into the inaudible. The sixth gate is where sound returns to its source.

The presiding deity is Paramashiva, the supreme Shiva, and the inner self, the atma, is realised here. With him is the shakti Hakini, described as six-faced, like so many moons, six-armed, bearing book and skull and drum and rosary, her mind pure. Within the centre is the third and last of the lingas the serpent passes, the itara-linga, shining within the triangle like a chain of lightning. The root had the self-born linga, the heart the bana-linga, and the brow the itara-linga: three milestones on the central road, and the sixth gate holds the last of them.

Where the rivers meet

The sixth gate carries a structural significance the others do not. It is here, the broader tradition holds, that the three principal channels of the second chapter, ida on the left, pingala on the right, and sushumna up the centre, finally meet and merge. The two rivers we live by, the cooling lunar and the heating solar, converge with the central channel at the third eye. The point is sometimes called the triveni, the triple confluence, borrowing the name of the sacred meeting of three rivers at Prayaga. The serpent, climbing the central channel, reaches the place where her two attendant currents rejoin her. Above this confluence lies only the crown.

The fruit named in the text is the highest yet short of liberation itself. The one established here, it says, realises his unity with the absolute and gains rare powers, an all-knowing and all-seeing condition, the siddhis of the perfected yogi. The mind, gathered at its own seat, sees without the eyes.

The modern overlay

In the popular system, ajna is the indigo chakra, the sixth band of the rainbow, the third-eye centre of intuition, imagination, and psychic insight, often wired to the pituitary gland. The “third eye” name is genuinely old and genuinely about inner sight, so the overlay here keeps something of the source. But the colour indigo comes entirely from the spectral ladder; the text colours the ajna lotus white, with white letters, a centre of clarity, not of a deep blue-violet. And the reduction of the centre to “intuition” loses what the text foregrounds: the command of the guru, the seat of mind, the confluence of the three channels, the unfolding of OM, the last of the three lingas. The treatise keeps the white lotus the text describes.

Hold the image the text gives: a white two-petalled lotus between the brows, the syllable OM dissolving within it into point and subtle sound, a six-faced shakti, a lightning-bright linga, and the place where the three rivers of the subtle body finally become one.

One gate remains, and it is unlike the six below it. The text does not quite call it a chakra. It calls it the goal.