Yoga the Mental Body

We must now deal with the mental body, which is taken as equal to mind for practical purposes. The very first thing for a person to do in practical Yoga is to split himself from the mental body, to draw away from that into the sheath next above it.

And here remember what I revealed formerly, that in Yoga the Self is always the consciousness and the auto from that the consciousness is not able to split itself. All that's above the body you can't leave is the Self for practical purposes, and your first attempt must be to draw away from your mental body.

Under these conditions, Manas must be identified with the Self, and the spiritual Triad, the Atma-buddhi-manas, is to be realized as separate from the mental body. That is the 1st step.

You must be ready to take up and lay down your mind as you do a tool, before it is of any use to think about the further progress of the Self in dumping its envelopes. Therefore the mental body is taken as the place to begin. Quiet it.

Still it. You find that they are sometimes started from inside, occasionally from without. Often a vibration from without has been responsible for a change in consciousness, and a corresponding change in the colors in the mental body.

If there's a change of consciousness, that causes vibration in the problem in which that consciousness is working. The mental body is a body of ever-changing colors and colors, never still, changing color with swift rapidity thru all of it.

Yoga is the stopping of all these, the inhibition of vibrations and changes alike. Inhibition of the change of consciousness stops the vibration of the mental body ; the checking of the vibration of the mental body checks the change in consciousness.

The color of the mental body of a Master is as moonlight on the rippling sea. Inside that whiteness of moon-like refulgence lie all chances of color, but nothing in the outer world can make the faintest change of hue sweep over its steady glow.

If a change of consciousness happens inside, then the change will send a wave of fragile colours over the mental body which replies only in color to changes instituted from inside and never to changes excited from without.

His mental body is rarely His Self, but only His tool or instrument, which he will be able to take up or lay down at His will.

It's just an outer sheath that He uses when he must communicate with the lower world.