Mental Forms

“The All is Mind, everything in the Universe is mental.”

The Kybalion

This ancient - and always relevant - assertion that the Greeks extracted from much older Egyptian aphorism and which have come down to us through the versions that the Neoplatonists of Pergamo and Alexandria had conserved. These fragments had been commented and recommented upon many times with more or less success, has maintained a truthfulness that goes beyond the field of metaphysics and touches daily life, that which affects everyone at any moment.

Everyone of us and our surroundings experience perceivable reality according to how it is conceived. This does not change the Archetypes that wait for us at the end of the Path, of which Plato has brilliantly explained, however, our intention with this article is to refer to, not the Logos or Divine idea whose rudder governs the march of the Universe in an intelligent manner and that is reflected in the stars and the atoms, but rather to the human aspect that we are called upon to live, personally, within the limits of our time-space reality.

We mustn’t be egotistical, but we can’t avoid being egocentric. Protagoras said that “Man is the measure of all things” and by this he referred not only to human consciousness and the universe, but also to the physical body, which gave him the notion of the small and the great, of the near and the far. Microcosmic Man is Himself a living image of that Macrocosmic God which Is and Exists.

Any value capable of being understood and lived, really lived by each one of us, brings not so much an access to the Hidden Founts of Truth, but rather a relationship with our Self and that which can call our environment.

This however presents us with a double problem initially: When we are born into this life it’s evident that our environment already exists, and so we therefore become conscious of religious, political, scientific, artistic beliefs; social customs according to gender and condition; idiomatic expression according to the language of the country and the family wherein we develop. We taste different foods and drinks. We learn how to use instruments, from our own body to the daily machines and utensils for work or play that surround us. However ... before this pre-existing environment we can ask ourselves: “What about me, did I exist before being born? Where? How?...And if I didn’t exist, was I born with my body? Is my Self but a sum and combination of properties of matter, some of them unknown from a scientific standpoint?

The capacity to think perceptively gives reality to my environment. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that, as I have conceived myself, I am also forming reality? and if this is true, would not the existence of my Self depend on the existence of my surroundings?

This apparently logical question that has preoccupied the materialists so much is nothing but a crude sophism.

If it were certain that our existence depends on our surroundings and that our Self is not pre-existent, then all children born in similar conditions would necessarily be similar in all aspects. Therefore, if the only factor was the force of our environment, and if our Self was but a product of this environment, we would all come out of Nature’s “production line” the same, just like cars and planes do. But we aren’t things; we are beings. And the differences that appear in people raised in the same home and environment - profound differences and not tangential - demonstrate to us the pre-existence of a differentiated Self for each one of us. We think differently and therefore we feel things differently, we are different. There is no person who exactly the same as someone else.

Thus, upon birth, beyond the influence of the “habitat” the distinctive characteristics of each person manifests themselves. Our Self is an extremely complicated idea-form that has no equal. It is reasonable to think that we were formed by different experiences, in previous lifetimes, where we were again different from everyone else through the accumulation of millennium of experiences.

Our knowledge of history teaches us that the environments of specific eras and countries were distinctly different. And it follows that we ourselves, from a distinct distant past, make it that, with the differentiated relation with different vital scenarios, we cannot all be the same.
Taking this difference into account, the term “we” is nothing more than a relationship that is more or less harmonious or conflictual with others. Hence Plato’s concept of a society as an interrelation between different individuals. Each one of these individuals has his own concept of themselves and their environment. All attempts of homogenous massification is homogenous and painful.

For that reason we must care for the purity and nobility of our mental forms, since each thought that we carry or emit, has its own distinct dynamic emanated from that of our Self en relation to the non-Self or surroundings.

Profound ethics, an instinctive notion of the good - fruit of the accumulated karmic experience - persuades us to be not only good, but to surrounds ourselves with the best possible things. An essential and existentially good environment doesn’t do us any harm. It won’t hurt us or anyone else. And this environment doesn’t begin where it apparently first appears, with others, but rather inside of us, in a form of “sub-environment” that surrounds the Deeper Self.

We are inhabited by thousands of form-ideas that cause joys, pains, passions, aberrant distortions, lapses in the estimation of the value of things and men.

For a better understanding of the above-mentioned concepts, it’s useful to notice that the Esotericism of all times has conceived of man as being a perfect physical robot, but obeying at the same time to biological, vital, psychological, mental, intuitional and spiritual factors.

This septennary constitution allows for all of its part to be a reflection of the whole, that is that each one of the vehicles of man is also sevenfold, and we therefore have a Mind, which, according to the pedagogical framework of the great occultist H. P. Blavatsky, presents the following characteristics:

Higher Mind (Manas)

(1) MANAS-ATMA
Spiritual
(2) MANAS-BUDDHI
Intuitive
(3)MANAS-MANAS
The pure mind where the latent principles of Atma and Buddhi are reflected, constituting the causal body or Self.
Lower Mind (Kama-manas)

Antakarana or Bridge

(4) K.MAMAS-K.MANAS
Obscure Mind, seat of obsessions.
(5) ASTRAL-K.MANAS
Mind that gives form to desires.
(6) PRANIC-K.MANAS
Mind fortified by the breath of life
(7) DENSE-K.MANAS
Mind dealing with physical things

(1) The mental forms emanated from this Sub-body are of colors close to violet, with sharp and brilliant geometrical shapes; they have a last a long time by themselves and are related to heroic and mystico-philosophical themes.
(2) The mental forms emanated from this Sub-body are of colors close to silver, with clear and brilliant geometrical shapes with their edges shading into a brilliant light; they don’t last as long as the previous ones and they are related to religious themes.
(3) The mental forms emanated from this Sub-body are of colors close to blue, with clear, precise geometrical shapes but not very brilliant; they don’t last as long as the previous ones and they are related to the intellect and pure reason. Speculative philosophy. Pure sciences.
(4) The mental forms emanated from this Sub-body are of colors close to green, with clear, solid and relatively simple; geometrical shapes; they don’t last as long as the previous ones and they are related to concrete, technical, and mechanical speculative themes. Applied sciences.
(5) The mental forms emanated from this Sub-body are of colors close to brilliant red, with unstable geometrical shapes that tend to return upon themselves; they don’t last as long as the previous ones but they repeat themselves and are related to exaltations, emotions, sensations, and pleasures and pains.
(6) The mental forms emanated from this Sub-body are of colors close to orange combined with blood red; with curved and spiral shapes constantly renewing themselves. Their temporal duration is meager, but in constant and circular renewal engendering many others, give a sensation of continuity, like the impression that running water gives from a distance, giving live and heat to the others.
(7) The mental forms emanated from this Sub-body are of hot and dark colors that form a polychromatic interlacing, which are, in reality, like baskets that contain all the other mental energies and concretize them into geometrical forms that tend towards of a stability of a mechanical compensation. They don’t for very long, but their presence is clear and well-defined.
As the mental forms suffer the universal “boomerang” effect, they tend to return to their point of departure, especially if they don’t hit the “target” the were aimed at. That’s why we have the millennium-old recommendations to encourage good thoughts and to discourage bad ones, since aside from the impacts that they can provoke in the outer surroundings, they inexorably return, and many times increased, hit and nest within our inner environment, that is, in the very mind that generated them. The Orientals would say that this is Karma, but we mustn’t understand it as being a simple arithmetical type of Karma, but rather a vital kind.

When a seed is plated, it doesn’t change into another kind of seed, but rather a plant that contains a hundredfold copies similar to the original one because, planted in the earth, it absorbs from it the elements that help it to develop. It is a multiple echo of the original and unique sound.
This capacity to multiply means that the Ego is assailed by thousands of foreign, native, and mixed mental forms. The untrained will of today’s individuals, turn them into the playthings of these mental forms and thus, from the selection of toothpaste to that of a political position or a form of life, they are constantly moved by the great waves of the multitudinous ocean that controls the circumstances, which are both the reflection of combinations of different previous situations, already established when the individual arrives on the scene and of hidden will powers that are not always human.

Behind actions that are apparently purely human are hidden forces of Nature like great Elemental and it is therefore suicide to weaken people’s willpower. The iron discipline of the old monasteries and the old military quarters were not as stupid as we are today lead to believe. They forged Men, in the best spirit of that word. A marching procession or troop is the antithesis of the herd, of the gluttonous pack that chomps here and there the first thing that comes out the ground that has been fertilized by its own excrement. The spirit of Mysticism, of the exaltation of deep ethical values, generosity, courage, and the control of one’s body, create mental forms that, by returning upon society and upon its own projectors, ennoble and purify all, repelling the pestilent spirits that promote physical and metaphysical illness.

The lack of these disciplines allow, like terrible vampires, the worst mental forms to appear, some have been asleep for centuries in the obscure corners of what today we would call the “collective unconscious” and attack those with the weakest will power, weakening them further and corrupting them. That is where the tendencies towards drug use, irrational violence, anguish, the incapacity to work, and the lack of power to make redemptive decisions. come from.
Those affected, like small children, are always asking for things, but never offer anything. Lacking in vitality and without will power, they drag themselves and are dragged into the worst of their slaveries, which is the servile offspring of fear and father of all errors.

True liberty is the obedience to the harmonious laws that govern Nature. That is ecology, and not the politicized form that we see in the streets. This liberty is the source of the higher mental forms, those that, returning upon its producers, cover them with halos of saintliness and heroism. These characteristics make them beautiful to the sight of the Gods.

The shield of power and saintliness protects one from the larvae and dragons engendered by the moral nighttime that we are passing through.

The sword of will cuts the head of the dragons of fear, corruption, and physical and moral misery. From honorable work, from the courage to not only to claim one’s own rights but also to also to assume one’s own duties, from the goodness and humility of heart, from the healthy joy that distances us from the howling of beasts, from oration which is talking with God and from individual and collective courage in facing adversity, from the upright concentration on the best in each of us, are born the most splendid and beneficial mental forms.

That is what being an Acropolitan is: to dream and build that High City, that Acropolis, made with mental forms of Will, Love, and Justice.

Jorge Angel Livraga

http://nueva-acropolis.org/articles/articles-read.aspx?lang=fra&ID=69