Crown 001 - Introduction
The Sanskrit name Sahasrara means 'thousand-petalled,' in reference to the infinite petals visualised with this chakra in the traditional system. The crown is located at the top of the head, in the place where our soft spot used to be when we were babies. Where the petals of the other chakras are typically drawn pointing up, the crown points down.
At its highest expression, the crown chakra represents enlightenment, pure awareness, and an ability to escape from the endless cycles of birth and death from which most of us suffer. However, for us regular mortals it is also connected with inspiration and creativity, similar to the third eye chakra.
The consciousness of the crown chakra is beyond all duality, all grasping for temporal things like love, success, and so on. A person with an activated crown chakra can be described as glowing, literally. Life is lived fully aware of each moment, desiring nothing and appreciating every new moment and the experiences they bring. It's a state of consciousness wholly foreign to most of us, but to many Eastern traditions, it represents the goal of the human experience and is believed to be possible to achieve in a single lifetime.
An out-of-balance crown chakra leads to insanity, the god complex of an unfortunately high number of contemporary gurus. Drugs are a huge hindrance to the development of chakras and the healthy expression of kundalini life-force energy, and part of this is because of the way drugs alter the human energy field. They can blow open the third eye chakra and allow the unprepared to experience the psychic phenomenon in an unhealthy way, and they can also alter the expression of the crown chakra and make people feel like gods or goddesses when in reality they are anything but.
When properly activated, illumination is the key influential force of the crown chakra. Its essence connects us to the divine, to the entire cosmos. Or rather, its awakening allows us to remember the connections we've had all along to everything in existence. There is no seed mantra, or sound, associated with the crown chakra. It is beyond all expression and in a way represents the void between all things, the pause between the inhale and the exhale of creation. The moment between all things--that's how the crown chakra is connected to the All, through the in-between spaces between every manifested thing.