The ability to see auras is described as a psychic skill that many people naturally possess, especially children. It is in the category of clairvoyance. In this experience, the varying brilliant, transparent colors emanating from a person, called the aura, are perceptible to the naked eye. In this process, it is speculated that our electro-magnetic energy is radiating soul-consciousness through the vibrational levels of color corresponding to our soul pattern. This skill is related to clairvoyance, but has expanded to include the physical eyes in addition to the inner eye. Many psychics are naturally able to observe auras, and have gotten used to it since childhood. In one incident that has been written about in the life of the famous psychic Edgar Cayce, auras played a major role. As biographer Jess Stearn noted in his biography of Edgar Cayce The Sleeping Prophet (1979), apparently Cayce was able to forestall his death by instinctively refusing to step into an elevator that subsequently failed. Everyone in the elevator died. This leads us to believe that perhaps the absence of the aura is a sign of impending death. The reason he gave was that he knew something was wrong when the doors opened and he saw, momentarily, the lack of auric emanations around the people within it.

Kirlian photography has been able to capture the aura in a photographic technique that was developed by a Russian research team. As husband and wife, Valentina and Semyon Kirlian began their research in 1939 and were granted government funds by Russia in 1960 to continue their work. We in the West are indebted to the scientific advances that these scientists contributed to the field of parapsychology. Their experiments are covered in more detail in the UMS Chakras & Auras course.

Dr. Orloff, who worked with Kirlean photography at the U.C.L.A. research lab, describes it as a process that records the subtle energy field of all forms of life, as well as inanimate objects. She says in Second Sight (1966) that this field extends as far as a few feet or more beyond the body, and is not detectable by most people.