here is a distinct difference between etheric sight and astral
sight, and it is the latter which seems to correspond to the fourth
dimension.

"The easiest way to understand the difference is to take an example.
If you looked at a man with both the sights in turn, you would see the
buttons at the back of his coat in both cases; only if you used
etheric sight you would see them _through_ him, and would see the
shank-side as nearest to you, but if you looked astrally, you would
see it not only like that, but just as if you were standing behind the
man as well.

"Or if you were looking etherically at a wooden cube with writing on
all its sides, it would be as though the cube were glass, so that you
could see through it, and you would see the writing on the opposite
side all backwards, while that on the right and left sides would not
be clear to you at all unless you moved, because you would see it
edgewise. But if you looked at it astrally you would see all the sides
at once, and all the right way up, as though the whole cube had been
flattened out before you, and you would see every particle of the
inside as well--not _through_ the others, but all flattened out. You
would be looking at it from another direction, at right angles to all
the directions that we know.

"If you look at the back of a watch etherically you see all the wheels
through it, and the face _through them_, but backwards; if you look at
it astrally, you see the face right way up and all the wheels lying
separately, but nothing on the top of anything else."

Here we have at once the keynote, the principal factor of the change;
the man is looking at everything from an absolutely new point of view,
entirely outside of anything that he has ever imagined before. He has
no longer the slightest difficulty in reading any page in a closed
book, because he is not now looking at it through all the other pages
before it or behind it, but is looking straight down upon it as though
it were the only page to be seen. The depth at which a vein of metal
or of coal may lie is no longer a barrier to his sight of it, because
he is not now looking through the intervening depth of earth at all.
The thickness of a wall, or the number of walls intervening between
the observer and the object, would make a great deal of difference to
the clearness of the etheric sight; they would make no difference
whatever to the astral sight, because on the astral plane they would
_not_ inte