The Emotional Being

Along with the Physical, the Mental, and the Spiritual, the Emotional being constitutes one of the primary principles of consciousness.

 The ancient Greeks referred to the Emotional being as the thumos.  "Thumos" means "smoke", referring to the amorphous form of this emotional body.  As well as the thumos located in the chest (i.e. the Anahata chakra), Plato distinguished a lower emotional-desiring faculty, the epithumia, located in the belly (i.e. the region of the Swadhisthana/Manipura Navel Chakra).  This represents the lowest grade of emotional/feeling consciousness.

Sri Aurobindo interestingly taught a similiar "strata psychology", dividing the emotional or passionate being, or what he, rather misleadingly, termed the "Vital" (the use of the word in this context being coined by the occultist Theon), into four distinct divisions, the small or lower vital (concerned only with the smaller greeds, desires, passions, etc, "which make up the daily stuff of life for the ordinary sensational man"), the larger or "central" vital, the emotional being, and finally the mental vital.  In Aurobindo's spectrum of being, the small vital abutts and is transitional to the physical consciousness, while the mental vital, as its name indicates, grades into the mental consciousness.

These four divisions, representing the grades and shades of emotional consciousness, can, as with Plato, be associated with chakras - the euqivalence being lower vital = Swadhisthana chakra; central vital = Manipura Chakra; emotional being = Anahata chakra, and mental vital = Vishuddha chakra.  The next higher chakra, the Ajna, is, logically taken up solely withe teh Mental being.

There is also, in addition to these "vertical" emotional grades, a "spiritual vital", an "inner vital" a "psychic vital" and so on, these being all elevated spiritual states of consciousness (equivalent perhaps to Gurdjieff's "higher emotional center")

 In terms of psychological typology, the person with an Emotional psyche strong would be an "Intuitive-Feeling" type.  If you relate to spiritual concepts in a heart-centered way, or are very idealistic or imaginatively romantic, you are an intuitive-feeling type.  In general, the New Age and Alternative movement as a whole is very intuitive-feeling.

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page uploaded 12 September 1999
modified 16 Jan & 20 Feb 2000