Level three is where most of us spend most of our time, energy and focus, the locus for most of the conscious awareness of present-day humanity, the level which rules the world – for better and for worse.

We are speaking of the Mind.

It is the mind which sets humans apart from the animals. The root of “human” and “mankind” is the Sanskrit “manas”, meaning “the mind” or “the intellect”. Thus was mankind originally defined as “the thinking animal.”

The mind is our onboard computer. It receives all the information from our senses – what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch – processes it all through what it has already learned, and creates models of understanding through which we relate to ourselves and the universe.

In our hierarchy of concentric circles, the mind encloses the body and vital, so it has power to influence and control both body and vital and bend them to its will.

The mind is an ardent seeker of both knowledge and control. The mind applies its instruments of understanding: observation, experience, inquiry, logic, reason, analysis, the scientific method, to establish laws governing the world and behaviour. To the mind, knowledge is power, expressed through the expansion of itself, its ego and dominion: thus the mind seeks its fulfilment through extending and inflating itself. Knowledge, philosophy, science and technology are limbs of the mind, means by which it seeks identity, and to establish dominance and exert control.

Our present-day world is a projection of our minds’ majesty, immensity, ability, agility, fragility, facility, fecundity, creativity, audacity, ingenuity, intricacy, complexity, perplexity, perspicacity, superfluity, superiority, ambiguity, absurdity, disparity, disunity, duplicity, obduracy, autocracy, inflexibility, inadequacy, insecurity, instability, insincerity, impurity, inequity, iniquity, poverty, rapacity, hostility, cruelty, calumny, calamity – and insanity.

(…continued…)