by Ray Grasse

References and Notes

1. Specifically, my thanks to Goswami Kriyananda (of Chicago) and Shelly Trimmer, a direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, for first drawing my attention to this system of chakric-planetary correspondences. Importantly, this system is not exclusive to the Kriya Yoga tradition; one finds the same essential framework of correspondences described by such diverse writers as David Frawley (Astrology of the Seers), Jeffrey Wolf Green (Uranus), Titus Burckhardt (Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul ), and Marc Edmund Jones (The Sabian Symbols in Astrology : A Symbol Explained for Each Degree of the Zodiac), derived in each case from largely independent sources.

2. Although the yogic tradition tends to discuss this subject in somewhat literal terms (e.g., karmic "seeds"), it is likely that karmas are not actually stored in specific points of space, but simply find their greatest degree of resonance within these chakric locations. By way of analogy, a diseased liver would not be regarded by a holistic healer as a problem only of the liver, but as a systemic condition that has its greatest focus in that bodily area -- indeed, since the liver is associated by correspondence with the planet Jupiter, we might even say, astrologically, that the liver condition extends all the way out to involve Jupiter itself. Similarly, it is more accurate to say that karma is a field-phenomenon which extends through both space and time, on many different levels of consciousness simultaneously, but which resonates to certain nodal points in the chakric system in particularly concise ways.

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