For a very short period after death, while the incorporeal principles remain within the sphere of our earth’s attraction, it is possible for spirit, under peculiar and favourable conditions, to appear.[43]

It makes no communications during this brief interval, nor while dwelling in this form.  Such “ghosts” are silent, dreamy, like sleep-walkers, and indeed they are nothing more than astral sleep-walkers.  Equally irresponsive, but capable of expressing a single thought, as of sorrow, anxiety, accident, murder, &c., are apparitions which are merely a thought of the dying, taking shape in the astral world, and carried by the dying person’s will to some particular person, with whom the dying intensely longs to communicate.  Such a thought, sometimes called a Mayavi Rupa, or illusory form

May be often thrown into objectivity, as in the case of apparitions after death; but, unless it is projected with the knowledge of (whether latent or potential), or owing to the intensity of the desire to see or appear to some one shooting through, the dying brain, the apparition will be simply automatical; it will not be due to any sympathetic attraction, or to any act of volition, any more than the reflection of a person passing unconsciously near a mirror is due to the desire of the latter.

When the Soul has left the etheric double, shaking it off as it shook off the dense body, the double thus left as a mere empty corpse may be galvanised into an “artificial life”; but fortunately the method of such galvanisation is known to few.

II.  While the Soul is in Kamaloka.  This period is of very variable duration.  The Soul is clad in an astral body, the last but one of its perishable garments, and while thus clad it can utilise the physical bodies of a medium, thus consciously procuring for itself an instrument whereby it can act on the world it has left, and communicate with those living in the body.  In this way it may give information as to facts known to itself only, or to itself and another person, in the earth-life just closed; and for as long as it remains within the terrestrial atmosphere such communication is possible.  The harm and the peril of such communication has been previously explained, whether the Lower Manas be united with the Divine Triad and so on its way to Devachan, or wrenched from it and on its way to destruction.

III.  While the Soul is in Devachan, if an embodied Soul is capable of rising to its sphere, or of coming into rapport with it.  To the Devachani, as we have seen, the beloved are present in consciousness and full communication, the Egos being in touch with each other, though one is embodied and one is disembodied, but the higher consciousness of the embodied rarely affects the brain.  As a matter of fact, all that we know on the physical plane of our friend, while we both are embodied, is the mental image caused by