35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
cartographer’s contour lines. His nose was a banana-shaped grey
protrusion of something closer to pumice stone than skin; and his
few wisps of dying hair looked as if they’d been torn off someone’s
aged fox-fur coat and stuck haphazardly on his skull.
I asked what had brought him to these parts. Gurus was the
answer. He had visited every ashram known where there was still
said to be a living master in residence. On one hand, he was
researching the ‘psychology of discipleship,’ the factors surrounding
human behaviour under conditions influenced by proximity to
those who claimed spiritual enlightenment or even more elevated
achievements. And, on the other hand, he was a keen believer in
something called Kirlian photography.
‘You might call diss a subtle emanation of electromagnetic energy,’
he explained.
By the time he had finished describing the nature of his work,
using metaphors and analogies drawn from everything from music
to campfires, I had grasped that the human body is surrounded by
an energy field that extends about an arm’s length from the physical
body (which is why anyone standing nearer to you than that seems
aggressively intrusive); and that this energy field, or aura,
represented in the past by artists as a nimbus gleaming from the
heads of Christ and saints, or, in Indian miniatures, as a halo
similarly distinguishing maharajas and holy men, can even be seen
by certain individuals possessed of psychic vision. The auras differ
from person to person; those of children, for instance, virtually
identical in both boys and girls, change noticeably after puberty,
males developing an elongated, phallic form, females a more oval
one. The colours in an aura also reflect its owner’s inner state, too
much red meaning anger, and so on. Psychopaths and
schizophrenics apparently emit a bewildering display of flashing
lights akin to an electric storm. If a person is sick – or is going to be
sick, and the symptoms are not yet physically apparent – his aura
will distinctly lack the essential healing colours, and look dim. Most
important to Dr. Otis, the auras of great holy men are utterly different
from all others: far larger, brighter, and composed of golden light
through which bands of healing rays – usually violet, orange, or
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