← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 30/164
The Mind centre
The Mind centre — the tradition calls it the "Ajna" — is the downward-pointing triangle just below the Head on the Embodied Energy Chart. It is where the pressure of a question becomes thought: concepts, comparisons, opinions, the story that makes sense of things. If the Head asks, the Mind works it out.
The name is symbolic, like every centre name here. It describes a kind of experience, not the brain, and nothing in this entry is a statement about anyone's mental health.
What it is for
The Mind is one of the three awareness centres, beside the Instinct and the Feeling centre. Its awareness is conceptual: it holds an idea up, turns it round, files it and compares it with others. It is not a motor, so it gives no energy for doing, and it sits between the inspiration above it and the voice of the Throat below.
Its gates and channels
Six gates sit on the Mind — three facing up to the Head, three facing down to the Throat:
- Gate 47 — making sense of what pressed down
- Gate 24 — returning thoughts, ripening
- Gate 4 — youthful answers
- Gate 17 — opinions that organise
- Gate 43 — sudden inner knowing
- Gate 11 — a stream of ideas
They form six channels. Upwards: channel 47-64 ("making sense of the swirl"), channel 24-61 ("the thinker of inner truth") and channel 4-63 ("doubt refined into answers"). Downwards: channel 17-62 ("opinion made precise"), channel 23-43 ("insight put simply") and channel 11-56 ("ideas told as stories").
Defined and open
A defined Mind is read as a consistent way of making sense of things — the same mental gear most days. People with it tend to have a recognisable way of thinking that others can rely on, and that may not budge much when argued with.
An open Mind can think in anyone's terms. It understands other people's frameworks quickly and may lend itself to whichever one is in the room, which is a real gift for teaching, translating and mediating. Its conditioning is the pressure to sound certain. The chart sets one question beside an open Mind: am I performing certainty I don't actually have?
What it does to type and inner compass
The tradition is unusually firm here. However clever the Mind, it is never an inner compass (the tradition's "Authority"): thinking is for understanding and for advising others, not for deciding one's own life. A defined Mind changes no type by itself, because it is not a motor. Joined to the Throat it gives a voice to thought, and a chart whose definition is only Head, Mind and Throat — with no motor connected — is a Projector with the sounding-board compass: the person hears what they think by saying it to the right listener, and decides by what they hear themselves say, not by the reasoning that preceded it.
In your chart
A filled Mind is defined; an unfilled one is open. The numbers around it are its six gates — three along the top edge, three along the bottom. Each lit gate takes the colour of the moment that lit it: one colour for the aware side, another for the built-in side, a third for both. A * beside a number marks a hanging gate, a theme that is live in the person while its partner on the Head or the Throat is missing.