The Mental Body is intermediate between the three higher and three lower; therefore, it bears in the organism, in addition to its own, so to speak, personal loads, also special communicative ones.

          Mental prosperity hinders the blossoming of thought.

Keywords: mind, reason; modeling, comprehension; combining.

Thought images are objective perceptions of thought forms — individual objects that exist independently of a person in the mental realm of the subtle world.

Mental energy is capable of: composing several thought forms into one, gradually modeling it from logical building blocks similar to construction work; breaking down complex thought forms into their constituent parts; and building new ones, as well as examining them from different angles. All this is done through "left-brain" thinking.

When a thought form that resembles the current one but is not clearly defined by it enters the field of mental vision, this relates to "right-brain" associative thinking. It is also possible to create radically new thought forms, but this happens rarely.

Therefore, the process of thinking as a whole is a specific task, partly consisting of searching in the mental realm for suitable thought forms, templates for constructions, and starting points for associations, and partly in creating from them some larger thought form, or mental construction (opinion, concept, theory), which at the moment satisfies or does not satisfy the person.

Usually, if a person manages to correctly understand a complex situation and grasp a difficult problem, they feel how, in this area of the mental body (plane), an extraordinary clarity suddenly arises in their thoughts where chaos once reigned, as if order has been restored in a cluttered room: the floor and windows have been cleaned, dust has been wiped away, and the furniture has been rearranged.

There are many different symbolic systems and logics, meaning rules for manipulating symbols, and in some cases, one is more convenient than the other. But the mental plane itself is multidimensional, meaning that various logics coexist simultaneously within it, often incompatible and contradictory to one another.

Thought is cunning, often blatantly false, constantly trying to comprehend itself, like a snake swallowing its own tail—and it never succeeds in this. It is to the mental plane that the concepts of truth and falsehood relate, which do not exist on other planes, and this must be understood. Neither ideal, nor goal, nor event, nor emotion, nor movement can be true or false — they simply exist.

If we need to examine the correctness of the statement: “All leopards are spotted” and “Everything that is not spotted is not a leopard.” In studying the first statement, we will have to go to the zoo, and at the appropriate enclosure, we will quickly verify its falsehood. As for the second statement, we can begin to verify its truth at home, then continue at work, and after some time, we will confirm that it is also true: indeed, neither the table, nor the chair, nor the kettle in the kitchen, nor the many other non-spotted items that catch our eye are (thank God!) leopards. If, however, the millionth non-spotted item happens to be a leopard, it can confidently be classified as an experimental error.

It is clear that a logician will regard the described situation with indifference, stating that logic is one thing, and life is another, and that the former should be applied to the latter wisely, rather than formally. A physicist will note that each problem should be studied in essence, and if we are talking about leopards, we should consider them, not everything else, but I think the reader will understand the true meaning of this example...

The culture of thinking is more intuitive than we realize. The relationship between logic and life is not so simple. This is why there is empirical observation that the longer a person justifies themselves, the more dubious their justifications become. Logical chains of five links or more do not seem convincing at all, even if each individual implication raises no doubts.

Dialogue: «Is A1 true? Yes.»; «Does A2 follow from A1? It does.»; «Does A3 follow from A2, as A4 follows from A3? Yes, it does.» «So, is A4 true? I’m not sure... can’t it be simpler, shorter, more convincing?”

Ordinary logic — what is commonly referred to as common sense, and in science as sound reasoning — consists of certain rules that are quite difficult to describe accurately, but a cultured person instinctively learns them and strives to adhere to them strictly wherever possible. In cases where they fail, they feel internally upset and externally acknowledge the imperfection of their logic, hoping to find a way to correct the situation in the future.

However, it is striking that these rules are much more connected not so much with the internal laws of the mental plane but with its alignment with the causal. In other words, you may not be particularly logical, but you will be forgiven if you speak about the essence of the matter, and it is evident that you understand it and are trying to express it adequately in mental constructions.

Thus, a mental construction — a model or reasoning — is meaningful only when it pertains to some causal object (event, phenomenon, etc.) that directs the flow of mental meditation, the result of which will be a mental image, that is, a specific representation of the causal object.

This thought can be formulated in a much less pleasant way for a “freely thinking” person: for every mental meditation, there should be causal sanction. In other words, the mental body should not (except in special critical modes) go beyond the causal. Therefore, it is advised to reason only about relevant objects and events in one’s life that clearly require it. Justification for one’s own reasoning would only be valid if it sheds new light on what is happening. Other mental exercises merely clutter the mental plane and dirty one’s own mental body.

Unfortunately, in our mentally permissive time, chatter (empty talk) and unfounded idle thinking are not regarded as significant sins, even though they spoil life for both individuals and society, sharply disrupting the overall balance of their organisms.

An event is subtler and more detailed than its mental image. The laws of the causal flow are only roughly modeled by the laws of thought, which is why events are always somewhat unexpected, logically contradictory, and unpredictable for us. The flow of events rarely adheres to mental logic, in which there is only the concept of a clear goal and means to achieve it.

Modern scientific thinking, as it appears, has not yet adapted to the holographic paradigm, which, apparently, will need to be assimilated in various fields over the next decade.

Thus, the atmanic plane cannot itself serve as an object of mental manipulation. It can be reverently contemplated, seeking more or less suitable, but always grossly imperfect rational representations for its elements and plots. Then, in the mental-atmanic body, mental images of atmanic objects arise, and from the first, one can attempt to build various constructions, but the laws of the mental plane differ significantly from the atmanic, so the rational mind poorly comprehends the higher laws of existence.

The mind is primarily needed by a person to comprehend (mentally model) the events occurring to them and to partially influence them. The higher a person's evolutionary level, the better their subtle bodies are differentiated, and the richer and more diverse the connections between them become, and then the role of the mental body increases, as it connects not only with the neighboring ones, that is, causal and astral, but also with all the others, and begins to regulate the connections between the subtle and dense shelters.

However, the fundamental duty of the mental body is to correspond to the causal, and here many people encounter significant difficulties and misunderstandings. On the one hand, the current era is obsessed with mental energy — knowledge, information, theories, and concepts; on the other hand, thinking proves clearly insufficient to organize life in an acceptable manner, and it is not entirely clear what exactly it should be directed toward and what mental models and symbolic systems should be used.

The most common mistake a person makes is that, in trying to comprehend a particular situation, they focus their efforts specifically on the mental body, while they significantly lack information, or the information they possess is heavily distorted.

The notion of “freedom” of thought is doubly erroneous: firstly, thinking is subject to very rigid social stereotypes, from which it is very difficult to escape (most often unconsciously), and secondly, a person must think about quite specific things (for which there is causal sanction), achieving understanding at a level determined by the causal, rather than the mental body.

If humanity claims to evolve, it must first learn to behave culturally in understanding the world, which reacts very painfully to “one-sided” breakthroughs, as they disrupt the balance of its subtle planes. Truth, when it wishes to manifest to people, descending from the atmanic plane, creates for itself a conduit-editor in the form of a person (scientist) or a scientific collective, and preliminarily broadcasts a language (that is, the main mental constructions through which it can be expressed). However, after its birth, the balance of subtle energies of all planes is disrupted, and it takes a long time to restore it. This requires coordinated efforts from a variety of people, from philosophers and poets to technologists and laborers.

However, there is no universal “correct” system of thought, just as there is no universal symbolic system. Any such system initially assists thinking, but at some point becomes too narrow for it. But neither of these is a determining factor in mental meditations. Thinking always has auxiliary, or, more accurately, partial functions, being a part of the functioning of the human organism, and must primarily serve the premises of other bodies and maintain its hygiene, and only secondarily become a parody of the World Mind, attempting to answer all conceivable and inconceivable idle questions.

When a skier rushes down a slope, their thinking primarily serves the needs of the physical body. It is also difficult to think after a hearty meal, as in this case, thinking serves etheric needs. A girl trying to comprehend the feelings a certain young man evokes in her uses her mental-astral body for this purpose. In contemplating their actions, values, and ideals, a person activates, respectively, the mental-causal, mental-buddhic, and mental-atmanic bodies, and it is very important to understand that adequate symbolic systems and rules for operating symbols are different in all the mentioned cases. The general pattern is this: the more freely one can operate symbols of the subtle body, the closer it is to the mental body.

Thus: the mental plane is fundamentally multidimensional, and the concepts of priority, truth, and falsehood exist only within the framework of sufficiently narrow symbolic systems like mathematical logic or arithmetic, which do not have direct relation to reality and the causal plane (the latter includes such a procedure as decision-making).

The question of the ethics of scientific cognition is much sharper than one might think. For the normal functioning of the organism — both of an individual and of humanity as a whole — it is necessary to align its mental body with the causal and astral, and if the mental in some places goes beyond the causal, while in others leaves it bare and constantly tears at it here and there, then one cannot speak of the health of the organism as a whole. The fantastic distortions of the fate of modern civilization are primarily related to the hypertrophy and deformity of the mental body of humanity. It has been additionally burdened with completely inappropriate functions of the entire subtle shelter, that is, the atmanic, buddhic, and causal bodies. Thought forms an ideal, life positions, and controls events — this is what the social subconscious believes, and it vainly searches for a person (president) or a small group (politburo, government, supreme council, etc.) capable of generating such thought. As a result of such efforts, the focus shifts to the mental-atmanic, mental-buddhic, and mental-causal bodies, in which a person begins to manipulate using well-developed mental methods aimed at qualitatively different problems. In this process, a double error occurs, or rather, an incorrect substitution. Firstly, the higher bodies (subtle shelter) are not identical to their mental images: for example, what a person does (causal body) is often very weakly related to how they consciously or unconsciously imagine it (mental-causal body), and secondly, the usual techniques in other parts of the mental body, such as combining using logical connections, can rarely be applied to the objects of the mental-causal, mental-buddhic, and mental-atmanic bodies.

Another common variant of expanding the symbolic system is the introduction of differentiated scales of assessment: instead of a rough polarization like “good — bad” or “like — dislike,” scales such as: satisfactory, not bad, good, very good, wonderful, magnificent appear. And, conversely: not important, somewhat bad, bad, very bad, completely unacceptable, and absolute evil with two negatives. Not solving any problems in essence, such scales distract a great deal of a person's mental energy, creating the illusion of constructiveness in their meditation, while in reality, they are merely entertaining themselves, attracting the attention of mental parasites with an excess of mental energy, but the main one becomes the symbolic system itself with an excessive multitude of assessments, constantly demanding new food.

The abuse of a differentiated-assessment thinking system is not only common in high school, but its roots go back to the Middle Ages (possibly even to more ancient times), when the unit of sin could be a seduced innocent girl — in such a variant of assessment: «For it is better for you to seduce fourteen virgins than to miss the morning prayer».

Here we encounter the phenomenon of sacrilegious attitudes towards atmanic objects — natural numbers, which can be used in mental models only in the most exceptional cases when there is direct atmanic sanction. Unable to solve the problem of preference at the mental level, a person, instead of taking a more suitable qualitatively different mental symbolic system, or reaching a more subtle (causal) plane, tries to increase the energetic capabilities of their system by artificially introducing atmanic objects into it, or rather, their clumsy mental imprints. What results from this does not fit any standards — in mathematical economics, mathematical linguistics, or many other “mathematized” sciences.

Just as there is one world, there is also one mental model worthy of anything. Matter is not some elementary aggregate of identical particles; by studying them and the simplest rules of their combination, we will not understand the world as a building made of blocks.

An atom, like the universe, is not indivisible. Moreover, it contains all the information about it, but this information must be extracted carefully and delicately, obtaining its sanction and in any case not violating its fundamental structure: will we understand Rodin's sculpture better by cutting it in half or by crashing it at first cosmic speed against the Kremlin wall?