I don’t know if you’ve ever felt your own aura–or energy field–or seen a loved one’s hue or essence. But, you’ve probably taken an immediate dislike to an individual, or inexplicably felt drawn to someone else for some intangible something-or-other. Some might say, oh, that’s just pheromones, but others might suggest that we needn’t believe in auras or vibrational frequencies to be influenced by them.

Actually, I don’t know if I “believe” in auras myself. I can expand my awareness and mysteriously sense them when I set my heart and mind to it, but nearly all the time, like most everyone else, I am not paying attention. So I had no idea what my sons (10 and 12) and I would discover when I paid the spiritual bookstore Crystal Essence, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, seventy-five dollars to have our auras photographed this past summer by an expensive Aura 6000 camera said to make electromagnetic energy visible.

Being “Star Wars” fans and disciples of “The Force” (as in “May the Force Be With You!”) my sons liked the aura camera concept. We walked upstairs to a room containing the camera on a tripod, a chair flanked by boxes topped by hand-shaped metal plates, and an attractive woman calling herself “Waterfall” who made us feel at home right away. I sat down first, placed my hands on the plates and was photographed. Except for the plates (which are said to sense the body’s electromagnetic meridians), I could just as well have been in a Sear’s portrait studio. The boys took their turns at the camera after that. Then we waited.