A Series of Short Articles giving a Sceptical Slant on Out-of-Body Experiences and Auras Part 6 / Source Psychology Today

Out-of-Body Experiences: The Psychology of Seeing Auras

Part 6: Kirlian photography, synesthesia, and why some people see auras.

Posted Jul 25, 2019. By Susan Blackmore. Psychology Today (.com) Blog Ref  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science
 

In my previous post, I explored claims that psychics can see a human aura, with experiments showing that the aura is not physically present around people’s bodies.

One final claim worth testing is that auras can be captured with something called Kirlian photography. This method, invented in 1939 by the Russian engineer Semyon Kirlian, involves placing photographic paper or film over a metal plate connected to a high-voltage, high-frequency power supply. With a brief exposure, this method does indeed produce auras surrounding, for example, a finger, a hand or even a coin or a leaf. Superficially the effect does look something like the claimed human aura. 

 

In 1975, before I knew anything about the physics involved, I bought a Kirlian machine and took dozens of pictures, developing them myself in our bathroom ‘darkroom.’ I photographed hands, feet and fingers, insects, leaves and even our cat’s paw but I was gradually disillusioned by what I found. I also learned something about the physics involved. It turns out that the Kirlian effect is produced by the well-understood phenomenon of corona discharge brought on by the ionization of an electrically charged conductor.

The final straw came when I thought to photograph two fingers pointing towards each other. I remembered that when I saw auras after my OBE, I could reach out toward Kevin or Vicki’s hands and their auras would stretch out toward mine. It was a rather nice and friendly feeling and I subsequently discovered that mediums and aura-seers describe a similar effect. But Kirlian photography does not. Place two fingers pointing at each other on the plate and the ‘aura’ of each repels the other – just as would be expected from two negatively charged objects coming together. The corona discharge is not the etheric or astral aura.

 

So what did I see and touch? I am happy to believe that, like all the psychics and mediums tested, I would fail the doorway test. Yet this experience of seeing my own and others’ auras was vivid, as was the sense of feeling it with my hands around Kevin’s body. And I am not alone. In Iceland, 5 percent of the public said they had seen the aura (Haraldsson 1985), and in an American survey, 5 percent of the public and 6 percent of students had (Palmer 1979). In a small study of OBErs, half saw objects as transparent or glowing or with auras around them. So there does seem to be a connection between the OBE and aura-seeing. Again I find I am not alone, but if the aura is not a physically existing emanation around the human body, what is it?

Could it be imagined, even though it appears so realistic? The failure of doorway tests led some researchers to think so (Gissurarson & Gunnarsson ( 1997) and others tried to find out.

Alvarado and Zingrone (1994) at the University of Edinburgh compared 19 aura-seers with a control group who had never seen auras and found they scored higher on both the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire and the Inventory of Childhood Memories and Imaginings. They more often saw apparitions, had mystical experiences and ‘seeing with eyes closed’ – a strangely interesting experience I shall return to in future posts.

They also had more OBEs. So this confirms a link between OBEs and auras, and gives a clue that imagination is involved but why are auras typically seen as right there in physical space? Tart concluded that an imagined aura with no objective existence was projected beyond the seen body, but how?

One promising idea involves synaesthesia, and some people with synaesthesia do report aura-like experiences (Cytowic 2008). Synaesthesia is a mixing of the senses, in which sounds can become colors or tastes have shapes. Many children experience the world this way but lose the ability with age, leaving some adults with weak synaesthesia and just a few (about 4%) as true synaesthetes. In the most common type of synaesthesia, color-grapheme synaesthesia, one person might see the number 2 as green and 3 as orange, while another sees 2 as blue and 3 as lurid pink. These colors leap out from written text and have been shown to last for decades if not a lifetime (Ramachandran and Hubbard 2001). Could the colors of the aura come about in a similar way? Might the aura-seer look at a person and then intuitively convert their impressions into color?

Some synaesthetes associate colors with human faces and forms but a study of four such people did not find their experiences were like seeing auras (Milán et al 2012). Even so, there are links between auras and synaesthesia.

In their classic study of LSD, a psychedelic drug with a reputation for inducing synaesthesia (Luke & Terhune 2013), Masters and Houston found ‘a fairly common experience where the subject seems to himself to project his consciousness away from his body and then is able to see his body as if he were standing off to one side of it or looking down on it from above.’ Some said they could ‘move about in something like the “astral body” familiar to occultists’ and ‘Some identify this astral body with an “aura” they earlier had perceived as radiating from them, an “energy force field” surrounding the body. The perception of the aura by psychedelic subjects is very common.’ (Masters & Houston 1967 p 86).

Another idea that I have begun exploring is that the bodily shape of the aura is created by a misplaced body schema. In other words, the continuous representation we have of our own body shape is projected onto another person. I shall delve into the nature of the body schema, and the ways in which it can be distorted and exteriorized, when I come back to the science of OBEs. For now, we have at least learned that there really is a link between OBEs and seeing auras, even if we don’t yet understand why.

In my new book, Seeing Myself (Blackmore 2017), I describe auras in more detail and in the next few posts I will delve further into the potential of the human brain.

References

Alvarado, C. S., & Zingrone, N. L. 1994. Individual differences in aura vision: Relationships to visual imagery and imaginative-fantasy experiences. European Journal of Parapsychology, 10, 1-30

Blackmore, S 2017 Seeing Myself: The new science of out-of-body experiences, London, Robinson ISBN-10:1472137361 and 2019, New York

Cytowic, R. E. (2008). The man who tasted shapes. MIT press.

Gissurarson, L.R. and Gunnarsson, A. 1997 An experiment with the alleged human aura. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 91, 33-49

Haraldsson, E. 1985. Representative national surveys of psychic phenomena: Iceland, Great Britain, Sweden, USA and Gallup's multinational survey. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 53, 145-158

Luke, D. P., & Terhune, D. B. 2013. The induction of synaesthesia with chemical agents: a systematic review. Frontiers in psychology, 4: 753

Masters, R. E. and Houston, J. 1967 The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience. London, Anthony Blond

Milán, E. G., Iborra, O., Hochel, M., Artacho, M. R., Delgado-Pastor, L. C., Salazar, E., & González-Hernández, A. 2012. Auras in mysticism and synaesthesia: A comparison. Consciousness and cognition, 21(1), 258-268.

Palmer,J. 1979 A community mail survey of psychic experiences Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 73 221-252

Ramachandran, V. S., & Hubbard, E. M. 2001. Synaesthesia--a window into perception, thought and language. Journal of consciousness studies, 8(12), 3-34.

A Series of Short Articles giving a Sceptical Slant on Out-of-Body Experiences and Auras Part 5/ Source Psychology Today

Out-of-Body Experiences: The Human Aura

Part 5: Do psychics really see an aura around other people?

Posted Jul 18, 2019. Susan Blackmore. Blog Ref  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science

 

I described how my OBE turned into a mystical experience in a previous post and how when I finally got more or less back to normal, I could see or feel auras around myself and my friends. I had heard of the occultist’s aura, the colourful display that psychics claim to see around other people’s bodies, so I assumed this was what I was seeing. But was it?

Psychics claim that the colours they see reveal a person’s personality, their hopes and fears and even their future. The spirit medium, Ursula Roberts, who died (I mean ‘passed over’) in 1996, described auras as like the skins of an onion. The etheric body forms just an outline around the physical, appearing as silvery radiance in the healthy but a dull grey in people who are tired or ill; the astral or psychic aura is larger and colorful; and the even greater spiritual aura is ‘radiated by souls who consciously send out healing, light, and loving thoughts, through...their spiritual will’ (Roberts 1975, 8).

According to Besant (1896) and Leadbeater (1895), clear blues are the colors of spirituality and yellows reveal intellectual development. Pride shows up as bright red while selfishness and depression are various shades of brown.

I recently looked into just one color, yellow, in a variety of books and websites. One site divides yellow into different shades that can mean spiritual inspiration, fear of loss, or latent psychic abilities. Another claims that “Yellow Aura people are analytical, logical and very intelligent.” A Reiki healing site relates yellow to the spleen and ‘life energy’ and, copying some of the previous site word for word, lists so many possible characteristics that any reading becomes meaningless.

Delving more thoroughly into aura colors, psychologist Andrew Neher (2011 p 188-9) found many incompatible claims. For example, the famous psychic Edgar Cayce describes red in the aura as increasing with over-work to the point of nervous breakdown, while Ursula Roberts claims that “the colour of earthly love is red”.

In principle, if auras could reliably be seen, these claims could be tested. For example, aura-seers could record the colors and sizes of the auras of a group of volunteers and then psychologists test the volunteers for personality type, stress, happiness and so on.

IQ is easy to measure, and tests could show whether people with yellow in their auras score higher. If consistencies were found we might be able to tell which psychics were accurate, and even train people to see auras, turning aura-reading into a useful psychological tool.

None of this has happened.

Experimental tests

A different kind of aura test has been damning. This is Charles Tart’s ‘doorway test’ designed to find out whether there is any sense in which auras are actually present in the space around a person’s body.

The idea is very simple. If a psychic can see a person’s aura sticking out around their body then they should be able to see that aura whether or not the body is visible as well. So Tart (1972) suggested the following test, shown in the illustration.

 

First a psychic (let’s call him Jim) is asked whether he can clearly see the aura of a target person (we’ll call her Julie). If he confirms that he can, he stands facing an open doorway while Julie goes through the doorway and stands behind the wall. She then takes up one of two positions: In position (A) she is well away from the edge of the doorway and so neither her physical body nor her aura should be visible to Jim; at position (B) she stands very close to the edge of the doorway, so Jim still cannot see her physical body but he ought to be able to see her aura sticking out past the side of the doorframe.

For a good experiment, Julie should take up each position several times, an experimenter choosing the position randomly so that Jim cannot guess where she is likely to be. All Jim has to do is say whether he sees Julie’s aura or not. Tart and Palmer (1979) tried this test with the well-known psychic healer, Matthew Manning, but in ten trials he was no more accurate than would be expected by chance.

I have also tried this test with no success, as have others. In another test, ten aura-seers were tested along with a control group (Gissurarson & Gunnarsson 1997). Four screens were placed in a row and an experimenter stood behind one of the screens. The aura-seer then came into the room and had to say which screen had someone hidden behind it.

Each group completed 18 sessions of 40 trials each and the results were clear. The aura-seers chose the right screen 185 times and the control group 196 times. Neither total is significantly different from the 180 expected by chance guessing.

TV testing of aura-seers

The same idea has been used on TV, and in 1991, I took part regularly in a TV series called “James Randi: Psychic Investigator”. James ‘The Amazing Randi’, now in his nineties, is an ex-magician and perhaps the most famous skeptic ever, well-known for his offer of a million dollars to anyone who could prove a psychic claim (no one has ever succeeded).

For this show, he would stride onto the glitzy stage in his flowing black cape and put various psychics to the test, including an aura-seer.

First, he asked her to look at a group of people and say whether she could see their auras around and above their heads. She said she could and agreed that the test was fair. This is an important step in testing psychics because there’s no point testing a claim they are not making.

On stage was a row of screens just taller than the people, so that if they stood behind them their auras should still be visible over the top. Some screens had a person behind and some did not. The psychic could not tell which.

In a similar TV show in the USA, the Berkeley Psychic Institute sent their top aura-reader to try the same test and again she failed, claiming to see auras above twenty screens when only six had someone standing behind them (Carroll 2003).

These tests together prove that auras are not physically present in the way that most aura-seers say they are. So what is going on when people, myself included, seem to see an aura around someone else? Another claim involves Kirlian photography, and other experiments explore the psychology behind aura-seeing. I’ll consider these in my next post.

References

Alvarado, C. S., & Zingrone, N. L. 1994. Individual differences in aura vision: Relationships to visual imagery and imaginative-fantasy experiences. European Journal of Parapsychology, 10, 1-30

Besant, A. 1896 Man and his bodies, London, Theosophical Publishing House

Carroll, R.T. 2003 The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions, Wiley

Gissurarson, L.R. and Gunnarsson, A. 1997 An experiment with the alleged human aura. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 91, 33-49

Leadbeater, C.W. 1895 The astral plane: Its scenery, inhabitants and phenomena. London, Theosophical Publishing Society

Neher, A. 2011 Paranormal and Transcendental Experience: A Psychological Examination, Dover Publications

Roberts, U. 1975 Look at the Aura - and Learn, Greater World Association

Tart, C. T. 1972. Concerning the scientific study of the human aura. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.

 

A Series of Short Articles giving a Sceptical Slant on Out-of-Body Experiences and Auras Part 4/ Source Psychology Today

Out-of-Body Experiences: Seeing with Astral Eyes

Part IV: Is astral projection a useful theory, and can it be tested?

Posted Jul 08, 2019. By Susan Blackmore. Blog Ref  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science

 

 I began this series of posts by describing a long out-of-body experience I had many years ago, and then turned to exploring how it might be explained. Astral projection is the most obvious and popular ‘explanation’ but, as I described in the previous post, it hits a big problem. Indeed, this problem applies to all types of OBE. It is this. The astral body (or any type of out-of-body entity) needs to see the world it is apparently experiencing, but how? Does it have eyes, and if so what are they made of and how do they work?

The distinguished Cambridge vision scientist, William Rushton, provided my favourite argument against any astral version of events. Writing in a letter to the Society for Psychical Research in 1976 he asked...

"What is this OOB eye that can encode the visual scene exactly as does the real eye, with its hundred million photoreceptors and its million signalling optic nerves? Can you imagine anything but a replica of the real eye that could manage to do this? But if this floating replica is to see, it must catch light, and hence cannot be transparent, and so must be visible to people in the vicinity. In fact floating eyes are not observed, nor would this be expected, for they only exist in fantasy" [Rushton 1976 p. 412].

Is his argument as damning as it appears? I think it is. Astral projection theory entails there being a fully mobile, light and invisible double that can see clearly, vividly and in full colour. Why then would evolution bother with all the complex paraphernalia of eyes, muscles, nerves and a massive brain in which about twenty percent of its cortex is devoted to vision, if we all have an astral body that can do the job without them?

 

The answer, from believers in astral projection, is that the astral body is not seeing the physical world at all but is travelling in the astral world; it is not seeing physical objects, but their astral counterparts, as well as thought forms and all the non-physical beings that live in these other realms (Muldoon & Carrington 1951, Ophiel 1961).

The problem with this answer is that it is infinitely flexible and totally untestable. If you ask any difficult question, astral projection theory will provide an answer. Why were the gutters and downpipes I saw in my travels not the correct plastic ones? Why – because astral counterparts are not identical to physical objects in this world; because there were old metal ones long ago, and people have left thought forms of them; because my astral vision was not clear enough and I fantasised the old type. Answers like this can be concocted at will to ‘explain’ anything, and that means they can explain nothing.

This is a fundamental point about science and about finding good theories. If we want to understand anything, we need to think up possible theories to explain it and then investigate which theories do best at explaining the phenomena we find. We reject theories that make false predictions and carry on investigating ones that make good predictions. The most useless types of theory are those that can give glib explanations of anything at all and make no specific predictions. Astral projection theory is like that.

Are there really seven planes or could there be more, or fewer? There is no way of finding out, and Theosophists, spiritualists, mediums and promoters of astral projection disagree about what they find on each plane and how many there are. Does the etheric body really provide energy to the astral body? If it does, this ‘energy’ is conveniently invisible, unmeasurable and ‘subtle’; in other words, we cannot find out.

In my early enthusiasm for astral projection and magical thinking, I not only sat with spiritualist mediums and joined séances to summon up the dead but began training in magic and briefly joined a coven. I learned to see images in my beautiful crystal ball, read Tarot cards and the I-Ching, and diligently studied the theory of astral projection. Eventually I saw through it. Like so many other popular theories, it is appeals to the desire to be free, powerful and to live forever, but it cannot give us that. All its planes, energies and bodies are invented fantasy, and they cannot explain why I, or anyone else, seems to leave their body and fly around the world.

In my next post, I turn to another aspect of occult lore that I was lucky enough to experience myself and this is one claim that can be tested – the human aura.

References

Muldoon,S. and Carrington,H. 1951 The Phenomena of Astral Projection. London, Rider & Co.

Ophiel 1961 The art and practice of astral projection, New York, Samuel Weiser

Rushton,W.A.H. 1976 Letter to the Editor, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 48, 412-3

A Series of Short Articles giving a Sceptical Slant on Out-of-Body Experiences and Auras Part 3 / Source Psychology Today

Out-of-Body Experiences: Into the Astral?

Part 3: Does the theory of astral projection make sense?

Posted Jun 27, 2019. By Susan Blackmore. Blogger Ref  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science

 

In my previous posts, OBEs Part 1 and Part 2, I described a long and powerful out-of-body experience (OBE), culminating in a mystical experience of oneness. I was just a first-year student, studying psychology and physiology, neither of which helped me in any way to explain these travels of the mind. How was I to understand what had happened to me?

The obvious starting point, and one urged on me by fellow students in our Oxford University Society for Psychical Research, was the theory of astral projection. This idea, still wildly popular in occult and alternative circles, was an important part of Theosophy, a movement founded by the Victorian occultist and spirit medium, Madame Blavatsky. She claimed to have traveled the world, studied with Tibetan gurus, contacted the dead, and learned to reach higher planes with Hindus and Buddhists. Her followers, Annie Besant (1896) and C.W. Leadbeater (1895), wrote about the ‘ancient wisdom’, the power of ‘thought forms’, and ‘the seven principles of man’. They always spoke of ‘man’ even though Annie Besant was a feminist, atheist and campaigner for marriage reform.

The idea of thought forms enchanted me and a version of it lurked for many years in my (ultimately abandoned) theories of consciousness and the paranormal (Blackmore 1982). According to this ‘ancient wisdom’, every thought creates a form and these forms have a life of their own, attracted by similar thoughts, repelled by opposites, making up our dream life, forming apparitions of the deceased, and facilitating telepathy and clairvoyance. By learning to concentrate deeply we can produce powerful thought forms that leave the mind that created them and continue to exist on another plane.

The Seven Bodies of Man

Theosophy teaches that each of us is a continuing Self that enters and leaves different bodies, over and over again, while really existing on a high mânasic or mental plane” (Besant 1896 p 90). This is, of course, a version of the idea of personal reincarnation. This meme is extraordinarily popular in both certain religions and in New Age thinking. I find it strange and rather depressing that it even persists in Buddhism, despite the fact that the Buddha taught the difficult idea of ‘anatta’ or ‘no self’; based on his experience of enlightenment he explicitly denied that selves are persisting entities – discovering that, like everything else, selves are impermanent and ever-changing (Rahula 195.

But back to Theosophy. The bodies that this eternal Self inhabits are the seven ‘vehicles of consciousness’ and we use different ones in different regions of the universe, from the gross physical world to the subtlest and most spiritual realms beyond. We must learn, says Besant, that this Self is the owner of the vehicle, and we can exist in far fuller consciousness outside the vehicle than inside it.

A typical list of the vehicles includes:

1. The physical body.

2. The etheric body or body of vitality.

3. The astral body.

4. The mental body.

5. The causal body.

6. The Buddhic, diamond or cosmic body (there is much less agreement over the higher levels).

Our seven bodies according to Theosophy

Our seven bodies according to Theosophy

 

7. The celestial, eternal or nirvanic body.

The physical body, composed of ‘ordinary matter’, confines consciousness to the laws of space and time. It is interwoven with the etheric double or ‘vehicle of vitality’ which transmits energy between the physical and higher bodies and may briefly survive after death as ghost or graveyard wraith. It is an exact replica of the physical body but made of ether.

 This clearly makes no sense now, but in the late 19th century, the idea of an interpenetrating ether seemed far more plausible than it does today. Most scientists still believed in the need for a ‘luminiferous ether’ to explain the propagation of light, until the great Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 disproved its existence and presaged a revolution in physics. Even so, the idea of the ether persisted in the popular imagination and seemed to provide a haven for the higher planes of theosophy and spiritualism.

Onto the astral planes

We can now see where astral projection fits in because the astral body can leave the physical and etheric bodies behind and go traveling on the astral planes. Sylvan Muldoon was one of the most famous astral projectors of the twentieth century and worked with psychical research Hereward Carrington, producing books about OBEs and diagrams (shown here) of how he typically left his body (Muldoon & Carrington 1929, 1951). It is said to be the ‘vehicle of consciousness’, which means that the astral body is supposed to be doing our thinking, seeing, feeling and being conscious. We don’t need to be ‘in’ our body at all. We can fly free without it, seeing the world from any place we like to go, and moving completely free of the encumbrance of a physical body.

You are probably asking yourself the obvious questions - if the astral body can see without using physical eyes why do we need to have eyes in the first place? And if we do need eyes, how is the astral body supposed to see without them? These are not trivial questions. Indeed, if astral projection theory is to be any use at all, it must answer them.

In my next post, I will try tackle these questions and ask whether astral projection theory really can explain my OBE, and those of many thousands of other people who seem to leave their body and go flying.

References

Besant, A. 1896 Man and his bodies, London, Theosophical Publishing House

Blackmore, S. 1982 Beyond the Body, London, Heinemann

Blackmore, S. 2018 Seeing Myself: The new science of out-of-body experiences, London, Robinson

Leadbeater, C.W. 1895 The astral plane: Its scenery, inhabitants and phenomena. London, Theosophical Publishing Society

Muldoon,S. and Carrington,H. 1929 The Projection of the Astral Body London, Rider & Co.

Muldoon,S. and Carrington,H. 1951 The Phenomena of Astral Projection. London, Rider & Co.

Rahula,W. 1959 What the Buddha Taught, London, Gordon Fraser