| You probably would want to look through the journals and magazines
on 'subtle energies.' There are a few of them that regularly publish
research of varying quality on this sort of thing.
The selection of reading material on this particular subject
that would satisfy you will depend very much on your own
standards of what you believe 'scientific investigation' is supposed to
entail. There is no true scientific experimental support for any of
the original occult notions (taken literally) from anything I've every
come across, though there are a few anomalies that are in some cases
construed (with a great deal of stretching in my opinion) as supporting
subsets of Theosophical or Paracelsan occult doctrine.
The biggest problem is that the Theosophical and similar theories are
not themselves scientific (not precisely stated or testable), so
they are not really amenable to legitimate experimental
investigation.
Years ago, _most_ reputable and sympathetic researchers gave up on
attempts to 'photograph the aura' because the most promising version
of such experiments (Semyon Kirlian's electrophotography) were so
often and easily faked by various means, and the few incidences of
the infamous 'phantom leaf' effect turned out to be extremely
difficult to replicate and so remains more an experimental oddity
than a true effect to most people.
One good technical book I saw recently which explains
the details and techiques of Kirlian electrophotography (it is
used for other purposes than psychic investigation) also contains
a section on various ways in which phantom effects are faked
and a failure to replicate the phantom leaf effect, which was presumably
a very sincere attempt. Parapsychologists seem to have
drifted away from Kirlian photography, though Topher Cooper can give
a much better reading of that than I can.
IN addition, other researchers sympathetic to psychic phenomena,
such as Charles Tart, attempted to find physical evidence of the
"psychic aura" by having people who see auras attempt to determine
whether a person was just to one side of a doorway (presumably
a physical phenomena would extend beyond the edge of the doorway
and the observer could see the aura extend. The results were
at the chance level, as far as I know.
The 'psychic aura,' which
I believe is probably a real and persistent effect, though
seemingly not consistent in form from person to person,
may not have any discernable _external_ physical basis, and I
speculate may be a complex hallucinatory effect into which
a lot of other intuitive or psi information are able to sometimes
feed, but is certainly so far without any observable
_electromagnetic_ physical manifestation.
There was a great deal of loosely related Russian literature around
'bioelectricity,' and 'bioenergy,' but it's not clear how much is
legitimate and that much if any of this is related to the occult or
psychic aura, and may well be a different class of phenomena in
many cases. Plus, since it's largely in Russian, I've never tried to
get any of it and can't provide much information about it.
If you're still interested, I can probably dig up a bibliography on
whatever particular aspects of this you are interested in.
Or maybe Topher can help out ... ? I've always wondered what
his view of this topic were.
kind regards,
todd
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"Hands of Light", and "Light Emerging", by Barbara A. Brennan, Ph.D.
You can find these in most any bookstore. They are excellent.
She is a former NASA physicist turned healer, and has founded her
own healing school.
Cindy
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