natural wave-rate is more nearly in accordance with that which the man
habitually permits within his astral body.

This gives the reason for what are called promptings of the lower nature
during life. If the man yields himself to them, such promptings grow
stronger and stronger until at last he feels as though he could not resist
them, and identifies himself with them--which is exactly what this curious
half-life in the particles of the astral body wants him to do.

At the death of the physical body this vague astral consciousness is
alarmed. It realizes that its existence as a separated mass is menaced, and
it takes instinctive steps to defend itself and to maintain its position as
long as possible. The matter of the astral body is far more fluidic than
that of the physical, and this consciousness seizes upon its particles and
disposes them so as to resist encroachment. It puts the grossest and
densest upon the outside as a kind of shell, and arranges the others in
concentric layers, so that the body as a whole may become as resistant to
friction as its constitution permits, and may therefore retain its shape as
long as possible.

For the man this produces various unpleasant effects. The physiology of the
astral body is quite different from that of the physical; the latter
acquires its information from without by means of certain organs which are
specialized as the instruments of its senses, but the astral body has no
separated senses in our meaning of the word. That which for the astral body
corresponds to sight is the power of its molecules to respond to impacts
from without, which come to them by means of similar molecules. For
example, a man has within his astral body matter belonging to all the
subdivisions of the astral world, and it is because of that that he is
capable of "seeing" objects built of the matter of any of these