Mental body

The mental body (the mind) is one of the subtle bodies in esoteric philosophies, in some religious teachings and in New Age thought. It is understood as a sort of body made up of thoughts, just as the emotional body consists of emotions and the physical body is made up of matter. In occult understanding, thoughts are not just subjective qualia, but have an existence apart from the associated physical organ, the brain. According to Theosophists C.W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant (Adyar School of Theosophy), and later Alice Bailey, the mental body is equivalent to the "Lower Manas" of Blavatsky's original seven principles of man. But the New Age writer Barbara Brennan describes the Mental body as intermediate between the Emotional and the Astral body in terms of the layers in the "Human Energy Field" or Aura. The mental body is usually considered in terms of an aura that includes thoughtforms. In Theosophical and Alice Bailey's teachings, it corresponds to the Mental plane. According to Max Heindel's Rosicrucian writings, the mind is the latest acquisition of the human spirit and is related to the Region of Concrete Thought, which is the lower region of the World of Thought. It is not yet an organized body, and in most people it is still a mere inchoate cloud disposed particularly in the region of the head. It works as the link or focus between the threefold Spirit and the threefold body , in a reversed reflexion manner : the mind is like the projecting lens of a stereopticon, it projects the image in one of three directions, according to the will of the thinker, which ensouls the thought-form. His writings, called Western Wisdom Teachings, give a clear description on how the man's inner Spirit perceives, from the world of thought, the lower worlds through the mind: " We ourselves, as Egos, function directly in the subtle substance of the Region of Abstract Thought, which we have specialized within the periphery of our individual aura.