{"id":4438,"date":"2021-11-16T17:46:52","date_gmt":"2021-11-16T23:46:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/?p=4438"},"modified":"2023-06-22T06:47:43","modified_gmt":"2023-06-22T12:47:43","slug":"why-i-believe-in-auras","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/why-i-believe-in-auras\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I believe in auras"},"content":{"rendered":"

A friend asked today if I believe that some people can see auras. Although I can’t see them, yes I do. Here’s why. This is a true story.<\/p>\n

When I was a child my father barely survived a heart attack. From that day on I lived with the expectation that at any moment he might have a second heart attack and die from it, but he held on for a long time. Finally one day in 1985, when I was 32 years old, my mother called, very upset, and told me that my father had collapsed while jogging and had been taken by ambulance to a hospital.<\/p>\n

I called my girlfriend. This wasn’t Julia — Julia and I met a few years later. This was my former girlfriend Sarah, the woman I wrote about here<\/a>, the woman who got me started on this path by sending me to Meenakshi Temple.<\/p>\n

Sarah was a doctor. She asked, “Would you like me to call the ER and try to find out what’s happening? I’ll talk like a doctor and they’ll probably tell me.” <\/p>\n

I stayed on the line while she got the triage nurse on the phone. “This is Dr. Silverstein,” she said. “I’m calling about my patient Boris Yam who I’m told was brought in by ambulance. Can you tell me his condition?”<\/p>\n

The nurse said, “He came in about twenty minutes ago. His heart was stopped when he came in. They started working on him immediately, and I can see from here they’re still working on him.”<\/p>\n

Sarah said thank you and the nurse hung up. Sarah and I were left alone on the phone. “Did you hear that?” she asked.<\/p>\n

“Yeah,” I said. “That means he’s dead, right?”<\/p>\n

I’ll interrupt here to say that Sarah’s answer was one of the most wonderful things that anybody has said to me in my entire life.<\/p>\n

“Well,” she said, pausing to think. Then, speaking very precisely and carefully in a voice that could be interpreted, if you chose to do so, as slightly ironic, she said, “They wouldn’t perform these procedures unless they were occasionally efficacious.”<\/p>\n

Thirty six years later, I’m still in awe at her ability to think of something to say that conveyed hope without being dishonest. And which, without being hurtful, was very slightly funny.<\/p>\n

Although I couldn’t be sure I felt certain that he was dead. My father had been an enormous figure in my life. His death was a stupendous event. (Indeed, it turned out to be the dividing line between the two main parts of my life, because it was the start of my path as a seeker). <\/p>\n

My thoughts and emotions were reeling. I described them years ago, in another post<\/a>, as follows. In that post I was describing how I felt two months after my father’s death, but those feelings began at the instant I learned of it:<\/p>\n

Events like the death of my father are terrible storms that churn the oceans of our minds to a froth. Even the ocean floor gets disturbed; even the tectonic plates under the floor get jostled apart, and the raw burning magma, the pure energy of our real lives, leaks out in an incandescent haze.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I apologize for the overwrought prose but I really felt that way. The intensity of my emotions was colossal. I felt like my whole life had turned upside down in an instant.<\/p>\n

I left my apartment, went downstairs, and hailed a taxi to go to the hospital. I lived in New York City at the time. A cab stopped and I got in. The thoughts I described above were ringing in my head. The driver glanced at me in the rear view mirror. Then he did a double take. Then he swiveled 180 degrees and stared at me. Then he said, “My God, you have the brightest aura I’ve ever seen.” (Maybe he said biggest aura, I don’t remember exactly.) “Brilliant yellow.” I think his jaw literally hung open. “Has anyone told you that before? I’ve never seen anything like it.”<\/p>\n

I said no, nobody had ever said anything to me about my aura.<\/p>\n

The man might have been lying. Maybe he said this to all his passengers to get bigger tips. But I think he was telling the truth. He didn’t seem to be acting.<\/p>\n

That was the only time in my life that a stranger said anything to me about my aura. I think my aura must have looked very unusual because I was in a very unusual emotional state. But he knew nothing about my emotional state; he was reacting to what he saw.<\/p>\n

That’s why I believe that some people can see auras.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend asked today if I believe that some people can see auras. Although I can’t see them, yes I do. Here’s why. This is a true story. When I was a child my father barely survived a heart attack. From that day on I lived with the expectation that at any moment he might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,9],"class_list":["post-4438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-experience","tag-freddies-biography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/photo-not-found.jpg?fit=1344%2C896&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6YVpx-19A","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4438"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4471,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4438\/revisions\/4471"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/freddieyam.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}