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 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 physical world.