Ethical Adulthod: An Old Map | The Upper Triangle

Part Three — The Upper Triangle

Many people seek transcendence while leaving unfinished the developmental work below it.

They want awakening without grounding. Wisdom without conscience. Insight without relationship.

But what if the upper chakras aren’t spiritual achievements at all? What if they simply amplify the psychological organization that’s already in place?

In this final installment of The Old Map, I am exploring the developmental work of the throat, third eye, and crown through the lens of ethical adulthood. Rather than pursuing certainty, special powers, or enlightenment as a personal accomplishment, this episode examines the lifelong practice of speaking truthfully, seeing clearly, and gradually loosening the belief that reality revolves around “me.”

This is a conversation about voice without performance, discernment without dogma, and consciousness in service of reality rather than identity.

The upper triangle is not an escape from ordinary life.

It is the culmination of learning how to live it well.

Transcript

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Welcome back to Ethical Adulthood with Andrea Fiando. Today we'll finish discussing the old map, a three-part exploration of the classical chakra system through a developmental lens. And as I've said, I'm not interested in getting you to believe in chakras. I'm asking if this old map can still help us understand human development and the work of ethical adulthood. So let's dive right in to the upper triangle. Three chakras: throat, third eye, and crown. So I'll call this part three the upper triangle. Voice, vision, and the end of being the center of everything. A lot of spiritual people want to start at the top. They learn about the root, the sacral, and the naval chakras, and they feel they understand those centers. They do some work, sometimes a lot of work, around quieting their fears, tempering their impulses, and they contemplate their willpower and their ability to manifest abundance. This is the yogic path. They learn about the heart chakra and they spend some time here. And I think a lot of us just sort of feel like, yes, I've heard this before. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. And then we set the heart aside. Never mind that that self-love part is often more a wish than a reality. Then they come upon chanting, meditation, and understanding about union with God or goddess. And we want the clear throat chakra. We want to speak our truth. No matter who doesn't want to hear it. We want the open third eye, knowledge that makes us special. Ah, the crown, the big mystical experience. We all definitely want that. We want to feel like we've got a direct line to God or source or higher consciousness or whatever language that we use. And I get it. I get it deeply. I was there. That stuff is very compelling. But here's the problem. If the lower work isn't done, the upper work is just distortion. Voice becomes a performance. We mouth the right words. In our conversations, in our relationships, and even in our prayers. Vision becomes fantasy. We tell stories about the psychic trips we've been on. We imagine we talk to dead people. Our dreams, we say, are becoming reality. That's not vision. That's a story that we like better than the one we're actually living in. The feeling of higher consciousness can become an escape from ordinary life. And then people start calling confusion intuition or avoidance transcendence. And their lack of accountability, well that's freedom. That is not an awakening. That is unfinished development with incense. So this final part of the chakra map, I want to talk about the upper triangle, throat, third eye, and crown. But I do not want to talk about them as special powers or as spiritual achievement. And I definitely don't want to talk about them as a way to escape ordinary life by now. If you've been with me even for five minutes, you know how committed I am to ordinary life. Because the upper triangle does not liberate us from responsibility to be in the world. It amplifies the way that we are already showing up here. If we're grounded and honest and responsible and capable of repair, then opening the upper centers may deepen clarity, truth, and freedom. But if we're disorganized, avoidant, inflated, deceptive, or unwilling to be accountable, then the upper centers will amplify that too. This is why I keep coming back to ethical adulthood. Before we talk about enlightenment, we need to talk about whether a person can keep their word. Can they tell the truth even when it is inconvenient?

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Especially then.

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Can they get to sleep? Can they eat at least with an assemblance of an eye toward regulation? Can they pay attention to the body they actually live in? Listen to its messages, and develop an appropriate response based on facts. Can they stay in relationship without constantly creating confusion, drama, or harm? Can they leave relationships that are constantly creating a hellish lived experience? Can they apologize? Not performatively or as a knee-jerk reaction, but honestly. Can they repair? Do they even know how to begin? When to begin? And what the first step or two might be? Can they live in some basic coherence between what they say they value and how they actually behave? That does not require conventional success. You don't have to have it all together in the economic sense. It does not require conformity. You needn't belong to a stable group of people who agree with you. It doesn't require being rich, married, thin, productive, impressive, or respectable in some narrow cultural sense. But it does require reliability. Reliability is defined here as the degree to which a person can be counted on to maintain consistency in behavior. And I think reliability is wildly underrated in spiritual life. We show up the way we say we will show up, or can we really be fully trusted to tell the truth? Most of the time. So yeah, I have stories that I've written blogs about, about spiritual communities, teachers, charisma, certainty, silence, truth telling, and the very high cost of not telling the truth. But this episode is not the memoir version. So I'm going to use my experience only as a doorway into this map. Because the point is not what happened to me or even to thousands of others. The point is what these experiences taught me about voice, vision, responsibility, and discernment. One pattern is something that happens when we're scammed out of money. That experience taught me something. If I'm willing to bend the truth to fit my needs, I am working with a blocked throat. If I cannot tell when I'm being lied to, not always, but it is often because I am still trying to get through my life with little lies to myself andor others, as a matter of course, in order to maintain some sense of comfort. There's a kind of phone call or text message that eventually comes in, and someone says, I think I've had a kundalini awakening. And sometimes what they mean is, I've never felt more alive. I am more sensitive. I am more open. I am more aware. But what they often mean is, I am completely disoriented and I think I need some help. They're not sleeping at night, or they're sleeping 14, 15 hours a day. They are having intense physical sensations. They're seeing signs everywhere. Their relationships are destabilizing. Their nervous system is lit up. They describe feeling chosen, terrified, euphoric, doomed, special, or all of that in the same afternoon. And I want to talk about this carefully because in no way do I want to mock anyone's experience. But I also don't want to romanticize disorganization. Not every intense experience is spiritual development. Sometimes it's simply too much energy moving through a system that does not yet have enough grounding, support, discernment, or ordinary life stability to metabolize it. This is why the lower triangle and the work that happens there matters. And this is so much why the heart chakra matters. And this is why ordinary life matters. Because the question isn't, did something powerful happen to me? Powerful things happen. The question is: can the person integrate it? Are they making progress toward metabolizing the experience? If the answer is no, then I'm not especially interested in calling it enlightenment. I'm interested in helping the person get grounded. And often that's not what they were hoping to hear from me. Grounding can sound disappointing when someone comes in hoping for confirmation that they're entering a higher spiritual state. But sometimes the most loving thing is to come back to the body, to the nervous system, to ordinary life, and to the lower triangle and heart. But if one is really certain that they're ready for adulthood and not just extended adolescence, then this is where the upper triangle begins. Not with blasting off into the upper dimensions of human abilities. But with responsibility. With responsibility. So let's talk about the throat chakra. Voice and responsibility. So the throat chakra is often talked about as finding your voice. Finally, getting to say your piece. Speak your truth. Name the thing that makes you you. But I don't think that's quite enough. A developed throat is not just the ability to say what you think. A developed throat is knowing when to speak and when to stop talking. When to listen, when to say you're sorry, when silence is actually the more truthful response. In classical systems, the throat chakra is called the shuddha, often translated as purification. That word can be misunderstood. In my yoga teacher training, they emphasized cold showers at four in the morning, early morning sadhana practices, refusing meat and dairy, clean living, and frankly, an adherence to an organized religion. Purification does not mean becoming morally clean. It doesn't mean eliminating desire, emotions, personality, humor. It doesn't mean eliminating anger, grief, or ordinary human messiness. It doesn't mean introducing a new repertoire for becoming what? More worthy of unification. It means, at least to me, reducing distortion. And by distortion, I mean lies. By distortion, I mean the ways the truth is varnished or used as a weapon. It means not using your voice to manage people, impress people, control people, punish people, or keep yourself safe at the expense of what is true. It means clearing enough space inside yourself so that speech is not constantly bent by fear, hunger for approval, defensiveness, or the need to control the outcome. Look at those words. Each one is a reason to lie. Fear. I'm scared. I need you to like or love or approve of me. I need to defend myself from accusations of moral impurity. I need to get my way. I need to control how the next steps unfold. Now, the element of the throat chakra is space. And that matters a lot. And the ancients were just really sharp when you look at how the elements associated with each energy center just click. Because space is what allows sound or information. If you look at it from a physics lens, vibration is what everything is doing, and that is information. But it's the space that allows sound to exist. It's space that allows information to exist. Because without space, there's just constant noise, right? It's the empty spaces that showcase the sounds. Think about music. Or they are if the vessel is clear. Without space, vibration becomes cacophony. It becomes nonsense. Developmentally, space appears when the self no longer has to fill every silence, justify every position, or speak in order to prove that it matters or that it exists. A developed throat tross space. It allows words to arrive when they belong. And it allows silence to remain when silence is the more honest response. Purification is not saying more true things, it's learning to say fewer unnecessary ones. Once the heart comes online, speech can no longer be considered neutral. Words before they carried consequence. But now they carry our conscience as well. Voice can clarify truth or distort with lies and mistakes. It can heal or harm. It can connect or dominate. So I think the real question for the voice, for the for the throat chakra, is not, may I speak? The question is, what does this moment call for me to say, if anything at all? The lower triangle uses voice to secure safety, uniqueness, position, and advantage. It argues, it persuades and cajoles, it performs, it pleads, it defends and it offends. It explains and it offers rationalizations. None of that is automatically wrong. Defense mechanisms, well, they're functional. We all do it. But when voice remains organized only around survival and identity, defending that ego, that lower triangle, speech becomes just another strategy to get ahead. We will speak to win. We will speak to protect ourselves. We will speak to control the narrative. The heart, if it's online, it interrupts that logic. The heart brings care, conscience, and right relationship into the equation. And now the throat must reorganize. It's been doing a job for the lower triangle its whole life. This is the slowest developmental process I know. It can and does take years, and sometimes decades, to change our relationship with how our voice matters, and how the truth and the lie operate in real time, under real pressures, in real relationships. I think of all the seven chakras, this one is the one we work on more than any other. In devastating and gorgeous ways, both. It develops as the capacity to let truth take precedence over self-aggrandizement, protection, edification, to let restraint take precedence over displays of importance. To listen without simultaneously preparing a rebuttal, to allow silence without experiencing it as non-participation or as disconnection. And this is where we have to talk about spiritual teachers. Public speakers, writers, influencers, and just regular people who dominate rooms just because they can. Let me say that first. I just want to say that a highly active throat is not the same as a developed throat. People who speak constantly are sometimes not expressing freedom. Sometimes that's an expression of an intolerance of space. Hello, darkness, my old friend. Pauses feel like disappearance. Speech becomes a way to regulate anxiety, assert existence, or stay important, or keep ahead of discomfort. And because we live in a culture that rewards output, we often mistake volume for clarity. We mistake confidence for truth. We mistake charisma for wisdom. We mistake prolific teaching for realization. But volume alone tells us nothing about purification. An unfiltered channel can carry distortion just as efficiently as truth. A wide passageway is not necessarily a clear one. So this does not mean that we get to reject everyone who is flawed. That would be too easy. And it also doesn't mean that we excuse harm just because someone says beautiful, true things. That would also be too easy. But man, we love a shortcut. One shortcut says, if the teaching is valuable to me, the teacher doesn't matter to me. The opposite shortcut says, well, if the teacher is flawed, then the teaching needs to be buried. Or it's worthless. Both positions eliminate the burden of discernment. Ethical adulthood doesn't permit either shortcut. It's possible to learn something true from someone whose life is disordered, compromised, or even corrupt. Reality is not so fragile that truth disappears when spoken by an imperfect mouth. But it is also true that repeated exposure to distortion, especially when it comes with charisma, authority, or institutional power, can erode our discernment if we stop evaluating what we're hearing. The mature stance is neither devotion nor wholesale rejection. It's something that we were taught in cellular biology. It is selective permeability. You let what is true pass through. You refuse what is not. And never outsourcing our responsibilities, never outsourcing our judgment to the teacher, to the lineage, to the institution, or to the community. This is one of the great difficulties of spiritual life. It would be so much easier if the vessel had to be pure for the teaching to be useful. And it would also be easier if the vessel just didn't matter at all. But life is not that tidy. So we must practice discernment. It's not something that you have. It's not a gift, it's a capacity. We listen, we question, we notice impact, and our ultimate response must adjust to the current reality. This brings me back to the phone call, the text message. The person who says they've had an awakening and their life has derailed. This is where throat and vision matter. Can the person speak about what is happening and perceive what has occurred without needing to make what it means the central idea? Can they say something intense is happening in me without needing to say, therefore, I am special, chosen, advanced, or exempt from ordinary responsibility? Can they recognize when they're drifting from contact with reality and obtain or create some intervention rather than continue to suffer by continually trying to escape that reality? Those distinctions matter because when insight or energy bypasses ethical filtration, well, meaning pours out faster than it can be metabolized. That result may look like openness, but it functions more like suffering. Spaciousness is abandoned in favor of more output. Discernment gives way once again to the cotton candy cave of certainty. The throat is also where the distortions of the lower chakras get exposed. And here I want to talk about lying. Not only the dramatic kinds of lying, not only grand betrayals or obvious deception, I mean the small strategic untruths, the omissions, the exaggerations, the little lies we do not perceive as having negative consequences. The stories that we tell to avoid discomfort, to secure an outcome, to protect an image, keep the peace, or stay attached. We learn how to do this really early in life. Really early. Those of you with babies and young children know what I'm talking about. Teenagers do it constantly because adolescence is a social jungle. There are hierarchies to navigate, alliances to maintain, punishments to avoid, approval to gain, status to protect. But this strategic management of truth, unfortunately, it doesn't end with adolescence. As we mature, it just gets more sophisticated and socially acceptable. We learn to call it tact. We learn how to change the subject as a reflex. It's professionalism. It's keeping the peace, not making a big deal. But the cost is the same. Reality becomes something to manage rather than meet. And the throat loses its reliability as an instrument. The slow alignment of speech with reality, even when honesty threatens comfort, belonging, or advantage, this is the discipline that ethical adulthood asks us for. Each distortion may seem small in isolation, but over time distortions accumulate. We become confused. When lies and truth are mixed together long enough, we stop trusting our ability to tell the difference. We stop knowing what's true and what's false. We stop using the tools at our disposal because we can't trust what we read, see, or hear. We begin to live inside a managed version of reality rather than reality itself. And if we're caught in a web of our own lies, then we have to remember what we said, to whom, and why. We have to maintain coherence across contradictions. We have to protect the structure. It is exhausting. The kind of exhausting that doctors call unmanaged stress. It leads to all kinds of physical problems. Because as Dr. Bussel van der Kolk put it, the body keeps the score. And this is often where most of the most consequential mistakes of a life begin. One of the most painful lessons of my own life was learning that telling the truth and discerning the truth are connected. If I lie, I distort reality. If I participate in lies, I become easier to confuse. If I tolerate too much distortion around me, my own perception starts to blur. Truth telling and truth seeing are not separate capacities. They belong together. And that brings us to repair. Because the throat is where rupture and repair occurs. Harm is rarely caused by sitting around just thinking harmful thoughts. It's caused by what is said, not said, misrepresented, withheld, implied, denied, or refused. Repair does not happen silently. Repair requires naming, listening, clarifying, apologizing. Sometimes explaining if asked, sometimes not explaining at all. Sometimes accepting that the other person's experience is real, even if it does not flatter our self-image. Without this capacity, relationships fracture and never mend. And with it, even serious harm can sometimes be addressed, integrated, and transformed. The throat is not where we avoid conflict. It's where we learn to stay present inside it. When voice becomes more reliable, well then perception can begin to clarify. And this is where the work of the sixth chakra, Ajana, begins. Ajana, vision and clear seeing. In many traditional teachings, Ajana, often called the third eye, is associated with intuition, psychic perception, or unusual ways of knowing. Some traditions describe special abilities that may appear as attention becomes more focused and steadier. Maybe they happen sometimes. Maybe they are misunderstood. Maybe they're real in ways that we just don't yet know how to measure. That's not really my focus here. Because unusual perception is not the same as maturity. And this is a developmental lens. Unusual perception very often leads to the egoic self-identifying as very important. I am an empath. I am a reader. I am psychic. I can leave my body at will. Fine. But a person can have strong intuition, vivid inner imagery, a deep understanding of systems, powerful dreams, altered states, or moments of deep insight, and still struggle to make wise decisions, maintain honest relationships, or take responsibility for their actions. Which is the focus of ethical adulthood, right? Extraordinary experiences are not reliable signs of development, goodness, or trustworthiness. From a developmental perspective, Ajana is about something simpler and more practical. Clear seeing. If the throat asks us to speak truthfully, then Ajana asks us to perceive truthfully. The sixth chakra is about the gradual reduction of self-deception. Clear seeing means noticing what's actually happening inside your own mind. Your fears, your beliefs, your habits, your emotional reactions, projections, and preferences. And here's the key: not just recognizing what's actually happening inside your own mind, but not immediately assuming that that's the truth. It means recognizing when you are reacting from old conditioning rather than responding to the present moment, what's actually happening. If you're still building stories around a simple sentence that's said to you in passing in the supermarket, this is not clear seeing. When we react from old conditioning rather than responding to the present moment, we are not able to access that third eye. That's a blocked sixth chakra. And you know, these chakras, I want to say, development is not either blocked or free. There are apertures like a camera. They can widen and they can tighten. They're capacities, right? Yeah. So it means being able to say, as I look out onto what is happening to me right now, well, this feels true. And still ask, but is it true? That is such an important distinction. Because a lot of things feel true. Fear especially feels true. Shame especially feels true. Attraction feels true. Coincidences feel correlated. And you know what feels especially true? So true it can engulf an entire lifetime? Certainty. Certainty is truth with its first letter capitalized and its ready close on. But ethical adulthood requires us to develop enough space inside perception to ask what is actually happening? Not what do I hope is happening? What can I do to make this happening more comfortable? What explanation makes me feel special or innocent, superior, or safe? What is actually happening? And over time, this self-awareness extends outward. We begin to see people, relationships, communities, institutions, and systems more realistically. What's working? What's not working? What is honest? What looks like performance rather than contact? What is being articulated? What is being avoided? What's being protected? What is being sacrificed? Notice that the clear widening perception does not include a declaration of who's right and who's wrong, who's good and who's bad. The judgments are discernment, not certainty. So this opening of the third eye, this kind of vision is not usually dramatic. It doesn't necessarily feel mystical. Often it feels really quiet because often it's accessed in meditation. It may be quiet, but it really changes how a person lives, how a person thinks, and how a person behaves. When perception becomes clearer, it becomes harder to lie to yourself. Harder to pretend not to know when something you're doing is harmful. Harder to justify actions that go against what you understand to be true. So, Ajana, it's not about supernatural sight in this framework. It's about the growing ability to look at reality, both inner and outer, without needing it to match your preferences. And when perception becomes clearer, behavior begins to shift. Decisions become less reactive. Responsibility increases. Ethical adulthood deepens. Because you can see more clearly what your actions create. This is also how I understand karma. Not as a mystical reward and punishment system, not as cosmic tit for tat, but as a deepening understanding of how things actually work. What we attend to grows and gets magnified in our perception. What we avoid returns to remind us. What we distort becomes harder to navigate. What we refuse to repair continues to shape the field. What we practice, we become. And as perception becomes less distorted, the sense of self that was built around defending those distortions begins to loosen. It's no longer only, what do I see? It becomes who is the one calling herself I who needs to be at the center of awareness. That's where the work of Crown begins. So the seventh and final chakra, crown, the end of psychological centrality. Let's zoom out. I like to call this using drone footage. So let's use some drone footage over this framework. In this framework, the lower triangle is where we become functional. Root, we survive. Sacral, we form identity. Naval, we develop agency and power. The heart is where care enters the system. Conscience, responsibility to others, the beginning of ethical adulthood. The throat is where transmission becomes not only legible, but accountable. Truthfulness, repair, responsibility for impact. Ajana, third eye, is where perception becomes clearer, less self-deception, more tolerance for uncertainty, insight grounded in reality. Okay, so crown cannot mean blasting off into the upper realms of ecstasy. It can't mean a final rung of spiritual achievement. It can't mean transcendence as a personality upgrade. It cannot mean leaving the world. At least not in the way I understand this map. Crown becomes a radical shift, however. It's a shift not easily stepped into by seekers unwilling to leave everything they've learned behind. I'll call it the end of the story of me, or the end of psychological centrality. It's not the disappearance of the self. It's not the destruction of the personality. It's not becoming a blank, wholly, floating person with no preferences, no humor, no grief, no bills to pay. The end of psychological centrality means the quiet collapse of the belief that the self is the organizing center of reality. Life is no longer experienced primarily as something happening to a separate somebody.

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You.

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Or dissolves completely. Another way to say it is this: if Ajana is seeing clearly, doing accordingly, Crown is no longer needing to be the one who owns the seeing and the doing. This is why crown development may look very ordinary from the outside. People who have had this level of development enter into their experience, still work, still teach, still raise kids, pay taxes, make food, go to the doctor, argue, apologize, make art, make mistakes, try again. The difference is internal. It's not out there. Crown is not union as mystical drama. It's closer to the recognition that the original idea at the root chakra, that there is no separation between me and my creator. It's not the complete fallacy the ego thought it was when it couldn't get the creator to bend to its every request. It's the softening around the quest to become so independent that one will no longer need anyone or anything to be successfully human and happy. It can feel like a release of pressure. It can also feel like a surge of grief. No longer trying to protect and perfect the self because all the work you did on that self is no longer the relevant reality. No longer trying to control the world as if that were ever possible or even desirable. Instead, life becomes more ordinary and more intimate. Live responsibly. Act with care. Speak truthfully, repair when possible, perceive clearly. Let existence be larger than the story of me. That's how I understand the upper triangle and the chakra system. Not as a way to escape from ethical adulthood and ordinary life, but as resolution, as culmination, as a place to rest. A good map can help us notice where we are. It can help us see where development has become distorted. It can help us understand why spiritual experience without grounding can become dangerous. Why voice without responsibility can become harmful. Why vision without discernment can become fantasy. And why raised consciousness without ethical adulthood can become escape. Not whether it's true in some certain sense. But because no map represents reality, as reality actually is. But this framework for me, it has some use. It helps me understand why becoming a self matters. Why care changes everything. Why truth has to be practiced every day for as long as we both shall live. Why discernment has to be protected and not outsourced to a guru, a psychic, an organization, or even our favorite person on earth. And why freedom, if it's real, does not remove us from life. It returns us to life with less distortion, less grasping, and more responsibility. That's the work. Not becoming special, becoming reliable. Becoming clear. Becoming less defended against reality. And maybe eventually discovering the self that we've spent so much energy protecting was never the center of the whole thing at all. And with that, I wish us all some peace. This is Andrea Fiando, and you've heard now three episodes that are acting as a bridge to season three, where I've decided to explore maps. The Chucker System was the first map I looked at years and years ago during teacher training, yoga teacher training. And that's when these three essays were written back around 2018. Yeah. So I think there are a lot of really good maps that are available to us. I think that we're often handed these maps so that we can have a way to navigate how to go forward in life. And I think they are fascinating. So I want to take a look at some of my favorite ones as we embark on season three. But I also have noticed during the recording of these three essays that there's a capacity that hasn't been named yet that actually precedes the five capacities that were named in season one. So those five capacities you may remember were tolerating discomfort, rupture and repair in relationships, recognizing power and how it operates, metabolizing grief, and acting without guarantees, without certainty, without innocence, right? So those five capacities I suggested were basic to a life lived ethically without a book to tell you how to do it, without a map, right? But it appears to me now that there is a sort of zeroeth capacity. And I think that's going to be the next episode. So before I embark on maps, I'm going to do one more episode, the next one, on this sort of underneath these five capacities, capacity. Not sure what I'm going to call it yet. But that's the teaser. Anyway, this one has been extraordinarily long. If you've stuck with me all the way to the end, and even if you haven't, gosh, thank you so much. Your time and attention is so precious. I'll see you next time.