Dear Julia: 

I'm very worried about a friend of mine. I saw him a few months ago after a long absence (20 years). He was different. He used to be kind, funny, intelligent and loving. While he seemed okay on the phone, in person he seemed angry, forgetful and depressed, though he insisted he's happy. I can see auras, and his had black smoke rising out of it and lacked other colors except for a deadened paper white. I became very distraught after seeing him. I realized I still love him very much, and since we're both married, it seemed inappropriate to stay in contact. I sent him a truthful but painful letter asking him for distance while I sorted this out. He became enraged; I could feel his fury from 100 miles away, and his anger turned my skin pink. (He projects his feelings very well but doesn't realize he does it.) He won't speak to me now. A few days ago, I sent a letter asking his forgiveness for hurting him but got no response. Something is very wrong. This is not the young man I once knew. His aura looked nothing like I've ever seen before. Does this seem like a spiritual illness - an affliction of the soul? Or could something physical change his personality? Any advice would be most welcome.

Naomi

Dear Naomi:

First, a lot can happen in 20 years: we can indeed become new people for better and for worse. You ask if it's possible for something physical to change someone's personality, and there are endless possibilities where that idea is concerned. Even something as common as low blood sugar can cause people to seem depressed and forgetful. While there are lots of common explanations for his demeanor, from physical maladies to medications to simply going through a rough patch in his life, this column is about metaphysical subjects, so let's focus on what you saw in his aura.

Based on your description of his aura and everything else you wrote, I'd say your friend was trying to prevent you from psychically reading him. You wrote that he is very good at projecting his feelings. On some level, he knows this and is also aware that you are clairvoyant, so if he didn't want you to know what he was thinking and feeling, he may have purposefully projected that blank white canvas onto his aura in order to prevent you from reading him.

Though it's pretty silly, people sometimes do this in psychic readings: they try to prevent the psychic from being able to read them by projecting a blank wall around themselves. I say this is silly because they are supposedly there because they WANT to be psychically read, not to see if they can prevent the psychic from doing her job. In any case, most people aren't good enough with this sort of thing to succeed, and good psychics can usually get around their efforts anyway by talking the client into energetically opening up or asking Spirit to intervene. (Not all psychics directly read a person's energy; many of the best work through guides.)

So that dull, flat white you saw in his aura may not be a sign that he is emotionally dead, but rather that he was psychically guarding himself. Given the rage you describe, it certainly sounds like he has an active emotional life! Since it sounds like you two share some intense emotional history and getting romantically involved would be problematical now, he could have been guarding himself to avoid forming new attachments to you, or trying to prevent you from reading his attraction to you. Of course, there are many other possibilities for why he wouldn't want you to be able to psychically read him.

That black smoke is another matter, however. Black is one of the trickiest colors to read in the aura because it's hard to discern its quality. Black in the aura is often a sign that someone is trying to hide something, which fits with our interpretation of the white. Imagine that you're playing hide and seek and you don't want to be found. People who are really good at hiding do more than choose good spots: they pull in their auras so that that they can't be energetically sensed. When people who are skilled at energy work do this, their auras can look like jet black capes. Your friend sounds pretty energetically powerful. Since he was probably trying to make it hard for you to read him, it's possible that this is why you saw black in his aura.

There are a few reasons this explanation isn't a perfect fit, however. First, you describe him as basically angry, and you communicate a clear sense that something was just not right about his energy. Further, you describe the black in his aura as smoky. Given all of this, the black you saw most likely represented dark malice. (Anger is red hot, where hatred is black and cold.)
Smoky black can be seen in the auras of people who carry evil thoughts and feelings, especially people who are calculating revenge.

When you see something like this in someone's aura, be careful. It's one thing to deal with someone who is in emotional turmoil and another to deal with someone who has shifted into hatred and is capable of coldly acting on evil thoughts and feelings. If I were you, I would ask myself if I had done something (or failed to do something) to this friend that he may be holding a grudge about. If I could find nothing, I'd wonder who he else he was hating.

Of course, it's possible that life has just not gone as he expected, and he is hating life in general and everyone around him. Perhaps in reconnecting with you, he was reminded of the boy he once was and all his dreams for the future, and thus meeting with you brought his existential angst to the surface. He may have been trying to hide this from you via the blank white wall, but some of it came leaking out in that black smoke.

All this information about auras and colors can only take you so far; it's important to focus on what your own inner knowing tells you. A bright shade of red can mean passion where a murky shade means anger; beautiful green can mean love where murky green suggests jealousy; silver can indicate clear intuition where gray denotes fear. So if you don't want to totally mix things up, you have to dialogue with your own intuition to interpret what you see.

I thus believe the most important element in your question is your overwhelming feeling that something is just not right with your friend, and I encourage you to trust that feeling. Since our physical bodies are extensions of our metaphysical vibration, it's entirely possible that he does have some major health problem in addition to some serious mental and/or emotional issues.

While this will seem pretty far out to most people, before closing I have to mention one more possibility. When we meet someone and they don't seem to be themselves, it's sometimes because they're not. If an attached spirit has gained a lot of influence over someone, they can seem just as you described: out of it, angry, depressed, and just plain different. For more information on this idea, research "spirit releasement therapy." By the way, if this is the case, then the malevolence you felt may have nothing to do with your friend. If this spirit intuited that you would be able to perceive it, the black you saw may have been a reflection of this entity's animosity toward you as someone with the potential to root it out, while the white wall may have been a result of its desire to hide from your awareness.


Julia