We have reached the loftiest body of the human compound, the instrument which manifests the thought of the Ego and therefore of its spirit. This vehicle of consciousness penetrates the emotional body , the etheric body and the physical or anatomical body, exceeding them and forming around them a beautiful radiant atmosphere in the spiritually evoluted individual, but insipid and unpleasant in other cases.

 

The mental body does not have the human form as noted in the astral and etheric body, but is ovoid. The matter making up this vehicle of the spirit (pneuma or Neshamah) is the substance of the 4 sub-planes of the inferior mental plane (each plane is always divided
in 7 sub-planes), since the other 3 sub-planes represent the superior mental plane. The mental body centralizes in itself the senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell). It is these senses.

 

When man thinks, his thought penetrates with a remarkable speed the nervous system by the bridge of the astral and etheric bodies. The personal mental body grows with the daily gymnastics of the mind, with attention, concentration, meditation. It has the same Centers as the other energetic bodies .

 

At physical death, after the Purgatorial period or of the purification spent in the astral world to live and eliminate the bad emotions, man passes into the mental world when, with the new posthumous death, the astral body detaches itself from that of the mental.

 

The mental world is composed of two regions: the Abstract and the Concrete. In the first, the superior mental body or Causal Body operates, in the second, the inferior or common
mental body.

 

The sojourn in the mental plane will be short or long according to the life led on earth. It is natural that if the intellectual life has been noble, intense, if one has cultivated the most elevated sentiments of human nature, if the individual is devoted to the study of art, literature, science, religion, esotericism, leading a life of selfdenial, of apostolic thinking, he will survive for a long time in the region of the inferior mental world, making contact with angels, masters and helpers, quenching his thirst for knowledge. In this world he will bring only those tendencies and latencies of his own astral nature, whose development will determine, at the re-entering in the astral plane, the composition of the astral body for the following reincarnation.

 

Tommaso Palamidessi

excerpt from "MENTAL WORLD AND MENTAL BODY"

in the 8^th Booklet of Archeosophy