Aura photos — one great deception
(please don't call it a scam!)

A long-time puzzler for me

My father, who was what you might call a 'rigid' intellectual, thoroughly steeped in the materialist-reductionist belief system while posing as being 'broad-minded' about everything, a long time ago (probably when I was in my late teens) recounted to me an example of pseudo-scientific quackery, as follows. I can't remember exact details now, so I reconstruct what he told me, to faithfully recount the essence of what he told me rather than every last accurate historical detail.

He was librarian and information officer at a Kodak factory here in the UK (long before digital photography had started coming on the scene), and on one occasion he and a few colleagues were detailed to visit some photographic trade fair. At that fair was a demonstration of Kirlian photography by some firm promoting and presumably selling Kirlian cameras, and my father and colleagues attended that demonstration, being sure it must be quackery.

For the most part the audience at the demonstration (I think probably the demonstration bit was of Kirlian photos being taken of various people's hands) were apparently accepting it all as genuine and most impressive, as demonstrating the existence of the human 'aura'. However, at question time at the end one of my father's group piped up with a perfectly straightforward response to one of the demonstrators' remarks — a response that could hardly be a great surprise, coming as it was from a senior employee of a firm that made both cameras and photographic film, and knew more than a few things about both of those.

In response to one of the demonstrators pronouncing triumphantly to the audience now, can you tell me any way that that [i.e., the photo of a hand with the strange tenuous light effects around it] couldn't be genuine?, an awkward cuss in my father's little Kodak group spoke up. — Well, actually, could we have a look inside that camera? It looks to me to be just the sort of effect one might get when some light is getting into the camera and slightly fogging part of the film!

— To which, the particular demonstrator suddenly got rather agitated, didn't answer that point at all and apologetically said they'd better get on now to 'next business', and closed that session.

So, whatever was going on generally in the name of Kirlian photography, at least one firm that was selling supposed Kirlian cameras in a most high-profile manner was evidently running some sort of scam. Nonetheless, I kept an open mind about all such things, particularly in the light of my father's clearly dismissing out of hand everything that didn't fit neatly into his own materialist-reductionist belief system.

That, then, was the limit of my knowledge about such things until I became enlightened at the beginning of 1997 and then started getting, shall we say, 'pixie-led', into the 'spirituality' phenomenon, with all the problems and disruption that that was eventually to bring me as a result of rendering me increasingly vulnerable to the garbage.

Then I was starting to take on elements of 'spiritual' and 'New Age' beliefs, with which I was actually generally feeling rather uneasy, because in various ways those beliefs didn't accord with my own enlightened perceptions. Nowhere was that discrepancy more obvious than in the case of the popular notion of us each having a highly structured 'energy system' or 'aura' including energy centres called chakras, and the notion of 'reality' containing or consisting of different discrete 'dimensions' populated by various kinds of non-physical beings.

Of particular relevance here was the fact that generally the people into 'spirituality' accepted without serious question that Kirlian photography was genuine (though with no data to back that up) and was a demonstration of the existence of the human aura, and indeed it turned out that various people and firms were earning money by taking purported 'aura photos' of people and then supplying them with prints and often supposed interpretations of the depicted 'auras', according to the colours displayed and their distribution and proportions — though it appeared that these were produced by some means other than the Kirlian method.

That never rang true with me, because there was a great lack of transparency about how such photos were created, and, more importantly from my viewpoint, there had to be some sort of deception involved, because the aura, if it existed at all, was non-physical and therefore couldn't be photographed. I thus remained extremely sceptical about purported aura photos.

Then in 2002 I attended a local introduction to a markedly different type of supposed aura photography — the PIP scan, which seemed more convincing in a way. Here is one 'nutshell' description of it:

PIP scans (poly-contrast interference photography) give you the opportunity of gaining accurate information about the human (or animal) energy field. Using only a digital video camera, a computer and a special programme the scan is completely non-invasive (unlike x-rays) and simple to understand.

This was extremely puzzling for me, for the colourful interference pattern effects over and surrounding the photographed person were being described as the aura, and I could see no way that they could be that, even if they were showing something useful. The PIP scans were apparently being used for various sorts of medical diagnosis and assessment, supposedly showing where there were problems in the aura and thus which part(s) of the body needed healing attention. Something wasn't 'adding up' here, notwithstanding PIP scans apparently being a useful holistic healing diagnostic tool of sorts.

At the Quest 'mind, body and spirit' fair in Newton Abbot in July 2004 I was encouraged by a certain Gordon Hughes* (henceforth abbreviated to GH) to have a (purported) aura photo taken at one of the stands there. This I did, somewhat against my better judgment, and I show the result below. This was clearly neither Kirlian nor PIP scan, and involved my having to have one of my hands resting flat on a sensor device while the photo was taken.

Even then I was fairly sure that it couldn't be a genuine photo of my aura, even if it was showing useful things. I showed the photo to GH, and he pointed out the irregularities in the yellow in the fuzz around and above my head, confidently telling me that the various extrusions of the yellow into the green were 'guides' (i.e., 'spirit guides') of mine.

— Really? — Goodness me!* — But, most uncharitably, I remained stubbornly unconvinced that this could really be my 'aura', even though very superficially I sought to convince myself that all that was genuine and that the proportions and distribution of the colours was meaningful. And I was even more unconvinced that anything in that photo was really 'guides' of mine — even though that was during the period when I was sort-of carrying a superficial belief in existence of the human aura and was assuming that I must have one.

In the years since then I'd had no further contacts with any sort of alleged aura photography, because I felt that there was something not 'adding up' about it, and also, I got uncomfortable intuitions about the people who were promoting and carrying out such photography, for they all appeared to have some pattern of holding and promoting a particular set of beliefs and seeking to make them sound convincing by backing them up with what appeared to me to be unsound data, and skipping round any 'awkward' observations that didn't fit the beliefs that they were promoting.

Generally this was to their considerable financial advantage, which again reinforced my scepticism. A fair proportion of such people were talking / writing in 'scientific'-sounding terms that I recognised as pseudo-science — just the sort of stuff that my father got so dismissive about. The problem with him, however, was that he then assumed that anyone at all who countenanced anything outside his materialistic reductionism was similarly being a 'crank' — irrational and unscientific or at least pseudo-scientific.

Finally, in 2012, having over the previous few years come to the conclusion that the human 'aura' must be an illusory phenomenon created in the mindspace of psychics by the garbage, I decided to revisit this subject area and see if I could clarify just what is going on with these different types of purported aura photography, and indeed whether I could thus show my own most recent conclusion about the human aura to be in need of modification.

Ultimately a belief, whether of mine or anyone else's, is no good to anyone, for the only information or 'understanding' that is of genuine benefit is that which points to what is actually there — not to what I or anyone believe or would like to think is there.

I thus did a little Internet searching to get a better idea of to what extent the three aforementioned purported aura photography methods might actually be demonstrating the existence of the aura, and, if not, whether they were showing anything that was (a) genuine or 'real' and (b) actually genuinely useful.

 

My current understanding of the purported aura photography methods

(Pssst — They're (apparently) all nice, well-intentioned people — please don't call it a scam!)

One thing that became clear(er) to me through my new investigation was that NONE of these methods actually directly depicts anything apart from the person or object plus some artificially created effects — what one can call artefacts. Let me relate here another instance of artefacts being created and then widely compulsively misinterpreted to cultivate various people's 'wish fulfilment' beliefs.

I recently found that a particular unidentified sound nicknamed 'Bloop' had been recorded in deep ocean by the NOAA Acoustic Monitoring program. The recording on the NOAA site was actually speeded up 16 times to make it easily audible, for at original speed the sound was so low as to be almost completely inaudible to human ears. All well and good, but then 'mystery junkies' had got in on the act and posted on a 'Bloopwatch' site what they claimed was the NOAA Bloop recording reduced to its original speed.

Actually they posted the 16x speed NOAA recording 'as is' plus a version of that with noise reduction and also an alleged 16x slowed-down (i.e., more or less original speed) version of the NOAA recording, plus a version of that with noise reduction.

Curiously, all those recordings apart from the basic NOAA one contained a lot of strange and indeed 'mysterious' synthesizer-like musical tones, largely or completely replacing the original sound.

This turned out NOT to be deliberately added music, but artefacts created by the process of noise reduction and the purported slowing down of the recording. I say 'purported' slowing down, because what the fools had done was to process the NOAA recording in a way that was NOT genuinely slowing it down (which would have lowered the pitch into inaudibility again) but was simply stretching out its duration to 16x length, while maintaining the pitch. Unfortunately, this had virtually obliterated the original sound, replacing it with rather beautiful musical-sounding artefacts!

That in itself would be fine as a bit of artistic work based on the Bloop sound, but what those fools had done was to post on their site those recordings full of artefact sound, claiming them to be the genuine Bloop sound, and then to encourage people generally to believe that the source of the Bloop sound was that awesome and mysterious, to be creating such a weird (and indeed 'musical' sound) — with not a word about the artefacts, actually created by their sound file editing software in the process of virtually obliterating the genuine original recording.

Unfortunately, it appears that people had widely swallowed that bait, uncritically taking it to be the genuine article, and had enthusiastically posted on sites and forums all over the place with links or indeed actual copies of those sound files, claiming them to be this really awesomely mysterious Bloop sound, when in reality the contents of those files were just a mass of rather nice-sounding artefacts that had appeared during the actual destruction of the actual Bloop sound by inappropriate processing of the original recording.

I myself even tried experimentally giving the same type of processing to the NOAA recording in the Audacity sound file editor, and, sure enough, I got a similar effect. So, this wasn't just me being negatively sceptical, but simply me being the awkward cuss that I am and pointing out what's really going on instead of uncritically feeding some personal 'mystery' addiction.

It was thus clear that a considerable body of interested people were not in the slightest interested in knowing what was really going on down there in the deep ocean, and that their real interest was in cultivating particular beliefs and illusory realities about what was down there, to feed some emotionally based compulsion of theirs in order for them to have feelings of 'mystery', 'awe' and excitement — no doubt to add a certain frisson to their otherwise largely dull and none too happy lives (hence also the near-universal preoccupation with soap operas, computer games, mobile phones, watching professional competitive sports, and other such trivia).

We need to keep this 'I want it to be true, so it is true…' problem clearly in mind also when looking at the 'aura photos' phenomenon, because all those photos are of artefacts and NOT, at least in any direct way, of the aura either as generally understood, or indeed of any other objectively existent type of 'aura'.

Kirlian photography

Actually it looks to me on the face of it as though Kirlian photography might be a genuine method, despite the experience related by my father — but one needs to be thoughtful about what such photos are really showing. In other words, we need to apply clear-mindedness to the matter of what the method is actually for.

If Kirlian photography is showing anything genuine at all, it's showing an interference effect, allegedly between a reference electrical field around an electrically charged plate or other object and some very slight electrical or at least electromagnetic field of the actual object being photographed. So, that would be a sort of indirect photograph of the object's slight electrical / electromagnetic field, though it's a direct depiction NOT of that electric field itself, but of an artefact caused by the interaction / interference effects between that electromagnetic field and the stronger reference electric field of the deliberately charged plate (or other object).

In any case, the possible presence of a very weak electrical / electromagnetic field around people and other objects would hardly be the structured aura recognised in various 'healing' and spiritual / metaphysical traditions and the whole New Age confusion of a 'movement', because that's clearly non-physical and supposedly has all sorts of structural features that don't show at all in the Kirlian photos.

Thus, whatever Kirlian photography is showing, if it's genuine at all, we can rule it out with regard to aura photography, and it could be at best only very weak evidence of the possible existence of the 'aura' as generally understood — i.e., because much more likely the weak field that's being apparently demonstrated is physical and thus is presumably a separate phenomenon, and it shows no structuring that would suggest that it relates to the 'aura'.

'Aura photography' using an 'aura camera' with hand contact on a sensor device

This is the regular 'aura' photography that's widely offered, particularly at all manner of 'spiritual' and New Age fairs. Here is a quote from one website that, as quite a rarity, actually gives some apparently useful 'information' about how one of their purported aura cameras works (or at least, is purported to work), and, in so doing, has allowed me to catch the scoundrels with their pants down, so to speak!

How Does The AuraCam 6000 Work?

The Auracam 6000 consists of one or two hand sensors which are connected through cables with the camera. Polaroid instant film is put into the camera and is adjusted and aligned to the customer. Once the customer puts their left and right hand onto hand sensors, the AuraCam 6000 begins to gather standardized biofeedback parameter data through the hand sensors. The measured points of resonance are connected with certain organs and the electromagnetic field of the person; this information about the energetic and auric qualities of a human being are then delivered to the camera. Through a patented operation, these parameters are projected as a radiant, colorful aura field around the body onto the Polaroid film, along with the image of the person.

So, as was actually obvious from my own experience of having an 'aura' photo taken, what's being displayed is actually NOTHING to do with any extant 'aura' — it's simply an artificially-created shaped coloured blur — as far as I can tell, not even what would be generally recognised as an interference pattern — that is configured to slightly resemble many people's notion of an aura (and to look actually pretty so that people would want to pay good money to have their non-aura photos taken), superimposed upon an actual photo of the person.

You see how the above-quoted description actually seeks to confuse the prospective customer into blindly accepting the claims about this technology? Look again:

Polaroid instant film is put into the camera and is adjusted and aligned to the customer.

For one thing, what the hell do they mean by that — adjusted and aligned? — They'd obviously adjust placement, exposure and focus of the camera, but there's NO adjustment to the film that would need doing or indeed could be done — and in any case there would be no cause to mention the normal setting-up procedure for taking any photo, so their reference is clearly signifying some other procedure(s), so this wouldn't be just sloppy use of language, inadvertently making it sound as though the film rather than the camera is adjusted and 'aligned'.

Indeed, it gives the strong impression that they're making out that something very special is done to the film as a preparation for taking the photo — and it fits into the pattern of obfuscational false claims that follow in their statement…

The measured points of resonance are connected with certain organs and the electromagnetic field of the person; this information about the energetic and auric qualities of a human being are then delivered to the camera.

…And then, what in the name of Winnie-the-Pooh do they mean by The measured points of resonance are connected with certain organs and the electromagnetic field of the person?

To me, in the light of the physical nature of the sensor devices, that's just pseudo-scientific gobbledygook. The sensors can relay only physical parameters from the flat of the person's hand. Perhaps what they mean (in which case, why didn't they say so?), is that the sensor is configured to capture data from reflexology points on the hand — how else could there be this connection between the measured points of resonance (whatever those are supposed to be) and certain organs?

However, even that wouldn't do anything to convince me, because I've so far found nothing that demonstrates that reflexology points are anything more than the effects of a particular illusory reality (actually just a subset of the 'aura' system illusory reality) that the garbage has kindly installed in the backwaters of very many people's mindspace to cause them a wide range of problems.

In that statement it's taken as 'read' that the data that comes from the sensor(s) relays information about the energetic and auric qualities… — But, oh no, it doesn't! These people are completely confusing physical and supposedly non-physical 'energy', and effectively claiming that the data relayed by the sensor(s) — which would all be straightforward physical parameters (if indeed anything genuine is being transmitted at all) such as temperature, static electric charge, moistness and so on, just from the skin surface, are actually energetic and auric (i.e., non-physical) data. And then, to add to the deception-through-confusion, they tell us that:

…these parameters are projected as a radiant, colorful aura field around the body onto the Polaroid film, along with the image of the person.

So, if you read that properly, with due awareness, you'd see that in effect their system is doing NOTHING relating to the genuine aura as generally understood. — And it's fully incorrect to claim that the parameters are projected onto anything at all. The parameters merely get translated into different colours, and no-one is given a key to what parameters are represented by which colours! Absolutely nonsensical.

All that the camera does is to create a pretty-looking projected image consisting of coloured blurs, which is superimposed on the photographic image to give the impression of some sort of 'aura' as many people might expect to see it. But they dishonestly describe that synthetic collection of coloured blurs as a radiant, colourful aura field around the body…, evidently hoping that no awkward old b*gger like me would come along and read that sentence fully and properly and thus notice that that bit of colourful language was just a bit of artists' (or, I might uncharitably say, scammers') licence — and NOT a statement of what was actually being represented or portrayed on the photo.

Also, those supposed 'aura' representations generally are only over and around the head, whereas the actual aura is supposed to be permeating and extending outwards in all directions from the whole body, and is supposed to be punctuated by (coloured) chakras. Yet NONE of such photos that I've seen has materially shown anything that could reasonably be identified as a chakra.

So, Philip the AOB — i.e., not 'Any Other Business' but 'Awkward Old B*gger' — has to blow the whistle here and say it loud and clear — ALL use of this sort of method and technology for purportedly photographing or displaying auras, i.e., as something that's actually, objectively there, around and permeating a person's body, is BOGUS and is in effect a SCAM!

However, I've cause to qualify that last statement, because probably in the majority of cases the scam is a sort-of involuntary one, because the people who are perpetuating it are generally doing so because they're poorly grounded and have distorted perceptions of reality, which are configured in such a way that they're incapable of the necessary logical reasoning, and they compulsively scramble their reasoning to make their claims sound convincing to similarly poorly grounded people.

Hence the fairly considerable and enthusiastic market for personal 'aura' photos even though they're really quite obviously bogus if you look at the matter with a reasonable degree of awareness and clear thinking.

Am I therefore actually dismissing the technology involved? — In theory, not necessarily. If this technology could be used (maybe in adapted form) in ways in which it acts as a genuine diagnostic tool for holistic healing purposes, then that would be positive — not that I see that system working out as anything genuinely, usefully informative in the 'real world'. However, even if the technology did have genuinely useful potentiality, the problem would be not so much the technology but the people who would generally get hold of it and set out to use it.

The trouble is that those very people would be ones who were poorly grounded and would have an extremely distorted perception of anything technical, 'scientific' or 'medical', and would immediately get into convolutions of 'pseudo-science' or 'pseudo-medicine' to use the technology in ways that are not founded on the 'reality' of 'What Is' but instead would be founded in their own ungrounded and distorted perceptions of 'reality', plus of course a certain financial interest, and thus would generally tend to perpetuate / compound problems or indeed add new ones, rather than actually help towards resolving any problems or 'healing issues' that people have.

PIP scans

Here is another description of the PIP scan system:

PIP looks at light interference and changes in and around your body. The process uses a software programme with a video feed that takes a scan of energic and light interference at and above our visual range. An image is displayed 'live' on a monitor where signals from the camera are graded into clearly visible colours. This gradation represents a much finer value of light intensity than the image entering the camera, and therefore spectrums can be distinguished that would otherwise be impossible to see.

One thing that's immediately clear from this description is that, whether or not the scans are showing anything useful at all, the colours produced by that system are false colours, as you often get in astronomical photos, and therefore it would be a great mistake (or a scam) to equate those colours with any of the colours that are claimed for the auric system and its components.

It appears that, typically, PIP scans are described up-front as being of the human energy field (i.e., rather than being 'aura photos'), which actually could thus be representing something real, but still NOT the aura as generally understood, because that, if it exists, is non-physical and would look nothing like a PIP scan photo even if one had done the impossible and rendered it visible. Again, what's shown in the photos is NOT in itself any energy field but simply a complex of artefacts created as an interference pattern. Yes, that's presumably caused by some sort of energy field, but it still needs to be clearly understood that what's being portrayed is just interference pattern effects, even if they may be very useful for various diagnostic purposes.

As already noted, back in 2002 I attended an introductory lecture on PIP scans — it was given by none other than Dr Thornton Streeter, one of the developers of this technology. As I remember it, he was fairly laid back about equating the colourful areas and bands in PIP scan displays with the aura as recognised by 'healers' and psychics — though he certainly made out to be open to the possibility that the PIP scans were actually showing the aura.

He showed (projected) a whole lot of photos in which he pointed out some parallels between PIP scan colour effects and the aura, including just a few with the odd centrally situated colour patches that, in our enthusiasm, I and some other 'healers' in the audience assumed must be chakras — though their colours were generally different from what the Western New Agers believed to be the true colours for chakras in those positions, and they didn't have the smooth outline that a genuine chakra would surely have had, as the chakras are supposed to be 'energy' vortices.

Actually I was never really convinced about trying to bring in the poor old aura into interpreting PIP scans, because really it was simply an unnecessary complication. It did appear that the PIP scans could well be demonstrating the existence of a subtle physical surface or field effect on or around the human body (but not the aura as generally understood), and looked to be an excellent diagnostic tool if used methodically, with grounded, clear-minded awareness so that what the scans showed got properly interpreted.

However, I was then, and am considerably more so now, unconvinced about the portrayal in PIP scans of dramatic apparently positive effects of a short spell of hands-on healing given to a person who was PIP-scanned before the healing session and again immediately afterwards. It's not that such effects would never be happening to some extent, but, for one thing, in recent years I've come to see how, particularly in the wrong hands, PIP scans could be highly inaccurate because there are ways that the garbage could easily interfere with the process.

That wouldn't be a significant issue with really well grounded operators who are reasonably immune to direct garbage interferences, but it would very likely be a major issue with operators who have weak grounding and, whether or not they're aware of it, are very open to garbage interference.

The garbage could then, just prior to a PIP scan being taken, cause the operator's non-physical aspects to create a weak elemental*, which the garbage would then control, using the operator's 'energy', to make it alter those interference effects in the PIP scan process in specific ways to mislead the operator and the scanned person according to the garbage's agenda for those individuals at that time. This is a potential problem with ALL methods using interference patterns or more or less chaotic systems (i.e.,'chaotic' in the statistical sense) or extremely small parameter variations, so this reservation really applies in one way or another to all three of the technologies covered in this critique.

Also, my own hard-earned insights into what really goes on in hands-on 'spiritual' healing put a big question mark over any system that consistently shows such 'healing' to have a dramatic positive effect upon people. Of course, what may well be happening in the case of PIP scans is that those sequences of scans that show unequivocal positive effects from hands-on healing have been selected out of a much larger collection of such 'before and after' pairs of scans, most of which show equivocal or even negative effects.

I've no means to check up on that, but if the latter were the case it would conveniently fit into a more broad-based pattern that I see in 'spiritual' and 'holistic' healing practice generally. If PIP scans showed up the grounding problems of people, the effects of attached 'entities', stored emotional stresses / traumas, connections to primary archetypes, and of course garbage interferences / attacks (which can't be cleared with a little bit of hands-on healing, and indeed may in some circumstances be aggravated by it), then it would have much more value as a diagnostic tool.

My inspired guess about that is that hands-on healing may be showing unduly positive effects in PIP scans because what the latter reveal (roughly) is the state of a very weak electromagnetic field around the person. That then gets confusingly called 'the human energy field', but that's neither the aura as generally understood, nor the person's non-physical aspects, nor what I myself call the human 'energy field' or 'resonance field', and shows only very superficial aspects of a person's state — so that a bit of hands-on healing could make a short term big change in what the PIP scan reveals, while actually having little or no significant positive effect for the whole person — particularly long-term.

That tallies with the way that people usually do feel 'better' and more relaxed after a hands-on healing session, even though that's actually not doing all that much for them from the deeper and more fundamental perspective of comprehensive self-healing and self-actualization — and their main and underlying problems / issues generally remain untouched (or in some cases, compounded).

My recent Internet search on PIP scan revealed that many operators and promoters of PIP scans actually claim that the PIP scans are showing the aura, even though they don't usually use the term 'aura photograph' for a PIP scan. The problem, then, isn't so much the technology but the 'wish-fulfilment-belief' compulsion of at least a major proportion of its users.

As it's clear that PIP scans don't show nor represent the aura as generally understood, for my own immediate practical purposes they're of no special interest. With regard to my own methodology, what's important is actual results in terms of greatly changed life experience and mental and physical functioning — not whether or not some impressive-looking 'pretty picture' system shows supposed positive changes resulting from my methods.

On occasions when I actually want to have an idea of whether or not I'm getting particular positive changes in my system, which haven't yet become consciously observable, I can use inner inquiry using Helpfulness Testing — and that would inform me of deep changes in my non-physical aspects that no physical device could detect nor show in any photograph. So, I have no plans to rush out and buy a PIP scan system, nor to go anywhere to have a PIP scan done for me, anytime soon — for I've got something MUCH better: i.e., myself (via Helpfulness Testing)!

As already implied, one aspect of the use of PIP scan technology as expounded by Thornton Streeter in the introductory lecture that I attended needs to be held up to deeper scrutiny. He made much of how a PIP scan would show particular problems that a client or patient was carrying, and then the person could receive a hands-on healing 'treatment' and then apparently (i.e., as shown by a further PIP scan) be a whole lot better.

The trouble here really is the whole 'treatment' mindset, because the real need is for the person who's been 'diagnosed' — the 'client' — to receive NOT 'treatment' at all but counselling from a sufficiently deeply aware and inspirational person, to point the client to measures to take him/herself to bring about his full healing process. At best, a 'treatment' could give only a superficial and temporary improvement, and generally it wouldn't address the real underlying issues and indeed would help cultivate the client's ongoing state of self disempowerment, and would thus actually be harmful on balance.

That of course isn't the fault of PIP scans — the real problem being a flaw in the outlook of people who are using them, by which their whole approach to healing is a pseudo-holistic and pseudo-scientific one that's little better than, and in some ways, worse than, 'medical'.

So, to sum up for PIP scans, although I can see potential great usefulness in them as a diagnostic tool at a certain fairly superficial level, i.e., if only they were used by the right people, who would interpret them properly and fully understand their limitations, my jury is still out on them because of the distorted perceptions and reasoning of at least the vast majority of people who would use them — which would lead to PIP scans being compulsively misinterpreted in ways that help keep people pointed away from genuine fundamental healing and self-actualization such as can be progressively gained by the methods that I present free of charge on this site.

Indeed, it would be much better if the people who have ideas of transforming healthcare generally by incorporating (no doubt quite expensive) PIP scan technology into it saved everyone their precious pennies and took up and disseminated Helpfulness Testing instead (available from this site absolutely free of cost, though a donation or two would greatly help!), then getting that integrated into healthcare. Sure, Helpfulness Testing doesn't look 'sexy' like PIP scans, but it can reveal a whole lot more, at deep levels of one's being, as well as the superficial levels, so that real underlying causes of problems can be identified and addressed. Compared with that, PIP scan technology used in healthcare would be, at best, just 'titting around at the edges'.

In practice, it would be by far the better for all of us if 'PIP scan' were at last universally spelled and pronounced correctly for a change — i.e., 'PIP scam'.

To sum up for the three technologies…

It's clear that none of these technologies shows what people generally know as the aura. Indeed, according to my own working model, the aura, as a structured physically located system of nested 'energy bodies' (each, working from smallest to largest, in a successively higher 'dimension') permeating and extending from the centre of a person's physical body, is purely an illusion given to people with psychic — i.e.,astral — perceptions by the garbage for a very troublesome purpose. One's non-physical aspects are not physically located, and so in any case wouldn't tally with the term 'aura', and would intrinsically be invisible and non-photographable.

There do, however appear to be a lot of indications of a non-physical phenomenon that I loosely call an 'energy field' or, probably more accurately, a 'resonance field' around each person, but that would be something different from the aura as generally understood, and also different from the apparent very weak physical energy field that surrounds each person and presumably every object, and which can be detected by physical means, and is what's been picked up on in different ways by two of the three photographic technologies that are the subject of this critique.

I say two of the three, because the 'aura photograph' technology that uses one or two on-body sensors wouldn't even pick up that weak physical energy field around the body, for what it's picking up instead is certain physical parameters on a small area of the surface of the skin — nothing more — and then the data is transformed into a pretty-looking pretence of being some sort of 'aura'. — Real charlatanry with no more value than a party conjuring trick!

The very many people who claim that one or more of the three photographic technologies referred to here really do portray the aura, or even just claim that the technologies show evidence of the existence of it (i.e., the structured aura as generally understood), have a serious problem in that they have a particular block to their ability to think and reason in a rational way, and are remaining attached to a harmful belief in the existence of the aura, whose existence has actually NOT been demonstrated at all, because there are other explanations for the various effects that 'healers' and psychics use as supposed demonstrations of the aura's existence.

It's as though those people have a permanent 'kink' or 'fault line' in their thinking 'machinery', which ensures that there's a sort of 'crack' running through any attempt of theirs to describe 'reality' or to be 'scientific' — and it's presumably that mental state that's being referred to by the term 'crank', i.e., when it's not just being used as a meaningless term of abuse.

None of that actually means that the aura's existence has been disproved, of course, for a negative hypothesis can never be proved — but it defies common sense actually to believe in the existence of something for which no clear and valid evidence has yet been demonstrated*, and to attempt to justify that belief by saying that nobody has proved that it doesn't exist!

Just think — I eat babies! I know it must be the case, because I can't prove, and neither can anyone else prove, that I don't eat them. After all, I might be a werewolf and go flying out of my window invisibly in my sleep and doing it, including eating all those babies, without my ever knowing about it. So, the fact that I'm not aware of ever having done such a thing in no way challenges the incontrovertible fact that I'm a baby eater! So, all you tabloid newspapers out there, come on and get your lurid story about Phil the Wild Baby-Eater of Woon Gumpus Common!

Okay, that's facetious, yes, but it's exactly the type of false reasoning of the vast majority of those who are involved in purported aura photography and in the production / purveying of all manner of other alleged healing-related technologies and products, the claims for which are in the vast majority of cases based on distorted perceptions or/and false reasoning. In that whole field there's a mind-boggling lack of willingness to open to full rational, clear-minded scrutiny of what one is involved in.

Unsoundly based beliefs, claims and assertions are persistently upheld on the basis of unsound reasoning, often just like what I parodied above, with much use of confused pseudo-scientific sales talk to gain the naive trust of other people who are similarly poorly grounded and thus gullible and having similar problems with their thinking ability.

Could it really be that all those people making money one way or another out of supposed aura photography or indeed PIP 'scans' (i.e., scams) are just innocently believing all that nonsense? — Somehow I can hardly imagine so. No doubt at all, a certain proportion are sort-of in that category, but even there, they have a strong financial incentive to be deliberately 'innocent' and 'naive' and to stick with the pseudo-science that they've picked up, so they can continue making their money out of deceiving others.

So, yes, this awkward old cuss says that disgusting S-word loud and clear, however inconvenient / uncomfortable it may be for certain individuals.

SCAM! — SCAM! — SCAM!

There's a strong case for trading standards officers and indeed police closing down any websites or businesses that are purporting to offer aura photographs or equipment claimed to take them.

However, unfortunately, as things are at the moment, the materialist-reductionist belief system rules in our legal and consumer protection services, and so the 'aura photography' and PIP scam rascals get away with it, because the relevant authorities have no clue as to what an aura or 'human energy field' is or is not, nor how one would assess a purported 'aura photo' or 'PIP scan', and so they'd be completely out of their depth with any dispute over the claimed authenticity of 'aura photos' or 'PIP scans'.

And in any case it would be no good to have the Authorities cracking down on just anyone who was offering some product that in some way contravened their own materialist-reductionist belief system, or the baby would be well and truly thrown out with the bathwater.