After-Death States of Man's Three Astral Bodies

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Mabel Collins · Constitution of Man Series · 17 pages

Three quite different things get called the double, and the file separates them. The first and most material is the protean or plastic body, the linga-sharira of the gross physical body: born with a man, dying with him, never able to separate itself far from the body during life, and decomposing along with it. The second is the middle, psycho-physical double — the thought or dream body, kama-manas, vehicle of animal desires and worldly thoughts, which occultists call the illusion-body or mayavi-rupa; after death it becomes a distinct body of ante-mortem desires, the kama-rupa, and survives as an independent but temporary entity in the shadowy desire world of Kama-Loka until its final dissipation.

The third is the truly spiritual double: the real Ego, the causal body or karana-sharira, chief cause of reincarnation and known in the trans-Himalayan schools as the karmic body. After the death of the physical body and its subtle counterpart, the body of purified thoughts and aspirations withdraws into the bliss of Devachan, keeping its immortality and kinetic energy between incarnations throughout the manvantara unless Nirvana ends it sooner. A table of the semi-exoteric constitution of man is included. The last section treats projection: that adepts consciously, and dying persons unconsciously, can project an illusory appearance of themselves to a distant place while the physical body is left entranced — the phantom so produced being the mayavi-rupa, which is what most reports of a doppelganger actually describe.

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