I once took a class on how to see auras. Auras are the visual correlate to the bio-energetic field that imbues and surrounds living things.
The class was offered by a fairly well-known New Age group whose bread-and-butter main thing is training people to do energy healing. I also took a bunch of their energy healing classes, just to get a feel for the endeavor, it being so hot these past 10 years or so. Well, for me of course it was just another checklist item.
Anyway, auras. The main instructor for the class was the local trainer/representative for this New Age group, whose Big Cheese guru lived in the Phillipines at that time (since deceased). But the Big Cheese guru had come in to personally train us in the earlier energy healing parts of the course and it was promised that he'd make a cameo appearance at the aura viewing session, towards the end.
The instructor gave us some ocular exercises, to help us learn to "soften" our eyes. It was continually emphasised that we mustn't have excessive expectations or be too earger to get the skill. That kind of attitude would only delay our getting it.
They had people stand in front of a variety of background panels, to try different effects. We also worked with a partner for short distance training.
I found that it was very easy to see the first level of aura (according to this group's categorization), which is a kind of grey, un-colored haze or visual distortion that emanates out about 6 inches or a bit less from every living thing (later I found out that EVERYTHING has this kind of aura, not only living things). That was interesting.
But everybody who thinks about auras wants to see COLORS. That's considered the real meat in the auric training sandwich. I think people want to see colors for the same genetically-hardcoded reason that we are obsessed with human faces, and the same reason that we love to gossip, so on. Because auric colors supposedly reveal a person's inner, hiddend qualities, strengths and weaknesses, emotional and medical conditions and so on, being able to see them easily would be a huge advantage in the vast human gamespace of unceasing jockeying and jostling for social and economic advantage. In a predatory world, reliable auric viewing would be just another poison arrow in the social huntsman's quiver. So much for all the New Agey prattle about ushering in a world of sweetness and light. It's all just business as usual, but we cannot admit that to ourselves, natch.
Anyway, I could see the gray have level quite readily. Colors I could see only in intermitent flashes, at least in that particular session. Later on, when trying my auric vision out in the field, I did much better with colors. Seeing the colors gives a very different feeling than seeing the outline of gray haze. First of all, the colors, even when transparent or pastel, have a startling vividness and immediacy, almost like a quick flash of a neon sign (though in actual hue values they are often pastel, as I said). If you can imagine a lit-up neon sign flashing pastel colors you wouldn't be far off the mark.
Later as my eyes got more sensitive, I realized that there are two kinds of para-normal color vision. The first is rather mundane - it is just seeing the PHYSICAL color corona of any colored object, especailly a brighly colored object. That isn't hard to do once you know how to soften your eyes. Now my eyes do that automatically, routinely, especially in bright sunlight everything has a bright and obvious physical color corona. Unfortunately ability to see this type of aura yields basically none of social intelligence benefits alluded to above, so as a good, normal, genetically programmed primate, one who seeks social domination and economic advantage over my fellows at all times, I pay it little mind.
The second kind of colored auric vision is when you see the classic full-body technicolor view of the non-physical aura itself. Of course there was a lot of jabber about multiple auric visual/energetic layers, self-contained in successive shells around the physical body like a Russian doll. Even at my best I have rarely seen that in its full glory, but I know it exists because I have occasionally seen it, when the background is just right and when I have time and pateience to start the viewing process perfectly.
So to summarize, when done with this training, I could see basically the following:
- whitish/gray translucent body outline aura
- physical reflective color aura (in strong sunlight)
- occasional full colored mind/emotion stative aura
I remember the week after I returned from the auric training, I was at a meeting in my company and one of the guys I considered smartest was sitting quitely listening to somebody talk, and since he happened to be positioned just in front of a corporate whiteboard type of background, I defocused, softened my eyes, and was shocked to see a huge flash of brilliant sky blue burst all around this guys head and shoulders. Checking my course textbook at home that night, I found that (to this group anyway) a blue aura indicates intelligence.
I also later realized how easy it is to see the full-body aura of trees. Their auras are much stronger and more extensive than that of any human.
Anyway, as far as it goes, I have to say the whole thing more or less works and hangs together, in both theory and pratice.
Although it can be taken to comical extremes. In the last part of the training session I attended, the Big Cheese guru took the podium and we students were called on in turn to describe what aura, if any, we saw surruonding the Master. We all kind of squinted and scrunched our eyes (actually of course they had told us to relax our eyes and not try too hard when aura-viewing, but hey this was the Big Enchilada himself, and we were eager to shine as students and get a figurative gold star of praise pasted on our foreheads. This too is typical primate social behavior, so no biggie).
Anyway they then went around the room and asked what we saw. I said I had only seen the gray outline aura (normal for me). I sensed a slight chill of disapproval in the room at that. Apparently the Big Guy should be seen lit up like a Christmas tree, as I understood from my classmates subsequent answers. They claimed to see practically a whole Las Vegas revue show going on in the Teacher's aura, gold and diamonds and so on. And the unspoken implication was obviously that this gentleman's specialness and Holiness and advanced spirituality and all such gunk was patently visible in his aura. It may have been so. I can only report what I personally saw, which wasn't all that much as I said. But what you can expect from a 1-day beginner student?
The comedic high point came when one young man stated that he saw a giant dog figure etherically surrounding the Great One, up on the stage. He apparently meant that as some kind of praise, but The Big Cheese Guru guy was definitely displeased to hear this, and the resident local instructor person audibly sucked in his breath at the gaffe. You see, the Big Cheese guru guy was ethnic Chinese. And in Chinese traditional culture, dogs are baaaaad things, dirty and crummy and so on. So it was an unwitting cultural insult. The local teacher guy started to intervene to contain the embarassement - "probably as a beginner you are mistaking what you saw blabbitty blah blah...". But to his credit, the young student guy landed on his feet, rather nimbly I thought - he clearly realized his mistake and after babbling for a moment he recovered by saying "Wait ... wait... I am seeing more clearly now, it isn't actually a dog figure I see, but rather it is the Great Sphinx of Egyt, surrounding and protecting the Guru...". Ahahaha! Good save bro!
I did begin to wonder, if the aura is an informationally stable and useful phenomenon, how can it appear radically different to every single viewer? None of the student viewers agreed on the basic visual structure, and certainly not the details, of the Great Man's aura!
They also had us do elementary breathing and meditative exercises, then check with a partner how our arua had been affected. It seems that just doing a little deep breathing or thinking about something nice radically aftects your aura! I was surpised at that, and from then on I pretty much discounted the practical value (social and economic primate dominance utility) of aura viewing as a real-world skill. Because if the aura changes so radically and so quickly in response to such trivial transient stimulii, it isn't going to show us anything deep that we can use to get our fellow chimps into a hammerlock as we all seem to long to do. So after that I realized that aura viewing, though based on something true in a way, and certainly an amusing pastime, is unfortunately pretty much useless for the kinds of things we really care about (money, sex, power ... you know!)
Anyway, another funny thing I realized later is that you can see your own aura. No, I don't mean looking at your own face in a mirror, or holding your hand up to a dark background, everybody knows all about that easy stuff. I mean you can see your own aura from the inside out - so that it actually covers your vision of anything external to it. It's as though you are wrapped in a cocoon, existing as a head to toe spindle or cyclone of colored silk, which is normally invisible to you, you are looking out at the world straight through that self-wrapping, as through transparent glass. But if you are in a heightened energy state and sufficiently relaxed you can see the wrapper itself, it visually solidifies and you see your own aura from the inside out! Most amusing when that happens (though equally useless).
But to me, the most fun auric thingie is to see the massive swarm of energy bugs that populate every clear blue sky. Yap, it is so, the sky is always filled with a giant ominpresent covering swarm of energy bugs, they are present all over the air at all times, but they only become visible (to me anyway) when seen against a clear blue sunlit sky. They are yellowish/orange color and they swarm and zip and streak around crazily more or less same as the frantic mindless milling of microbes or protozao seen through a hi-power microscope. These energy bugs are what we breathe all the time, they are what puts the zing in the ki (Japanese word for air) of the earth's atmosphere. For some reason it is really really fun to view these. There are noticably fewer of these in the skies of industrialized or heavily urban areas. They are most lively and numerous in the upper atmosphere (seen through airplane window) and directly over ocean or beach areas.