Mental World
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
Formerly known as the Manas Plane-is in the theosophic scheme of things, the third lowest of the seven worlds. It is the world of thought into which man passes on the death of the astral body, and it is composed of the seven divisions of matter in common with the other worlds. It is observed that the mental world is the world of thought, but it is necessary to realise that it is the world of good thoughts only, for the base have all been purged away during the soul's stay in the astral world. According as these thoughts are, is the power to perceive the mental world. Perfected man would be free of the whole of it, but the ordinary man has in his past imperfect experience, gathered only a comparatively small amount of thought and he is, therefore, unable to perceive more than a coma comparatively small part of his surroundings. It follows from this that though his bliss is inconceivably great, his sphere of action is very limited, -this limitation, however, becoming less and less with his abode there after each fresh incarnation. In the Heaven worlddivision into which he awakes after dying in the astral world, he finds vast, unthought-of means of pursuing what has seemed to him good, art, science, philosophy and so forth. Here , all these come to a glorious fruition of which we can have no conception, and at last the time arrives when he casts aside his mental body and awakens in his casual body to the still greater bliss of the higher division of the mental world. At this stage he has done with the bodies which form his mortal personality, and which form his home in successive incarnations, and he is now truly himself, a spirit, immortal and unchangeable except for increasing development and evolution. Into his casual body is worked all that he has experienced in his physical, astral and , astral and mental bodies, and when he still finds that experience insufficient for his needs, he descends again into grosser matter in order that he may learn yet more and more.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The doctrine described here has not been revised, because it was never the sort of claim that evidence could touch: the seven-plane scheme of physical, astral, mental and "casual" (properly causal) bodies came from the writings of Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, and Theosophists who use it today describe the mental plane in much the same terms Spence's Encyclopaedia of Occultism set down in 1920. What has changed is the movement's standing. Theosophy was a serious cultural force when this was written, with a worldwide society and its own publishing houses; after Krishnamurti repudiated the messianic role prepared for him in 1929 and the society fractured, its membership shrank drastically, and the vocabulary of astral and mental bodies survives mainly as borrowed furniture in later New Age writing. Modern scholars read entries like this one as evidence about Edwardian esotericism rather than as a description of anywhere.
Written for this edition, 2026.