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 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

A Series of Short Articles giving a Sceptical Slant on Out-of-Body Experiences and Auras Part 2 / Source Psychology Today

Out-of-Body Experiences: Far Beyond the Body

Part 2: How an OBE became a mystical experience.

Blogger Ref  https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Multi-Dimensional_Science

Leaving my body had been easy, or so it seemed when I had a completely unexpected out-of-body experience (OBE) as a 19-year-old student.

In my previous post. I described the first hour or so of this extraordinary experience, up to the point when I tried to return to my body for the second time. It was on this attempt that everything changed again.

 

I found the room I wanted quite easily, and I could still see my friends Vicki and Kevin, but when I looked at my own body I was shocked. It was strangely colored, with a jagged edge around the neck where the head had been. Intrigued, I found myself landing on the edge like a fly, before slipping inside, exploring what seemed to be an empty shell, zooming up and down the legs and into the feet.

I was so noisy in my excitement that Vicki told me to shut up, whereupon I told her to take ‘that body’ away. I’d lost any sense that this weird body was really mine.

Even so, I wanted to get back to normal. So I tried to get bigger, to fill up that empty shell and regain control. But this attempt spectacularly failed. Instead of growing to the right size I grew and grew, and kept on growing. I expanded out through the room and my friends, through the building and the streets, through the underground places of Oxford, all of England, and ultimately the earth.

Afterward, I wrote that I “had the wonderful experience of being able to look at the earth from being all round it”, an ability I can only vaguely imagine now. Then I kept on expanding until there was nowhere further to go—expanding ever faster but going nowhere. I was all, and nothing else existed.

As so many mystics say, describing such experiences is hard; they are ‘ineffable’. But I can try, knowing that I cannot do my memories full justice. Being everything was more like being everywhere and nowhere as an unknowable spaciousness in which everything happens, but nothing happens.

If that sounds odd, I can say that neither time nor space had their ordinary meanings anymore. It was as though everything were just as it should be and complete, and yet still ever changing. I had the sense of knowing things or being taught things which I cannot recount. I had a sense of rightness and peace: nothing to be done; nowhere to go.

By now Kevin was worried and started asking questions. What was I doing? Could I see anything else? What came next? They seemed silly questions. After all, this was ‘it’. Yet somehow, they changed everything.

As I struggled to find any kind of answer, it seemed as though I was swimming up through white mist or cloud to gain the slightest glimpse of another world. Through this veil, there seemed to be a great wide open plain and from all around the sense of some kind of infinite awareness. And that was that.

I was exhausted. All I could do was to try, weakly, to get back to my body again. At first, it seemed easy, but when I opened my eyes I seemed to shoot out to where I was looking. Then I had to try again, fail, and try again. I kept telling myself, ‘Wherever you go you have to take the body with you.’ Or, ‘You can only be in one place at a time’. Then gradually, after about three-quarters of an hour, I was almost back and carefully stood up.

The room, my friends, and my own body still looked strange. I could still see the whitish stuff I had been made of, now more or less coincident with my body but not keeping quite still. Round my friends was a similar pale glow, like a living, body-shaped aura. And further out I could feel, but not see, yet another body. Was this the occultists’ aura that psychics could see, and ordinary people could not? Had my third eye been opened?

When I finally got back to my own room, Kevin said it was too dangerous to go to sleep in case my astral body went flying again and couldn’t return. So he kept me awake all night. Eventually I did sleep, and as far as I know, my astral body did nothing of the kind. But I felt very weird indeed. As I cycled around Oxford, I seemed to be watching myself from one side and almost fell off my bike. For a few days, I could still see the ‘auras’, but these soon disappeared.

So what had happened? Like the OBE that had preceded it, this experience echoes classic descriptions. Mystics and meditators throughout the ages have described these same strange features—becoming nothing but a point of awareness, becoming tiny or vast, being wrapped in light, losing any ordinary senses of time or space, and, above all, merging with everything and losing self.

William James, often called the father of psychology, explored many such experiences in his classic 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience. A year earlier, Maurice Bucke had described being wrapped around by a flame-coloured cloud and entering joyful and wonderful states that he termed ‘Cosmic Consciousness’.

In my new book, Seeing Myself, I describe this in more detail and in the next few posts I will delve into some of the theories I considered and where they led me—from astral projection and the etheric aura, to drugs, hallucinations, and the potential of the human brain.

References

Bucke, R.M. (1901) Cosmic consciousness. Philadephia: Innes & Sons and New York: Penguin (1991).

Fontana, D. (2007) Mystical experience. In The Blackwell companion to consciousness, ed. M. Velmans and S. Schneider, 163–172. Oxford: Blackwell.

James, W. 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A study in human nature, London, Longman

Stace, W.T. (1960) The teachings of the mystics. New York: The New American Library.

Underhill, E. (1920) The essentials of mysticism. London: Dent & Sons.