e, and is dull in hue, browns and dirty greens and reds
playing a great part in it. Through this will flash various
characteristic colours, as his passions are excited. A man of a higher
type has his desire-body composed of the finer qualities of astral
matter, with the colours, rippling over and flashing through it, fine
and clear in hue. While less delicate and less radiant than the mental
body, it forms a beautiful object, and as selfishness is eliminated all
the duller and heavier shades disappear.

This desire (or astral) body gives rise to a second class of entities,
similar in their general constitution to the thought-forms already
described, but limited to the astral plane, and generated by the mind
under the dominion of the animal nature.

These are caused by the activity of the lower mind, throwing itself out
through the astral body--the activity of Kama-Manas in theosophical
terminology, or the mind dominated by desire. Vibrations in the body of
desire, or astral body, are in this case set up, and under these this
body throws off a vibrating portion of itself, shaped, as in the
previous case, by the nature of the vibrations, and this attracts to
itself some of the appropriate elemental essence of the astral world.
Such a thought-form has for its body this elemental essence, and for its
animating soul the desire or passion which threw it forth; according to
the amount of mental energy combined with this desire or passion will
be the force of the thought-form. These, like those belonging to the
mental plane, are called artificial elementals, and they are by far the
most common, as few thoughts of ordinary men and women are untinged with
desire, passion, or emotion.

THE TWO EFFECTS OF THOUGHT

Each definite thought produces a double effect--a radiating vibration
and a floating form. The thought itself appears first to clairvoyant
sight as a vibration in the mental body, and this may be either simple
or complex. If the thought itself is absolutely simple, there is only
the one rate of vibration, and only one type of mental matter will be
strongly affected. The mental body is composed of matter of several
degrees of density, which we commonly arrange in classes according to
the sub-planes. Of each of these we have many sub-divisions, and if we
typify these by drawing horizontal lines to indicate the different
degrees of density, there is another arrangement which we might
symbolise by drawing perpendi