r
training a living human being can come into conscious contact with and
control many of the sub-human denizens of Kamaloka; human beings, who
have quitted earth and in whom the kamic elements were strong, may
very readily be attracted by the kamic 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 Kamaloka 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 Kamaloka 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 Kamaloka.[19]

Prana, 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 Prana, 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 Prana, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain
appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.

The man now is clothed, but with the Kama Rupa, or body of Kama, 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 physi