To further understand the function of the Mental Envelope, we can start from the outside by looking at the not-self and work inwards towards the Self. We acknowledged that what the mind thinks is itself be can not be, as the mind dissolves at the end of each incarnation. Let us then focus on thought and the processes that revolve around it. The process of consciousness can be analysed as follows: First, contact with the physical envelope from the outside occurs, and this contact is turned into sensation by the emotional envelope. The sensation is then transformed into a precept by the mental envelope, and the precepts are further elaborated into concepts. These concepts preserve the ideal form, which provides the material for future thought. This is obviously occurring at an advanced stage of human development. Caveman was not over-engaged in precepts and concepts. This occurs when we reach the 3. Cultured, and 4. Compassionate stage of evolution.
Every contact with the external world modifies the mental envelope, a key player in the process of consciousness, by rearranging a part of its materials as a picture or image of the external object. Thinking involves establishing relations between these images, and it consists of corresponding modifications within the knower themself.
The knower’s work involves establishing relationships between the images formed in the mental envelope, which turns them into thoughts. When the thinker repeatedly reforms the same images, memory and anticipation come into play.
Consciousness is also illuminated by ideas that come from the Universal Mind and are not based on materials from the physical world. When a person reasons, they add their own unique contributions to the information they receive from outside. The mind works on the supplied materials, linking perceptions together and blending various streams of sensation into one image. This unique work of establishing relations and synthesising is the speciality of the knower and is a unique aspect of the mind. This may help restore the faith in a student who is still smarting from the knowledge that they are incapable of original thought.
This level of cognition and processing of information is mainly the preserve of the 4. Compassionate, and 5. Initiated monads. The ability to review a broad spectrum of ideas and synthesise a coherent narrative is rarely seen in most people. It is worth remembering that humans are not capable of original thought yet. That faculty develops when we become second selves. Appreciating the relationship between objects or events is different. When Alexander Fleming noticed that mould on a petri dish seemed to be killing bacteria, he was not inventing antibiotics. They already existed. He was just noticing what effect this class of compounds had on prokaryotic organisms, bacteria, to you and me.
The activity of the mental envelope affects the emotional envelope and, subsequently, the etheric and dense bodies, leading to electrical discharges and magnetic currents. These currents leave a nervous track along which another current can run. The nervous matter of the sensing envelope vibrates under these impulses, resulting in electrical discharges and magnetic currents interacting between the particles, creating complex interrelations. If the thoughts cascading from the mental envelope are negative, there is an inevitable corrosive effect on the emotional and physical envelope. The current paradigm is to look for causes in our genes and environment; that is not even half the story. If a group of particles associated with a particular vibration is activated again by the consciousness repeating the same idea, the vibration readily travels along the existing track, re-activating the other group of particles and reintroducing an associated idea to the consciousness. This is the mechanism of associated ideas. This mechanism of associated ideas is well known to students of psychology. Use it or lose it is what we are told. You may not forget a language completely, but you can get rusty if you have not spoken it for 40 years.
The mind’s unique role lies in establishing connections between objects of consciousness. This phrase encompasses all the diverse processes of the mind. Therefore, the Hindu refers to the mind as the sixth sense, as it absorbs sensations from the five senses and combines them into a single perception, forming one idea. The mind is also known as the “Rajah” of the senses.
Furthermore, the sutra indicates that the modes of the mind represent pentads. Here, “pentad” is used in the same way a chemist speaks of the valency or the power of forming combinations of an element. The mind acts like a prism, gathering the five different sensation rays from the sense organs and merging them into one ray. Considering the five organs of action in the physical body and the five sense organs in the emotional body, the mind becomes the eleventh sense. Thus, the Bhagavad Gita refers to the “ten senses and the one”.
When we consider the senses of the mental envelope itself rather than the mind as the sixth or eleventh “sense”, we find that they differ significantly from the physical envelope’s senses. The mental envelope comes into direct contact with the mental world, becoming conscious of everything throughout itself that can influence it. There are no distinct organs for sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell in the mental envelope; the term “senses” is, in fact, inaccurate – it is more precise to describe it as the mental “sense.”
This means that, by being able to communicate directly through thought transference without the need to articulate thoughts in words, the barrier of language is no longer present on the mental plane as it is on the emotional plane. That is a relief to know. I am saved.
The mind does not think in colour, sound, or form. It thinks a thought, which is a complex vibration in mental matter, and that thought is expressed in various ways through vibrations. In the mental envelope, a person is free from the limitations of their separate sense organs, and is receptive to every vibration.
The average person’s mental envelope today is relatively less developed than the emotional and physical envelopes. The normal person identifies with the brain-consciousness, feeling themselves as ‘I’ only on the physical plane, in the waking state. The average person’s consciousness works from the emotional plane and is moved more by sensations.
In the more highly evolved individuals, the centre of consciousness is in the mental envelope, situated in the 47:4 permanent molecule or the mental unit, as it is also referred to. These 4. Compassionate monads are moved more by ideas than sensations. The average person is conscious but not self-conscious on the emotional and mental planes. They recognise emotional and mental changes within themselves but do not distinguish between changes initiated by themselves and those caused by external impacts. Hence, the physical plane is the only ‘real’ world for them, and all phenomena of consciousness belonging to the emotional and mental worlds are considered ‘unreal’, ‘subjective’, and ‘imaginary’. They are regarded as created by one’s own ‘imagination’ and not as results of impacts from external worlds. It can not be overemphasised how important it is to realise that the emotional and mental worlds are as real and “physical” as the world revealed to us by our five senses. By almost every metric, they are more “sensorious”, but in a different way.
The undeveloped person’s mental envelope cannot function separately on the mental plane as an independent vehicle of consciousness during their Earth life. In this manner, the mental life of a person is subjective, unlike the emotional life, which is objective, when the monad removes its focus from its physical-etheric brain and retires to the Emotional World every night. When such a person exercises their mental faculties, they must clothe themselves in emotional matter before they can become conscious of their activity, hence the entanglement of kama-manas.
We can summarise the principle functions of the mental body in the following five points:
(1) To serve as the vehicle of the Self for the purpose of concrete thinking.
(2) To express such concrete thoughts through the physical body, working through the emotional body, the etheric brain, and the cerebrospinal system.
(3) To develop the powers of memory and imagination.
(4) To serve, as evolution proceeds, as a separate vehicle of consciousness on the mental plane.
To these four functions must be added the further function, which will be described in later presentations, which is;
(5) To assimilate the results of experience gathered in each earth-life and to pass on their essence to the monad, the real person, who is focused in the causal permanent atom, 47:1, but who is not objectively conscious until the monad takes the (i3) and becomes an initiate.
The animal kingdom also employs mental matter to some extent. The higher domestic animals at least undoubtedly exercise the power of reason. However, naturally, the lines along which their reason can work are few and limited, and the faculty itself is far less powerful than is the case with human beings. In the case of the average animal, only the matter of the lowest sub-division of the mental plane would be employed. Still, with the highly developed domestic animal the matter of the higher of the four lower levels might be to some degree utilised.
In the following presentation, we will examine examples of what a clairvoyant would see if they were able to examine the mental envelopes of a range of people at differing developmental stages in their passage through the Human Kingdom. This is similar to what is seen in the emotional envelope but is worth revisiting.