When I was young, about seventy years ago, very few people had even heard of the word aura. Just about everyone nowadays knows something about auras. And quite often what they know is acquired from someone who doesn’t see auras. Then it’s often a case of the old proverb…" It ain’t what people don’t know that’s the problem…it’s what they do know that ain’t so."

And what is it "they" know that ain’t so about auras?. Usually they know that auras are perceived only by psychics, or specially gifted people can see them as colored energy fields around other people’s bodies. And usually they know that such people are generally weirdos.

I had the same misconceptions about auras for years. I didn’t see any pretty colors around people. Leadbeater’s books with colored pictures of the aura were available when I was young, but very few people ever read them. The occult was a taboo area because the Witchcraft Act had not been repealed. I did read them, and such books merely added to the frustration I felt of not seeing what seemed obvious to some other people, who must therefore be superior to me in some way. I constantly felt like a tone deaf person must feel when people around are discussing music, or what a color blind person must feel when the superior arty types begin discussing theories about the colors of some artist or other.

And then I discovered when I actually did meet people who could see auras from birth that they weren’t necessarily weirdos. Some indeed were, and made a point of being weirdos, but others were just ordinary type folks with what seemed like an extra sensitivity to ranges of the light spectrum.

It took a long time before I realized that my problem was lack of discrimination. I was fixating on SEE instead of PERCEIVE. Everybody perceives auras. Everyone has felt a sensation at the back of the neck that told them that they were being looked at very hard by someone behind them. Every animal that can be eaten by other animals has a warning system that a predator is around. Humans are no exception. They can sense an acute observation across a crowded room. There are even songs about it.

Everyone has had the experience of being repelled or attracted to someone at the first meeting, before even a word has been exchanged.

Everyone has had the experience of listening to what someone was saying and getting the feeling that something about it wasn’t quite right, though they ‘couldn’t put their finger on it.’

Everyone has felt drained of energy in the presence of a particular person, and everyone has felt energized simply by being near someone else.

All of these turn out to be perceptions of auras though none of them necessarily involved seeing pretty colors.

So, even if you can’t presently see auras, at least validate your normal human attribute of having the capacity to perceive or sense the effects of the auras of others on your own.

When you are around a physically active person you will feel differently from being around a couch potato, no matter how affable they both may be. Note the subtle difference. It is due to the well developed first level auric field. The athlete actually has a stronger magnetic field and you are receiving signals from it.

When you feel really relaxed with someone, even if you are both just sitting around, note the subtle difference. It is due to their highly energized second auric level.

You meet someone who feels like a breath of fresh air. Being around such a person helps you think better. You may have had the good fortune to have a teacher like that who inspired you to learn just by their presence. You were perceiving the brightness of the energy of their third auric level, though maybe not the colors.

Around some people you may feel love and compassion flowing towards you. There is a danger that you may run that effect through an autobiography saturated with TV sit-coms, and may misinterpret it. The other person has a high energy fourth level auric field and has no barriers to letting a feeling of love flow from them to EVERYBODY. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with romantic love or sexual attraction. But it could be misinterpreted as such by someone who didn’t realize that they were actually perceiving the subtle energy from an aura that they could not see.

Some people seem to emanate integrity and you feel a sense of truth and safety around such people. Congratulations! You are picking up that the person has a highly energized fifth level auric field.

In the presence of people with a firm spiritual basis to their lives, people who meditate or pursue a spiritual path with an effortless discipline, you may feel that you are expanding. You may feel an elevation of your own spirit. You are perceiving a highly charged fifth and sixth level in another’s auric field.

All of these experiences are available to those who cannot SEE auras, and all of them are perceptions of auric energy.

Every sense can be involved. Though I regarded myself as hopelessly inadequate because I couldn’t see auras I did sometimes get the experience of sensing a fragrance in the air when thinking about, or meditating on the person of a highly evolved being. Some people pick up their messages from auras in terms of scent. Others hear sounds or voices when they experience the auras of others.

None of these experiences are necessarily as continuous as the normal experience of seeing the world around us while our eyes are open. Many experiences are intermittent or occur only when the survival mechanism is desperately trying to get a message through that the situation is dangerous, even though superficially it seems OK.

But a heightened awareness that these messages are actually reaching you all the time is all that is needed for your perception of them to become more common and more sensitive. And by becoming more aware of them your extra senses will begin to grow in scope and effectiveness, not to mention reliability.

Your perceptions of auras by any means will be enhanced if you remember the connection between the basic seven chakras and the auric field. When I was young the word chakra was not in the common vocabulary. Now almost everyone knows about the basic seven lights visible to psychics in the energy field of the human body. By another cosmic coincidence, and there are no real coincidences, the colors are the same as the colors of the rainbow. Easy to remember if you know the Norwegian word for roast beef is ROYGBIV. Each letter is the first letter of the colors from the lowest chakra RED to the highest VIOLET. Below the red spectrum are the infra-red rays that we feel as heat, but don’t see. Above the violet spectrum are the ultra-violet rays that most people don’t see, but clairvoyants do. Some animals apparently see in these areas of the spectrum. They can see things going on that the ordinary red through violet human cannot see.

When Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic, was about to step into an elevator containing several passengers, he noticed that he could not see any of their auras. Since he normally lived with this ability he was so surprised that he stepped back, and didn’t enter the elevator.

At the next stop the cable broke and the braking malfunctioned. Everyone in the elevator was killed. Obviously the ability to pick up messages from auras had a survival value in this case. I don’t doubt that everyone on the elevator had a functioning aura but Cayce’s psyche used the off switch to give him a strong signal of imminent danger. It was a signal he couldn’t miss.

The point I want to hang on to this easily remembered story is that an aura is the property of a living person. The energy emanating from the aura has to come from somewhere. The easiest way to explain it, though a bit simplistic, is to say it comes from the chakras.

You can get a good idea of how this happens if you know a little about discrimination. Sanskrit for swan is hamsa or hansa. The swan is famous in Indian religious mythology for its amazing powers of discrimination. So good is it that the mythological swan can be given a mixture of milk and water and can drink only the milk.

It is this extraordinary power of discriminating what is from what isn’t that is honored when an Indian guru receives the title of Paramahamsa, the ultimate swan. You may have heard of Yogananda Paramahansa or Muktananda Paramahamsa. They could at any time see things as they actually were. They could not be fooled by the illusions that fool other people in this dream we are sharing together. This is the meaning of enlightenment; continuous, effortless, discrimination.

Each chakra is a photo-filter with the same powers of discrimination. From the energy spectrum of white sunlight each chakra can take out a single range of vibrations corresponding to one of the major seven colors.

The first chakra pulls out the reds from the white spectrum and therefore looks like a red whirlpool or vortex to the visually gifted psychic. And so on through the chakras. Look on the chakras as the pumps that take in the inflow and the colored field of the layers of the aura as the outflow.

This constant inflow and outflow is the Cosmic Dance, and ceases when the body is no longer used as a vehicle for an incarnation.

For pretty illustrations of how the aura appears to the clairvoyant check on books on the aura by Leadbeater and books on healing by Barbara Brennan the NASA engineer who has become famous as a medical intuitive, able to perceive the initial stages of a physical disease in the auric field months or years before it manifests in the physical body.

Barbara could not see auras at first, but did realize that she was getting data from people along the lines I have mentioned, and began to act with a heightened awareness of her own intuition and perceptions. The growth in abilities that comes from this simple step is an illustration of the hard saying, "To he that hath shall be given, and from he that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath." Perceiving what you can do and being grateful for it automatically increases the ability perceived. It is a natural law.

Now, in the work of the Healing Ministry, and in consultations I am able to help along lines that were impossible to me as long as I fixated on SEEING as the one and only way to receive information from the subtle bodies. The power of perception grows along the lines that you acknowledge.

Happy Trails,

Douglas

Vol VII Tid-Bits # 93. So, you want to see Auras