Chapter
20

Physical, Astral, Causal: Three Bodies, One You

Let’s just say you are so inspired by this book that you’re dreaming of learning Sanskrit and flying off to India to study with a Tantric master. Fantastic. We’re happy to have helped fuel your inspiration. However, we are guessing that while you find chakra and yoga philosophy somewhat interesting, you likely are more interested in your chakras as a way to help you feel better and evolve in your personal life—right there in the comfort of your home. We think you’ll find this last short philosophical chapter interesting because it takes the theoretical concept of the chakras as well as the right-here, right-now reality of chakras beyond your body.

Actually, that’s not entirely accurate. It takes the concept and reality of the chakras to the next level of your body—and the next level after that.

Your Three Bodies

You know all about your physical body—the body you can see and feel, comprised of your bones, muscles, organs, and physical features, as well as your physical feelings like pain and pleasure. But did you know you also have an astral body that permeates and extends slightly beyond your physical body? This is your energy body, and it is the realm of your nadis and your chakras. But your body-ness doesn’t end there. You also have a causal body, and it permeates and extends to about a foot beyond both your physical and astral bodies. This is the realm of the soul and the essence of you that lives on when your physical body ceases to exist. This is one of the basic ways that yoga philosophy understands the body.

At least, that is a simplified explanation of yoga’s subtle bodies. We aren’t going to bore you with the details of the entire cosmic infrastructure as yoga philosophy describes it. However, we do want to walk you through the basics of the three bodies because understanding what they are, how they are different, how they interact with each other, and what they have to do with your chakras can help you understand yourself better.

That’s because there are many different theories on the different subtle bodies, including how many there are and what they are called. Some theories, for example, name five bodies: the physical, etheric, astral, mental, and causal bodies. However, just as there are many chakras—and we only discuss seven of them in this book—for our purposes, we have chosen to limit our discussion to the physical, astral, and causal bodies. We did this with the full recognition that not everybody interprets things the same way we do, and not everyone who writes about such matters has learned about them from the same sources or traditions.

The Physical Body: Blood, Guts, and Glory

We don’t have to introduce you to your physical body. You already know it well. This body is made up of your bones, muscles, organs, and blood. The physical body has legs and arms, a torso, a face, hair, fingernails, toenails, and teeth. It has hands that grasp and feet that walk the ground. This is the body that gets headaches and pulled muscles and that loves to eat, sleep, and have sex. This body breathes air, drinks water, and needs to sleep. It is the body people recognize as you.

The chakras don’t live in the physical body, which is why you can’t see them (without intuitive training, of course!). Everyone can see the parts of the physical body, inside and out, whether with the naked eye, with a microscope, or with medical equipment, such as X-ray machines and MRIs. Yet, chakras exist within (and outside of) the physical body, and structures within the physical body, such as clusters of nerves, particular glands, and certain organs, relate to and respond to the energy of the chakras.

The Astral Body: Prana Central

Your physical body breathes in air, but with every breath, the astral body also breathes in the prana life force. The astral body permeates the physical body and exists inside of it, but it is also bigger than the physical body and extends anywhere from a few inches up to about a foot beyond the physical body. You move your arm, and your astral body’s “arm” moves, too, as the energy imprint and aura of the physical body’s arm.

The astral body is your energy body. It is the realm of thought and also the place where prana moves through you, in and out of you. This is the body that contains the meridians doctors use for acupuncture and Shiatsu massage. They put needles in and press points on your physical body, but they are doing it to manipulate the energy flow within your astral body.

The astral body contains not just the primary meridians but thousands and thousands of energy channels like a network of rivers and streams on a planet. At every intersection between two or more energy channels, there exists a chakra. Although this book focuses on the seven primary chakras along the midline of the body, there are thousands of other chakras of various sizes and strengths, all over the body.

Because your chakras exist in the astral rather than the physical body, you can’t see them through normal visual means (see Chapter 19). However, they are hard at work bringing prana into your body and processing it. This is prana transforming your physical qualities into energy, which your chakras process and then respond to by getting bigger or smaller, brighter or dimmer, or changing shape or speed. Once the chakras process what is going on in your physical body, those events become a part of your energy body and a part of your thoughts, feelings, and the energetic expression of yourself.

The astral body is also the source of your aura, the energy field in and around every person or object, and the outer boundary of the astral or energetic body, which is larger than the physical body. In the same way that you can learn to see the chakras, you can also learn to see your aura, and the auras of others. Some people believe auras can be photographed using a technique called Kirlian photography, although not everybody agrees that a Kirlian image really does show the aura.

Seeing auras is interesting, and is a great way to get a sense of the astral body. It is also (arguably) easier than seeing chakras. The auras encircle all people and objects like a whole-body halo. We could write a whole separate book about auras and using them to diagnose problems and improve your life, but for now, we’ll just say that people have auras of different sizes, shapes, and colors, and like chakras, auras can change depending on what you are doing, feeling, thinking, and experiencing. If you stand in front of a mirror and relax your eyes, you might be able to see your aura. If you practice, you might eventually begin noticing other people’s auras.

Some people practice astral projection, a conscious and purposeful out-of-body experience in which the astral body leaves the physical body for a while. This is a difficult practice that not everyone is able to master, although some people crave it and strive for it. Others believe astral projection doesn’t exist and is really just dreaming. There is a tradition of astral projection in certain cultures, such as among certain Native American tribes. However, like all other aspects of the astral body, the phenomenon can’t be measured or proven using society’s current tools and techniques, which are limited to the phenomena of the physical body.

The Causal Body: Universal You

The causal body permeates and interpenetrates the physical and astral bodies; also, it extends beyond these bodies to form a sort of egg shape around you that extends approximately two or three feet beyond your physical body. The causal body carries the seed energy of you, which some people think of as the soul.

Even when your physical body is gone to dust and your astral body dissipates into the ether, your causal body remains.

According to the Law of Karma, the causal body carries on into the next reincarnation. The Law of Karma is an ancient Eastern concept that says, in essence, that there is no good or bad, only action and reaction, or cause and effect. Everything you do, and everything that happens, is imprinted on the Universe and will eventually be balanced by other actions or happenings. Reincarnation is the belief that the soul is reborn many times into different physical bodies.

Reincarnation will take the form of a new physical and astral body, but the causal body will be the same. Karma is commonly discussed in terms of past lives because the actions of an individual can become imprinted on the causal body, and the individual can carry that imprint from one life to the next, so that what happens in one life can be the reaction to what happened in a previous life.

Although the chakras exist within the astral body, they are also a link between the physical and causal bodies because the result of prana processed through the chakras is part of the imprint upon the causal body. In other words, all three bodies are linked, and what links them most potently are the energy vortexes that are the chakras.

Chakras: Three Bodies, One You

When we envision the three bodies—physical, overlain by astral, overlain by causal—we like to think of the chakras as a row of buttons down the middle, holding them all together. The physical body is like the bottom layer of clothes, and the causal body is like the top layer. The astral body floats between them, with the chakras buttoning them all together into one whole being: you.

Understanding that you are more than your physical body—that your energy has a body, and your soul has a body, too—can help you to understand how much bigger and more important you are than you might have thought—and what potential you have for evolution. Your chakras anchor you to that something bigger. They are the means for accomplishing a better, more complex, more amazing, and eventually enlightened you.

Sure, it’s all a bit esoteric, but think of it like this: You are more than your physical body. You are more than your thoughts. You are more than your soul. But you are all those things, and the common thread between them all is the thread running from the base of your spine to the crown of your head.

Connecting to your partner’s chakra energy means joining your astral and causal bodies as well as your physical ones.

Your chakras help to take a piece of the Universe’s consciousness and mold it into an individual body-mind-spirit. You are here now for a reason, and your chakras are here to help you figure out what that reason is.

Life is funny. So full of challenges, pain, and separation, it is also so full of connection, beauty, and joy. Life isn’t meant to be easy, but it is a gift that we get to be here, manifested in life and inhabiting these bodies on this beautiful Earth for a little while. It’s so fortuitous that we have our very own chakras as tools to make the most of our lives. And when do we finally make the most of living? Do we do so in this lifetime or over the course of a thousand lifetimes? The point is that we have the opportunity to make the most of being alive. And having our seven chakras (and all the others) is part of that opportunity. So, what are you waiting for?

Stepping into Love

The end goal of our journey on this Earth and through this life, according to yoga, is to finally fully understand that we are part of the Universe’s consciousness—an integral part. When we see that and when we have finally learned all the lessons we have come here to learn, we take the final step. We move beyond ourselves and into the bliss of enlightenment, which is purely love. Finally, in the end, we get to turn in those bodies—all three of them—and drop back down like a wave rolling up a beach and falling back into the ocean.

You don’t have to believe in reincarnation to understand the chakras, but if you do believe in reincarnation, you can see that you could live a thousand lives in a thousand physical bodies with a thousand different sets of chakras, all plugging away to make it work—to help you see. When you’ve learned everything you need to learn, at long last, you get to go home to the primal consciousness where you started. Maybe this is how the Universe itself evolves, tiny bit by tiny bit, part by part, or heart by heart.

Or maybe you don’t believe in reincarnation. It doesn’t matter because where the chakras are concerned, it comes to the same thing. You are here, inside layers of bodies and layers of meaning, feeling, and understanding. You are right here, right now, here to learn how to be something bigger than yourself—to remember who you really are. The chakras spin and churn and process your energy to help you see the truth. When you finally do, you get to step back out of those bodies—those temporary tools—back into the great healing current of love. You were born there, and in the end, it’s where you belong.

The chakras are such powerful tools for this ultimate process of transformation that we sincerely hope you will continue to work on them, feel them, measure them, look at them, contemplate them, and heal them. We believe that only through the evolution of one person here, one person there, each person at a time, will the human race ever really move to the next level of consciousness and awareness. By healing our chakras, we give expression to the empathic promise of humanity as it evolves toward love. And this happens without a need for artificial intelligence or genetic manipulation. It happens with you. We see a future for humanity that sparkles with promise and glows with hope, despite all our Earthly challenges, and it is a future you can help grow. As you heal through your chakras, the Earth heals as well, restoring the elements and all that lives.

We can all help grow the future of the human race together because when we change ourselves, we change the world. Happiness, peace, and love are powerful and infectious. When you find them within yourself, they radiate from your life, from your chakras, from your very pores, and everyone around you feels the difference. Let your chakras help you become that difference, and we promise to keep working on ourselves, too.

You hold within you the Sun 3 and the Moon 4 and all of the Universe. As you join your palms in yoga’s Prayer pose, inhale and feel prana flow to your Heart chakra. As you exhale, feel that energy flow toward Heaven and Earth. Namaste. We honor the Divine Light within you.

The light within us recognizes and honors the light within you. May we all go forth with grace, secure in our Root chakras, passionate in our Sacral chakras, powerful in our Solar Plexus chakras, loving in our Heart chakras, truthful in our Throat chakras, intuitive in our Third Eye chakras, and filled with the bliss that flows into our Crown chakras from the love that catalyzed us.

And may we shine.