Archive for the ‘Auras’ Category

Re: Double Energy Blueprints

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

“Double energy blueprints” and subtle energies are exactly what clairvoyants (and yogis) have claimed to be able to see/sense for ages … and precisely failed to demonstrate, when proper controls are put on the testing of their abilities.

See also Emily Rosa’s testing of practitioners of Therapeutic Touch. (The pathetically muddle-minded attempts at offering competent “criticisms” of her study in that Wikipedia entry show just how solid the experiment actually was: If those are the worst faults anyone can find in her protocol, etc., she’s golden.)

Should any clairvoyant actually pass such competent testing as James Randi has long offered in his Million-Dollar Paranormal Challenge, I for one would be positively delighted to go back to accepting the existence of ethereal doubles and the like. Until then, the proper approach to all this is to recognize that, short of the ontological reality of witnessing consciousness, most paranormal claims—and certainly claims about perceptions of auras and subtle energies—are completely testable, even without the “personal experience” of higher levels of reality on the part of skeptics. That is, materialistic explanations come into play (and are fully appropriate) here, not from a lack of superconscious experiences per se on the part of skeptics, but rather because if these abilities and energies actually existed, someone would have passed the testing and claimed prizes like Randi’s by now.

This is all “boilerplate skepticism” which I for one have detailed many times before, and which anyone familiar with the details/process of how believers become skeptics will likely already know. None of that transition has anything to do with the presence or lack of “personal experience”; it’s rather a product of recognizing how very little one’s own easily misinterpreted and wrongly-elevated “personal experience” actually matters in determining the ontological reality of paranormal claims.

Update: There are plenty of other prizes also available in additional to Randi’s, which were included at the very same link I had previously posted, as indicated by the phrase “prizes like Randi’s.” Here is more direct link to the full list:

List of prizes for evidence of the paranormal.

None of them have ever been claimed.

Randi has indeed been testing and debunking many of the “best” of the self-deluded crazies who think they have paranormal powers, and doing that left, right and center, for many decades; it is no mere claim. From the Million Dollar Challenge FAQ:

Between 1964 and 1982, Randi declared that over 650 people had applied [for his Challenge]. Between 1997 and February 15, 2005, there had been a total of 360 official, notarized applications.

That’s more than 1,000 fools, frauds and quacks—a drop in the bucket, surely, of all the naked apes who imagine themselves to have paranormal powers, but hardly “a relatively small amount,” by any reasonable criterion for easy dismissal! And it ain’t his fault when applicants withdraw from consideration prior to even taking the preliminary test—I have read some of the back-and-forth he’s had to go through with those flakes, and you honestly couldn’t pay me to put up with the weaseling stupidity he faces from them. In fact, I would not hesitate to take each of those withdrawals, in practice, as a valid “data point” equivalent to his having tested the claims, with the claimant failing the test.

There are certainly “leading lights” in New Age blah-blah who haven’t even applied to be tested by Randi. People like Barbara Ann Brennan and Cynthia Larson. Not to mention Ken Wilber.

If you’ve done your research, even just to the point of reading my past postings on this site, you already know that Larsen is clinically synesthetic … and yet still considers the “auras” she sees (even in photos!) to be real phenomena. Brennan’s claims of how preliminary auras look are completely explicable in terms of basic wave-diffraction phenomena of physics; and her ideas about how pendulums interact with the human energy field are fully explicable in terms of the ideomotor effect. If you think that, when these “leading lights” get such simple things as that provably and ascientifically wrong, that they’re to have anything valuable to say about paranormal phenomena in areas that can’t be so easily tested, you’re royally fooling yourself.

Randi’s sheer quantity of evaluating and testing works out to nearly two applicants per month on average, over forty-five years. If you cannot consider that to be “very scientific” (i.e., to be enough), ponder for a moment how much less scientific is the attempt (which has no place on this rational website) to use the postulated (and hardly settled) existence of “dark matter” as a springboard for hypothesizing the existence of etheric doubles! Randi’s tireless work isn’t “scientific enough,” but “double energy body blueprints” are supposedly not “too much of a stretch” from science??!

Please. If you want to continue that line of thought, do it on Randi’s forums instead. I have no interest in it, much less do I have the time to waste on it.

(When foolish comments appear on my websites, just as back in the day when people would send me links to Ken Wilber’s latest idiocies, I have to take time out of my life to respond to them, otherwise it looks like I can’t respond to them—I have been very open about that problem elsewhere, in explaining why I have not opened my personal blog to comments. I did not allow comments here with the intention of providing a free forum for the support of indefensibly unscientific ideas, with me paying for the bandwidth. If you want to debate the possibility of woo-woo ideas being true, or take a stand about how much more debunking of paranormal claims needs to be done before you’ll accept its long-obvious and unavoidable conclusions, there are other places you can do that. This is not one of them. To refresh: This is my research blog for pulling together all the different strands for explaining how religion evolved from pre-shamanism into orthodox religion and “meditative spirituality.” I don’t want indefensible, Chopra-esque quack-scientific musings diluting and compromising the rational integrity of this site. You are free to pay unintentional homage to his evidence-free view of the world elsewhere.)

Posted in Auras, Subtle Energies | 1 Comment »

Humans Glow in Visible Light

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

From Strange! Humans Glow in Visible Light:

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.

Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.

No, it’s not a clairvoyantly visible “aura.” Still interesting, though.

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Mead and Me

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

Jerry Coyne, in the middle of the Mooney/accommodationist debate:

Science uses logic, reason and evidence to find things out.  Religion uses dogma and revelation.

Well, except that the dogma for them is regarded as properly vetted evidence from reliable sources (to a comparable degree as are refereed journals in science), and religious meditative experiences (as a subset of “revelations”) could in theory be reproducible, as Ken Wilber (of all people!) has rightly noted—even though, in practice, there are no controls in place to ensure that meditators are not merely experiencing what they expect to experience, in “group bias or error.”

Coyne continues:

These are fundamentally different ways of arriving at “truth.” Indeed, religions can’t arrive at truths at all, because the truth claims of different religions are in irresolvable conflict with one another, and there is no way of knowing which of these are wrong and which (if any) are right.

In exoteric terms that’s probably true. But in esoteric readings of holy books (e.g., of the resurrection of the Christ consciousness within you), not only are different religions not in irresolvable conflict with one another, they can actually be read as being in profound agreement in their cartographies of higher states of consciousness—as Paramahansa Yogananda, Wilber, and every advocate of the perennial philosophy have long emphasized.

In contrast, science has built-in ways of determining if it is wrong. When making a truth claim, scientists can answer the question, “How would I know if I were wrong?”  The faithful have no such way to test their “truth” claims.

Again, that’s true only in the literalistic readings of scripture; taking them instead as being based in the internal experience of higher levels of reality, there are indeed (in principle) ways of testing the truth claims (about the existence of auras and of claimed astral travel, etc.). Unfortunately, when those claims get tested by skeptics, they invariably fail. But that’s very different from there being no way of testing whether the claims are wrong.

Of course, the New Atheists are explicitly not directing their arguments toward that kind of “religion.” In fact, I once saw a video of a talk by the philosopher Daniel Dennett where, in the question period at the end, an audience member asked him why he hadn’t covered meditation-based religions like Buddhism in Breaking the Spell. His reasonable response was that he didn’t know enough about them to include them.

Ophelia Benson then commented:

And furthermore—if science can’t test or measure statements about the supernatural, then no one can. I think that formula is very often deployed to suggest (without stating, because of course it isn’t true) that some other ‘way of knowing’ can test or measure statements about the supernatural. But what would those be? Nothing. They would be nothing. There isn’t some other way of knowing that can test or measure things. There’s only one. If the supernatural is out of reach of science then it’s out of reach of human beings and we can’t know anything about it—so we shouldn’t make factual claims about it. We shouldn’t pretend we can know something about it. We shouldn’t suggest that other people can know something about it. It’s a black box—or else it isn’t. It’s not a black box for empiricists but a transparent one for others.

Since (as Wilber—gah—has pointed out) meditation is a “science” (albeit one with woefully inadequate controls), she’s actually (somewhat accidentally) right about the “reach of science” there … unless, of course, the experience of “no space, no time” really is an experience of Spirit (with no actual knowledge content, but still being ontologically real) rather than just a product of one’s parietal lobes and proprioceptive body-sense shutting down. Can science tell us which of those it is? Nope.

So you can see how pathetically little these “New Atheist” arguments can actually do to untangle you from New Age or yogic spirituality, if you’ve gotten yourself involved in those. In fact, it’s perfectly possible and logical for someone like Wilber to be as much of an atheist as Sam Harris, while simultaneously being one of the worst purveyors of post-metaphysical woo-woo on the face of the Earth.

So anyway, all of that got me reading Steven Dutch again, which led me to this:

There are certain classes of miracles that never seem to happen. People have been alleged to be revived from the dead, but no decapitation victim ever has. Nor are there any reliable accounts of severed limbs regenerating.

Which in turn reminded me of one of Yogananda’s stories:

Sadasiva never spoke a word or wore a cloth. One morning the nude yogi unceremoniously entered the tent of a Mohammedan chieftain. His ladies screamed in alarm; the warrior dealt a savage sword thrust at Sadasiva, whose arm was severed. The master departed unconcernedly. Overcome by remorse, the Mohammedan picked up the arm from the floor and followed Sadasiva. The yogi quietly inserted his arm into the bleeding stump.

And that got me thinking about Margaret Mead, and how she swallowed every daffy sex-liberation story told to her by a couple of Samoan girls.

And then it hit me, to a degree which it hadn’t previously: I was as guilty of believing every tall tale Yogananda told, as Mead was of taking those prank-playing girls at their word—of assuming, on good faith, that they wouldn’t outright lie to her. I mean, I knew that I was gullible, but I hadn’t previously realized that I was as gullible as Margaret Mead.

Ouch.

Of course, I wasn’t publishing peer-reviewed papers on all that. But still, there is that first book of mine….

Posted in Auras, Parapsychology | 6 Comments »

Hands of Light

Monday, June 15th, 2009

From Barbara Ann Brennan’s classic Hands Of Light:

With the light dim in the room, hold your hand so that the tips of the fingers point toward each other. Hold your hands in front of your face at a distance of about two feet. Make sure there is a plain white wall for a background. Relax your eyes and softly gaze at the space between your fingertips, which should be about one and a half inches apart. Do not look into bright light. Let your eyes relax…. About 95% of the people who try this exercise do see something….

Most people see a haze around the fingers and hands when trying to sense the aura. It looks somewhat like the heat wave over a radiator. It is sometimes seen in various colors, such as a blue tint. Usually, most people see it as colorless in the beginning.

The “artist’s rendition” picture is here:

The phenomenon which Brennan describes is real—physically real, that is. It’s just the product of light-wave diffraction, and can thus actually be photographed. Zajonc inadvertently gives an example photograph, in his Catching The Light:

That picture was created using laser light, which produces very sharp boundaries in the diffraction around the object blocking the light source; in his case, a human hand. Any other light source—e.g., the light reflecting from a plain white wall in the background—would simply produce a softer boundary around the object. Obviously, there is nothing special about using a “living hand” in the production of that diffraction pattern: an inanimate object such as a book or a pencil would work just as well.

The same is true, of course, of the “auras” which Brennan describes: Hold a pencil up against a white wall, and you will see exactly the same “aura” as you can see around your own hand.

Since those “colorless” or even “blue-tinted” “auras” can be photographed, they are not the product of the micromovement (i.e., the saccades) of our eyes. Rather, the phenomenon really exists in the physical world. There’s just nothing at all paranormal about it.

So, Brennan is actually being unduly modest in claiming that only “about 95%” of people can see that supposedly lowest level of the human aura: Everyone with good eyesight can see it.

Susan Blackmore, in her book In Search of the Light, provides another explanation of the existence of such simple “auras,” which is complementary to the (original, by Geoff) one given above:

[I]f you hold out your hand against a dark background and look at the space just beside the skin, you will begin to see a faint glow around it. Under some conditions it is possible to see colored halos and other more complex effects. If the fingers of two hands are pointed at each other and gradually brought together there comes a point at which the two auras seem to reach out and combine into one….

[T]he light skin against a dark background provides high contrast and good conditions for after-images. As the eyes move slightly but rapidly about (as they always do), an after-image builds up around the edge of the hand and produces a light blur. Colored after-images can also be formed.

Of course, if we can see these “auras” against both white and black backgrounds, any intermediate level of such contrast (and any background color) would also work, for producing a weighted mix of the aforementioned two visual effects.

There is at least one other contributing factor to at least some people’s ability to see (non-paranormal) auras. This is Dr. Jamie Wood:
 

A popular notion is that some people have a magical ability to detect the hidden emotions of others by seeing a colourful “aura” or energy field that they give off. Our study suggests a different interpretation. These colours do not reflect hidden energies being given off by other people, rather they are created entirely in the brain of the beholder….

Synesthesia is a condition found in 1 in 2000 people in which stimulation of one sense produces a response in one or more of the other senses. For example, people with synesthesia may experience shapes with tastes or smells with sounds. It is thought to originate in the brain and some scientists believe it might be caused by a cross-wiring in the brain, for example between centres involved in emotional processing and smell perception….

The ability of some people to see the coloured auras of others has held an important place in folklore and mysticism throughout the ages. Although many people claiming to have such powers could be charlatans, it is also conceivable that others are born with a gift of synesthesia.

Interestingly, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman may have exhibited a mild case of exactly that “gift.” From his “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”:

When I see equations, I see the letters in colors—I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.

Such an association of colors with numbers is indeed a form of synesthesia, as V. S. Ramachandran noted in his A Brief Tour Of Human Consciousness (p. 18-9):

Synesthesia, which appears to be genetically transmitted, results in a mingling of the senses. For example hearing a particular musical note might invoke a particular color: C sharp is red, F sharp is blue, etc. Visually perceived numbers can produce a similar effect: 5 might always be seen as red, 6 always green, 7 always indigo, 8 always yellow … Synesthesia is surprisingly common, affecting about one in two hundred [sic] people.

Posted in Auras, Synesthesia | 2 Comments »

Auras, Part II

Monday, June 15th, 2009

I had grown up seeing auras.

—Rosalyn Bruyere, Wheels Of Light

Most people see auras when they are kids, but it’s not verified, therefore, they disregard the phenomena.

—Barbara Ann Brennan

You may recall having seen auras when you were a young child. Perhaps you could see the mood of your family members as waves and shapes of color that changed as they were angry, happy, or sad. Many children see auras around people and material objects, and can keep this ability if they are encouraged (or, rather, if they are not discouraged)….

When I was an infant, all my senses seemed interconnected, most especially vision and hearing. This way of experiencing the world is known as “synesthesia,” a Greek word that means “perceiving together.” Whenever something made a sudden and surprising noise, such as a metal spoon falling off a table and hitting the floor, I would simultaneously witness a piercing flash of color that accompanied the sound.

—Cynthia Larson

Recall that one of the ways in which people see “auras,” beyond mere Imagination Run Amok Syndrome (IARS), is precisely via the neurologically real (but entirely non-paranormal) phenomenon of synesthesia. Thus, from Richard Cytowic’s The Man Who Tasted Shapes (p. 47-8):

“Your beeper made me see three red lightning bolts, brilliant red, going up to the left.” [Victoria] kept rubbing her head….

“Sharp, shrill sounds always do it,” she said, “like your beeper, or ambulance sirens, crashes [e.g., of metal spoons falling onto the floor], screeching tires.”

And from later in the same book (p. 245, 253):

The observation that synesthesia is more common in children suggests that in most individuals neonatal connections are pruned sufficiently so that any “anomalous” hyperbinding among modalities never reaches consciousness….

Roger Walsh [!] at the University of California … finds that synesthesia is one hundred times more common during meditative states compared to baseline prevalence….

With increasing years of experience, the percentage of meditators experiencing synesthesia increases (35 percent vs. 63 percent). Even within the most inexperienced beginners groups, those experiencing synesthesia had twice as much average practice time (17 years) than those who did not experience synesthesia (8 years). Among a third group of adept teachers (who had from 24 to 31 years of practice experience), over half had polymodal experiences and also perceived categories synesthetically—thoughts, emotions, and images felt as a sensation, for example. Further relevant observations for all three groups are that synesthesia was most apparent during meditation, and that some noted the onset of synesthetic experience only after they had taken up the practice of meditation. Walsh concludes that, “Awareness-enhancing techniques such as meditation may unmask an ever-present synesthesia to consciousness”….

The capacity for anomalous binding, which is the essence of synesthesia, is … latent in all brains.

So, why do you figure that meditation increases one’s ability to see auras, then?

Not that someone as overall-perpetually-clueless as Walsh (or his New Age-head wife, Frances Vaughan, who together with Roger introduced kw to the latter’s eventual second wife, Treya) or Larson would ever follow through on the logical/debunking import of the synesthesia-aura connection, though. Still, how refreshing it is to see any Wilberite contributing anything intelligent to the debate, however inadvertently that may be done.

Larson again:

It’s possible to see auras around photos of people … and they do change according to the moods of the people (usually the auras in the photos stay the same as the time when the photos were taken).

Geez, could you find a clearer demonstration that what “clairvoyants” such as Larson herself are sensing is not “life fields”—which couldn’t possibly exist in mere photographs!—but instead simply an involuntary mental association of certain colors with certain shapes? (Such associations, in synesthesia, do indeed usually stay constant with the passage of time; that has been abundantly verified experimentally [against control subjects who do not experience synesthesia], and provides one of the most solid indications that the subjects in question are not simply making the associations up as they go along.)

Posted in Auras, Synesthesia | 1 Comment »

Blue Aura of Death

Monday, June 15th, 2009

From Cynthia Larson’s book, Aura Advantage:

Guy Coggins, founder and owner of Aura Imaging Systems and inventor of the Aura camera and the WinAura video system, first became interested in aura photography in 1970 when he saw a Kirlian camera at a holistic health event. Coggins was fascinated by the Kirlean photography and dreamed of one day building a camera that could photograph the aura around a person’s body. The Aura camera, which Coggins subsequently invented and refined over the past thirty years, transmits radio waves through a person’s energy field, which are detected by electrical sensors on an antenna grid receiver system behind the person and translated by a computer into colored lights that appear around the person’s head and shoulders in the Polaroid photograph. This Aura camera and his newer computer/video WinAura system have made practical aura viewing a reality, helping people get instant feedback about their auras.

However, from Joe Nickell’s Aura Photography: A Candid Shot:

Can a photograph lie? I was intrigued by the process, which I found demonstrated at a psychic fair at Olcott Beach in western New York (July 17, 1999). There I posed for my very own “Full Body Aura Photograph”….

The photograph … showed such an intense “energy field” of yellow-bordered white light that it washed out my facial features. The printout designated this area as “Yellow” and interpreted it (in grammatically unparallel fashion) as “Sunny, Exhilaration.” (Small areas of “Green”—”Healing, Teaching”—were shown on either side.) One of the enterprise’s “experienced Certified Aura Imaging Counselors” told me the bright area of light showed I had prominent “spiritual” qualities….

When I returned to the booth for a second portrait, the proprietor seemed discomfited, asking me why I wanted another. I expressed curiosity, wondering aloud whether different moods would affect the outcome. She said it would, jokingly cautioning me not to think about sex and—when I asked what would happen—telling me the color red would predominate.

In fact, however, while I (blush) thought vividly about the warned-against subject … my aura was depicted in the resulting photo … as predominately blue (“Peaceful, Contemplative”) and green (“Healing, Teaching”).

As a knowledgeable source explained to Nickell:

The computer plots the information from the sensors. Within the camera is a liquid crystal display [LCD] of different colors. Each electrical frequency plotted by the computer is assigned a different color. The higher frequencies are assigned warmer colors—reds, yellows, oranges. The lower frequencies fall toward the cooler end of the spectrum—blues and purples. Greens and shades like turquoise, aquamarine, and yellow-green fall into the center of the vibrational spectrum. Coggins said he worked with psychics who helped him interpret the frequencies, and the colors they could represent. People with a lot of high energy in their field—red and orange—are described by most clairvoyants as vibrant and passionate.

Hmm. Maybe the LinuxAura or Apple iAura would do better….

Posted in Auras, Technology | No Comments »

Complementary Auras

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Well, this is interesting. From W. E. Butler’s otherwise hopelessly woo-wooey How to Read the Aura, Practice Psychometry, Telepathy and Clairvoyance (p. 174-5):

It often happens that someone in an audience will remark of a speaker to whom he has been listening intently that his aura was quite perceptible to him…. [O]ften the cause is a purely physical one and has nothing whatever to do with this radiating influence which we call the aura. The explanation is fairly simple. If one gazes with fixed attention at someone for a lengthy period of time, as, for instance, when one is listening to a lecture, the muscles controlling the focusing mechanism of the eyes become fatigued, and the eye focus suddenly alters. When this happens, the new image being received upon the retina falls on a slightly different point, and the result is that the old image is seen as a “surround” to the one we are looking at. This surround will be in the complementary colors to that of the person, and will usually be seen as a white or yellow band of light around him. This is purely a physiological phenomenon, but in an exceedingly large number of cases it is taken to be a vision of the aura.

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