There is a great law in this universe which consists in the reduction of subjective experiences to objective phenomena, and the evolution of the former from the latter.  This is otherwise called “cyclic necessity.”  Man is subjected to this law if he do not check and counterbalance the usual destiny or fate, and he can only escape its control by subduing all his terrestrial attachments completely.  The new combination of circumstances under which he will then be placed may be better or worse than the terrestrial conditions under which he lived; but in his progress to a new world, you may be sure he will never turn around to have a look at his spiritualistic friends.

In the third of the above three cases there is, by our supposition, no recognition of spiritual consciousness or of spirits; so they are non-existing so far as he is concerned.  The case is similar to that of an organ or faculty which remains unused for a long time.  It then practically ceases to exist.

These entities, as it were, remain his, or in his possession, when they are stamped with the stamp of recognition.  When such is not the case, the whole of his individuality is centred in his fifth principle.  And after death this fifth principle is the only representative of the individual in question.

By itself it cannot evolve for itself a new set of objective experiences, or, to say the same thing in other words, it has no punarjanmam.  It is such an entity that can appear in seance-rooms; but it is absurd to call it a disembodied spirit.* It is merely a power or force retaining the impressions of the thoughts or ideas of the individual into whose composition it originally entered.  It sometimes summons to its aid the Kamarupa power, and creates for itself some particular ethereal form (not necessarily human).

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* It is especially on this point that the Aryan and Arahat doctrines
quite agree.   The teaching and argument that follow are in every respect
those of the Buddhist Himalayan Brotherhood.—­Ed. Theos.
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Its tendencies of action will be similar to those of the individual’s mind when he was living.  This entity maintains its existence so long as the impressions on the power associated with the fifth principle remain intact.  In course of time they are effaced, and the power in question is then mixed up in the current of its corresponding power in the macrocosm, as the river loses itself in the sea.  Entities like these may afford signs of there having been considerable intellectual power in the individuals to which they belonged; because very high intellectual power may co-exist with utter absence of spiritual consciousness.  But from this circumstance it cannot be argued that either the spirits or the spiritual Egos of deceased individuals appear in seance-rooms.

There are some people in India who have thoroughly studied the nature of such entities (called Pisacham).  I do not know much about them experimentally, as I have never meddled with this disgusting, profitless, and dangerous branch of investigation.