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Sometimes this double is seen by persons in the house, or in the neighbourhood, when the thought of the dying has been strongly turned to some one left behind, when some anxiety has been in the mind at the last, something left undone which needed doing, or when some local disturbance has shaken the tranquillity of the passing entity. Under these conditions, or others of a similar nature, the double may be seen or heard; when seen, it shows the dreamy, hazy consciousness alluded to, is silent, vague in its aspect, unresponsive.
As the days go on, the five higher principles gradually disengage themselves from the etheric double, and shake this off as they previously shook off the grosser body. They pass on, as a fivefold entity, into a state to be next studied, leaving the etheric double, with the dense body of which it is the counterpart, thus becoming an ethereal corpse, as much as the body had become a dense corpse. This ethereal corpse remains near the dense one, and they disintegrate together; clairvoyants see these ethereal wraiths in churchyards, sometimes showing likeness to the dead dense body, sometimes as violet mists or lights. Such an ethereal corpse has been seen by a friend of my own, passing through the horribly repulsive stages of decomposition, a ghastly vision in face of which clairvoyance was certainly no blessing. The process goes on pari passu, until all but the actual bony skeleton of the dense body is completely disintegrated, and the particles have gone to form other combinations.
One of the great advantages of cremation—apart from all sanitary conditions—lies in the swift restoration to Mother Nature of the physical elements composing the dense and ethereal corpses, brought about by the burning. Instead of slow and gradual decomposition, swift dissociation takes place, and no physical remnants are left, working possible mischief.
The ethereal corpse may to some extent be revivified for a short period after its death. Dr. Hartmann says:
The fresh corpse of a person who has suddenly been killed may be galvanised into a semblance of life by the application of a galvanic battery. Likewise the astral corpse of a person may be brought back into an artificial life by being infused with a part of the life principle of the medium. If that corpse is one of a very intellectual person, it may talk very intellectually; and if it was that of a fool it will talk like a fool.[14]
This mischievous procedure can only be carried out in the neighbourhood of the corpse, and for a very limited time after death, but there are cases on record of such galvanising of the ethereal corpse, performed at the grave of the departed person. Needless to say that such a process belongs distinctly to "Black" Magic, and is wholly evil. Ethereal corpses, like dense ones, if not swiftly destroyed by burning, should be left in the silence and the darkness, a silence and a darkness that it is the worst profanity to break.
Kâmaloka, and the Fate of Prâna and Kâma.Loka is a Sanskrit word that may be translated as place, world, land, so that Kâmaloka is literally the place or the world of Kâma, Kâma being the name of that part of the human organism that includes all the passions, desires, and emotions which man has in common with the lower animals.[15] In this division of the universe, the Kâmaloka, dwell all the human entities that have shaken off the dense body and its ethereal double, but have not yet disentangled themselves from the passional and emotional nature. Kâmaloka has many other tenants, but we are concerned only with the human beings who have lately passed through the gateway of Death, and it is on these that we must concentrate our study.
A momentary digression may be pardoned on the question of the existence of regions in the universe, other than the physical, peopled with intelligent beings. The existence of such regions is postulated by the Esoteric Philosophy, and is known to the Adepts and to very many less highly evolved men and women by personal experience; all that is needed for the study of these regions is the evolution of the faculties latent in every man; a "living" man, in ordinary parlance, can leave his dense and ethereal bodies behind him, and explore these regions without going through Death's gateway. Thus we read in the Theosophist that real knowledge may be acquired by the Spirit in the living man coming into conscious relations with the world of Spirit.
As in the case, say, of an initiated Adept, who brings back upon earth with him the clear and distinct recollection—correct to a detail—of facts gathered, and the information obtained, in the invisible sphere of Realities.[16]
In this way those regions become to him matters of knowledge as definite, as certain, as familiar, as if he should travel to Africa in ordinary fashion, explore its deserts, and return to his own land the richer for the knowledge and experience gained. A seasoned African explorer would care but little for the criticisms passed on his report by persons who had never been thither; he might tell what he saw, describe the animals whose habits he had studied, sketch the country he had traversed, sum up its products and its characteristics. If he was contradicted, laughed at, set right, by untravelled critics, he would be neither ruffled nor distressed, but would merely leave them alone. Ignorance cannot convince knowledge by repeated asseveration of its nescience. The opinion of a hundred persons on a subject on which they are wholly ignorant is of no more weight than the opinion of one such person. Evidence is strengthened by many consenting witnesses, testifying each to his knowledge of a fact, but nothing multiplied a thousand times remains nothing. Strange, indeed, would it be if all the Space around us be empty, mere waste void, and the inhabitants of earth the only forms in which intelligence could clothe itself. As Dr. Huxley said:
Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known, it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until we reach something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience.[17]
If these entities did not have organs of sense like our own, if their senses responded to vibrations different from those which affect ours, they and we might walk side by side, pass each other, meet each other, pass through each other, and yet be never the wiser as to each other's existence. Mr. Crookes gives us a glimpse of the possibility of such unconscious co-existence of intelligent beings, and but a very slight effort of imagination is needed to realise the conception.
It is not improbable that other sentient beings have organs of sense which do not respond to some or any of the rays to which our eyes are sensitive, but are able to appreciate other vibrations to which we are blind. Such beings would practically be living in a different world to our own. Imagine, for instance, what idea we should form of surrounding objects were we endowed with eyes not sensitive to the ordinary rays of light, but sensitive to the vibrations concerned in electric and magnetic phenomena. Glass and crystal would be among the most opaque of bodies. Metals would be more or less transparent, and a telegraph wire through the air would look like a long narrow hole drilled through an impervious solid body. A dynamo in active work would resemble a conflagration, whilst a permanent magnet would realise the dream of mediæval mystics, and become an everlasting lamp with no expenditure of energy or consumption of fuel.[18]
Kâmaloka is a region peopled by intelligent and semi-intelligent entities, just as our own is thus peopled; it is crowded, like our world, with many types and forms of living things, as diverse from each other as a blade of grass is different from a tiger, a tiger from a man. It interpenetrates our own world and is interpenetrated by it, but, as the states of matter in the two worlds differ, they co-exist without the knowledge of the intelligent beings in either. Only under abnormal circumstances can consciousness of each other's presence arise among the inhabitants of the two worlds; by certain peculiar training a living human being can come into conscious contact with and control many of the sub-human denizens of Kâmaloka; human beings, who have quitted earth and in whom the kâmic elements were strong, may very readily be attracted by the kâmic elements in embodied men, and by their help become conscious again of the presence of the scenes they had left; and human beings still embodied may set up methods of communication with the disembodied, and may, as said, leave their own bodies for awhile, and become conscious in Kâmaloka by the use of faculties through which they have accustomed their consciousness to act. The point which is here to be clearly grasped is the existence of Kâmaloka as a definite region, inhabited by a large diversity of entities, among whom are disembodied human beings.
From this necessary digression we return to the particular human being whose fate, as a type, we may be said to be tracing, and of whose dense body and etheric double we have already disposed. Let us contemplate him in the state of very brief duration that follows the shaking off of these two casings. Says H.P. Blavatsky, after quoting from Plutarch a description of the man after death:
Here you have our doctrine, which shows man a septenary during life; a quintile just after death, in Kâmaloka.[19]
Prâna, the portion of the life-energy appropriated by the man in his embodied state, having lost its vehicle, the ethereal double, which, with the physical body, has slipped away from its controlling energy, must pass back into the great life-reservoir of the universe. As water enclosed in a glass vessel and plunged into a tank mingles with the surrounding water if the vessel be broken, so Prâna, as the bodies drop from it, mingles again with the Life Universal. It is only "just after death" that man is a quintile, or fivefold in his constitution, for Prâna, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.
The man now is clothed, but with the Kâma Rûpa, or body of Kâma, the desire body, a body of astral matter, often termed "fluidic," so easily does it, during earth-life, take any form impressed upon it from without or moulded from within. The living man is there, the immortal Triad, still clad in the last of its terrestrial garments, in the subtle, sensitive, responsive form which lent it during embodiment the power to feel, to desire, to enjoy, to suffer, in the physical world.
When the man dies, his three lower principles leave him for ever; i.e., body, life, and the vehicle of the latter, the etheric body, or the double of the living man. And then his four principles—the central or middle principle (the animal soul or Kâma Rûpa, with what it has assimilated from the lower Manas) and the higher Triad—find themselves in Kâmaloka.[20]
This desire body undergoes a marked change soon after death. The different densities of the astral matter of which it is composed arrange themselves in a series of shells or envelopes, the densest being outside, shutting the consciousness away from all but very limited contact and expression. The consciousness turns in on itself, if left undisturbed, and prepares itself for the next step onwards, while the desire body gradually disintegrates, shell after shell.
Up to the point of this re-arrangement of the matter of
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