Different texts have the astral body listed in different areas of the aura, as you have seen already. There is no consistent material suggesting which layer of the aura is actually the astral body. The heart area is most often suggested as the astral body. The astral body is made up of clouds of color more wondrous than the colors in the emotional body. It tends to have the same colors, but they are different because of the love in the heart. The colors span the rainbow, but they are infused with rose light. The chakras are seen as being in consecutive order in the rainbow color spectrum as well.

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As with the emotional body, the astral body also has blobs, streams or wisps of light energy moving outward toward other people, interacting on an astral level. Barbara Brennan writes in Hands Of Light (1988), "It is not just body language; there is an actual energetic phenomenon..."

According to Genevieve Lewis Paulson in Kundalini And The Chakras (1991), this is the first of the four spiritual bodies. She calls it the Intuitional/Compassionate Body. She says that in this layer there will be a new understanding of God and the universe, and it will be possible to feel compassion without getting caught in other people's stuff.

Ted Andrews in How To See & Read The Aura (2000), says that this is the Buddhic layer of the auric field. Older texts tend to call it the Buddhic layer too.

In Vera Stanley Alder's book The Finding Of The Third Eye (1976), she believes this is the final layer, the spiritual body, containing the finest, highest frequency vibrations of all, and can for that reason take control of all the lower ones. (This theme of only four layers of the auric field is common among many texts on the subject.)

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in Meditation: The Art Of Ecstasy (1976), says the polar opposites of this layer is life and death. He calls this the fifth body, instead of the typical fourth body that most writers call this. "Life itself is not in you. It simply comes in and goes out, just like breath... Life and death are just breaths to the fifth body...You have never been alive, you have never been dead. You are something that completely transcends both." He goes on to explain how it is that everyone, sometime or another in their lives, have contemplated suicide because it is the other side of the pole. He also says animals cannot commit suicide because they can never become aware of the fifth body.

In The Chakra Handbook (1999), Shalila Sharamon and Bodo J. Baginski say, "The spiritual body, frequently referred to as the causitive body, possesses the highest vibrational frequency of all the energy bodies. In human beings not yet highly conscious on the spiritual planes, its aura only extends about a yard from the physical body. Compared to this, the spiritual aura of a totally awakened person can radiate outward for miles, with the original oval shape changing to a perfect circle."

Joshua David Stone, Ph.D., says in Soul psychology: Keys To Ascension (1994), "The soul, or causal body, exists on the higher mental plane and its characteristic is the abstract mind. The causal body is the temple of the soul. It is the storage house of all good karma and virtue from all past lives and the present life. The causal body is a collection of three permanent atoms enclosed in an envelope of mental essence. The three permanent atoms are recording devices for the physical, astral, and mental bodies… When you have achieved liberation from the wheel of rebirth, the causal body is burned up and merges back into the monad; the evolving soul extension then receives guidance from the monad rather than from the soul." (The monad is thought to be an oversoul which contains a series of souls.)