passions and emotions; now it is in the
very heart of them, it can miss none, and it gets them at their strongest.
Therefore it feels itself in a good position, and it makes an effort to
retain that position. It finds itself in contact with something finer than
itself--the matter of the man's mental body; and it comes to feel that if
it can contrive to involve that finer something in its own undulations,
they will be greatly intensified and prolonged.

Since astral matter is the vehicle of desire and mental matter is the
vehicle of thought, this instinct, when translated into our language, means
that if the astral body can induce us to think that _we_ want what _it_
wants, it is much more likely to get it. Thus it exercises a slow steady
pressure upon the man--a kind of hunger on its side, but for him a
temptation to what is coarse and undesirable. If he be a passionate man
there is a gentle but ceaseless pressure in the direction of irritability;
if he be a sensual man, an equally steady pressure in the direction of
impurity.

A man who does not understand this usually makes one of two mistakes with
regard to it: either he supposes it to be the prompting of his own nature,
and therefore regards that nature as inherently evil, or he thinks of the
pressure as coming from outside--as a temptation of an imaginary devil. The
truth lies between the two. The pressure is natural, not to the man but to
the vehicle which he is using; its desire is natural and right for it, but
harmful to the man, and therefore it is necessary that he should resist it.
If he does so resist, if he declines to yield himself to the feelings
suggested to him, the particles within him which need those vibrations
become apathetic for lack of nourishment, and eventually atrophy and fall
out from his astral body, and are replaced by other particles, whose
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 mena