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Command
When the tasks of the fifth chakra have been accomplished, two degrees of illumination become available to the perfected saint, that at the sixth, known as savikalpa samadhi, "conditioned rapture," and finally, supremely, at the seventh chakra, nirvikalpa samadhi, "unconditioned rapture." Ramakrishna used to ask those approaching him for instruction: "Do you like to speak of God with form or without?" And we have words of the great doctor ecstaticus Meister Eckhart, referring to the passage from six to seven: "Man's last and highest leave-taking is the leaving of God for God."The center of the the first of these ecstasies, know as the lotus of "Command," Ajna, is above and between the brows. The uraeus serpent in Egyptian portraits of the pharaohs appears exactly as though from this point of the forehead. The center is described as a lotus of two pure white petals, bearing the syllables ham and ksham. Seated on a white lotus near its heart is the radiant six-headed goddess Hakini, holding in four of her six hands a book, a drum, a rosary, and a skull, while the remaining two make the "fear-dispelling" and "boon-bestowing" signs. Within the yoni triangle is a Shiva Lingam, shining "like a chain of lighting flashes," supporting the sign of the syllable OM, of which the sound is here fully heard. And here, too, the form is seen of one's ultimate vision of God, which is called in Sanskrit Saguna Brahman, "The Qualified Absolute."When the mind reaches this plane, one witnesses divine revelations day and night. Yet even then there remains a slight consciousness of "I." Having seen the unique manifestation man becomes mad with joy as it were and wishes to be one with the all-pervading Divine, but cannot do so. It is like the light of a lamp inside a glass case. One feels as if one could touch the light, but the glass intervenes and prevents it.
For where there is a "Thou" there is an "I," whereas the ultimate aim of the mystic, as Eckhart has declared, is identity: "God is love, and he who is in love is in God and God in Him."
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