Soul to Spirit: The New Spiritual Psychology

NOTE: This book is now in the process of being edited. Once it is completely edited it will no longer be free online. As of 4/11/20 this chapter has edited. 

Now that we have considered the three primary things connected to the Emotional Plane which are Emotions, Desire & Imagination, let’s take a look at how Bailey views mental development on the Emotional Plane. We will begin by looking at three different levels of kāma-manas (or desire mind) that Bailey claims are comprised of: 1) Instinctual mind, 2) Lower concrete mind (as it is found on the Emotional Plane vs the Mental Plane), and 3) Personality Mind. These three types of mind are mainly selfish in their orientation, which is why they belong to the Kāma-Manasic or Emotional Plane.

Regarding these three types of mind Bailey refers to them when she discusses the role of what she calls the Buddhas of Activity and their role in helping evolve the mind from an instinctual mind (found with the Lemurian race), to the lower concrete mind (found within the Atlantean race), to the personality mind (found within the Aryan race). (See Rays and Initiations, p. 272). To help you understand what she means by Lemurian, Atlantean and Aryan please review the chapter on Bailey’s Evolutionary Names, or read my book Becoming Human that discusses these three evolutionary groups as they move up the Emotional Plane. You can also consider the chart below which are my ideas of where these various levels of mind on the Emotional Plane connect to Bailey’s Ten Evolutionary Groups.

Instinctual Mind

Beginning with instinctual mind we find that humans at this level are only able to use their minds in a mostly reactive and impulsive way making it difficult for them to satisfy their desires keeping them too dependent on the whims of the environment around them. In many ways we could say that they react to their surrounding environment instead of consciously responding to it. These reactions Bailey states happen primarily in five ways. She says, “We are told, for instance, that we have five main instincts, which we share in common with all animals. These, when used with selfish and personal objectives, enhance the body life, strengthen the form or material nature and so serve increasingly to hide the Self, the spiritual man. These must be transmuted into their higher counterparts, for every animal characteristic has its spiritual prototype” From Intellect to Intuition, p. 79.

She goes on to list these five main instincts that are found on the Emotional Plane and then transmuted when they are on the Mental Plane as follows:

1. Self-preservation — which she says is eventually “transmuted into the realization of our immortality” From Intellect to Intuition, p. 79.
2. Selfishness — “The instinct which causes the lower self to thrust its way forward, and force itself upward, will eventually be transformed into the domination of the higher or spiritual Self” From Intellect to Intuition, p. 80.
3. Sex — which is she says is an “animal instinct powerfully governing all animal forms, [that] will give place to a higher attraction, and will, in its noblest aspects, bring about conscious attraction and union between the soul and its vehicle” From Intellect to Intuition, p. 80.
4. Herd instinct — which she says “will be transmuted into group consciousness” From Intellect to Intuition, p. 80.
5. Inquiry — which she says is the “Urge to inquire and to investigate, which characterizes all minds at a high or a low level, will give place to intuitive perception and understanding” From Intellect to Intuition, p. 80.

When you look at most of humanity, especially when they move into a state of stress, it is not hard to see how these five instinctual types of mind still exist.

Lower Concrete Mind on the Emotional Plane

Eventually the instinctual mind needs to become dominated by the lower concrete mind which Bailey says is the “mind as it serves the selfish interests of man and enables man thereby to achieve a sense of proportion and a finer estimate of values.  Forget not that selfishness is a stage of unfoldment, and that it is a necessary stage whereby humanity learns the price of self-interest” Rays and Initiations, p. 272. Here the mind is used in a more methodical and strategic way allowing human beings to react less and respond more to their world, which in turn makes it easier for them to increasingly dominate and subdue their outer environment to satisfy their human desires.

So how does this lower concrete mind develop according to the Bailey teachings? To let you know it is very much in par with what most academicians, educators, and psychologists in our modern world understand about the concrete mind and how it develops. For example let’s look at the research of Jean Piaget. His ideas are based upon empirical observation of how infants, children, teenagers, and adults think. For Piaget concrete thought occurs when we look at everyday tangible objects in the physical world and attempt to provide facts about them, or describe what they are.

Almost all children develop concrete mental thinking capacities (what Piaget calls Concrete Operations) between the ages of 7 to 11 years old. Children are also able to reason about concrete events by applying inductive logic, which helps them go from a specific experience to a general principle so that they can recognize correlations. For example, a child who gets itchy eyes whenever he is around a cat, starts to understand the correlation between the cat and the itchy eyes. The child may even be able to reason out that an allergy to the cat exists. This knowledge helps the child become more logically informed about the effect cats have on him giving him the choice as to whether he wants to be around cats or not. For a more complete understanding of Piaget’s model please see the chapter Mind on the Emotional Plane: Piaget.

Piaget’s description of the concrete mind fits within Bailey’s teachings when you focus on the three types of mind she refers to in regards to the Emotional Plane. As we saw in my book Becoming Human almost all human beings reside on the Emotional Plane where they use their concrete minds almost exclusively to help them obtain facts about how things work in the outer physical world allowing them to manipulate that world so they can get their desires for money/security, pleasure/sex, and power in the material world met. As we shall see that is a very different kind of process from what Bailey talks about in regards to the lower concrete mind on the Mental Plane, where the focus is on the spiritual and not the material worlds.

Personality Mind

Next we have what Bailey refers to as the personality mind. She states “The personality mind.  This assumes control over the man and leads him to prove the nature of power and of success and—above all else—of integration.  This too is a necessary phase and precedes a stage of awakening (Rays and Initiations, p. 272). The personality mind is essentially the equivalent to the selfish, materialistic, and separative nature known as  the Integrated Personality by Bailey. I summarized Bailey’s ideas about the Integrated Personality more extensively in my book Becoming Human. But, essentially her Integrated Personality is someone who has been able to dominate the material world and exploit it much to her/his satisfaction so that nearly all, if not all, of that person’s desires for money/security, pleasure/sex, and power are being met. She/he is now considered to be fully human having become a “Master of the Universe” primarily in regards to the outer material world. As for the inner spiritual realms? Mastery of these levels is still a long ways off, which leads us to the majority of Bailey’s teachings regarding shifting from being fully human towards Becoming Soul. When that shift starts to happen we move off of the Emotional Plane and onto the Mental Plane in the Bailey model, which is what we will look at that shift next in the chapters to come.

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