We’re nearly to the end of our chakra journey, and we continue today with the third eye, which is located between the brows. If you’re just joining us, check out earlier posts here: root, navel, solar plexus, heart, and throat.
3 Signs of a Healthy Third Eye
- You regularly tap into your intuition. All of us have intuition, but not all of us think to use it. When you regularly check in with what your inner voice is saying and you trust its guidance, this is a sign of a healthy third eye. But what if it’s wrong?! is a common fear. With practice, you will learn to discern between your ego chatter and your inner wisdom, the latter of which has never led me astray, and the two have distinctly different feelings. One key: Your ego is usually paired with fear or a desire to control (which are basically the same thing) while the inner voice is always moving you towards love. If the voice is riffing on some variation of “If you don’t do this, bad things will happen” then you can bet it’s your ego. Your inner voice will sound more like: “Doing this feels spacious and freeing. It feels more loving to do this.”
- You are aware of times when your inner vision is clouded. Even the most intuitive of us are still human, and at times our emotions can cloud our ability to see clearly. Now, emotions in and of themselves are not “bad” in the context of tapping into your intuition. In fact, during tarot readings I often get valuable information for my clients in the form of emotions. Where challenges arise is when your emotional experience is so powerful that it distorts your vision like ripples in a pond. We all have different triggers, and bringing awareness to these moments of “cloudy vision” means getting to know your triggers. For example, one of my triggers is someone saying one thing and doing another. This inconsistency, while totally human, triggers me, so I can introduce awareness by checking in with myself when I’m in these situations. I might think I’m seeing clearly but my inner wisdom clues me into the fact that, in these triggering moments, there’s a high probability that my emotions are skewing my take on things. This is an opportunity to take a time out before responding, relying on trusted friends for a second opinion, etc.
- You accept that there is more to life than meets the eye. This doesn’t have to come in the form of a belief in a god or higher power, even. The third eye is all about seeing beyond: seeing beyond the obvious, the physical, the purely logical. When you are able to accept that life is inherently mysterious and that we can never fully comprehend it with a finite mind, this is a sign that your third eye is happily functioning. If you are deeply disturbed by this unknowing and it drives you nuts that you can’t understand everything, this is an indication that your third eye needs some love.
Look Into My Crystal Ball…
The following is an excerpt from my eBook, Luminous: Powerful Energy Practices to Make You Glow from Head to Toe.
Below, I am referencing an earlier section in the book that detailed how holograms work. For the purpose of this excerpt, you simply need to know that a holographic plate, which is what it used to create a holographic image, like the one of Princess Leia above, can be broken into tiny pieces, and each tiny piece is still capable of recreating the entire image.
Karl Pibram conducted experiments attempting to explain how the brain works. If the brain acts like a hologram, Pibram reasoned, then this could explain why part of the brain could be damaged, yet the still-intact portions could carry out most, if not all, of the functions of the entire brain before the damage occurred.
So, in holographic terms, even though the holographic plate has been broken, each of the tinier pieces are still capable of recreating the whole image.
Where this gets really fascinating is when we look a bit closer at the interference part of the holographic process, and stick with me, because this offers an interesting explanation as to how tarot cards and runes work.
If you recall from our experiment with [creating a holographic image], where the magic happened was in the collision of the two laser beams. When they collided, or interfered with each other, they created an interference pattern [like the ripples on a pond created by throwing first one stone and then a second stone into the water].
This pattern is what we need in order to create the hologram. Without that interference pattern, we can no longer access the whole through one tiny part.
Let’s see how this applies to the brain. Prior to Pibram’s work, many scientists focused on the brain cells, or neurons, and how they function. When Pibram began looking at the gaps between the brain cells, the space through which messages were sent from one neuron to the next, he found something interesting. When he looked at a whole series of these gaps as a whole, he saw that the messages formed a wave. One message wave might come in from the right, and another message wave came in from the left. Where they met they formed an interference pattern, creating a kind of holographic plate.
Recall how, in our [experiment in which we created a holographic image of an octopus], all we needed to do was shine our original laser beam through the holographic plate in order to see our three-dimensional octopus again. Well, let’s say you have a memory of being at your grandmother’s house as a child and she had fresh lilacs in a vase on the table. This memory gets stored in the holographic plate of your brain.
Ten years later, you get a whiff of lilac and this smell acts like the laser beam, shining through the holographic plate, allowing you to see the original memory. This memory might have been buried, lost to your conscious awareness, until it was retrieved by the proper stimulus in the form of the smell of lilacs, in the same way that our holographic plate looks like a jumbled mess until we shine our laser beam through it.
What does this have to do with tarot cards and runes? Well, with this model you can look at a tarot card or rune as a laser beam, shining through the holographic plate and allowing you to access the relevant information from the whole.
If the holographic model of the universe is correct, we all contain the whole within us, so we have infinite information at our fingertips (or in our fingertips, you might say). The challenge is extracting it when we need it. In other words, we need to shine the right laser beam through it, and tarot cards and other divination tools can serve as this laser.
Of course, there are many ways to see beyond the limits of our tinier piece of the universe, and what it really comes down to, with or without the use of tarot cards or runes, is asking the right questions. A question acts like a laser, focusing our attention and allowing us to access information far beyond the scope of our immediate experience.
Anodea Judith in The Wheels of Life puts it this way: “[Clairvoyance] is a matter of being able to call up relevant information on demand, regardless of whether it had been previously known. Our minds are using a self-made [laser] beam in the form of a question, to retrieve previously unknown data from the holographic memory bank.”
Or as Ms. Frizzle of The Magic Schoolbus likes to say, “If you keep asking questions, you’ll keep getting answers!”
More About the Third Eye Chakra
To continue reading, download your copy of Luminous: Powerful Energy Practices to Make You Glow from Head to Toe. (This title is no longer available.)
You’ll learn all about the holographic model of the universe and the brain and how that relates to your third eye (super fascinating stuff!), the importance of asking the right questions, and how to ignite the psychic power of your third eye.
Each chakra chapter includes a guided meditation mp3 that will help you heal and balance your chakras while increasing your ability to attract and manifest what you want.