We have talked about what the emotional body is, but what exactly does it do? The functions of the emotional body may be roughly grouped under three headings: —
1. To make sensation possible.
2. To serve as a bridge between the mind, located in the mental envelope and physical matter.
3. To act as an independent vehicle of consciousness and action.
We will deal with these three functions sequentially.
When we describe a monad’s envelope, we talk about ” principles,” i.e., into modes of manifesting life. The four lower principles are sometimes termed the “Lower Quaternary”. The list given by Leadbeater of the quaternary are:—
- Physical Body,
- The Etheric Body,
- Prâna, or Vitality,
- and the Emotional Body, also known as Kâma, or the Desire envelope.
I question this division, as it breaks with the nomenclature devised by the Theosophists, which only acknowledges the etheric envelope as the lowest principle body of the monad and also includes the mental envelope. The reason why the whole concept of “principle” bodies came into being has been discussed in the series of presentations on “What is the Self?” It should also be noted that the causal-mental body is referred to as the Higher and Lower Manas or mind. As Lower Manas is entangled with Kama, the emotional envelope, it would naturally fit in with the lower quaternary and not the higher triad of Atma-Buddhi-Manas, manas being the causal envelope. Oh, and why is Prana given a separate designation? I would have thought it would enter and function through the etheric envelope. Confused? I am.
Anyway, let’s stick with this classification for the time being. The fourth principle, Kama, is the life manifesting in the emotional body and conditioned by it. Its characteristic is the attribute of feeling, which in rudimentary form is sensations and in complex form is emotions, with many grades in between these two. This is sometimes summed up as desire; that which is attracted or repelled by objects, giving either pleasure or pain. Kama thus includes feelings of every kind and might be described as a passional and emotional nature. It comprises all animal appetites, such as hunger, thirst and sexual desire. It also includes other passions, such as the lower forms of love, hatred, envy and jealousy. It is the desire for sentient existence, for the experience of material joys — “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life”.
Kama is the brute in us, the “ape and tiger” of Tennyson, “the force, which most avails to keep us bound to earth and to stifle in us all higher longings by the illusions of sense. It is the most material in Humanity’s nature and is the one that binds us fast to earthly life.” Blavatsky describes the emotional principle thus: “It is not molecularly constituted matter, least of all the human body that is the grossest of all our ‘ principles’, but verily the middle principle, the real animal centre; whereas our body is but its shell, the irresponsible factor and medium through which the beast in us acts all its life”
Kama or Desire is also described as a reflection or lower aspect of Atma or Will, the distinction being that Will is Self-determined, whereas Desire is moved to activity by attractions to, or repulsions from, surrounding objects. Desire is thus Will de-crowned, the captive, the slave of matter. Another way of regarding Kama has been well expressed by Ernest Wood in his book “The Seven Rays”. Kama ” means all desire and desire is the outward-turned aspect of love, the love of the things of the three worlds; while love proper is the love of life and love of the divine and belongs to the higher or inward-turned self.”
For our purposes in this presentation, desire and emotion are frequently used as synonymous representations of the one principle. Strictly, however, emotion is the product of desire and intellect. The emotional body is often known as the Kama-Rupa; and sometimes, in the older nomenclature, as the Animal Soul.
Impacts from without, striking on the physical body, are conveyed as vibrations by the agency of Prana or Vitality, but they would remain as vibrations only, merely motion on the physical plane, if it were not for Kama, the principle of sensation, translating the vibration into feeling. Thus pleasure and pain do not arise until the emotional centre is reached. Hence, Kama joined to Prana is spoken of as the “breath of life”, the vital sentient principle spread over every particle of the body. It appears that certain organs of the physical body are specifically associated with the workings of Kama; among these are the liver and the spleen. It may be noted here that Kama, or desire, is just beginning to be active in the mineral kingdom, where it expresses itself as chemical affinity.
In the vegetable kingdom, it is, of course, much more developed, indicating a far greater capacity for utilising lower emotional matter. Students of botany are aware that likes and dislikes, i.e., desire, are much more prominent in the vegetable world than in the mineral and that many plants exhibit a great deal of ingenuity and “intelligence” in attaining their objectives. It would be a mistake to consider that the weeds in your garden are conspiring to take over the world. The nature spirits that control the plants may be, but not the plants themselves! Plants are quick to respond to loving care and are affected by a person’s feelings towards them. They delight in and respond to admiration: they are also capable of individual attachments, as well as of anger and dislike.
As an agronomist, this should sound very left-field to me, yet empirically, I can report that plants thrive in the care of some people and wither in the care of others and it is not just how frequently they are watered that causes this. I feel that the biggest contributor of vitality from a human to a plant is facilitated by transfers of energy through the etheric envelope.
Animals are capable to the fullest possible extent of experiencing lower desires, though the capacity for the higher desires is more limited. Nevertheless, it exists and in exceptional cases, an animal is capable of manifesting an exceedingly high quality of affection or devotion. If you were able to view an animal’s emotional envelope, the matter in it would be very skewed towards its base. This would also depend if you were examining a domesticated pet, such as a cat or a tiger.
Passing now to the second function of the emotional body — to act as a bridge between mind and physical matter — we note that an impact on the physical senses is transmitted inwards by Prana, and becomes a sensation by the action of the sense-centres, which are situated in Kama or the emotional envelope. It is then perceived by Manas, or Mind, in a yet higher envelope. Thus, without the general action through the emotional body, there would be no connection between the external world and the mind of a person, no connection between physical impacts and the perception of them by the mind or mental matter in the mental envelope. Conversely, whenever we go through the process of thinking, we set in motion the mental matter within us. The vibrations that this generates are transferred to the matter of our emotional body. The emotional matter then affects the etheric matter, which in turn acts on dense physical matter, the grey matter of the brain. The emotional body can thus be accurately regarded as a bridge between our physical and our mental life, serving as a transmitter of vibrations both from physical to mental and from mental to physical and is principally developed by this constant passage of vibrations to and fro.
In the course of the evolution of our emotional bodies, there are two distinct stages: the emotional body has first to be developed to a fairly high point as a transmitting vehicle: then it has to be developed as an independent body, in which the person can function on the emotional plane.
In Humanity, the normal brain-intelligence is produced by the union of Kama or emotions, with Manas, or Mind. This union is often spoken of as Kama-Manas. Kama-Manas is described by H. P. Blavatsky as ” the rational, but earthly or physical intellect of man, encased in, and bound by matter, and therefore subject to the influence of the latter”; this is the “lower self” which, acting on this plane of illusion, imagines itself to be the real Self or Monad focused in these envelopes. The consequence of this is that we fall into what Buddhist philosophy terms the ” heresy of separateness”. Kama-Manas, that is Manas with desire, has also been picturesquely described as Manas taking an interest in external things.
It may, in passing, be noted that a clear understanding of the fact that Kama-Manas belongs to the human personality. It functions in and through the physical brain. This is essential to a get good grasp of the process of reincarnation and is sufficient to show how there can be no memory of previous lives, so long as the consciousness cannot rise beyond the brain-mechanism, this mechanism, together with that of Kama, being made afresh in each life and therefore having no direct touch with previous lives. Fear not, all is not lost. The positive stuff we learn is stored in our causal envelope and the negative stuff is tucked away in our subconscious. The physical location of this is in our permanent atoms, 49:1 and 48:1, as well as our permeant molecule 47:4.
Manas, by itself, can not affect the molecules of the physical brain, but, when united to Kama, it can set the physical molecules in motion and thus produce ” brain-consciousness”, including the brain memory and all the functions of the human mind as we ordinarily know it. It is, of course, not the Higher Manas (causal), but the Lower Manas, i.e., matter of the four lower levels of the mental plane, 47:4-7, which is associated with Kama. In Western psychology, this Kama-Manas becomes a part of what in that system is termed Mind. Kama-Manas, forming the link between the higher and lower nature in humanity, is the battleground during life and also, as we shall see later, plays an important part in existence once we die and start our journey back towards our causal envelope.
We will conclude our look at the functions of the emotional envelope in the next presentation.