The Aura

Excerpted from
The Women's Book of Healing: Auras, Chakras, Laying On of Hands, Crystals, Gemstones and Colors
By Diane Stein

Women's healing, like Women's Spirituality, is a connecting of the seen with the unseen, and women's sensitivity to the unseen, her psychic ability and knowledge, is healings greatest hope today. Women's use of psychic sensitivity, of intuition of aura awareness, has been laughed at and repressed in Western patriarchy, but is recognized and respected in Native America, Africa, India, China, and South America - many still matriarchal and Goddess cultures. Women are re-claiming and re-sourcing the lost skills in the West that the witches knew, paying attention to inner knowledge and inner health. Like other "women's work," "women's intuition" has real things behind it, and is a wisdom for survival and well-being.

Inner awareness, sensitivity, attunement, intuition arc available to all and arc women's keys to the Goddess and Goddess-within, to healing and to self-healing power-within. By connecting and making conscious the four parts of Being, the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, women use Being and the aura to heal. Though human energy is much more complex than the first four bodies and their chakras, only the basic four bodies will be discussed in this very basic book.

Surrounding a woman's dense physical body is her unseen body, the aura, composed of layers of energy The physical sell first has an energy-layer double, called the etheric body. Health begins here, is mirrored here, and this is where disease manifests first, before it reaches the physical flesh. The emotional/astral body is the next aura layer, woman's feeling level, her connection between body and mind. Her menial body the next layer beyond the emotional, has two aura levels, the lower and higher mental, or rational and intuitive thought. The spiritual body's three aura levels, the lower, middle, and higher, are a woman's spirit or soul, her connection with the Goddess and the universe. A woman's aura is composed of the lour energy bodies, the physical/etheric, emotional, mental, and spiritual, which are in turn seven layers or levels. More discussion on them follows. A "silver cord" of life energy connects the unseen bodies, and connects a woman to Be-ing and non-Being (life to death).

In simple examples of using the unseen bodies for healing- a woman holds an amethyst in her hand, and opening to its energies, she uses the stone and her powers of emotion and mind - her etheric, emotional, and mental unseen bodies - to relax herself into sleep. Medicine calls this biofeedback. In another instance, she holds a crystal over an inflamed foot. She uses the crystal and laying on of hands, her own auras etheric body, connects spiritually with the Goddess, and visualizes and wills the swelling and redness gone. The pain and inflammation disappear overnight. In the same way, she uses the energy of her hands (etheric body) and a crystal with another woman, and the woman's three-day headache goes away. She can do the work with only her body and aura - her physical hands and etheric double directed by her mind via emotions, and relaxed into spiritual level calm - or she can do it with her hands and gemstones using these aura levels as well. When working with another woman, both women's auras are affected. Medicine calls the results spontaneous remission or the placebo effect; it cannot explain and it discounts this, but the woman and the women together know that they did it themselves and how. Healing is using the unseen aura bodies, the energy bodies, to change conditions on the seen and earthly plane.

Male medicine and patriarchy fragment the parts of woman's Be-ing. They not only separate the seen from the unseen whole, but separate the physical self. One doctor treats the back and another the heart, a different one the uterus and ovaries. None treats the whole woman or re-cognizes her energy bodies, the unity of her whole Be-ing. The power-over system denies the non-physical, the non-scientifically measurable, the psychic and irrational, as it denies the female with her connection to these things. It refuses to acknowledge, derides and represses the emotions, mind, and spirit in healing, and cuts itself off from studying or making use of them.

The earthly physical body is accepted as fact, is provable, measurable and treatable, but is also seen in Judeo-Christian patriarchy as "evil," as something to be punished or dominated with force. Medicine to this day holds this attitude. The auras physical body/etheric double bond is not recognized. Its emotional/astral level is not considered. The mind and mental body is downgraded to physical brain, and the spirit is left to male religions that fail to satisfy or fulfill it.

Science denies and ignores the teachings of thousands of mystics, psychics, and healers across all cultures and times. In addition it denies women's inherent aura intuition and even the Bible, both of which describe the aura and lour bodies. It also denies the "silver cord," the life thread that connects the lour bodies to earthly flesh and existence. By doing so, male medicine loses valuable resources and treats disease in only a fraction of the patient, on her earthly flesh plane only. Its "cures" are partial and ineffective, are traumatic and drastic - and could be much better and easier.

A woman with insomnia, for example, is given barbiturates to deactivate portions of her brain. She comes to depend on them, can no longer put herself to sleep alone, but needs the pills to do it for her. A woman with an inflamed foot is given drugs to kill the infection, instead of using her own aura and bodies to remove it herself. The "cure" takes more than a week, the cause of infection is not gone, and the drugs leave her body resistant to them and without immunities. A woman with a headache takes another aspirin, and her pain is gone for four hours. She has had it for three days and it returns.

Women's healing is psychic healing; it includes a woman's physical body, her etheric double, her unseen emotions, mind, and spirit. It includes her will and her whole Be-ing. The skills of visualization, meditation, psychic healing, crystals and gemstones bring the unseen to affect the physical, and bring the invisible energies into conscious reach of solid mass. The methods work with free will, with the Goddess and natural law, with the aura, the dense physical body and power-within, lo achieve cell-source healing in harmony with all the levels. It works where male medicine often fails because it connects the four planes of existence: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit; connects the seen and unseen, the mass and energy levels of the life force.

A woman's energy aura is an electrical force field, the easily fell but usually unseen energy that envelops the earthly physical body. It contains seven mirror layers or energy ring levels, and these make up the four bodies. Each of the aura layers has in turn seven levels of its own for a total of forty-nine levels. The next chapter describes the seven major chakra or energy centers located in the etheric double, the physical layer of the aura. There are also forty-nine total chakras, including smaller centers, and the seven major chakras correspond to the seven major aura layers. Only the major levels and chakras are fully considered in this book.

Of the seven major levels of the aura:

The first ring reveals her slate of health (etheric double), the second (astral or emotional body) her emotions, the third her intellectual makeup, the fourth her higher mind (both together are the mental body) ... the fifth her spirit, or the link between the individual and the cosmos (spiritual body), and the sixth and seventh reveal cosmic aspects (also the spiritual body).

The etheric double contains the chakras and is the level of psychic diagnosis and laying on of hands; the emotions or astral body is the one of changing colors that women who can see or sense auras are aware of, and healing requires emotion; the mental body is made up of two aura bands, the intellectual and intuitional levels, and is the place of creative visualization/mental healing; the spiritual body is three aura layers, the Maiden/Mother/Crone aspects of the Goddess, the highest of which is woman's connection with divinity and the universe. Women connect with the Goddess and their spiritual bodies for healing through meditation stales.

The menial and spiritual auras are the levels least likely seen by women who sense auras, but the ability to see or sense the physical aura/etheric body and the emotional/astral levels can be taught. The physical aura is usually sensed as a very thin bluish or clear line around the earthly body, above and below the etheric double, and is part of it. The etheric double is a reddish black, lined ribbon between layers of light. The emotional/astral body is the wider, color-changing vibrant band that starts about four inches from the body and that varies with the woman's emotions and thought forms. Thought forms are transmitted by the lower mental body and can sometimes be seen as shooting colors or lights inside the emotional aura.

The visible, physical, earthly flesh body that the aura envelops is dense, low-vibrating matter, and each of the unseen aura levels and aura bodies vibrates at a faster rate above it. The earthly dense body is the woman seen; it eats, breathes, and talks, digests and eliminates, menstruates and experiences life by the earthly senses of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Male medicine treats and works totally on this earth plane, on reactions that arc measurable and empirical lo science by cause and effect. It treats mass, where women's healing treats energy, and its expectations are based on norms and averages, rather than on the individual patients responses, chemistries, or astral dimensions. Acting on the lowest energy vibration, it is the crudest level for healing effectiveness, the site of surgeries and drugs. The earthly dense body is the only reality that male medicine accepts, and a partial one, until science discovers the aura that's always been there.

The newest theories of physics and body chemistry have some interesting ideas on the seen body's makeup, theories that scientifically verify what psychics and healers have said for thousands of years but doctors still laugh at, and that give scientific credence to the aura levels. Dr. W. J. Kilner's chemical screens made the etheric double visible to anyone and a tool for diagnosis as early as 1911, and Kirlian photography makes visible the auras surrounding people and animals, plants, crystals, and inanimate objects. The science of X-ray crystallography is a growing specialty, pioneered by woman scientist Rosalind Franklin in the 1950s.

Quantum physics' discoveries of the structures of the atom posit great empty spaces between atoms and atom parts, which are energy field (aura) areas. Even the densest matter is composed mostly of empty space. In the explanation of healer/science writer George Meek, the solid portions (mass) of the human body are composed of 75 to 80 percent water, and the distance between atoms in that very solid matter/flesh makes the body 99+ percent void! The example is that if an atom in the body were the size of an apple, the next closest atom to it would be one lo two thousand miles away. The idea of this is that solid human flesh on the earth plane is composed mostly of energy, of the spaces between atoms, and healers cross-culturally know that energy is what composes the four bodies and the aura, and is what they use to heal with. Medicine treats the little bit of solid matter that exists.

Another scientific theory that discovers healing is the composition of the water molecules that make up most of the earthly seen body. The body is mostly water, and water is an unstable compound of hydrogen and oxygen that is changeable lo almost any form of energy. Healing energy in laying on of hands and in crystals and gemstones is an energy that can transform water's bonding structure and change growth in the body's enzymes. thereby explaining the change from disease to health. Sister Justa Smith in Buffalo, with several other American scientists and many more outside the United States, are working to measure and document these changes. A healer using laying on of hands creates changes in the unseen energy bodies of the aura, and also changes in the earthly "solid'' material flesh by changing its water composition and the energy balance between atoms. More on crystals' part in this and laying on of hands later.

A third interesting theory scientifically verifying the work of healers is the new knowledge of cell intercommunication and rapid changeover. "Most of the 60,000,000,000,000 cells of the physical body ... are linked by a highly perfected communications system," and cells are generators of living energy and DNA. A single cell from any body part can be used in cloning an entire new organism; this is fact and one of today's great scientific controversies. Each cell contains the full blueprint of the individual. Cells die and are replaced by new cells at a rate of 5,700.000 per second. Protein, the major body component alter water, is also being replaced continuously the matter of the lungs, brain, bone, skin, muscles, in varying amounts of time from days to months.

Only the design of our bodies, changing slightly with the passing years, remains constant.... If the healer and the patient can help these new cells to be born in a slate of health and perfection, rather than as a facsimile of the diseased and ailing cells which died, then the body is on its way back to health."

The seen human body is totally new every six months by these cell changes and replacements, and each cell is an aware microcosm of the whole body mass. Changing the information of the cell from diseased to healthy, by healing energy of laying on of hands, by creative visualization and thought forms, by the energies of crystals and gemstones, brings disease back to well-being rapidly, far more rapidly and thoroughly than the trauma of surgical recovery or drugs. Disease is written out of the actual cell-source blueprint by women's healing methods, and allopathic medicine is failing its patients by not investigating and making use of such methods. The cell theory is one known to Eastern healers since before Christianity and Judaism, and before Christianity and Judaism were the Goddess matriarchies of women's healing.

The etheric double is the unseen mirror of the earthly physical body its next dimension. It's the first level, the life force band of a woman's aura, and interpenetrates the earthly dense body. Also called the physical aura, health aura, or bioplasmic level, its purpose is to maintain life by distributing energy, and to connect the earthly body to the astral/emotional plane. The basic seven chakras are located in this level (discussed more thoroughly in the next chapter), and the etheric double is responsible for the intake and use of prana (vitality and the life force), the energy sent and utilized in crystal work and laying on of hands. Changes made in the etheric double or the chakras by creative visualization, gemstones, or absent healing work can remove disease, re program the etheric body, and transmit the changes to the dense earth level, to the cells and organs. Like the root chakra that this aura band has correspondence with, its color is black or red, its circle direction is north, and its element is earth." Beginning gemstones for this level are garnet and black tourmaline.

A woman sees her own etheric double. She sits skyclad on a dark rug floor, candles lit on her altar, no other light in the quiet nighttime room. She breathes deeply and rhythmically and relaxes her physical body step-by-step, holding a crystal in her left hand lo help. Casting a circle if she wishes or inviting the Goddess's presence, she asks to see. Looking at her leg or arm lit against the dark background, she clears her mind and holds her eyes steady on one spot. If she wears eyeglasses or contact lenses, she takes them off, allowing her physical vision to unfocus and her third eye, her aura vision, to open. Slowly and elusively the aura appears. When she blinks it wavers but returns; she does not move her eyes.

The woman sees a very thin line of light at the edges of her skin and following her body's contours. The line is a quarter inch or less wide," and connected to it and above it is another line, a flat red/black band. The dark band has lines or striations through it and is the texture of grosgrain ribbon. The ribbon is her etheric double, following the contours of her body and the thin line of light between it and her skin. It is a half to one inch wide. Above the etheric double is another band of light, wider this time, bluish, silver, rainbow-like, or clear. In her quiet meditative stale, the light band is one-half to two inches wide, or may be as wide as several inches. It's of even width all around her body, and shimmers, seeming to be there and not-there.

Healing takes place in the etheric double before it manifests in the earthly body, and disease both manifested and pending is visible in the etheric double. W J. Kilners 1911 book, The Aura, was the first to scientifically observe both healthy and diseased physical auras in women, children, and men. He used lenses coated with the chemical dyes dicyanine and carmine to make the etheric body visible.