All Seeing Eye

Tilaka bindi

Egyptian crownOK, it’s true, I am very undisciplined about this blog but here we finally are now thinking about the next part of the Sacred temple. We are working down from the crown.

The Ajna chakra is the third eye, the all-seeing-eye of consciousness. It is located in between the eyebrows in the center of the forehead.  In India this chakra is honored with a tilaka, a small red dot of paste and powder or a glued on gem sometimes for women. Persian princesses wore jewels dangling in front of the third eye, Indian Ascetic monks paint flames at this point on their foreheads. It is a chakra associated with light and seeing, but not just seeing but also comprehending on a deeper, spiritual level. At this chakra major forces of manifestation, energies of life come together before bursting from physical to transcendent realms, it is the gateway of our mundane life and consciousness to our transcendent consciousness within the Sahasrar chakra just above.

Though we do not honor this chakra so much today in our clothing or decorative motives it is well represented in ancient and tribal cultures. In Egypt  the kings often wore a crown with a winged serpent on the forehead signifying flight from the gravity of earth to the transcendent spaces of higher consciousness. The third eye in Hinduism is a symbol of enlightenment hence the red dot or sometimes graphic flames. It is the eye of knowledge representing not just seeing but knowing the truth as well.