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.
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.
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.)
[...] 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 [...]