Over the next two presentations, I plan to revisit the topic of kama-manas and explore it more from a mental perspective. In the series of presentations on the Emotional Envelope, we discussed Kama, also known as desire. We went on to explore the topic of Kama-Manas, the combination of desire and mind. In this presentation, we will delve further into Kama-Manas, assuming you are familiar with the concepts discussed in the series on the Emotional Envelope. This leaves us free to focus mainly on the aspect of Manas or mind.
To recap briefly, as mentioned previously, Kama is the life force within the emotional envelope, characterised by feeling. It encompasses animal instincts, passions, and desires, serving as our earthly attachment. Kama, or Desire, also represents the lower aspect of Atma or Will.
Kama is sometimes misconstrued to solely signify base sensual desires. However, it encompasses all forms of desire, representing the outward expression of love for the things of the three worlds. True love, on the other hand, pertains to love for life or the divine, belonging to the higher, inward-focused self.
In the Rig Veda, Kama represents the feeling that drives creation. It is the longing for an intense and passionate life, both for individuals and the universe. Kama is the primary cause of reincarnation, as desire leads the Thinker to be reborn on Earth time after time. In the East, the craving or desire that leads to incarnation is known as Trishna; in Pali, Tanha. The culmination of Trishna is called Upadana.
The word Manas comes from the Sanskrit word “man,” the root of the verb “to think.” It refers to the Thinker in us, which is often referred to as the mind in the West. Manas is the immortal individual, the real “I.” However, Manas, the Thinker, living on the higher mental or causal plane, cannot directly engage with the lower worlds. Therefore, the mind projects the lower manas, also called a reflection, a shadow, or a ray.
The Ray interacts with the brain, expressing mental abilities based on the brain’s structure and other physical characteristics. The Ray causes the molecules of the brain nerve cells to vibrate, resulting in consciousness on the physical plane.
The lower manas is encompassed by the quaternary, which includes:
– Kama, or desire
– Prana, or Vitality
– Etheric Double
– Physical Envelope
It can be visualised as holding onto kama with one hand while retaining its connection to its higher manas with the other hand.
In life on Earth, kama and lower manas are combined and often referred to as Kama-Manas. Kama provides the animal and passionate elements, while lower manas rationalises these and adds intellectual abilities. They are so closely intertwined that they rarely act separately, as almost every thought is influenced by desire. Kama-Manas is not a new principle but the blending of the lower part of manas with Kama. Kama-Manas, which is manas with desire, has been aptly described as manas taking an interest in external things.
The functions of lower manas in humans manifest as mental ability, intellectual strength, sharpness, comparison, reasoning, judgment, imagination, and other mental faculties. These abilities may extend to what is often termed as genius, but as H. P. Blavatsky noted, it is more accurately described as “artificial genius” resulting from cultivation and purely intellectual acumen.
What is commonly referred to as the mind or intellect is, in H. P. Blavatsky’s words, “a pale and often distorted reflection of manas itself.” Its true nature is sometimes revealed by the presence of kamic or emotionally based elements such as passion, vanity, and arrogance.
True genius consists of flashes of higher manas penetrating into the lower consciousness. As stated in an ancient Hindu text: “Manas is declared to be twofold, pure and impure; the impure is determined by desire, the pure is desire-free.”
Genius, which perceives instead of arguing, belongs to the higher manas, or monad; true intuition is one of its faculties. Reason is the process of weighing and balancing, which organises the facts gathered by observation, analyses them, and draws conclusions from them—this is the function of the lower manas through the brain apparatus; its tool is reasoning. Through induction, it moves from the known to the unknown, forming hypotheses; through deduction, it descends again to the known, confirming the hypotheses through new experiments.
There is also a distinction between the mechanism of ordinary reasoning and the unique flashes of consciousness known as genius. Reasoning comes to the brain step by step through the successive subplanes of the emotional and mental planes; however, genius arises from consciousness flowing downward through the atomic subplanes only, from the atomic emotional and the atomic physical. Its source is to be found on the 2nd Triad in the causal envelope or even higher.
The faculty of reason, which resides in the physical brain, is entirely dependent on sensory evidence and, therefore, cannot be directly associated with the divine spirit in humanity. The divine spirit operates through consciousness, which provides instantaneous perception of right and wrong. Thus, prophecy and divine inspiration are simply the effects of illumination from what is described as one’s immortal spirit. Christianity would call this the Holy Ghost; we call it our solar deva.
Kama-Manas, or humanity’s personal self, is referred to as the “emotional soul” in Isis Unveiled, one of Blavatsky’s books. It is the lower manas that gives the individual the sense of self-recognition. This lower manas becomes intellectual and recognises itself as separate from others, often deluded by this sense of separateness without realising a higher unity beyond sensory perception. Misleading as this perception is, it is nevertheless a necessary stage in evolution for humanity to individualise and become self-aware.
The lower manas, influenced by emotions, passions, and desires, is drawn to material things and may forget the serene origins of its existence. It immerses itself in the turbulence that provides pleasure but not peace. It is the lower manas that brings the final touch of delight to the senses and animal nature, as passion requires memory and anticipation, and ecstasy is fuelled by imagination and fanciful thinking.
Desires bind the lower mind to matter. When any action is undertaken with the intention of gaining love, recognition, power, or fame, the mind (manas) becomes tied to earthly desires (kama). This implies that even lofty goals or charitable actions, when pursued for self-centred reasons, can be tainted by impure motivations.
Kama and manas continuously influence each other, each one stimulating and arousing the other. Desire constantly drives the mind, making it serve as a source of pleasure. The mind always seeks what brings pleasure, striving to focus on pleasurable images and exclude those that cause pain. The mental faculties enhance animal passions with a certain strength and quality that are not immediately evident when they operate solely as animal qualities. The reason is that impressions made on the mental envelope are more permanent than those made on the emotional envelope, and the mental envelope constantly reproduces them through the agency of memory and imagination. Thus, the mental envelope stimulates the emotions, arousing in this envelope the desires that, in the animal, slumber until awakened by a physical stimulus. Hence we find in a less evolved person, a persistent pursuit of sense-gratification never found in the lower animals, a lust, a cruelty, a calculation to which they are strangers. Thus, the powers of the mind, yoked to the service of the senses, make a person a far more dangerous and savage brute than any animal.
The role of the Desire-Elemental, which is the instinctive life in the emotional envelope, in the interaction of manas with kama, has already been thoroughly described. The emotional and mental bodies of individuals are so closely interconnected that they are often considered to function as a single envelope. In Vedantic classification, these two are actually grouped together as one kosha or sheath, like this:
- Unity Envelope (46)
- Causal Envelope (47:1-3)
- Mental Envelope (47:4-7)
- Emotional Envelope
- Etheric Double
- Physical Organism
The student should be aware that the centres of sensation, all five of them, are located in kama. This is reflected in the saying from an Upanishad that “the organ of thinking of every creature is pervaded by the senses.” This emphasises the dual function of the Manomaya Kosha, which serves as the organ of thinking but is also “pervaded by the senses.” Manomaya Kosha refers to the Mental Body. The Taittiriya Upanishad says: “Within the vital force is yet another body, this one made of thought energy. It fills the two denser bodies and has the same shape”. We know it has the same shape as most of the mental matter of a person is contained within the limits of the physical body. The Upanishad finishes by saying, “Those who understand and control the mental body are no longer afflicted by fear.”
The tangled connection between our mental and emotional envelopes goes back into the dim and distant past—I mean really dim and distant, to the First Round of this chain, to be precise. This is why I made an effort to explain the chronology of Chains, Rounds, and Globes. So much of what happened today is rooted in a past series of evolutionary developments that need to be understood if one is able to make sense of the present.
We will begin to unravel this story in the next presentation.