United States or Saint Kitts and Nevis ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The vehicle employed is no longer the astral body, but the mind-body a vehicle, therefore, belonging to the mental plane, and having within it all the potentialities of the wonderful sense of that plane, so transcendent in its action yet so impossible to describe.
It can know itself as something extended and intricately built up, burning away, moving, throbbing; it can also know itself as the seat of sensation, perceptions, feelings, wishes, thoughts. Cerebral control and mental activity are, on this view, different aspects of one natural occurrence. What we have to do with is the unified life of a psycho-physical being, a body-mind or mind-body."
The process has already begun, and far more has been accomplished than is generally known. The solution of the mind-body problem is already in the air. And, with it, will come theoretical consequences by no means secondary to those associated with the theory of evolution. With some of these consequences we shall be concerned in a later chapter.
With the imminent solution of the mind-body problem, the last bulwark of the old supernaturalism will have fallen. Man will be forced to acknowledge that he is an earth-child whose drama has meaning only upon her bosom. It is my firm conviction that the clear realization of this fact will startle men into insights and demands of far-reaching import.
If the mind-body problem were solved in a concrete, empirical way, what then? It has been customary to examine the question of immortality from three angles which may be called, respectively, the empirical, the ethical and the philosophical. The more recent drift of philosophy toward realism has tended to bring the first and the third methods of approach closer together.
This body is the artificial vehicle used on the four lower or rûpa divisions of the devachanic plane by those capable of functioning there during earth-life, and is formed out of the substance of the mind-body.
There is good reason to believe that the persistence of the mind-body puzzle has been due to two conditions, the lack of an adequate theory of knowledge, and an ultra-mechanical, or non-evolutionary, view of the physical world. Scientists and philosophers, alike, were possessed by an inertia which prevented them from taking the principle of evolution seriously.
So long as the reincarnating Ego remains upon the plane which is his true home in the arûpa levels of Devachan, the body which he inhabits is the Kârana Sharîra, but when he descends into the rûpa levels he must, in order to be able to function upon them, clothe himself in their matter; and the matter that he thus attracts to himself furnishes his devachanic or mind-body.
The true home of thought is on the mental plane, and all thought first manifests itself there as a vibration of the mind-body. But if it be in any way a selfish thought, or if it be connected in any way with an emotion or a desire, it immediately descends into the astral plane, and takes to itself a visible form of astral matter.
Thus we see that the influence of the thought-form is by no means so far-reaching as that of the original vibration; but in so far as it acts, it acts with much greater precision. What it produces in the mind-body which it influences is not merely a thought of an order similar to that which gave it birth; it is actually the same thought.
Word Of The Day