The human aura extends out around the body from three to four feet, even from five to six feet in the case of more evolved souls. It is made up of a variety of vibratory rates or colors. Each area of the mind that awareness flows through reflects a change in these vibratory rates of colors in the human aura. When you have developed a certain psychic sight, by seeing through the eyes of the soul, you will be able to look at a person, see the aura around him and know immediately the area of the instinctive, intellectual or superconscious mind he is aware in at that particular time. ¶For instance, if someone’s awareness was flowing through the realms of depression, that is, the area within the vast mind substance that contains the vibratory rate of depression, his aura would look rather gray, dim and dismal. If he was aware in the feeling of a genuine love for all humanity, his aura would look light blue, fringed and tinged with yellow. However, if his love for humanity was of a superficial, emotional nature, being more idle talk and emotion than subsuperconscious compassion, his aura would be pink or reddish, telling you there was still a lot of instinctive fire, and should an upsetting circumstance occur, he could easily forget about universal love and become quite angry. Then the pink would turn to flaming red streaked with black. After this, if he were to feel remorseful about the emotional upheaval, the aura would turn to dark blue, and you could hardly see his face for the deep blue mist that would form around his body. If awareness was flowing through the area of the mind of inferiority and jealousy, the aura would be dark grayish-green in color. Someone with healing inclinations would have a pale green aura. A student increasing his intellectual knowledge would have an aura of brilliant yellow. The combinations are almost endless. ¶Several colors often appear in the aura at the same time. For example, the red of suppressed desire and seething anger might appear along with the yellow of intellectual involvement. This person’s head would be surrounded in yellow, and the lower part of his body streaked in red. Even a touch of very dark green might appear, showing that jealousy caused his anger. It becomes easy to diagnose emotional problems simply by looking at the vibratory rate of the aura’s colors and judging the area of the mind awareness is flowing through. §
The vast plasma of the mind is complete and finished in all of its various states, departments, areas and moods. It only seems as though it is being created as we move our awareness through it. Each area of the boundless universe of the mind has its own colors and sounds. We interpret them through our nerves and register them as feelings. When we separate awareness from that which it is aware of, it is possible to separate feeling from that which we feel. Then we can become aware of the sound of feeling and the color of feeling, as well as the color of sound, the sound of color and the feeling of sound. It will require some good meditation on your part to fully grasp this concept. But in time you will come to understand the complete gamut of emotion and its vibratory rates as you begin to become aware of the aura around the physical body. ¶When someone is flowing his awareness through subsuperconscious areas of the mind and programming his subconscious anew, his aura rapidly changes. You know he is progressing on the path, for his aura goes through various changes of color patterns week after week as he works inwardly with his awareness. A devotee sitting in meditation, diligently working within himself, will in the course of half an hour change the colors of his aura three to four to five times, as he moves his awareness from the instinctive-intellectual areas into the brilliancy of subsuperconscious realms. His aura will take on shades of light blue and light yellow interlaced with white. Then as he moves into superconsciousness, rays of light from the central source of energy will begin to emerge from the core of his spine and flood out through his aura and penetrate the atmosphere of the room. You feel his presence as a darshan. ¶The sub of the subconscious mind has an aura of its own, deep within the outer aura that we have been describing. It is seen “within” the physical body itself and is different from the daily emotional-intellectual aura which appears around the physical body as a result of awareness being in one area of the mind or another. All the reactionary conditions of our past which are currently reacting in our subconscious mind are reflected in the colors of this inner subconscious aura. Oddly enough, the inner aura looks much like a modern art painting. This part of the aura does not flood out around the body, but hovers deep within the body in the area of the chest and torso. Peering deep into the torso, one can see its various colors. They do not move. Modern art painters may without knowing it be depicting the subsubconscious aura of themselves, their family and their friends, for that is exactly what some paintings look like. ¶The inner aura might look like this: on the left side of the chest, a large area of green; down in the lower abdomen, a patch of red; near the throat, yellow; and across the heart area are streaks of orange or purple. These colors do not move. They just remain there vibrating, and the rest of the aura moves around and through them. §
As soon as one begins to meditate, to gain enough control of awareness, the colors begin to move a little. When the meditator breaks out of his ordinary daily life habit patterns by beginning to reprogram his subconscious mind, his inner aura begins to change. When after a good meditation a predominant subconscious reactionary pattern comes before his vision as if it happened yesterday, and he begins to react to it all over again, one of these color patterns may move up to the throat area. He will have to swallow. At that point, if you ask the question, “What’s on your mind?” he would speak out this reaction. I always recommend it be written down and burned instead of spoken. Then that color leaves, never to reappear, and another one rises from underneath. A green color might leave and a brown one come up in its place. These repressed areas eventually will dissipate, and awareness, once divided in many different ways, will pull in its tentacles from externalized areas of the mind until it can move freely through all areas of the mind. ¶Each time one of these deep-rooted subconscious reactionary conditions leaves, the inner aura becomes more fluid, brighter and less rigid. The devotee becomes more wholesome. After an entire subconscious cleansing, due to maybe a year of someone working with himself and developing and reprogramming his subconscious mind positively, the chest would turn into a pure sheet of very beautiful yellow, and rays of white light could be seen coming out from within it. This would continue until the devotee stopped working with himself. And if he began dwelling more in subconscious areas or encounters a condition in life which he is not able to face within himself and regresses into resentment, selfishness, self-pity and spite, the chest would cloud again and look exactly like a modern art painting. ¶The mind is like a vast universe. Man’s individual awareness travels through the mind from one planet to another, one area to another. Or, if we compare the mind to the world, man’s individual awareness travels through the mind from hate to love, to joy, to sorrow, to all the various ideas and concepts within the mind, as he would travel from country to country, city to city. Therefore, the human aura is very consistent. Each time man’s individual awareness flows through love, the human aura reflects the pastel colors of love, as it would reflect the colors of hate, fear, jealousy, exuberance, compassion and the various areas of the intellect. One can learn to read the colors of the human aura and know in what area of the mind the awareness of the person is flowing. §
The big question always arises, “How do we know whether or not we are seeing an aura, or if it is just our imagination?” Actually, there is no such thing as imagination, according to the general use of the word. When we go within ourselves, we find that each thing that is so-called imagination, or “in the world of image,” actually exists within the refined substance of the mind, and we are just becoming aware of it where it is imprinted in the vast internal substance of the mind. Only when we become aware of something that we imagine for a long enough period do we bring it out of the subtle areas of the mind and impress it upon the memory patterns of the physical brain. At that point we do not call it imagination. We begin to call it real. Finally, if we can bring it into physical manifestation, then we really begin to call it real. I suppose that this is the way man’s individual awareness has become externalized, so that he looks at the external world as real and the internal, refined areas of the mind as being unreal or elusive. It was not always so, however, because with the absence of the things to externalize man’s individual awareness, man is naturally within himself. ¶When awareness is within the very depths of the mind, so that color and light and sound are one and the same to him, he then looks at his fellow man from the inside out. He would first see the spine of someone he was looking at, and the lights within the spine, and then he would see the inner aura, then the outer aura of the individual, and last he would see the physical body. When awareness is externalized to the point where we see physical things as reality, then we see the physical body first, and have to strain to see the aura and the internal layers of consciousness. ¶Go within yourself and all things will be unfolded to you on the inner planes of consciousness, as well as in the external states of mind. You will begin to see through them all. Seeing an aura is like seeing through someone. Their physical body begins to fade just a little bit, and we see where their awareness is flowing in the wonderful world of the mind. ¶The colors around the person are first seen within your own mind. You would not clearly see them around their physical body. Later, after becoming adjusted to this new form of sight, you may see colors around an individual’s physical body. ¶Where do these colors come from? All things in the mind are sound and color. Look around you and observe each vibratory rate of every physical object as having a sound as well as a color. Everything is sound. Everything is color. Everything is shape. Therefore, in the refined areas of the mind, all things are color and all things are sound, recognizable through the sixth sense of the all-seeing eye. This faculty is always awake. You only have to learn how to be aware of and use it, in a similar way an artist must learn to distinguish with his physical eyes between one shade of color and another and between the dimensions in a painting. §
The mystic learns how to use his already developed sixth sense, his third eye. It is used all the time, constantly, day in and day out, though not consciously. For example, someone may walk into your home. You look at him and say, “You are not feeling very well today. You seem disturbed.” How do you know? Inside yourself you are seeing his aura. If he enters looking bright and shiny, you know how he feels inside because you see his aura. ¶The spiritual path to realization of the Self, however, is not to see and analyze auras. The quest is to flow awareness through even the core of energy itself, into the vastness of the Self God, where awareness completely aware of itself, dissolves in its own essence, and merges into timelessness, into causelessness, into spacelessness, into Śiva, beyond that still, still area of the mind. Yes, learning to read auras can be a hindrance on the path to enlightenment because one can become the center of attraction, for everybody wants to know what his aura looks like. The aura is constantly changing. To give a reading of a friend’s aura would be like telling him what kind of clothes he is wearing. The next day, he may be wearing something different. Also, when you can see someone’s aura, quite often you do not notice it. Generally if you do have this awakened inner perception of auras, you would only notice someone’s aura if it were peculiarly dull or strongly radiant. A mystic who has control of this faculty does not generally see auras all of the time, just when he wants to. But if a person’s aura were outstanding in a certain way, naturally it would stand out clearly and be seen easily. And so, when we look into such an aura, we are actually looking into the area of the mind in which his individual awareness is traveling, for the mind is always totally in a state of creation, with awareness flowing through the mind just as the traveler roams the world. ¶The mystic has to caution himself not to become overly involved in the emotions of others. He must protect his inner life by living two-thirds within and only one-third in the external realms of consciousness. And he must be wise enough to know that each one has to walk either over or around all the boulders in his path. In other words, if you are around people who are not good, who have dark auras, who have deep-rooted subconscious areas that represent a lot of black, gray, red, green blobs hidden in the psychic nerve currents of their chest, and you are not quite out of that area yourself, the vibratory rate of those people will draw you back into those areas of the mind. That is why those who live the contemplative life like to be among themselves. They like to be with people of the same lifestyle. It is necessary. It is extremely necessary to surround yourself with a good environment to make progress on the spiritual path past a certain point. You can meditate a little bit to move awareness into a peaceful area of the mind or get a little burst of inner light, or practice breathing and have a healthier body and a sound nerve system. But if you really want to go deep within toward your goal, you have to move awareness, physical body, emotional body, mental body, in with a group of people that are thinking along the same lines and living the same lifestyle. The group helps the individual and the individual helps the group. ¶The gift of psychic vision should be developed very gradually through the stages of sādhana. The veiling grace of Lord Śiva is for very good reason. Some people are born with psychic sight and maintain it throughout their lifetime. As this faculty was developed in a prior birth, the wisdom and understanding of its proper use comes naturally to them. But more commonly, psychic sight develops slowly, almost imperceptibly, through an unbroken continuity of sādhana. Through the unveiling grace of Lord Śiva we are allowed to see what needs to be seen at the proper time in our life when we can sustain the resultant reactions. ¶We often observe the facial expressions and body language of friends and strangers and thus learn the contents of their conscious and subconscious mind, and from this deduce how they are thinking and feeling. But much can be concealed if we see no deeper. For example, someone may be smiling when he is really feeling depressed. However, when we see with our astral vision, there is no mystery. When we peer into their subconscious mind, we see the colors of their moods and emotions that perhaps are not reflected in their faces. Yes, colors and auras do relate to the five states of mind, conscious, subconscious, sub of the subconscious, subsuperconscious and superconscious. §
There are seven great force centers of psychic nerve ganglia, called chakras, within the physical body, the astral body and the body of the soul. Each chakra is a spinning vortex of mind power, a vast collective area of many, many different thought strata of odic and actinic energy. When awareness flows through any one or more of these areas, certain functions happen, such as the function of memory, the function of reason and the function of willpower. As the chakras spin, releasing energies into the body, these energies permeate the physical cells with life and vitality and radiate out through the force fields that surround the body. The forces are cloud-like or fog-like in consistency and reflect these energies in much the same way as a cloud reflects the rays of the sun. You have watched clouds in the sky at sunset. They appear to change color from white to pink to orange and then to darker shades. Of course, the clouds do not change. The light waves change. The clouds faithfully reflect the color of the light. In a similar way, the human aura is a reflection of the wave length of energies generated in our mind by our emotions and from our body. The basic odic and actinic energy of the aura itself does not change. It is the energies emanating from the chakras that change. The aura simply mirrors those energies as color vibration. ¶Within the aura are psychic nerve currents called nāḍīs. It is through these nāḍīs that you feel someone standing next to you without turning your head to look at him. Also, by standing next to a person, two or three feet away, you can feel how he is feeling. Feelings are transferable, for feelings are vibrations which can be felt through the subtle nerve system. You feel them with these astral nāḍīs that extend out from the body into and through the aura. Oftentimes you may identify with the feelings that you pick up from others and begin to feel that way yourself, while actually you are just picking up the vibration from someone near you. As we have learned, through the clairvoyant vision these feelings can be seen as colors in the astral atmosphere surrounding your acquaintance. As feelings are transferable, the colors within our aura are transferable, too. We now know that our aura, and the thoughts and feelings which give rise to it, affects and influences those around us. In a sense, we “rub off on one another.” A positive example is the way in which the pure and healthy aura of the faithful and devoted Hindu wife enhances the aura of her husband. His mental state is generally more positive as a result, and his business prospers.§
With the knowledge of the effect that we have on others through our mental and emotional astral atmosphere, we gain a wonderful siddhi: the ability to develop and improve our own aura and thus our daily mental and emotional state, and at the same time the power to improve the aura and mood of those around us. Your sādhana now is to take pains to develop your aura in the direction of more desirable colors and to gradually eliminate undesirable ones. ¶Now we shall begin to understand how to perform this new sādhana. It works in two ways: 1) by visualizing one or more bright, positive colors flooding your aura, immediately your awareness leaves the undesirable area of the mind (such as depression, anger or jealousy), and you experience more positive feelings; 2) by consciously moving your awareness into more positive areas through the repetition of positive affirmations or mantras, while at the same time working to bring through the corresponding feelings, such as joy, happiness or contentment. In this way the aura is infused with bright, positive colors. Consciously working to improve one’s own aura becomes doubly important when we remember that its colors, being magnetic, react back on our mind and emotions, thus intensifying and neutralizing the original mental states which called them forth. We have all found this to be true through the lesson that any negative mood or mental state seems to hold one in its clutches of its own accord, and it takes willpower to pull oneself into a more positive frame of mind. But, as you may have found in your previous experience with sādhana, consistent effort does yield results. You can steady and strengthen your mental and emotional faculty just as you can strengthen your physical muscles and steady your nerves through exercise and practice. ¶By consistently visualizing desirable colors in your aura, especially during moments of trial and emotional turmoil, you can become quite facile and skillful in controlling your individual awareness. Brightening up your aura in this way neutralizes the remnants of negative emotion and charges the aura with actinic energy. Automatically, feelings of depression and despair give way to courage and confidence. Feelings of jealousy and resentment give way to confidence and compassion. ¶As you continue with this sādhana, you will see how well it can work for you. This practice will also help you to further build and mold your character in accordance with the yamas and niyamas by keeping your awareness out of the darker or more dense states of the mind. You will soon develop a strong and more attractive personality which will naturally uplift others. ¶You have discovered the five states of mind: conscious, subconscious, sub of the subconscious, subsuperconscious and superconscious. You also understand the three phases of the mind: instinctive, intellectual and superconscious. Now we are learning about our individual awareness, what it is and how it travels through the vast universe of the mind just as a traveler moves from place to place on the Earth. In each place that the traveler visits, he is affected by the vibrations around him. He absorbs the thoughts of others and their moods. He is influenced by the events he participates in. Similarly, when your individual awareness travels through the mind, it is influenced or colored by the vibrations within each area of the mind it becomes aware in. This influences your nerve system and lays the foundation for your thoughts and feelings, thus giving rise to the colors in your aura. These colors are ever changing, because your own awareness is constantly moving through the vast universe of mind substance. §