surrounding water if the vessel be broken, so Prâna, 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 Prâna, as a distinctively human principle, cannot remain
appropriated when its vehicle disintegrates.

The man now is clothed, but with the Kâma Rûpa, or body of Kâma, 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.

When the man dies, his three lower principles leave him for
ever; _i.e._, body, life, and the vehicle of the latter, the
etheric body, or the double of the living man. And then his
four principles--the central or middle principle (the animal
soul or Kâma Rûpa, with what it has assimilated from the
lower Manas) and the higher Triad--find themselves in
Kâmaloka.[20]

This desire body undergoes a marked change soon after death. The
different densities of the astral matter of which it is composed
arrange themselves in a series of shells or envelopes, the densest
being outside, shutting the consciousness away from all but very
limited contact and expression. The consciousness turns in on itself,
if left undisturbed, and prepares itself for the next step onwards,
while the desire body gradually disintegrates, shell after shell.