IN REFLECTING ON THE USE OF THE WORDS "ASTRAL PLANE" IT'S IMPORTANT TO BE CLEAR WHAT USE OF THE WORD "PLANE" MEANS. It is easy to consider that a "plane" might be some layer around the earth in much the same way we see strata in layers of the earth when travelling through something like the Grand Canyon in the United States. Or we might consider it similar to diagrams of the earth's structure where we see in cutaway diagrams the earth with its inner and outer cores, the mantle, the crust, the atmosphere with its layers, the surrounding magnetic field, the Van Allen belts, and so on. It could be argued that we could observe different states of density of subtle bodies that would cause them to gravitate to different altitudes -- just as we have different states of physical matter such as solid, liquid, gas, plasma, etc. That may very well be. We might consider that there exist denser and less dense strata in the subtle world that are centered around the earth. But more important is the idea that subtle matter is another state of matter, or gradation of matter, and that it is all-pervasive throughout cosmos rather than just around the earth. In that sense then it would be a continuous state that does not end at the limit the earth's physical atmosphere.