Around 1971 I acquired a study of the vital-etheric field of the human being entitled 'The Bridge of Consciousness', published by Adyar-Verlag Graz. The English nurse Phoebe Bendit-Payne, who had a certain psychic perception (clairvoyance), and her husband, the doctor Laurence J. Bendit, were the authors of this study, which describes the processes in the 'vital-etheric aura' of a person during pregnancy, childhood and adolescence, in health and illness and at the time of death.
This study fascinated me because it was not based on faith but on scientific methods of observation. It also described the force fields that I had been feeling and observing since the three-day fast. The sum of all the force fields is called the aura, which had previously been described by W.J. Kilner, the consultant physician at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, who was able to make it visible to the naked eye by using certain chemical filters.
In a preface, Phoebe Bendit-Payne explains what clairvoyance means to her personally: "In the physical world, much can be learned by observation, but it does not follow that one understands what one has observed. Even when using the ability of clairvoyance, one is still using an external method of observation, and one sees many things that one does not always decipher correctly. All such visions are personal and should not be confused with spiritual enlightenment. The testimony of the physical senses must never be accepted as proof of ultimate reality. Any extrasensory perception must pass through the mind of the perceiver and is therefore influenced by his thoughts, intellectual interests and the general tone and colour of his thinking”.
The authors describe an aura that surrounds every living being and is hidden from ordinary sight. It changes according to health and illness. The skin is only the outermost spatial boundary of the dense physical body. Outside it, however, there is an aura which, although subtle and beyond the range of normal vision or even the most sensitive photographic film, is nevertheless intimately connected with the body and its functions. It disappears only after death. “It might be objected," the authors write, "that it is a simple earthly thing, like the heat radiated by a living body, which disappears when the cold of death sets in. It may indeed be true that some of it has to do with heat. But that would leave unanswered the question of why a piece of hot metal does not have the same aura as a living body. Nor would it explain why the contours of this aura change when there is no measurable change in local or general body temperature.
In the light of modern research, it could also be assumed that what is being visualised here is simply an electromagnetic field, as produced by any physiological process, even if it is only a minimal potential of a few microvolts. This is certainly closer to reality, since these potential differences are directly related to mental and physical processes, i.e. vital processes.
Finally, in recent decades, many people have been able to diagnose the cause of illness, as well as the general state of health and vitality of patients, by using various devices, ranging from very expensive, supposedly electrical devices, to simple divining rods and pendulums, or even just their bare hands. It is logical to assume that they too were dealing with the radiation field that exists around and within the body...
When all these facts are taken together, they only confirm what clairvoyance has to say on the matter. And although there are probably no two clairvoyants who agree on every detail, there is a great deal of agreement, firstly, that an aura does exist and, secondly, that it is a projected image of the physical, vital and psychological, spiritual state of the person to whom it belongs.
If one takes a clairvoyant look at the aura surrounding living beings, it is far greater than the limited 'atmosphere' described by Kilner. It seems that his method could only visualise the inner layers, the part that roughly follows the contours of the body. However, more sophisticated methods of observation show that the entire force field is much larger and has an approximately egg-shaped shape. In a normal, alert and active person, it has a diameter of almost two metres at its widest point, and in a perpendicular direction it usually extends more than half a metre above the head and below the feet. But these dimensions are very variable, far more variable than those of the denser inner aura which surrounds the body.
The larger ovoid aura is a complex formation of lines of force which, on the one hand, reflect the momentary processes of thought and feeling at any given moment, and, on the other hand, indicate the developed as well as the undeveloped potentialities of the individual's spiritual and psychic nature. In short, it is a mirror that reflects the image of the whole person at every stage of his or her personal development.
A special feature of the aura, noticed by every true clairvoyant, is a series of rapidly moving energy vortices located at certain points on the body. These energy vortices were known in ancient times and can be found in both Eastern and Western cultures, depicted in drawings, statues and carvings. In any case, they appear again and again with striking consistency in the traditions of the ancients as well as in the perceptions of modern, sensitive people. Moreover, it is not even necessary to be able to 'see' them in order to recognise their presence; many people feel them with their hands when they examine a person using extrasensory touch... Their Sanskrit name, chakra, means 'wheel', which aptly describes them. They are the organs of the psychic part of every living being and are very complex in structure. They are also very closely connected to the control mechanism of the dense body through the nervous system and the endocrine glands.