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punarjanmam. It is such an entity that can appear in séance-rooms; but it is absurd to call it a disembodied spirit.*[1] It is merely a power or force retaining the impressions of the thoughts or ideas of the individual into whose composition it originally entered. It sometimes summons to its aid the Kámarûpa power; and creates for itself some particular ethereal form (not necessairly human).
Its tendencies of action will be similar to those of the individual's mind when he was living. This entity maintains its existence so long as the impressions on the power associated with the fifth principle remain intact. In course of time they are effaced, and the power in question is then mixed up in the current of its corresponding power in the Macrocosm, as the river loses itself in the sea. Entities like these may afford signs of there having been considerable intellectual power in the individuals to which they belonged; because very high intellectual power may co-exist with utter absence of spiritual consciousness. But from this circumstance it cannot be argued that either the spirits or the spiritual Egos of deceased individuals appear in séance-rooms.
There are some people in India who have thoroughly studied the nature of such entities (called pisacham). I do not know much about them experimentally, as I have never meddled with this disgusting, profitless, and dangerous branch of investigation.
Your Spiritualists do not know what they are really doing. Their investigations are likely to result in course of time either in wicked sorcery or in the utter spiritual ruin of thousands of men and women.†[2]
The views I have herein expressed have been often illustrated by our ancient writers by comparing the course of a man's life or existence to the orbital motion of a planet round
