The Aura, Animation of the Spirit

By Tymothy Smith

At the time he wasn’t sure if he was going crazy, so he decided to try to find someone that might know what was happening. Although he did find metaphysical groups, few had even heard of the term Out of Body Experience, never mind would be able to assist him in his explorations.

 Today however, most everyone has at least heard of such a thing, never mind that many have actively attempted to have these experiences. Such is the case with the human aura. A few years ago many would have given you a crooked grimace if you asked what the aura is, if it was real, what it meant, all these types of questions. But today, if you were to go to any home in Humboldt County, most of its fair residents would be able to give at least a cursory definition.

 There are many ways to look at the aura, many traditions that have discussed it and its applications in metaphysical studies, in medicine and in art. For the sake of this article, I want to give the loose definition that the aura is the motivator and the result of cellular processes that are mediated by what is known as the Kundalini, or Spiritual Power through the body/mind. Wow, you say, cellular processes, but I thought the aura was spiritual? But if I may, all processes in the body are spiritual, from the mitochondria creating their own DNA to feeling when your friend needs a hug. These are all a portion of our experience and from the most mundane, material based to the most ethereal, all processes have electromagnetic properties. In the human body/mind we call this collectively the aura.

 It is through the Vedic system, the ancient Indian medical philosophy that I would like to use a backdrop for our discussion, but because it is the Aquarian age, we will take a new look at an old paradigm.

 Let us begin simply with a discussion of the Kundalini and the chakras. In the ancient tradition it was thought that the Kundalini, the intertwined feminine and masculine serpents, lie dormant at the base of the human spine waiting to be awakened through disciplined spiritual practice, namely meditation and prayer. For the most part, until that transcendence, we as spirits having a human experience, would be essentially asleep.

 This, I feel is true, but I would offer that the Creative Force, in the shape of spiral energy that moves through the spine animating the corporal body is always awake to the needs and ideals of the spirit inhabiting the form. The Kundalini are awake to the degree that we are awake, for the Kundalini are also a symbolic representation of our own ability to be alive and as Joseph Campbell so aptly cited “spiritually mature.”

 Thus whenever we interact with another, we can think of our collective energies, from the base of the spine upwards as defined by the science of our day, Quantum Physics, as “entangling” through the Law of Attraction (and repulsion).

 The aura has been measured by the researchers at HeartMath as extending some four feet from the body and appears to be strengthened when multiple people come together with a single aim (namely raising the groups’ vibration such as religious gatherings or sporting events). This arousing of the vibration, the reversal of the laws of the world that tell us that when we give something away we have less of it, is the heart and soul of what the great spiritual masters have indicated throughout history.

 When I am excited about something and I share that energy with you, and you become excited, I do not become depleted. In fact the arousing of your Kundalini energy allows, and one could say seduces, the arousal of my own. This is the direct antithesis of the materialist paradigm that no longer serves us, and that through the evolution of the human spirit is being replaced by a more holistic and reasonable view of things.

 The Kundalini are essentially visualized as serpents. Remember that there is discussion that the serpent told in the Book of Genesis was originally set as two serpents, one that instructed the humans to experience materiality (the masculine) and one that instructed them to not eat of the tree of separation (the feminine). Later, unfortunately it appears that the feminine serpent was forgotten, and thus the poor snakes have suffered ever since. These two serpents, the masculine and the feminine, have residence at the base of the spine, and move in a spiral dance in and through the spine from the coccyx to the pineal gland in the center of the brain. The energy then continues down the front of the body creating what the Taoists call the “microcosmic orbit” by connecting the tongue to the roof of the palate, thus allowing the energy to travel to the solar plexus, creating the electromagnetic spectrum or more commonly, the aura.

 Where the serpents cross then creates what we all know and love as the chakras or Sacred Centers. These relate to the physical body through the endocrine glands and relates to Universal principles through color, sound and planes of consciousness.

 It is the movement of the serpents that define the rate, if you will, of these Sacred Centers. Much like a pinwheel, where the power of your breath (and all the words of the great traditions link energy and breath) increases the spin, just so does the relative spin of the Sacred Centers depend upon the ebb and flow of the Kundalini energy. Thus we can think of the Kundalini, not so much as asleep, but rather as dependent upon how much of the Creative Force we are allowing to animate us.

 In the Vedic system they have mapped the chakras through the rainbow of colors, starting with the base of the spine as red and moving up through each of the centers to the third eye or ajna center as violet continuing to the crown, or top of the head as pure light. In my experience, each of the centers can be any color, and this depends on multiple factors, namely the mood of the person and the movement of energy from and through one’s internal and external environment.

 Barbara Brennan, one of the first Americans to write about the human aura states that the chakras are there to bring energy in, but I would offer that this is only half the story. The chakras are the means by which we are animated in time and space and as such communicate between the interior landscape and the seeming outer world, thus we both receive and give energy through these centers.

 Vibrant health and well being are both what we get from our world and also, and perhaps more importantly, what we give. This is a very pragmatic perspective, namely that the quality of the health of our body/mind is in continual flux, (what Buckminster Fuller called “tensegrity”) and that though our systems can be looked at as filters against the seeming outer world, they are also the intermediaries of our very nature.

 With this perspective in mind then, we are forced to become more responsible for our own state of consciousness, realizing that this is what we share with another. That something as simple as the ability to listen is as important in our spiritual evolution as sitting on our zafus. Further that the ideal we set in our lives, be it a spiritual master or tradition, is the potential to the quality and quantity of energy made available to us. Let us then take this awareness and not hesitate to reach for the stars, we may not get there, but we at least we will walk in stardust.