The Mental Being represents the individual aspect of the universal mental or ideational plane. The cosmic nature of that reality is scaled down to the mental body, the physical embodiment of thought, and in turn progresses further down the scale of gradation of consciousness, becoming increasingly rigidified. These various substages (physical of Mental and so on) have been very well described by Theon, Sri Aurobindo, Ouspensky and Bennett, and other esoteric psycholgists. At the Physical Mental Subplane level all that is left of the original thought-archetypes or ideation forms are physical-brain thoughtforms.
The mental being also corresponds to an individual subtle body, the "Mental Body" or third energy body of Barbara Brennan's sequence of seven energy bodies. There are many other equivalent descriptions of the "mental body" found throughout Theosophical and New Age literature.
The Objective attribute of this plane is harder to attune to, but would presumably correspond to a strata of elemental forces; perhaps certain more limited "devic" forces of New Age and Theosophical lore may go here. These forces are further removed then the familiar "devas" and "elementals", as the mental subplane is less closely connected to the physical (hence philosophies such as Cartesian Dualism, based on the difficulty of reconciling the two). It may well be that what Steven Guth calls the "gnomes" that live inside computers (these terms should be understood metaphorically, not literally) originate here. Certainly the rise of the noosphere on Earth was a splendid opportunity for mental forces to embody themselves more integrally in the material dimension.
| Mental of Physical of Physical subdegree | Chakra |
Sri Aurobindo
based on "Planes and Parts of Being" (Letters on Yoga vol. 1, pp.326ff) |
Gurdjieff / Ouspensky
(3 centers and sub-centers) |
Carl Jung
(4 Ego-types) |
| Spiritual of Mental Body | Sahasrara | Pure Thinking / Higher Thinking | Intellectual part of Thinking Center ? | n/a |
| Mental of Mental Body | Ajna | Thinking Mind | Intellectual part of Thinking Center | Thinking Type |
| Feeling of Mental Body | Vishuddha / Akasha | Dynamic Mind | n/a | n/a |
| Feeling of Mental Body | Anahata / Air | Externalizing Mind | Emotional part of Thinking Center | Intuition Type |
| Willing of Mental Body | Manipura / Fire | Externalizing Mind | Emotional part of Thinking Center | n / a |
| Willing of Mental Body | Swadhisthana / Water | Externalizing Mind | Emotional part of Thinking Center | Feeling Type |
| Physical of Mental Body | Muladhara / Earth | Physical Mind | Moving part of Thinking Center | Sensation Type |
note: the above represents a simplistic linear interpretation only; in fact all these stages interact and overlap. Rarely do all these levels develop at the same time, and the Integral/Divine Realization encompasses all of them.
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