[Dyerryjex]

Akasha- the Quintessenstial element.
The ancients catalogued existing reality as comprising of four elements. These were not elements how modern science views elements (the smallest unit of something). For the ancients the elements were the most basic qualities matter could have. The elements then were fire, water, air and earth. Once again, we're not talking about 'a piece of ground', or a flame, but the quality inherent in material reality.
So for example fire would be the expansive, radiative (radiant), hot quality of an element, something that almost any material has (for example, you walk, get hot, radiate heat & light, that would be the fire element in you....etc.)
Such are the other three elements- water (magnetic, withdrawing, cold, heavy, fluid) Air (space, lightness, etc) earth (heavy cohesive nature of things)- you get the picture.

Ancients believed in cause and effect, but they considered the potential world, the spiritual, nonmaterial world to be the cause of the material- from the spirit comes matter (unlike some religions nowadays), and considered a fifth element, which was inherent in all the four elements, and called this Akasha. Akasha is the quintessential (quint=five) and is sometimes thought of as the fifth element. But quintessence also means the precursor, the originator from which it comes. That way, while matter is said to express four elements in differing strength (for example, material water will be mostly water element, but will have other elemental properties also, but akasha is also in it, and it is in each element. It is the precursor to the element.
The whole purpose of transmutation is to extract the Akasha from the material (as would alchemists try to do) but not as the precursor (because it is not material) so Akasha would not be the precursor nor the result of the work- it is essence, that knows no duality or polarity.
So Akasha can be described as primordial element, as primordial matrix, as the nonphysical emanation that permeates everything, etc. The philosopher's stone is the akasha that is somehow derived from a series of alchemical combinations, or unions-of opposite. I think you get the idea.

So the Akashic record is the imprint of everything that has ever happened on the akasha. The greeks called it ether (or aether). The ether or akasha is the matrix, the imprint is the effect of whatever we think or do on the matrix. A record. We then access the record by 'traveling' to the akashic record, in projection, claivoyant episode or dreamstate.

We call the titled phenomenon Akashic Wind or Akashic Pulse because of the 'all of a sudden' way it 'strikes', a force of nature, if you will. Like being taken away by a hurricane or tornado. But we can only speculate as to what it's true nature is- only on what we've experienced of the phenomenon.

Astral means star, probably because of the report from most projectors of sometimes finding themselves in a starry field when they project (and I sometimes see it as a vision screen, as an rv). Paracelsus equated the word astral with quintessence also, which is why it's sometimes used interchangeably with ether/ic, or akasha/ic.

Old-Fashioned Metaphysicists tended to separate astral from etheric by level- etheric would be closer to physical, and astral more removed from it. Since you sometimes end up in the RTZ (etheric) and sometimes end up in the 'star field' (Astral) it was classified as 'different places'. But as worldviews and paradigms change, we have (or most of us have) come to see the terms RTZ and Astral as degrees of the same phenomenon, degrees of separation from the physical, since some regions of the astral are virtually undistinguishable from the RTZ, except for the content of the experience, making the distance more psychological than anything else. Of course, like everything, this is debatable and will probably continue to be debated.

We mostly say 'astral' when we mean 'nonphysical'- but the terms energetic, nonphysical, etheric apply, and some more that I haven't thought of.
So an astral classroom is a classroom (teaching temple, etc.) located in the 'astral plane', or dreamstate lesson- which are essentially the same 'places', except that the experience will be mostly better remembered in projection or lucid dream, but is also something that happens in regular dreams, and mostly consciously forgotten. All ways of developing.

I hope this clears things up if you can get through it.