All About the 3 Mental Bodies

Yogis believe you have a thousand-petalled lotus that’s partly etheric and partly philosophical at the top center of your head. For every petal, a complete thought is produced every second. So that’s a thousand thoughts per second, which is serious computing power.

Some of these thoughts are conscious; most of them remain subconscious. All of these thoughts get channeled into different parts of the brain through neuro-pathways.

The way you process your thoughts depends on your disposition, your early childhood training, your culture, plus what you think and how you act on it. You lean towards being either protective (Negative Mind), projective (Positive Mind), or meditative (Neutral Mind), but you have a distinct bias towards protective or projective.

All thought processes tend to manifest first of all as protective, then projective, and then, usually with training, meditative. This is the pathway that the yogis have deemed best for most successful living; this pathway allows you to make the best decisions. It’s weighing the minuses and weighing the pluses, and making a decision based on both.

The more you can be conscious of your thoughts and especially the patterning of your thinking, the more you can stay out of trouble. When you get stuck in either the protective or projective modes, you’ll have problems.

The way it goes if the process is working right is that you calculate the negative first. You protect yourself by calculating the danger. Then secondly, you project yourself. You calculate the positive. Then you get into the meditative, or neutral, where you balance the two. At that point you take the action which is the best for you now and in the future as well. lt is the cultivation of your transcendent self. You and your exalted consciousness are truly directing your actions.

 

The Negative Mind (Protective Mind: Second Body)

The key words for the Negative Mind, or the Second Body, are “longing to belong.’ Every two wants to be one. You’ve got this urge to merge, you’ve got this longing to belong that’s definitely a part of human existence and consciousness. You want to be part of a group, you want to expand your identity. This is very much a part of human existence, that longing to belong, where every two wants to be one.

I want to make sure you know this is something you need to have, this protective mind, because it does protect you. It doesn’t have a negative connotation; it is a good thing. Setting boundaries is a good thing. Our society tends to be more positive mind, so that makes our attorney happy here. There’s a great need for attorneys because we aren’t trained in protective mind and they are. You have to pay somebody a hundred bucks an hour to protect you.

The question for the Negative Mind is: “Can I calculate the danger in a situation?” or better yet: ”In my urge to merge, in my need for completion, can I calculate the danger in a given situation?”

I like to use the analogy of crossing the street, because it’s something that you learn early on. You know, stop, look, and listen. You want to go from point A to point B. If you get stuck, if you’re stagnating in protective mind, what happens is you come to the corner, and even though you want to get across, you never move. You’re over-protective. You’re not willing to take a risk because no matter how you calculate it, you know you’re going to get hit by a car on your way across. You’ll never take a risk. That’s over-protective.

What also happens when you’re stuck in this mind is that you can calculate the dangers and ignore them. You want to get across the street so badly that even though you know it’s dangerous, you miscalculate and do it anyway. You rush in between the moving cars. Sometimes you get hit. Sometimes you will calculate wrong. Sometimes you know it and you do it anyway, and you get in big trouble. A lot of people get caught this way in their longing to belong, especially with relationships. You need to calculate the danger in relationships. It’s the protective mind that helps you do that.

The projective mind (Positive Mind-Third Body), just to give you a contrast, is: never look, who cares, just go right across, take your chances. That’s the way our society is; we’re a very positive mind society, a very projective society. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. Go for the gusto. Just do it-don’t think about it, don’t consider it, don’t contemplate anything-just do it. Get as much credit as you can and then hope you’ll be able to pay it off in your lifetime. No risks involved. That’s being stuck in over-projective mind.

Meditative mind (Neutral Mind – Fourth Body) is very smooth. You stop, look, and listen; consider the danger {protective), see yourself going across safely (projective), and then you go across easily and smoothly (meditative). So that’s how these three minds work.

 

The Positive Mind (Projective Mind: Third Body)

Key Question: “Will I allow myself to be hopeful? Will I allow myself to have the good things and experience the good things in life?”

With the Positive Mind, we’re dealing with the risk/reward ratio. The key words are “Devil or Divine.” The idea of “Devil,” by my way of thinking, means that people who are over-projective can take you to hell faster than anybody else. What I mean is that if you’re not calculating the risk of the situation, you get in trouble fast.

Our society is this way all the way: “Hype it up, build it up, sell it to the max and then take your lumps. It doesn’t matter, I got my money.” The false hopes projected range from those promoted by televangelists to the idea that if you drink a beer you’ll have the absolute time of your life and feel completely fulfilled. That’s the illusion, and that’s positive mind projecting.

The fact that you might have a hangover, you might be an alcoholic, that being sloppy drunk isn’t necessarily attractive—all those things aren’t considered in beer commercials. Everything is sold through projection. So that’s the idea of de-will or “Devil.” When there’s no downside presented, put yourself on alert. Trouble is around the corner. After all, Newton said, “Every action has a reaction equal and opposite.”

“Divine” means the ability to project your will into the Divine will. You have heard the expression, “Thy Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” In other words, go with the flow; be at the right place at the right time; things are happening for you as they should when they should (or as they will in Thy Will). “Devil” is de-will, where you’re unable to project your will into the Divine will.

Through your ego, you’re trying to project your will when the time is not right, or when it is happening and the time is absolutely right for it to be happening, you’re resisting and hanging back.

When your Positive Mind, your Third Body, is strong, you have a good sense of humor and you’re able to be very hopeful and project that hope. You’re like a candle in the darkness. If the Third Body is weak, there’s a tendency to either “rush in where angels fear to tread” and not consider the risks, or to be over-positive to everyone’s detriment including your own.

You can eliminate your negativity (i.e. your unwillingness to forge ahead) through meditating and through exercises which work on a certain part of your mind to release negativity. Most of all, you can actively and consciously develop your sense of humor. You can look at yourself with honesty and clarity.

The Neutral Mind (Meditative Mind: Fourth Body)

Key Question: “Will I allow myself to be meditative and intuitively balanced in my thinking?”

The Neutral Mind (Fourth Body) is meditative mind. It’s a balance between protective mind and projective mind. When this body is working well, you have automatic balance between the two.

You strengthen the Fourth Body through meditation. Generally, you think that weighing and balancing things logically is the way to go. That’s a conscious process. There’s nothing wrong with being logical, but if the meditative mind is strong, this weighing and balancing is an automatic process. You can still consider things; it doesn’t mean that you don’t go through conscious weighing and balancing. When you’re in meditative mind, you make your decisions from the balance between protective and projective mind.

The key words of the Fourth Body are: “Cup of prayer.” These are the words that my teacher gave. When you see a cup that’s half full of something, you may think that it’s half full or half empty. lt has to do with your bias toward either protective or projective mind. Meditative mind is neither of those; it’s a full cup.

Meditative mind makes you a good listener. If you get around somebody with meditative mind, they’ll pull you into their state right away. Their mental/emotional condition spreads out. That’s the idea of cup of prayer. Share this cup, have a drink out of this cup and you’ll be fine.

When meditative mind is working, you tend to balance out anyone around you or in your environment who tends to be over­protective or over-projective. A person in meditative mind is quite valuable. They’re intuitive, they have good timing, they know what to do and when to do it, and they make good listeners as well.

Meditative mind allows you to give and take criticism with equanimity. When you criticize somebody while you’re coming from the meditative mind space, it can be quite good. But if you’re being over-projective of your own self, or if you’re being over-protective, then it won’t work well as a result. You may feel bad at the time and later. Taking criticism with the meditative mind allows you to not dwell on it or feel bad about it at the time or later.

Meditative mind helps you to successfully work out recurring patterns in your life. The patterns that eventually will demote you are the ones in which you go radically off in one direction or the other, either over-projective or over-protective. You can work with those patterns through meditation, through developing a strength in this meditative mind.

Your strength comes from understanding yourself. That’s what true strength is. Everything flows through that, including this meditative mind. Meditative mind is the best way to become your strongest, and so the key is really to meditate, and to meditate more, because that will retrain your mind.

It does that through constantly juxtaposing a meditative mind-thought against your predominant subconscious pattern. Your subconscious patterns are going to come up. Whether you know it or not, you’ll bring things into your conscious mind so that you can deal with them. Little monsters turn into big monsters unless you dissipate them gradually. So, what meditation does is bring you to a meditative state; it allows you to retrain to become consciously conscious, and to retrain those thought patterns that demote you instead of promote you. It allows you to understand yourself a little bit better.

Now, how do you get meditative mind? You can’t go out and buy it, but you can retrain yourself, and the best way I know to do that is through meditation. There are two keys to effective meditation. First of all, the body has to be comfortable. If the body is bothering you, you can’t meditate. If you’re sick, if you’re hungry, if you’re in pain, it’s very difficult to transcend those things, and maybe not necessarily the best thing to do.

From the yogis’ point of view, meditation is the result of your glandular system working. You’re asking your glands to work a certain way and your brain to work a certain way to achieve meditative states. And that’s what yoga does. It works on the glandular system and the brain and nervous system. So, if you can do yoga exercises, it makes meditation much easier. It’s always good to do a little bit of yoga before you meditate because it gets you halfway there. The functioning of your body can either take you out of the meditative state or put you into the meditative state.

The second key to meditation is breath. I have found with myself, and I’ve found it very true with beginners as well, that breath will draw you into a meditative state faster than anything else. Breath and mantra, the combination of the two, changes your blood chemistry so much and so quickly that you will be drawn into meditative state. You can’t resist it. The breath is also a very good vehicle for retraining yourself because it’s with you all the time. It is your most available and accessible tool. It’s something that you can leave out of conscious control or put into conscious control. Control of the breath (or verbalized mantra) is probably the fastest and easiest way of changing your conscious state.

The real key for the Fourth Body is meditate, meditate, and meditate some more. Meditation helps to retrain your mind to that neutral state so you can strike the balance between protective mind and projective mind.

Excerpts from The Ten Light Bodies of Consciousness.

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