Kama-Rupa

Blavatsky

Original sense

The fourth principle: the form of desire. During life it is the animal soul, the seat of passions. After death it becomes a decaying shell in kama-loka, which mediums often mistake for the person. It is not a tourist body and not a demon, but it can impersonate the dead.

The Kâma-Rûpa is the subjective form created through the mental and physical desires and thoughts of the past life… a shell.

This is why she attacked spiritualism: the ‘uncle’ at the séance is, she argued, usually a kamic residual plus elementals, not the Ego, which has gone toward Devachan.

New Age

Later sense

The term is rare. The phenomena were reassigned: restless ghosts become ‘stuck souls to be crossed over’; the desire-body becomes the ‘inner child’ or ‘shadow’ in therapeutic language, or the traveling astral body.

Typical use. Spirit-release work, ghost hunting, and shadow-work workshops that never say kama-rupa.