o live and move beyond all conditions of matter imaginable by us,
but pure Spirit is at present as inconceivable by us as pure matter.
And as in dealing with possible "communications" we have average human
beings as recipients, we may as well exclude the word Spirit as much
as possible, and so get rid of ambiguity. But in quotations the word
often occurs, in deference to the habit of the day, and it then
denotes the Ego.

Taking the stages through which the living man passes after "Death",
or the shaking off of the body, we can readily classify the
communications that may be received, or the appearances that may be
seen:

I. While the Soul has shaken off only the dense body, and remains
still clothed in the etheric double. This is a brief period only, but
during it the disembodied Soul may show itself, clad in this ethereal
garment.

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.