itual heart and the physical heart. This difference might have been based on Teresa’s relation to God, loving and friendly, coming from the “heart” rather than the intellect. By borrowing Bhagavad Gita’s expressions we may say that Teresa showed bhakti-like love respect to God. This might be the reason why the heart chakra is opened as the first. We can also see and prove that there is a flow of delicate energies to the crown of the head, which also supports the opinion that, also in her case, it was the kundalini energy. There is a hint of disproportion in placement of the mystical death. Teresa of Avila speaks about the fifth mansion, while in the Eastern traditions it is usually placed in the sixth mansion. Perhaps this puzzle is not entirely compact in neither of these cases, because Jiyu-Kennett does not, for example, describe the previous two grades (Anahata and Vishuddhi) and Teresa of Avila does not set a precise placement for the fifth mansion. We believe these inconsistencies shall not be overestimated because the phenomenon of mystical death is very well described and this is important. There is a full agreement in description of the rest of the ecstatic journeys in the level of the sixth mansion and the sixth Ajna chakra. This all leads us to an assumption that also in the case of Teresa of Avila we may speak about her mansions as about the system of Yogic chakras. Teresa of Avila, being a 16th century Spanish mystic, did not have a slightest idea about other spiritual traditions, maybe except Judaism and Islam, which she might have know about a little, therefore these similarities really support the idea of a universal character of mysticism. 5 Conclusion We studied the question of universality of mysticism on the bases of comparison of Christian mysticism and several Eastern spiritual traditions such as Yoga, Buddhism, and Taoism. Christian mysticism was represented by one of the greatest mystics, doctor of the Church and a saint, Teresa of Avila. The comparison was focused on the chakra system, their localisations and effects as described in individual traditions. The advantage of such a comparison is in the fact that each chakra is linked to a specific location in a human body, which makes the process of comparison more precise. The very first impulse for the comparison came from the claims of Hans Küng and Eduard Tomáš, who hinted some significant similarities between the Teresa’s mansions and the chakras. However, these authors did not go any further. That is why we had been facing a fundamental question from the very beginning – does Teresa of Avila really speak about the same “system” – “the system of chakras”, which is recognized and described in Yoga? A more detailed study of Teresa’s Interior Castle showed us surprising similarities, but also some differences. Surely, Teresa does not speak about the chakras, because she is not familiar with Hinduism or Yoga, but she is metaphorically speaking about the seven mansions. We suppose that her descriptions of the fourth, fifth, sixth and the seventh mansion are similar to the descriptions of the chakras in Yoga. She places the fourth mansion in the region of the heart (the Anahata chakra). In the fifth mansion, which Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 109 (13)
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