Life in the Three worlds

Let's swing around and come back at this stuff from another angle that the compacts the five bodies down into three :

< Shula Sharira : the physical body

< Shukshma Sharira: the astral body

< Karana sharira : the causal body

The sthula  sharira includes both the material body and the body of vital energy Why? Because at death, when the material body starts to disintegrate, so does the prana maya kosha. According to the yogis, the "wreaths" some people claim to see floating over graves are decaying pranic fields that no longer have a purpose. There no longer is a material body for them to animate, so their energies gradually dissipate.

The astral body is the mental body or mano kosha from the previous scheme. It continues to exist after death. Each of us still experience ourselves as the same entity who used to live in a physical body. Yogic adepts are said to be able to travel outside their physical bodies in this ball of mental energy.

At the time of rebirth, the mental body from the last life now also passes away. Only the causal body reincarnates. The causal body contains all your higher intellectual and spiritual functions (Vijnana and ananda maya koshas). Your karmashya, the habits and attitudes developed in your previous lives, is carried with the causal body like a piece of luggage.

Spiritual masters, because they have aligned their awareness with their causal body, retain full awareness of their previous lives when they reborn. Most of us identify with our physical or mental bodies, which disintegrate rather than travel with us into the next life, so we don't have detailed past life recall. When the vaishnava shakti I mentioned in Chapter 7, " Born Again!" acts, our connection with our old mental or astral body is broken, and we begin evolving a new mental body or personality which develops along with our new physical body.

If you begin exploring Hindu sacred literature you will find numerous references to " the three worlds". Western scholars often interpret these as the surface of the earth, the atmosphere, and the upper sky. But to Hindu spiritual practitioners they refer to the physical world accessible to our five senses, the mental world accessible to our mind, and the causal or formless realm beyond the reach of thought. We can travel in the formless world only with the highest powers intuitive inherent in our karana sharira, or causal body.

The mental and physical worlds were originally projected out of the causal or " seed" world, the world of concepts or archetypal patterns, and will eventually dissolve back into it. This is the extra dimensional world of " ideas" the Greek philosopher Plato spoke of.