Sahasrara in the Tantric Sources

Sahasrara, the thousand-petalled, is described in the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana as lying above the six centres, at or above the crown, its petals bearing all the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet repeated twenty times. It is not one of the six chakras proper in the text's own reckoning but the place beyond them, the seat of Shiva with whom the ascending Kundalini Shakti unites; the union is the goal of the practice, and the text describes the resulting state in the language of liberation rather than of experience. Because it stands beyond the elemental series it is generally given no seed syllable in the classical description, although later and modern sources supply various ones, and it has no element and no presiding animal. Its thousand petals are a figure for completeness rather than a count.

One of the best documented modern accounts of an experience described in this vocabulary is that of Gopi Krishna, an Indian civil servant who reported a sudden kundalini awakening in December 1937 after some seventeen years of daily meditation, describing a rising sensation of light and heat that he connected explicitly to the ascent described in texts like the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana; he set the account out decades later in Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man (1967) and in a fuller autobiography, Living with Kundalini. The episode is recorded here as a documented modern testimony within the tradition, not as independent evidence that the physiological process it describes occurs as stated.