With this view I cannot agree.
I suggest rather, provisionally of course, that the Consciousness persists embodied in a four-dimensional vehicle to which the word "physical" as commonly understood cannot be applied at all. The replica, perisprit or "Etheric Double" as the Theosophists call it, is only the connecting link between the three and four-dimensional vehicles which, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, must be supposed to exist if the four-dimensional hypothesis is to hold good at all. It seems likely that it is no more permanent than the physical body, and that it disintegrates after death in the same way that the bodily tissues do.
It is interesting to compare and contrast this case with the somewhat similar one of which a brief resumé was given on page 58. In each case the consciousness of the narrator was separated from the physical body but the conditions after separation seem to have been notably different.
In the first case the patient seems to have been independent of space in that he was able to pay a visit to a friend at a distance of about a thousand miles and to return in the space of a few minutes; while in the second he seems to have been tethered to his physical body by the "cord" to which he refers.
This is perhaps the most important point, but others are easy to find—notably in the apparent constitution of the temporary vehicle of consciousness.
It seems probable that in the first case the vehicle was four-dimensional while in the second it was the "quasi-physical replica" which we have been discussing.
It is with this supposition in mind that I shall examine the second case.
First then we notice that the narrator seems to have been in error in referring to what he saw interwoven, tissue for tissue, with the physical body, as the Ego. But this error was clearly a very natural one.
Although the point is not brought out with precision, the record seems to suggest that the narrator was viewing things with that internal or four-dimensional vision which I discussed in my remarks on Clairvoyance in Chapter III.
The process which is described as the separation of soul and body, I should prefer to describe as the exteriorisation of the "Etheric Double."[6]