The Mental Body

The Nature of Mental Images

Keywords: mind, reason; modeling, comprehension; combining.

Mental images are objective perceptions of thought forms — individual objects that exist independently of the human being in the mental plane of the subtle world.

Mental energy is capable of:

• Composing one thought form from several, gradually modeling it from logical "bricks," similar to construction and assembly work.
• Disassembling complex thought forms into their constituent parts.
• Building new thought forms, as well as examining them from different angles.

All of this is accomplished using "left-brained" thinking.

When a thought form, somewhat similar to the given one but not uniquely defined by it, is drawn into the field of mental vision, this pertains to "right-brained" associative thinking. The creation of radically new thought forms is also possible, though this happens rarely.

The process of thinking as a whole is a specific activity. Partially, it consists of searching the mental plane for suitable thought forms, templates for constructions, and starting points for associations. Partially, it involves creating from these a larger thought form, or mental construct (opinion, concept, theory), which at the moment satisfies or dissatisfies the person.

Usually, if a person succeeds in correctly understanding a complex situation and grasping a difficult problem, then in that part of the mental body (plane) he feels an extraordinary clarity suddenly arise in his thoughts where chaos once reigned, as if a cluttered room had been tidied: the floor and windows washed, dust wiped away, and furniture rearranged.

Example of "Truth" and "Falsity" in Symbolic Systems

There are many different symbolic systems and logics, i.e., rules for manipulating symbols, and in some cases, some rules are more convenient, in others, others. But the mental plane itself is multidimensional, meaning that various logics often incompatible and contradictory to each other, coexist simultaneously within it.

Thought is elusive, often overtly false. It constantly tries to grasp itself, like a snake swallowing itself starting from its tail — and never succeeds. It is to the mental plane that the concepts of truth and falsehood belong, which do not exist on other planes, and this must be understood. Neither an ideal, nor a goal, nor an event, nor an emotion, nor a movement can be true or false — they simply exist.

Let's examine the correctness of the statements: "All leopards are striped" and "Everything that is not striped is not a leopard". To study the first statement, we would have to visit a zoo, and at the corresponding cage, we would quickly confirm its falsity. As for the second statement, its truthfulness can be tested at home, then at work, and after some time, we would confirm that it is also true: indeed, neither a table, nor a chair, nor a kettle in the kitchen, nor a great many other unstriped objects that catch the eye, are (thank God!) leopards. If the millionth unstriped object happens to be a leopard by chance, it can safely be attributed to an experimental error.

It's clear that a logician would be indifferent to this description, stating that logic is one thing and life is another, and that the former should be applied to the latter intelligently, not formally. A physicist would note that each problem should be studied intrinsically, and if it's about leopards, then one should consider them, not everything else, but I think the reader will understand the true meaning of using this example...

The culture of thinking is more intuitive than we imagine. The relationship between logic and life is not so simple. This is why there is an empirical observation that the longer a person justifies themselves, the more questionable their justifications become. Logical chains of five links or more do not seem convincing at all, even if each individual implication raises no doubts.

Dialogue: "Is A1 true? Yes." "Does A2 follow from A1? It follows." "And does A3 derive from A2, as does A4 from A3? Yes, it derives." "So, is A4 true? I'm not sure... couldn't it be simpler, shorter, more convincing?"

Ordinary logic — what is commonly called common sense, and in science, sound reasoning — is a set of rules that are quite difficult to describe precisely. However, a cultured person instinctively learns them and tries, wherever possible, to follow them strictly. In cases where they fail, they are inwardly upset, and outwardly acknowledge the imperfection of their logic, hoping to find a way to correct the situation in the future.

The Connection of the Mental Body to the Causal Body

However, it is striking that these rules are much more related not so much to the internal laws of the mental plane as to its alignment with the causal. In other words, you may be forgiven for being illogical if you speak to the heart of the matter and it's clear that you understand it and are striving to express it adequately in mental constructs.

Therefore, a mental construct — be it a model or a reasoning — is meaningful only when it relates to some causal object (event, phenomenon, and the like). It is this object that directs the flow of mental meditation, the result of which will be a mental image, that is, a certain representation of the causal object.

This idea can be formulated in a much less pleasant way for a "free-thinking" person: every mental meditation should have a causal sanction. In other words, the mental body should not (except in special critical modes) go beyond the boundaries of the causal. Therefore, it is advised to reason only about current subjects and events of one's life that clearly require it.

The justification for one's own reasoning would only be valid if it sheds new light on what is happening. All other mental exercises merely clutter the mental plane and soil one's own mental body.

Unfortunately, in our mentally undisciplined times, chatter (empty talk) and unwarranted idleness are not considered significant sins, although they spoil life for both the individual and society, sharply disturbing the overall balance of their organisms.

Interaction of the Mental Body with Higher Planes

An event is subtler and more detailed than its mental image. The laws of the causal flow are only roughly modeled by the laws of thought, so events are always somewhat unexpected, logically contradictory, and unpredictable for us. The flow of events rarely obeys mental logic, which alone contains the concept of a clear goal and the means to achieve it.

Modern scientific thinking, as can be seen, is not yet adapted to the holographic paradigm, which, apparently, should be assimilated in the most diverse spheres in the coming decade.

Thus, the Atmanic plane in itself cannot serve as an object of mental manipulations. It can be contemplated in awe, searching for more or less suitable, but always knowingly crude and imperfect rational representations for its elements and plots. Then, in the mental-Atmanic body, mental images of Atmanic objects arise, and from the former, one can try to build various constructs, but the laws of the mental plane still differ greatly from the Atmanic, therefore, the higher laws of being are poorly comprehended by the rational mind.

The mind — essentially — is needed by a person to comprehend (mentally model) the events happening to them and to partly influence them. The higher a person's evolutionary level, the better their subtle bodies are differentiated, and the richer and more diverse the connections between them become. Then the role of the mental body increases, as it connects not only with its neighbors (the causal and astral) but also with all others, and begins to regulate the connections between the subtle and dense sheaths.

Difficulties and Misconceptions of the Mental Body

However, the fundamental duty of the mental body is its correspondence to the causal. And here, many people encounter great difficulties and misunderstandings. On the one hand, the current era is obsessed with mental energy — knowledge, information, theories, and concepts. On the other hand, thinking proves to be clearly insufficient to organize life in an acceptable way, and it's not entirely clear what exactly it should be directed towards and which mental models and symbolic systems should be used.

The most common mistake a person makes is that, when trying to comprehend a particular situation, they focus their efforts precisely on the mental body, while they are significantly lacking information, or the information they possess is highly distorted.

The notion of "freedom" of thought is doubly mistaken:

1. Thinking is subject to very rigid social stamps. It is very difficult to escape their (most often unconscious) influence.

2. A person must deliberate on very specific things (for which there is causal sanction), while achieving understanding at a level determined by the causal, not the mental, body.

If humanity claims evolutionary development, it must first and foremost learn to behave culturally in the cognition of the world. The world reacts very painfully to "one-sided" breakthroughs, as they disturb the balance of its subtle planes.

Truth, when it desires to manifest to people, descending from the Atmanic plane, creates its own conductor-editor in the person of an individual (scientist) or a scientific collective, and first transmits the language (i.e., the basic mental constructs through which it can be expressed). However, after its birth, the balance of subtle energies of all planes is disturbed, and it takes a long time to restore it. This requires coordinated efforts from various people, from philosophers and poets to technologists and general laborers.

However, there is no universal "correct" system of thinking, just as there is no universal symbolic system. Any such system first aids thinking, but at some point becomes too narrow for it. But neither of these is a decisive factor in mental meditations. Thinking always has auxiliary, or, more accurately, particular functions, being part of the functioning of the human organism, and should primarily serve the impulses of other bodies and maintain its hygiene, and only secondarily become a parody of the World Mind, attempting to answer all conceivable and inconceivable idle questions.

When a skier races down a slope, their thinking primarily serves the needs of the physical body. It's also difficult to think after a hearty meal, as in this case, thinking serves etheric needs. A girl trying to comprehend the feelings a certain young man evokes in her uses the mental-astral body for this purpose.

In comprehending their actions, values, and ideals, a person activates, respectively, the mental-causal, mental-buddhic, and mental-Atmanic bodies. It is very important to understand that adequate symbolic systems and rules for operating with symbols are different in all these cases. The general pattern is: the closer a subtle body is to the mental body, the more freely one can operate with its symbols.

Multidimensionality of the Mental Plane and the Ethics of Cognition

So: the mental plane is fundamentally multidimensional. The concepts of priority, truth, and falsehood exist only within relatively narrow symbolic systems like mathematical logic or arithmetic. These systems do not in themselves have a direct relation to reality and the causal plane (the latter includes a procedure such as decision-making).

The question of the ethics of scientific knowledge is far more acute than one might imagine. For the normal functioning of the organism — both of man and of humanity as a whole — it is necessary to harmonize its mental body with the causal and astral. If the mental body in some places exceeds the boundaries of the causal, and in others leaves it bare and constantly "tears" here and there, then one cannot speak of the health of the organism as a whole.

The fantastic distortions in the fate of modern civilization are primarily associated with the hypertrophy and deformity of humanity's mental body. It has been additionally burdened with functions entirely unsuited to it, functions belonging to the entire subtle sheath, i.e., the Atmanic, Buddhic, and Causal bodies. Thought forms the ideal, life positions, and controls events — so the collective subconscious believes, and it vainly searches for a person (president) or a small group (politburo, government, supreme council, and the like) capable of generating such a thought.

As a result of such efforts, the mental-Atmanic, mental-Buddhic, and mental-Causal bodies come into focus. In them, a person begins to manipulate using mental methods that were well-developed for entirely different purposes and oriented towards qualitatively different problems. This involves a double error, or more precisely, an incorrect substitution:

1. The higher bodies (subtle sheath) are not at all identical to their mental images. For example, what a person does (causal body) is often very weakly related to how they consciously or unconsciously imagine it (mental-causal body).

2. To the objects of the mental-causal, mental-buddhic, and mental-Atmanic bodies, the methods commonly used in other parts of the mental body, such as combining with logical connectors, can be applied only extremely rarely.

Another common way to expand a symbolic system is to introduce differentiated scales of evaluation: instead of a crude polarization like "good - bad" or "like - dislike," scales appear such as: satisfactory, not bad, good, very good, excellent, magnificent. And, conversely: unimportant, rather bad, bad, very bad, completely useless, and absolute evil with two minuses.

Without solving any problems fundamentally, such scales divert a mass of a person's mental energy. They create an illusion of constructiveness in their meditation. In reality, the person is simply amusing themselves, attracting the attention of mental parasites with an excess of mental energy, but the main one among them becomes the symbolic system itself with an excessive multitude of evaluations, constantly demanding new nourishment.

The misuse of the differentiated-evaluative thinking system is widespread not only in middle school, and its origins go back to the Middle Ages (possibly even to more ancient times), when a seduced innocent girl could serve as a unit of sin — for example, in such an evaluation variant: "For it is better for you to seduce fourteen virgins than to miss morning prayer."

Here we encounter the phenomenon of a sacrilegious attitude towards Atmanic objects — natural numbers. These can only be used in mental models in the most exceptional cases, when there is a direct Atmanic sanction. Unable to solve the problem of preference at the mental level, a person, instead of adopting a more suitable, qualitatively different mental symbolic system or ascending to a subtler (causal) plane, tries to increase the energetic capabilities of their system. They do this by artificially introducing Atmanic objects into it, or more precisely, their clumsy mental imprints. What results from this "makes no sense" — neither in mathematical economics, nor in mathematical linguistics, nor in many other "mathematized" sciences.

Just as the world is one, so is any worthwhile mental model of it. Matter is not some elementary collection of identical particles, by studying which and the simplest rules of their combination, we will understand the world as a building made of cubes.

The atom, like the Universe, is not indivisible. Moreover, all information about it is contained within it, but this information must be extracted carefully and delicately, obtaining its sanction and in any case without violating its fundamental structure: would we better understand Rodin's sculpture by sawing it in half or by crashing it, accelerated to the first cosmic velocity, against the Kremlin wall?