These are the mental activities of Life left to itself

They constitute the first stirrings of a latent mind seeking manifestation.

Their essential characteristic is that mental activity and thought are entirely governed by sensation and bodily processes.

Yet, analogous to the generation of concepts through mental processing, during these processes, there happens a synthesis of various types of information into a new whole. But while in the former case the process is guided by reason, in the latter it is governed by the nature of a physical stimulation or internal physical processes.

So may as an example, some sense-impression of “my mother”, be followed by a later sense-impressions of a certain difficult lesson in school and yet later still a strange site of a dog that has been funnily dressed, become all mixed up when dreaming at night to form some elaborate story of my mother wearing a funny dress while, as my teacher is giving me difficult lessons in school, while holding a dog on her arms.*

Traditionally such consideration will then be analysed into its constituent parts. Thus, to keep things still close enough to tradition, here a small listing of various mental factors involved.

The traditional listing of Mental factors involved will include:

The Mental Life Faculty
Various Perceptions
Delusion
A Distorted View
Applied Thought
Sustained Thought
Contact with things external to a perceiver
Pleasant or Painful Feeling
Desire or Aversion

Considering then further about the dependency of the condition of the mind upon physiological processes, building up on our previous considerations of various bodily processes, one finds that unpleasant sensations due to the absence of food in the digestive organs (i.e. feelings of hunger) produce thoughts and dreams related to food and drink. A stimulation to the sexual organs will produce thoughts or dreams of a sexual nature. Stagnations in the chest, around heart and liver, may generate thoughts and dreams related to joy or sadness. While energisation of the senses will “turn on the senses”, producing an interest in their respective sphere (i.e. for the eye, physical forms etc.).

Even the activation of the brain may generate only a semi-conscious desire to think about the subject put before the mind by the senses.

And as all these processes very often get mingled up, either with each other, or with impressions from the past, continuously new connections are made between previously accumulated life-experiences and new sense-stimulation or bodily processes. Establishing a greater bond between mind and matter, with the mind being the subservient element.

* One further example for illustration:

A person, for example a man, sees during the day, perhaps in the morning, a woman in a beautiful dress walking along the street. Later during the day he reads in the newspaper something about monkeys, say a monkey has escaped from the zoo. Then at night, he lays down to sleep, finding himself jumping from tree to tree, wearing the beautiful dress of the woman from the morning, perhaps chasing a monkey.