Chakras as Circuits: Why Energy Gets Misdirected, Not Blocked

Picture a high school chemistry bench: a small plastic circuit board, a power source, a tangle of jumper wires. Connect them one way and a bulb glows. Connect them another and the current runs nowhere, or shorts with a pop. That bench is the picture Aaron Abke asks you to hold when you think about your chakras. In episode 22 of his Spiritual Intelligence series, a 36-minute video on the electromagnetic model taught in the SQ system, he sets aside the colored wheels and Sanskrit symbols that have described the energy centers for centuries and proposes a circuit instead. The earth supplies the current. The lower three centers act as wiring that carries it upward. The upper three act as the load that turns energy into something useful. Each center is a filter, and the question is whether energy rises clean or leaks sideways as unusable heat. The episode's central claim is the one that matters most: a "blocked" chakra is not a stopped one. Energy cannot be blocked, he argues. It is being routed somewhere it should not go.

Why do chakras need a new model at all?

Abke does not dismiss the older maps. He calls the traditional picture-based systems, drawn from Hinduism and Taoism, "extremely helpful and useful." His objection is about access. In the opening minutes he argues that in the modern era, "we need updated models that reflect scientific accuracy for the average layperson to really be able to wrap our minds around what our energy centers" are, and that the goal is to move the subject "out of this realm of the esoteric and the new age and into the realm of science and reality."

That is a bold reframing, and it is worth being precise about what it is. The episode is a teaching model built by one teacher, not a set of laboratory measurements presented on screen. What makes it compelling is the way Abke uses familiar physics as a scaffold. "The energy centers are real electrical conductors," he says. "They carry currents. They have resistance. They obey the laws of physics. And they can be short-circuited as well." Whether one accepts the literal claim or treats it as a powerful analogy, the structure it gives a student is concrete: you can ask where the current starts, where it travels, and where it is lost.

How does energy move through a chakra circuit?

Every electrical circuit, Abke notes, has three basic parts: a source of energy, a conductor, and a load. In his mapping, the earth is the power supply. Energy is fed constantly from the ground, enters through the soles of the feet, climbs the legs, and travels up the spine and the chakra network. "This power supply is always there, always charging us up," he says. What varies from person to person is how that energy is used, and that depends on "the quality and balance of our chakras."

The lower triad, the red, orange, and yellow centers, is the wiring that carries current upward. The upper triad is the device at the end of the line. Abke borrows the physics term directly: the load "is what receives the energy or current from the circuit to power on the electrical device, whether that's a watch or a television." He anchors the idea in a memory most people share. Think of the high school experiment of building a little circuit and seeing whether it was closed, open, or shorted. The chakra system, in his telling, is supposed to run as a closed circuit, with the lower centers feeding the upper ones.

The model also explains the bottleneck he sees in most people. "Almost everyone has a conduction problem," he says. The source is infinite. The load is fine and "can't be broken." The inefficiency lives in the middle, in the conductors that should carry energy up. This is the logic behind his emphasis on the lower three centers. From the circuit perspective, their job is "primarily to power up and feed the upper three centers with undistorted energy." He goes further and says that most of the SQ gained in practice comes from unblocking those lower three.

What is a blockage, in mechanical terms?

This is the heart of the episode. Abke starts with a correction to everyday spiritual language. Chakras are filters of energy, he says, and although the word "blockage" is useful, "it is not technically accurate because energy can't be blocked. It's just being put to use in a way that is not beneficial to us."

To describe what happens instead, he borrows entropy from thermodynamics. Entropy is "the level of randomness or chaos within any given system," which makes it the opposite of coherence. Energy, in this model, behaves in one of two ways. It can be coherent and radiate outward cleanly, or it can be incoherent and entropic, meaning it leaks. He notes that this is Ra's term for the same phenomenon in the Law of One, a source he cites directly. Entropic energy short-circuits and gets displaced as heat that cannot be used.

Here is the mechanical picture. If the lower three centers are distorted and full of entropic energy, the circuit shorts. Current does not travel vertically toward the load. Instead, Abke says, it "has to go out laterally," which he describes as a kind of spraying outward. In practical terms, the energy that should reach the upper centers is diverted sideways into the way a person lives: reactivity, leakage, and wasted intensity. A blockage, in this reading, is not an obstruction that holds energy in place. It is a misrouting that sends energy out through the wrong path.

Why are the lower three centers filters, and what do they filter for?

Each lower center, Abke argues, asks a different question of incoming energy, and the questions are not bad ones. The red ray filters energy in terms of survival, analyzing for "threats or opportunities to survive." Once basic survival needs are met and this center is balanced, it sends undistorted energy up to the orange ray. If the red center is blocked to any extent, it cuts that flow and sends less upward. He adds the point that lateral leakage follows from this: when the circuit is starved of clean current at its base, the upper flow is weakened from the start.

The orange ray processes what it receives according to individuality and emotion, filtering it through identity, relationships, and feeling. What remains passes to the solar plexus, the yellow ray, which filters energy through personal power and standing in the social hierarchy. It amplifies willpower, self-worth, and impact. When all three are balanced and energy rises freely, Abke says, a person becomes empowered to go into the world, gain status, and create value. When they are blocked, the same drives show up as control, status-seeking, and personal gain at others' expense.

The heart of this framing is that the chakras are always after the same things. "Wanting to survive is good," he says. "Wanting to individuate and understand who you are... is very good and very healthy. And finally, wanting to have standing and impact and personal willpower is also very good." The direction a center takes depends on how unblocked it is, not on whether the drive is legitimate in the first place.

Why do the upper centers shut off when you're blocked?

The circuit logic answers this question directly, though the video's transcript leaves some of the fine detail to the full broadcast. The upper triad is the load. Its job is to receive clean current and convert it into something useful. If the lower triad does not deliver undistorted energy, the load has little to convert. The upper centers do not so much fail as go quiet, because the circuit is not supplying them with the signal they are built to process. Abke's broader point is that you cannot skip the wiring and expect the device to work.

Is non-duality the answer, or part of the problem?

Abke's model carries an argument about spiritual culture, not just anatomy. He says the landscape today is "heavily slanted towards these kind of non-duality, new age advice and concepts" that encourage a denial of human life and treat the material world as illusion. He does not reject non-duality. He wants it brought into the human experience rather than used to escape it. "You should not use it to deny or downplay the human experience," he says.

The electromagnetic model is how he tries to hold both halves at once. By dividing the chakras into a lower triad and an upper triad, and into south and north poles, he places human and divine essences in one circuit. "Seeing our humanness and our divinity as equally divine," he says, "One is the expression of the other." He calls this true non-duality. The practical implication is that no amount of spiritual language substitutes for the unglamorous work he names: "healing your traumas, overcoming your patterns, your greed, your selfishness." Unblocking, in his system, is the work of letting the current climb cleanly.

What does this model change in practice?

The model gives a student a diagnostic question in place of a vague feeling. Instead of asking whether a chakra is "open," you ask where energy is leaking. If it is leaking sideways, the question becomes what in the lower centers is short-circuiting it: survival fear, emotional entanglement, or the hunger for status and control. Abke's claim is that these are workable problems, and that addressing them restores the flow to the upper centers without any special mystical act. Whether or not the electrical vocabulary persuades you, the structure is clear and testable in one's own life, which is perhaps the most useful thing a teacher's model can offer.

Where to go from here

Watch the full episode to hear the circuit diagram in Abke's own voice, including the sections that the transcript only partly covers. If you want to measure where you stand before working on the lower triad, Abke points viewers to his free SQ test, linked in the video description at aaronabke.com/go/sq-youtube. For more of his teaching, the description lists his Instagram, @aaronabke. And if the Law of One interests you, it is the source Abke cites for the word "entropy" as applied to energy that leaks. Read it alongside the circuit model and you will see how a teacher builds one framework out of several traditions, and where he chooses to draw his own line.