If everyone could see auras (I personally do not though I am very sensitive to emotions and thoughts), the world's problems would probably be solved relatively quickly. Auras are a field that surrounds people which are visible to a small percentage of the population and essentially consist of various color lights and shades of darkness. Years ago I read a book describing what the colors of the aura meant. That book was by William Walker Atkinson published under the pseudonym Yogi Ramacharaka called Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism. It's really too bad the new age wasn't built off his works rather than the more speculative works of Helen Blavatsky and the even more speculative works of later new age writers who turn the entire psychic phenomenon of the human experience into a phony party show with nonsensical superstitions.
The ability to see auras is actually quite real, I having met several people who could do it. I even tested a friend of mine's abilities years ago with a blind scientific test to see if Ramacharakas descriptions of what the aura colors meant were accurate. I would know my mood and what color I should be but told nothing to my friend about what the colors were supposed to mean. He then gave me 100% accurate readings of the color of my aura which always matched the mood as Ramacharaka descried. I did this probably a couple of dozen times with complete accuracy proving Ramacharaka's scholarship on the subject.
There are deeper levels of the aura that are even more complex. I have met one person who could see into this layer of the aura and it's much more intense and complete energy field. The aura is probably divided into several layers. The layers Ramacharaka descried are most likely the lowest level of the aura and just give you the mood information. Real psychics see at least this level and the really good ones see the deeper layers. I believe there are at least three main levels to the aura around a single person. I generally describe these layers as the etheric, astral, and causal auras currently.
A proper naming of levels of information concerning what can be read through psychic perception would include the primary levels of activity in terms of what can be known about an individual. There should be seven layers altogether that can be accessed. The etheric, astral, and causal (formally I called this the mental) correspond to the those three planes. Above them must be, as I currently understand it (my most recent ideas), the kabbalistic (formally buddhic), angelic (formally atmic), and archangelic (formally adi). These three levels of the aura would be more akin to what I call gridwork, a field of fractal psychic information available to those who have the patience to focus on it. The gridwork is built of light lines, that which connects objects and fields in and through planes through the planes of interaction effect I have described in a few of my works.
I don't recommend anyone really train in these areas of development unless they are born with the abilities concerning the layers beyond the causal. They are frightening complex and the higher one goes up the chain of being and reasoning the more difficult it gets to read properly without some heavy negative energy. Even the causal layer is difficult to deal with as it contains essential limitations of a human being within it.
As someone who is sensitive to feelings and thoughts (clairsentience/claircognizance) , it feels to me like layers of pressurized thought and resistance surrounding a person. A human being's basic state of consciousness is very evident when one is sensitive. People bring with them everywhere they go their built in attitudes, thoughts, and biases. This stuff literally surrounds someone immediately telling you what they are really like internally.
Those internal attitudes are visible as colors and hearable as sounds to those who have the clairvoyant and clairaudient gifts. The visible aura is the one described by Ramacharaka. The more of these abilities one has activated, the more difficult it is to stay focused when in the presence of others.
According to what I have learned the aura reading ability can be activated by various means. Yet one's life must be balance to do this. The safest way to activate the aura according to those I have learned from or read about is to do fasting and focusing until that ability activates. It is best to do so in a group of those of like mind about it and of good naturally happy dispositions. That is a difficult thing to find at this time in human history unfortunately. Yet if the more sensitive among us do not activate ourselves at some point, the world will be left in the hands of the politicians and those who are completely blind to this facet of human experience.
Since the human aura to me is a scientific and physical phenomenon (related to both the human magnetic field and dimensionality (planes of consciousness created by transdimensional physics)), one does not even have to believe in God/Goddess in order to have the experience of any psychic phenomenon really. Perhaps it is best proven in this way that indeed there is a greater reality than one would wish to believe in. It is probably more rewarding that way as well. But the truth is that one has to be open minded to really see what is real and what isn't.
Conventional thinking interferes with the unbiased truth reflected in the aura. We are taught to divide our thoughts and feelings with opinion. We are told to form biases from an early age. We are taught to analyze everything. Part of this is the problem with our scientific education. It encourages us to look at the world through the lens of language and to see the world as a series of parts. The more we look to analyze the world, the less we see of what is intuitively already there. It's as if we were taught not to look essentially. Then we are taught to label everything, and our entire social system does this constantly. Everything has a label with a meaning attached. We are taught to hate certain groups and like other groups.
Every time those messages get in our head we forget a little more of the real fact that humans are fully capable of reading situations using their natural born gifts if they are activated. If we all saw what was is in each other, then the ability to lie would vanish. Yet to do so would require everyone to be open to the possibility of actual being seen, heard, and felt as they really are, not as they wish to project. This would be very difficult for the vast majority of people to deal with as their attitudes would be on the table. And as long as they identify with those attitudes and not with the possibility of being part of something more, the ability to see those auras and live as we were meant to be will be a distant possibility of a future that no one knows. But of course, one day it all has to come true.