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Third layer

The mental body

Structured rather than cloudlike, and described as yellow in nearly every account. It holds ideas, opinions and mental habit, and in the Theosophical literature it is where thought forms are said to take shape.

thought structure ideas habit
Position
Third out from the body
Reported reach
Roughly 8 to 20 cm out
Structure
Structured, structured, usually reported as yellow
Paired centre
Solar plexus chakra
Concerns
Ideas, opinions, mental habit
Older counterpart
Manomaya kosha
Model
Modern, from Theosophical sources

What is described

The mental layer is reported as more organised than the emotional one, with definite shapes rather than clouds. Leadbeater's books devote considerable space to thought forms, the idea that a sustained thought takes a describable shape in this layer, and the illustrations in Thought-Forms (1901) are the best-known images the Theosophical Society produced.

How literally any of that was meant is a fair question. The books present it as observation.

Its pairing

Pairing thought with manipura rather than with the head is one of the more interesting choices in the model. It follows the older logic in which the navel processes what arrives, and it puts opinion in the same region as digestion, which is a joke the tradition does not appear to have noticed.

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