The Coming Age of Prayer
What "evolved consciousness" might look like.
I want to talk here about humanity’s future — about the “Age of Aquarius” or the “Global Awakening” or the “Singularity” or however a given person wants to name it.
I’m going to use the framework of chakras to do it. I like the framework. I’ve been using it for something like 25 years, and I really enjoy how the modern yoga community has embraced it.
But I think there’s a recurring confusion about the fifth and sixth chakras. It’s a necessary confusion, all part of the process. And, I think we’ve reached a point where we can shine some light on what’s going on.
To talk about this, I’m going to assume you know basically what chakras are. You might be able to get the gist of it by reading this post anyway. But if you find you’d like more background, maybe start with this blog post. (I really appreciate Brett’s orientation to chakras, and really her whole spirit around yoga. For what that’s worth!)
Confusing Ages
Sometimes I hear yoga practitioners claim that our species is transitioning to a sort of “heart chakra” stage. That’s why we’re being called to move from the sort of ego-driven third-chakra-like focus on profit and “me me me” into more heart-centered practices like yoga and compassion meditation.
I can see and feel the reasoning. And I strongly agree that the heart chakra is resonating with where we’re going.
And I still think this description misses something important.
I think a good example of third chakra culture is street gang culture. What can you do? Do you have the guts? If someone points a gun at your head, do you piss your pants, or do you meet it with honor? It’s not that caring and community are absent, but they aren’t parts of the organizing principle. The organizing principle is about individual action and empowerment. The question is, “Can you earn your place?”
Yes, that resonates with the first chakra’s focus on raw survival, but that’s because of something like chakra harmonics: chakras 1, 3, and 5 tend to be about individuality, while chakras 2, 4, and 6 are about surrendering to something greater. This means that when a culture (or an individual!) reaches a certain level of awakening, it’ll tend to most resemble the stage before the one it just left. In fact, each stage tends to emerge by partially rejecting the stage it’s growing out of.
The punchline here is that I think we’re actually entering the Age of Ajna, the sixth chakra.
It resonates with the fourth chakra because, like fourth, sixth is about surrendering to something greater. But I think that surrendering process gets greatly misunderstood — in part because there’s confusion about what is being surrendered.
We aren’t surrendering the ego anymore. That was third chakra business, and we sort of know that game. Of course there’s farther to go, but this kind of surrender isn’t new to us.
Rather, I think what we’re being called to surrender is the effort to answer our own prayers.
Traditional Anahata
To explain what I mean, I’m going to take a bit of a detour to talk about the global transition from third to fourth to fifth.
For a wonderful example of what I consider to be fourth chakra culture, listen to the song “Tradition” from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof”.
The little town of Anatevka isn’t organized by individual might: their beloved leader is a gentle rabbi, not a warrior-king like Conan or Genghis Khan. No one is killed for being “useless”. The town even have a beggar, whom they treat as playing a vital role in their community. Their traditions hold their way of life together, which in turn makes sure that everyone has a place in society and has food and clothing and shelter.
The price is, you have to surrender most of your personal power to the social good. You do what your role requires of you whether you want to or not. You marry whom you’re supposed to, you do the work that’s required of you, you pray when and how you’re told. This is about your duty to God, not your personal happiness, after all! You can complain about it, but only if your complaints don’t rock the boat. If you’re a real rebel… well, that just won’t do, and you’ll be pressured to conform or leave.
Most people in modern yoga culture don’t like fourth chakra culture. We know better. Traditions contain wisdom and value that’s often worth honoring, but we honor the wisdom and value, not the traditions for their own sake. We know to listen to our hearts and tune in to truth. We can feel where traditions are holding everything in love, and where they are instead acting as excuses for us to hide from our own pain. We might not be perfect at this discernment, but we can try, and we can speak up when we can tell a way of life is misaligned with the highest good.
Ah, but notice the themes that emerge here: We can discern the truth. We have the power to speak up about this.
Those aren’t fourth chakra functions at all.
Rather, we’re benefitting from centuries of being in a fifth chakra culture.
The Age of Vishuddha
The traditional (!) descriptions of the throat chakra appeared during the Age of Anahata, the heart chakra. It’s very, very, very hard for a culture to describe its future stage of awakening with much accuracy. So, unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of confusion here. But I think we can sort it out, since (I claim) we’re coming to the end of the Fifth Age and can look back with some clarity.
Yes, the fifth chakra is about truth, and discernment, and about owning our voice.
But I think it’s closer to the core to say: the fifth chakra is about truthful rhetoric.
The power of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses wasn’t just that he said words he believed in. People say all kinds of things in fourth chakra culture, and it generally doesn’t matter. The power of Luther’s words was that people could tell for themselves that he was naming an important truth.
The same could be said for Copernicus. He pointed out that the movements of the stars and planets in the sky make more sense if you imagine that the Earth is orbiting the Sun instead of the other way around. This was something anyone could verify for themselves by looking up and thinking. It didn’t matter who Copernicus was, and it didn’t matter that Church authorities violently disagreed. Truth won out because someone’s voice spoke it.
Mathematics, science, the Industrial Revolution, and now the Information Age are all results of fifth chakra culture. It’s not a coincidence that Google search requires words, or that programmers write programs (instead of painting them or feeling them out or dancing them). The information of the Information Age is also highly verbal, with blogs and Wikipedia and Facebook posts. Sure, there are some pictures, but even Instagram with its strong focus on pictures encourages a culture of talking and storytelling. And typically you search for images by verbally describing them.
The Fifth Age is ending.
Ultimately, the fifth chakra is about logic. (Appropriately enough, the word “logic” comes from the Greek word for “word”.) Logic, taken to its logical (!) extreme, produces computers and information theory and industrial science and social order through formal law.
The trouble we’re running into today is that we’ve been trying harder and harder to literally answer our own prayers with this logic:
We can’t cure cancer? Put more funding into cancer research.
We suffer an economic collapse? Work out economic theory and use it to justify how we try to recover.
We’re on the brink of global annihilation from nuclear war? Convert politics into a type of math and then proclaim a solution.
Psychedelics are threatening our social order? Make them illegal and create strong cultural narratives about them being dangerous and bad.
Etc.
It’s becoming more and more obvious that this doesn’t work. It’s like trying to make rippling water in a bucket become still by slapping the peaks. Yes, we have amazing computers and smartphones now, but at the cost of massive consumerism and literal physical mountains of toxic trash. Yes, we have marvelous modern medicine, but by alienating ourselves from the intelligence of our bodies and Nature. Every solution solves the problem we name but generates others that are often even worse.
Of course, if we clearly describe (!) this meta-problem, we can speak a solution into existence, right? What could possibly go wrong with that?
This is all a necessary stage of growth. It’s perfectly natural. We collectively have to discover that even with the divine language of logic, we cannot speak the answer to our prayers for joy and union with the Divine. We have to learn for ourselves that, as beautiful as our voices are, we cannot speak corrections to Creation without alienating ourselves from It.
Once we deeply understand this with our whole being, we can finally, finally find relief by surrendering our collective voice to a higher power.
Understanding comes from prayer
The word “intuition” comes up a lot when talking about the sixth chakra.
I think that’s roughly right, to the same extent that the fifth chakra is about “truth”. But I think we can be more precise than that now that we’ve run through the circuit of Vishuddha.
The intuition of the sixth chakra is different from the second chakra’s intuitive creativity, or the fourth chakra’s intuitive sense of communal harmony. The Third Eye looks into the Void and sees cosmic truths. It’s the vessel that transmits answers to the Throat’s prayers.
I see this most commonly in mathematics. In the Age of Vishuddha, the “math” that’s taught is hollow logic. I often say that schools mostly teach computation, not math: students memorize seemingly random sets of rules for solving problems that they usually don’t care about.
But mathematicians know better. To a mathematician, math is mostly struggling to clearly articulate a question about deep truths, and then waiting for the silence to grant an answer.
In other words, mathematics is an interplay between prayer and listening. And if both the prayer and the listening are sincere, the mathematician’s mind is graced with sacred insight.
As the Sixth Age unfolds, I expect this relationship to problem-solving to become more widespread. Instead of obsessively trying to figure out what to do (as though Creation is flawed and we mortals need to fix it), we as a culture will focus on articulating what looks like a problem and then trusting that we will receive clarity if we pause and listen to the silence. And just as happened in the Second and Fourth Ages, I expect that we will experience this as an ongoing devotion to and honoring of the Sacred.
And yes, “prayer” is the right word.
Fifth chakra cultures tend to find this sacred/holy/prayer-based language distasteful. It rings too much of religion, which is the form surrender took in the fourth chakra culture that the Age of Vishuddha rejects. But this is because Vishuddha culture cannot understand Sixth Age culture and mistakes it for Fourth.
We cannot go back to blindly obeying religious authorities. We have seen too clearly that we can tell truth from falsehood for ourselves.
This means that the Fifth Age fear of sanctity is misplaced. It’s understandable… but it’s part of what we have to surrender in our transition to the Age of Ajna. Because the Sixth Age is a return to the Sacred. There’s no getting around that — and we wouldn’t want to if we could.
Every chakra has an upward (“awakening”) and downward (“manifesting”) role. The upward role of the Throat is prayer. It ideally does not reply to the desires of the Heart or body as though it were God: it just transmits those desires upward as an offering to the Void. Then when we listen and the Void answers, the Throat can play its downward role of articulating what was downloaded so that our collective Heart can receive it.
Most of the pain of the Age of Vishuddha comes from refusing to pray this way. For instance, basically everyone in academia knows that the constraints around research are weirdly soul-crushing.
And we can tell that this isn’t aligned with the highest good. But as a Fifth Age culture, academia doesn’t (yet) recognize the need to pray to the Void for help with this. Instead, it focuses on articulating questions and then trying to answer them. It pretends that “sacred” doesn’t mean anything and that there is no higher power than the mind. Since that highest recognized power doesn’t have an answer to this soul-crushing problem, most academic researchers have to suffer with it.
But this faithlessness will come to an end. It’s inevitable. Vishuddha culture is unsustainable. Eventually each and every culture will either transition to prayer and a deep honoring of the Sacred, or die.
Please respect the mind
I think that most of what I’ve said here isn’t novel. People at the frontier of the Sixth Age have been talking about all of this in different ways — about the importance of trusting intuition, of not being overly bound by logical limitation or what seems to “make sense”, etc.
But there’s a recurring part of young Ajna culture that bugs me and that I don’t think is in alignment with where it’s ultimately heading.
Lots of people forging ahead into sixth chakra culture talk about being “heart-centered”. And compared to fifth chakra culture, I think that’s very right.
But Ajna culture in its fruition is at least as much about the head as it is about the heart.
The heart comes up so often because the Throat needs to listen to the Heart in order to articulate the Heart’s wishes to the Third Eye. If the fifth chakra is just focused on itself, like it often does in the Age of Vishuddha, it can’t perform its holy role as the voice of prayer.
But the Third Eye is about insight, in the same way that the Throat is about truth. The Age of Ajna will be an Age of understanding and accepting our role in the universe.
This is a direct, intuitive kind of understanding. As we collectively plug into it, we’ll find we can’t articulate it all. It will be too vast to say in words, much like we can’t capture literally everything about a photograph with a written description of it.
But part of our holy work will be to try, because that effort to articulate is part of the downward current of manifestation. It’s how Divine Will comes through us to take physical form.
So no, the coming Age is not an Age of surrendering our desire to understand for the sake of focusing on the Heart.
It’s surrendering our belief that we can figure out the universe and our role in it all on our own.