Emotion, The Emotional Physical Being and the Emotonal Reality

The Physical Emotional Subplane represents the diminished part of the Affective Principle, intermediate between the Astral plane and the Mundane Physical. This is scaled down to the emotional body, the physical embodiment of emorions, and in turn progresses further down the scale of gradation of consciousness, in the same manner as the mental and astral, becoming increasingly rigidified. These various substages (physical of Mental and so on) have been described by Theon, Sri Aurobindo, Ouspensky and Bennett, and other esoteric psycholgists. At the Physical Emotional Subplane all that is left of the original cosmic love impulse are bodily and physical-brain emotional thoughtforms.

At the individual level this would clearly seem to be equivalent to the "Emotional body" or second energy body of Barbara Brennan's sequence of seven energy bodies. This is represented (as indicated by the illustration at the left) as the rainbow body of Adyar Theosophy and the New Age movement; the various coloured chakras and so on. This would seem to be the lowest grade at which thought forms move in an amorphous fashion. Below the Emotional body things congeal into the emotional subconscious; fixed complexes, frozen auric structures, and so on, due to the increasing densification of matter

Objectively this plane corersponds to the region of fluid elemental forces; the lowest stratum of the devas of New Age and Theosophical teachings. However the bulk of the elemental nature forces can be found on the larger and deeper levels of the Subtle Physical.

Feelings - The Emotional Being

Following Sri Aurobindo's classification of the "vital" (= affective) being, the emotional faculty is here used to refer not to emotions in the widest sense of the term, but to the developed emotions. As such it is one of the four "vertical" subdivisions of the Affective (=Vital) being.

"...the emotional vital...is the seat of various feelings, such as love, joy, sorrow, hatred, and the rest;"

Elsewhere in Letters on Yoga, Sri Aurobindo writes that the Emotional Being corresponds to the Anahata or heart chakra

The Emotional Being is sometimes grouped with the epithymia and thymos or desire nature in that they are both "irrational", but the two are quite distinct. The latter two pertain to more intense and self-centered instinctual feelings, the other to a larger and more empathic feeling.

In Barbara Ann Brennan's description of the subtle bodies, the emotional body represents the second of the "human energy field" auras, the lower octave of the astral and celestial bodies/auras. This however is a completely different meaning to that of Sri Aurobindo.

In the current "theory of everything", the term "emotional body" is used to designate the affective Subtle Physical aura and being

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