The energy centres

Ask the material a practical question, and it answers with a map. Asked how a person goes about balancing himself, it does not describe a technique. It says there is one step, and that step is understanding the centres that make up what it calls the mind, body, and spirit together. Everything the material says about working on yourself is downstream of that answer.

So the map first. The figure below lists the seven centres in the order the material names them, with the material’s own vocabulary for each.

Figure 01

The seven centres

1. 1

   Red ray · Root

   Survival and the fact of being here. The material calls understanding and acceptance of it fundamental.

2. 2

   Orange ray · Belly

   The personal and emotional life: how a being takes itself, one to one.

3. 3

   Yellow ray · Solar plexus

   The social self. Blockage here shows as power and manipulation, or as difficulty in the group.

4. 4

   Green ray · Heart

   Universal love. The material describes this as the centre from which third-density beings can move toward infinite intelligence.

5. 5

   Blue ray · Throat

   The first centre described as outgoing as well as incoming: speaking, and receiving another.

6. 6

   Indigo ray · Brow

   The centre the material ties to work on the spirit. Its common blockage is described as a sense of unworthiness.

7. 7

   Violet ray · Crown

   Not a centre to be worked on. It is the whole vibration read at once, and the material says balanced or imbalanced has no meaning there.

Where the energy comes from

Before the centres can mean anything, the material has to say what arrives at them, and it does so in the answer that defines balancing in the first place.

These streamings are then available to the individual who, like the planet, is a web of electromagnetic energy fields with points or nexi of entrance.

That is the substrate the whole map stands on. One energy, streamed in; a structure of points where it enters; the individual described as the same kind of structure as the planet, smaller. The centres are not fluids to be moved or pools to be filled. They are nexi — places of entrance — and what enters is what the material elsewhere calls love becoming light. A reader coming from the subtle-body traditions can feel the difference immediately: nothing here is stored or generated by the practitioner. It arrives, and the work is what the arrival meets.

The next line of the same answer completes the picture, and it is the line the scorecard-readings always leave out.

In a balanced individual each energy center is balanced and functioning brightly and fully.

Bright and full, in each — not maximised, not opened in sequence, not graded. The material’s picture of health is evenness across the whole structure, which is a different aim from the accumulation most systems describe.

What the order is for

Read the list as one system rather than seven separate dials, because the material is specific about the relationship between them. Each centre is described as a place where energy arrives, and a blockage at one is described as a difficulty that limits what can arrive at the rest. In the material’s own account, difficulty lower down is a ceiling, not a detail.

The metaphor that survives contact with the text is a hierarchy of attention rather than a ladder of achievement. A person whose survival is genuinely insecure does not get to skip to the heart. The material is unsentimental about that, and it should be read that way rather than as an instruction to fix oneself bottom to top, which is not what it says.

It is also not a sequence to be completed once. Asked directly whether the centres are activated to completion by the end of each density’s work, Ra answers that the fully activated being is rare, and gives the observation this essay is mostly an unpacking of.

The important observation to be made once all necessary centers are activated to the minimal necessary degree is the harmony and balance between these energy centers.

Each centre has what Ra calls a variable speed of rotation. What matters, once the necessary minimum is met, is the relationship between them — which means the aim of the work is the whole system at once, not the top of the list. A strong heart with a blocked throat is not advanced. It is lopsided, and the material treats the lopsidedness itself as the finding.

Three hierarchies, one set of nexi

Readers of the material sometimes meet the centres as a single ladder, and the metaphor is half right. The rays do form a hierarchy of development — but the material is explicit that the being climbing it is three things at once, and the work done through them is done through the interaction of all three, not any one. The centres are where those separate developments meet: the mind’s distortions show at the higher centres, the body’s at the lower, and the spirit is described as the channel through which the whole inflow funnels in the first place. That is why the same centre can look like a mood on one day and a temperament on another. The nexus is one place; what is arriving depends on which hierarchy is doing the arriving.

Thus we refer to the mind/body/spirit complex rather than attempting to deal with them separately, for the work, shall we say, that you do during your experiences is done through the interaction of these three components, not through any one.

The practical consequence is that a centre is not diagnosed once and closed. It is met again at each layer of the being, which is one more reason the scorecard fails: a score would have to be three scores, kept separately, and compared by no one.

The heart, and what it is a springboard towards

The fourth centre is where the material’s language changes. It stops describing blockages and starts describing movement.

The center of heart, or green ray, is the center from which third-density beings may springboard, shall we say, towards infinite intelligence.

Third density is the stage of choosing, which is why the material locates the relevant work at the heart: below it, a being is managing its own conditions; at it, a being begins to move by love rather than by need. The material is careful that this is not a feeling to be produced. It is the point from which a person can stop being the centre of their own account.

The top of the list is not a state to reach

The seventh centre is the one most easily turned into a goal, and the material closes that door itself.

The remaining center of energy influx is simply the total expression of the entity’s vibratory complex of mind, body, and spirit. It is as it will be, “balanced” or “imbalanced” has no meaning at this energy level, for it gives and takes in its own balance.

This is a genuinely unusual thing to read in a system like this. The highest centre is not where a person is aiming, is not improved by effort, and does not report a verdict. It shows the whole thing as it is, at a level the material says cannot be worked on. What that leaves is the work described in the lower centres and the practice of meeting a day honestly, which is what our essay on catalyst in an ordinary day is about.

What this is not

Three warnings we hold here, and all three come from watching how this material gets used elsewhere.

It is not a diagnosis. Nothing in the material offers a way to read another person’s centres, and the assumption that one can see where someone else is standing is exactly the overreach the material’s first principle rules out. If someone tells you which of your centres is blocked, you have learned something about them rather than about yourself. This community will not do it, at all, in any form, which is also the charter boundary that keeps collective study separate from personal work.

It is not a chakra chart. Readers arriving from Indian practice will recognise the shape of this immediately, and the resemblance is real rather than a coincidence. It is also not a one-to-one mapping, and here the material is stricter than most discussions of it. The base correspondence is stated by Ra himself.

The first balancing is of the Malkuth, or Earth, vibratory energy complex, called the red-ray complex.

Malkuth is the tree of life’s lowest station, named by Ra as the red-ray complex directly. A reader who knows the kabbalistic diagram will feel the ground shift under the comparison at that point, because one of these systems has just named the other’s term as its own. What follows is more interesting than the agreement, though. Asked whether the ascent from Malkuth to Kether maps onto the densities — one station per rung, Malkuth as one and so on — Ra refuses the mapping while calling the thinking behind it pointed the right way.

Each of these stations has a complex number and shading of energy centers as well as some part in various balances; the lower, the middle, the high, and the total balance.

Each station, in other words, carries a shading of several centres and takes part in several balances at once — the lower, the middle, the high, and the total. The tree is not a ladder of densities with one ray per rung, and a reader who maps them one to one will misread both systems. Our own reading of why the correspondence holds at the base and frays above it: the tree describes a descent of the source into vessel, which is the same event the material describes as energy streaming in through the nexi; but the tree’s stations are stations of that descent, while the rays are centres of reception in a being. Two diagrams of one territory, drawn from different sides. We teach this correspondence in full, with the material’s own corrections, on the mystical Kabbalah page.

It is not a technique. The material was asked directly whether exercises for balancing the centres could be published, and its answer is that what had already been given is a good beginning — and then it stops, on principle: the seeker must be allowed to enlighten itself, or the exchange becomes an imbalance in free will. That refusal is why this essay describes a map rather than a routine, and why the practices our community does keep are on the practice page rather than here.

It is not a progress report. The material’s own instruction is that understanding a centre is mostly acceptance of what is already there, not improvement of it. A person who treats the list as a set of levels to clear has turned a description of how attention arrives into a scoreboard, and the material gives no scoreboard to compare.

How we study it here

Slowly, and alongside the transcripts rather than instead of them. The passage the quotations above come from is one answer in one session, and reading it in place is worth more than reading our summary of it: the

session is published in full at the source. If you want the vocabulary to settle, the [reading method](/library/reading-a-transcript) is the better starting point than this page.