What Is the Aura, Really? Understanding Subtle Energy Through Radical Reality

What is the Aura?

What is the human aura, really? Is it just a mystical glow, a metaphor for mood—or something far more profound? In this excerpt from the introduction to my book – Radical Reality: How Seeing the Aura Reveals Who & What We Are – I share the foundations of a journey that bestowed me with an unusual gift: the ability to see the human energy field. This isn’t just an esoteric ability—it’s a lens through which we can decode the deep connections between mind-body, consciousness, and the unseen architecture of reality itself.

Whether you’re a curious skeptic, a fellow practitioner, or someone simply seeking to understand the deeper forces shaping our lives, this excerpt offers a fresh, grounded, and surprising take on the aura and subtle energy. It’s an invitation to shift your perception—and perhaps your entire framework for what it means to heal, feel, and be alive.

Introducing Radical Reality

I’ve dedicated myself to studying the nature of things. To find out, what is really going on with this thing called reality? A modern scientist does this by studying things from the outside with measurements and theories. A traditional scientist—also known as a sage—does this by looking at reality from within. A sage studies reality through the very substrate in which it arises, in consciousness—whatever that may be.

There’s a parable about fish and water:

An elder fish approaches a young fish and asks, “how’s the water?”

The young fish replies, “what’s water?”

We are the young fish—unaware of our surroundings. The water is consciousness—the very ground of our existence, yet we seem to know nothing about it. The elder fish is the sage, it’s the voice of the people in our civilization who have studied the water extensively, can acknowledge and account for its existence. Get this, they may even have a bit of insight about it. Science, as it is currently practiced, does not account for the water, it’s considered a “hard problem.” Systemically problematic indeed! Might we start to take seriously what the sage has to say, the self-scientists, those who specialize in studying water?

This book is for people who want to understand the water they are in.

Explaining consciousness tends to be taboo in modern science. You can’t do it, not allowed to. You can’t say the c-word! And the reason why is simple: everything falls apart if you do. There are variables to take into account in science. The one that is ignored, because it is really the only elephant in the room, is you—your participation, your observation, your sense of self, your mind, your existence—the fact that you are aware of being aware. You know of this awareness simply because it is.

I began my inquiry as a skeptic, and through my own journey, learned to see the water of consciousness (but more on that later). In this book, I will share my story, step by step, and leave it up to you to arrive at your own conclusions. You’ll hear my own radical story of awakening and learn from many great traditions and thinkers who helped me contextualize my own experiences.

There was a philosopher-prophet in the 20^th century named Marshall McLuhan. His ideas were all the ragefor a while because he saw the world in a way no one had before. He was able to see the consequences of the Information Age well before its effects had begun to set in. He coined a term; the medium is the message. The phrase means that it is the medium that matters most, not the message contained within. For example, the fact that television exists is of greater consequence than any particular show that could be broadcast on television. It is the medium of television itself that is the message, not the content on it. This cryptic and ingenious phrase has been misunderstood and misused a million times, but it doesn’t dilute its poignancy.

The medium is the message—and the medium is consciousness, it’s something you know from your direct experience to be true. The most immediate thing you are confronted with is the fact that awareness exists in each and every moment. This is-ness is slippery, subtle and all-too-obvious for us to handle. It is the most directly knowable thing and yet we don’t know what to do with it. Scientists can’t factor in the variable—and they certainly don’t dare claim to understand it. If we assume that science produces our best understanding of the world and yet it cannot provide an explanation to the most immediate aspect of our very existence, then we’re missing out on the truth, whatever that may be.

We all have a role in the world. You have yours and I have mine. Together, we constitute our world. As if each person is a thought within the collective mind. We must reconcile the fact that we all have a unique perspective while simultaneously functioning as an inter-influential collective.

The world is changing, and fast. The speed of technological and cultural and geopolitical change is furious. And we don’t know where we are headed—we’re amidst a worldwide experiment, the likes of which humanity has never experienced before. As I write this, we’re well into the 21^st century and even in my lifetime—which began in 1982—things were quite different. We cannot possibly understand the long-term effects of our ecological, technological and downright self-experimentation. The life a modern person leads is a vastly different one from just one hundred, let alone two hundred years ago. The technological revolution has and is happening—we’re exposed to so much information and novelty, it’s baffling. We occupy a planet-sized petri dish! I’m not saying it’s good or bad, headed in the wrong direction or the right one. However, what I am saying is we don’t know where we’re headed because we don’t know what we are. We are lacking the self-understanding to have a reliable compass.

Our collective worldview is currently quite narrow. We’ve adopted science as the truth bearer. It has replaced religion in its function of regarding what we agree is real or unreal, valid or invalid, true or false. We’ve accepted this blindly, presuming it’s an upgrade from previous versions or truth-gathering, while not realizing it shares the same pitfalls: myopia and dogmatism. We’re looking through a keyhole, peeping into the majesty of reality, not able to cope or even openly acknowledge the elephant in the room, “What is consciousness?”

This book aims to serve as a harbinger of the scientific and spiritual integration taking place now. I believe the 21^st century will be seen as the century in which our civilization started to utilize all its accrued knowledge in a balanced fashion. This includes the ancient and the modern: the wisdom of the sage and the ingenuity of the scientist. If we don’t, we may drown and not even realize our lungs are filling with water. What’s water?

I invite you into a process of considering things deeply. I’ll be asking some big questions for you to consider. And why not? Big questions have big implications—they are important to ask. By asking these questions, I’m hoping to show you how my own personal journey has answered them. As I share my own open-ended conclusions, I invite you to draw your own.

For now, consider what it means to try and find out what the nature of reality is. Does that sound simple or easy to do? What would that require and how would you go about answering the question? How much time have you spent doing something that enables you to engage with that inquiry? Do you assume only a scientist can answer the question (or even has the right to)? There is no more significant question. I hope our civilization starts to be more curious about it, alongside how it may be answered.

Before my own inner journey, I was the skeptic, the scientific materialist— and a heavy one at that. I find this kind of personal shift of the most compelling nature. True scientific inquiry should be open-ended and curious. In my case I was open-minded, but didn’t have any desire to discover that reality was different from the one described by the scientific paradigm. I hope this invites and inspires the skeptics out there to view my story with an attitude of open-mindedness. In part, I am attempting to convey this story and these conclusions to my former self.

The book has two parts that unfold in parallel: my personal journey and explanatory frameworks. My story is a pretty unbelievable one. In some way, we’re all intrigued by the magical, the indescribable, the mystical and the transcendent. I’m going to share my story of awakening and attempt the potentially impossible task of articulating the ineffable. If you’re interested in deep explorations of life and reality, this story is for you. The focus is on a period of roughly seven years from late 2010 to late 2017. In that time, I practiced and studied the same amount of time for a doctorate, logging well beyond 10,000 hours on a subject and accruing an associated skill set.

Consider what you’re reading as a modern sage’s dissertation on reality. Whereas a physicist may take that accrued expertise and write about thermonuclear reactor technology, or a biologist about cutting edge stem-cell research, I’m presenting you with a map of mind and consciousness based on personal experience—explained through the many maps that exist regarding those phenomena from fields both scientific and spiritual.

There are regular pauses throughout the story to analyze my experience in hindsight; these are the explanatory frameworks. You’re going to see how exotic and paranormal my journey became, and these explanatory sections will show you how one might make sense of it. There is a progression of understanding that will build an overall map of how the mind and body and consciousness are related. I broke through the veils of everyday perception to discover that reality is far more complex, sophisticated and connected than we currently know. I hope to impart just how radical reality is from a grounded, integrated perspective.

I’m going to explain to you what I call the gap and the chasm. The gap refers to our current understanding of the mind. Science doesn’t even claim to know what the mind is—it isn’t proven at all—and the gap is massive. The chasm goes a step further into the unknown. The chasm is consciousness. Once we get a hold on what the mind may be, there is an infinitely large leap to consciousness. My intention is to explain the gap through a multidimensional model of mind and to consider, suggest, and speculate on the chasm of consciousness.

This book is both for the spiritual types and equally for the skeptics out there. The spiritual types are those of you who are practicing inner work, in one form or another, and who likely believe that whatever we are, we’re more than just physical. The skeptics are likely to be the scientific types who align with the current paradigm of materialist reductionism. Their beliefs would tend to be that we’re just physical bodies and that mind and consciousness are exclusive to humans or higher-level evolutionary organisms. I apologize for the brevity and limitation of such characterizations!

I wish to invite all types of reader and perspectives into this journey. You’re going to see how my own journey took me from a mainstream scientific perspective to a more traditionally spiritual one. This happened organically and unexpectedly. The compelling evidence that helped me cross the Rubicon was my direct experience: not what anyone said or suggested, and not what I thought or wanted to believe. It was what emerged when my very own direct knowing endlessly smashed my presumptions about reality to tiny bits.

As the story unfolds, you’ll see how my experience was somewhat common at first and then things started to become quite unusual as my perception of reality changed. The overall arc will reveal how I came to directly perceive that we exist in a multidimensional framework. Reality is far more complex and interconnected than it seems on the surface. Multidimensionality is a big shift in self-understanding, a radical one. However, you’ll see how this is being understood right now in cutting edge science, and how it’s also been understood for thousands of years by sages. I hope to elucidate this critical and consequential fact. My goal is to provide language that suits all types of curiosity because the phenomenon and the explanations can be articulated through both spiritual and scientific language.

For the scientific types, a useful way to interpret my story is to view our human experience as a relationship to data or information. In each moment we sift information through our changing perceptions. The inner journey I embarked on enabled me to engage with far greater information than is normal. This framework may help the scientific skeptics—my journey entails continually breaking through normal perceptual boundaries into deeper layers of information about the mind-body connection, and ultimately to the chasm of consciousness.

For the spiritual types, you may consider my experience as one of awakening to discover my true nature, or essence. I learn to transcend the faculties of normal human perception, gaining access to extrasensory abilities in which I can clearly view the complexity of the human aura, and the geometry which underlies the informational and perceptual network of the mind. A journey in which I have mystical experiences, recall of transpersonal and ancestral memory, and accurate precognitive experiences. Slowly, I’ll be revealing the structure of enlightenment.

To give a sense, here’s what my perception is right now. When I close my eyes, I have clear vision of the electromagnetic field that surrounds and interpenetrates my body and others. It is organized multidimensionally, meaning it has many levels, layers, or facets. The “connective tissue” of the field is a geometric lattice that serves as a multidimensional interface for energy and information to flow from one level to another. The movement of the field is an effortlessly brilliant and beautiful play of shape and light, whose underlying dynamics follow the same kind of rules as water running over earth or fire dancing with the wind. The forces behind it, however, are not gravity, temperature, or pressure gradients, rather they are emotions, thoughts and the quality of one’s presence. This inner landscape is a rich tapestry which reflects experience from an inverted vantage point from the familiar, external facing one. It is a highly complex, information-rich environment that may very well prove to be the next big step in revealing who we are and how we are connected to the universe as a whole. It is really quite something to behold.

I wasn’t born seeing this way, but you’ll learn how this came to be. Many people are fascinated by the idea of seeing auras. Why do you think that is?  My ability to see the aura was really an accident. Or maybe, more accurately, not something I intended to have happen, but a by-product of sustained meditation and healing work. Eventually, I’ll explain what this kind of vision actually is, and how individuals may be able to access it. I believe the structure and nature of the aura is the missing link to truly understand the mind-body connection.

My story is just another hero’s journey, not a special one. I dare suggest it’s the very same quest you’re on right now. Different actors, different settings, different dilemmas, yet all having the same general arc—the main character (you or me or anyone) has a great challenge or series of obstacles to overcome and then gets to integrate the gained knowledge and wisdom in their renewed engagement with the world. In truth, we’re all the same: unique on the surface, exactly the same at depth. As you’ll see, my journey is a confirmation of this shared essence.

Navigating deeply into our mind and body (even time and space!) can raise some gargantuan questions. And naturally so. We need to ask them because they inform the very foundational assumptions we have about who we are as individuals and our relationship to each other, the planet, and the vastness of the universe. That’s why I am most compelled to share this story with you—not to prove nor to glorify—but to create the space to ask and consider the most serious, consequential questions we can ask. If we don’t do this on a personal level and thereby a collective one, we could unintentionally walk a misguided path into the future.

Ultimately, we’ll consider the possibilities of how the universe is constructed: describing the key design elements of a radical reality, far removed from our everyday sensibilities and presumptions of how things are connected. We may be at the precipice of new ways of thinking at a collective level, and I describe these through a term I’ve coined, cosmimetics: a potential field of science and a mode of thought in which inspirations are drawn from universal design features, enabling human ingenuity to imitate the structure and systems underlying the cosmos.

Finally, a disclaimer of humility: despite how passionate or certain I may come across in text and tone, these explanations are open considerations. Please consider this book as a personal story alongside a theoretical model of reality. As you’ll soon discover, the model is based on direct experience, supernormal perception and interdisciplinary research.

So, here’s my story of awakening. It’s a story of healing, revelation, transformation, and insight. I’m going to explain how I went from despair and darkness to peace and equanimity. Let’s head down the rabbit hole together—it’s going to be a wild ride.

—- End Excerpt —-

Continue Reading Radical Reality

If this excerpt sparked something in you, you’ll find much more in Radical Reality, available now in paperback and eBook. The book explores how seeing the aura opens new pathways to healing, perception, and awakening.

To go deeper, explore our Field Dynamics trainings and our signature EHT-100 course, where we teach the principles of energy healing in a clear, grounded, and transformational way. You can also tune into our ongoing conversations on the Future of Wellness podcast.

Thank you for reading—this journey is just beginning.