HealthyGamerGG - Why Some People Have Divine Aura

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

Some people walk into a room and everything changes. They do not speak louder, try harder, or perform better, yet others feel calmer, steadier, and more grounded around them. This episode breaks down what Dr. K calls true or divine aura, which is different from confidence or charisma and cannot be faked through social skills. Dr. K explores how this kind of presence often emerges after profound psychological and existential collapse, when all normal coping mechanisms fail and a person connects to something deeper than ego, status, or validation. He explains why this stability feels magnetic to others, how it can be misused, and why chasing it directly is usually the wrong move. Topics Included What separates true aura from confidence or charisma Why modern psychology avoids studying divinity and aura The role of empathy and emotional stability in presence How extreme suffering can dissolve the ego Connection to the divine as a psychological experience Why people with aura seem immune to intimidation or rejection How cult leaders misuse this kind of presence Ick resistance and the link between aura and compassion Why longing for aura can actually block it A healthier way to live without chasing transformation HG Coaching : ⁠https://bit.ly/46bIkdo⁠ Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: ⁠https://bit.ly/44z3Szt⁠ HG Memberships : ⁠https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf⁠ Products & Services : ⁠https://bit.ly/44kz7x0⁠ HealthyGamer.GG: ⁠https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer Gigi podcast. I'm Dr. Alokinoja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in. All right, kids, today we're going to talk about where ORA comes from. And I want to be precise here because, you know, we were thinking about what to title this,

and it was like how to develop aura, but I'm going to be straight with y'all. The kind of aura that we're talking about, I'm not sure can be developed. And I'm really excited about this video because I find it incredibly fascinating. But we're talking about the kind of aura that is not regular charisma.

This is the ability to walk into a room and people like notice you're there. People can approach you and be very upset, very frustrated, and you sort of remain stable in that situation. people can be incredibly powerful, incredibly intimidating, incredibly wealthy, but this kind of person with this aura is untouched by all of that stuff. So this is real aura, not sort of scientific charisma that's based on oration skill or things like that. This is an internal quality that some people have that allows them to walk into a room and captivate the entire room. So this is a bit harder to talk about,

but this can absolutely be like sort of analyzed, and that's what we're going to do. So we're going to start with the research on charisma. So this is a great paper that I talked about earlier. I made a video about how to develop charisma in a very sequential way, broke down what all the components of charisma are. But in that video and in this paper, we'll see that there's an element of charisma which these authors choose not to include, which is something called divine related. This is what we're going to talk about today.

the aura that human beings associate with divinity. So all of the emphasis on charisma outside of divinity or religion is a relatively new thing. And basically what's happened in the research is people have said like, oh, that's weird, mysterious stuff. We don't know what it is. So we're going to ignore it and we're going to focus on the things that we can measure, the things that we can study. But if we look at the whole of charisma research, we see that actually in countries like France and Canada, Religion is the most commonly discussed scholarly subject when it comes to charisma. Out of all of the papers that have been ever published on charisma, religion is actually number

two on like the academic study of charisma. So I think we've sort of lost something where we've all acknowledged, we all know that when it comes to true aura, religion or divinity have something to do with it, right? We have from the top of the list, the people who started religions, people like Jesus, people like Buddha. Then we also have people like Joan of Arc or other people who are very religiously or I mean we call the religion came after. I don't know if that kind of makes sense. These people were not religious, right? So these major religious figures started a religion. So there was something so special about their aura that human beings flocked to them.

And after this person passed, something about what they taught continued for thousands of years later. So like, I'm explained to you what that is, right? So I know how arrogant that sounds. But really, I think we can like look at all these publications and we can try to get a sense of like where that really comes from. And that's what's so fascinating about this. Okay. I think we can actually crack that nut as insane as that sounds. I think that in the world, if you observe something, there is a particular analytical method that you can use to actually understand it, including the really weird, mysterious stuff. So let's start with the basics. So the basics. The first really basic thing about all these people is the way that empathy works with them. See, all human beings have empathic circuits, which means that when I see like you're crying, like the visual stimulus of you crying is going to turn my brain on in certain ways. And then maybe when you feel sad, I feel sad, we're going to feel sad together. I'm capable of feeling what you are feeling. And you are capable of feeling what I'm feeling.

And we sort of have all of these like weird dynamics that we play into. So earlier I talked about people who are intimidating or rich or powerful. There's all this empathy, weird empathic stuff that goes on when one of these people enters the room. Right. So there's the person who's the top dog. And when the top dog enters the room, everyone fawns and flocks around them. And there's a certain amount of like social respect towards the top dog. When people approach the top dog, like usually one of two things will happen.

Either you respond to them somewhat appropriately. you can respond to them neutrally, or if you're in defiance, if top dogs really bother you you piss them off, you're kind of like stern with them, right? I don't know if that kind of makes sense, but when someone really popular enters the room, there's a weird social like script that everyone starts to enact. So someone with charisma doesn't play into that script. And here's the reason why. When we empathically connect with someone who has true aura, what we feel on the inside

is incredibly uncommon. They have what feels like a soul made of steel. Like there's something about them that makes them impossible to perturb. The regular empathic crap that we get from other people that we signal to other people, there's some amount of like, oh my God,

like when I see you, you lack self-confidence and you're stuttering and that gives me the ick. Right? So we have like the person who's starting over here, the person who gets the ick over here, and we're both transmitting signals that kind of work with each other because you feel like you have a lack of self-confidence.

So when I give you the ick eye, that resonates with the way that you feel about yourself. You feel crappy about yourself? I am agreeing with you. I'm going to give you the ick. So we have all of these social scripts that are going on. Someone with true aura breaks all those scripts. When we sort of sit with them or when they're in a room, like they don't seem to be operating in that way. There's an immense amount of stability.

Now, where does the stability come from? St. John of the Cross wrote this thing called the Dark Night of the Soul. The light guided me more surely than the light of noonday to the place where he, well I knew who, was awaiting me. A place where none appeared. Okay, so this guy is saying, okay, I was guided by a light to where this person was supposed to be, but they weren't there. I remained lost in oblivion. My face, I reclined on the beloved. All ceased and I abandoned myself, leaving my case.

Hairs forgotten among the lilies. So when we look at people who have real aura, what we find is a common, usually a common experience for these kinds of people, whether it's people like Nelson Mandela or Orabindo is another major spiritual teacher from the roughly Hindu tradition who was in prison for a while. Like a lot of people like end up in prison or a lot of people have some kind of event messes them up in a very major way. How is their, how have their epigenetics changed? How has their brain changed when you have these kinds of experiences? And this is the best that I can put together. So normally in life, we have challenges, we have difficulties.

We have negative emotions. We feel sad. We feel hopeless. We have setbacks. People dump us. We feel lonely. We have all of this negative stuff that comes our way. And the way that most human beings survive is by balancing that negative stuff with the positive stuff.

So this is where like, if I get dumped by my girlfriend, my bro. are going to be like, hey, man, like, it's okay. There are other fish in the sea. There's some amount of negative and some amount of positive, right? There's some amount of, if I feel sad, what I'm going to do is play video games to make that negativity go away. So we'll do everything from read philosophical texts, to have emotional conversations, to go to therapy, to distract ourselves, you know, numb ourselves, the substances, whatever. We go through life with all kind of bad stuff and all kind of good stuff. And the purpose for most people's lives is to have more good stuff than bad stuff. I want to have money. I want to have love. I want to have relationships. I want to

have meaning. I want purpose in life. I want all these things. I want less of the bad stuff and more of the good stuff. I believe that finding true aura, that real transformation comes when the good stuff no longer touches the bad stuff. When all of the good stuff is wiped away and all you're left with is profound bad stuff. And when all of your compensatory mechanisms go completely out the window and you were overwhelmed by a torrent of negativity when everything in your life is completely falling apart and you have no logical kind of like defense mechanism left, you have no emotional support. You are actually at your lowest point when everything else around you has abandoned you and

failed you. And in that moment, when the mind is no longer capable of helping you, the intellect is no longer capable of helping you, the emotions are no longer capable of helping you, empathy and connection with other human beings are no longer capable of helping you. In that moment, some people find something within themselves, something so deep and so primitive. It's this weird connection to the divine. Like, that's the language that we use.

in those hardest moments is when you find God. I'm not saying Christian God. I'm not saying Hindu God. I'm talking about the phenomenological experience that we can look at in scholarly publications about charisma that are published in a religious way. There's something deep within you. One of my patients describes it to me

after his seventh suicide attempt. I said, should I be worried about you committing suicide? And he's like, no, you don't have to worry about me. And I was like, why the fuck not? You've tried to commit seven times. This is what he told me. He was laying on. on a stretcher in a hospital that seventh time,

and he realized that he has tried to kill himself seven times, but there is something within him that strives to live more than he strives to die. He found that connection, even though he struggled with depression. The neuronal patterns are still there. The emotional patterns are still there. The cognitive patterns, the traumas, all of that in the brain and in the mind are still there. but something deep down is incredibly powerful, and that's what you connect to. Once you find that connection, you are transformed.

There's a certain amount of stability. It feels like the rest of the world is like a tornado, and you're sitting in the eye of the storm. Right. So in the Eastern religious traditions, in the contemplative traditions, they talk about a systematic way to find this. Right. So we'll talk about things like Shunya meditation in Dr. K's guide to meditation. We talk about some of the stuff over on the membership side, some of these weird, esoteric, more advanced techniques.

But there are certain ways to potentially find that connection. Connect to the divinity within. And once you connect to that divinity within, the empathic circuits of the people around you get really confused because you don't respond because you've seen, you've experienced and lived through the hardest form of isolation, abandonment, loneliness, et cetera. And so you're still alive on the other side. Life threw it you,

the worst possible things it knew how to throw and you survived it, which means you have a stability. And that stability comes because the only way you can survive it is by connecting to the divine. And when you connect to the divine, other people pick up on it.

And this is how cults are born. So there are some human beings on the planet who have this connection, but don't have ethical training, don't come up in a religious tradition, have egos that have not been worked on. You don't have to work on your ego to have this kind of divine connection. And when that happens, this is where cult leaders are born, because human beings, they have true aura, so other human beings will gravitate towards them, because they can detect in this person. Holy shit, this person has a stability that I long for. I'm lonely, I'm hopeless, I feel sad. There's a deep, deep, deep, deep hurt deep inside me. And this person

seems to have healed it. Let me gravitate towards them. They're drawn like moths to a flame to this person who has aura. The problem is that this person, just because they have the connection to the divine, and this is where I try to get scientific, for lack of better term, I try to understand the quantifiable, phenomenological elements of this, right? Can you have a connection to the divine while still having an ego out of problem that still exists? Can you have a connection to the divine? Does that fix the deep hurt? It doesn't.

The neurological stuff is up here. The psychiatric stuff is up here. The divine stuff is down below. And that's why if you have a mental illness, we can fix it by working on the stuff up here with CBT and medications and things like that. That doesn't give you the connection to the divine. Both of these things can exist in parallel. And since they're egotistical, they fall into the traps of cults.

They start to get paranoid. They start to get afraid. They get addicted to power. That spark of the divine is there. But all the mental stuff is still on top. That's where a cult comes from. Once you discover this true aura, a lot of things about you change, right? So if you go down the wrong route, you'll end up as a cult leader.

But I think there are a lot of things about you that are going to be different. And if you guys have met someone who has true aura, you sort of may get this. The first thing that happens is these people tend to get ick resistance. So the rest of the world is very sensitive to ick. Oh, I don't want to hang out with people who are losers. I'm going to chase clout. I'm only going to hang out with people. I want big invitations.

And like, if I'm an influencer, I want VIP treatment wherever I go. And like, oh, yeah, there's like the icky people down there and there's the strong people up there. The majority of people that I've encountered have an immense amount of ick resistance. Because all of that social crap does not matter once you are connected to the divinity within. You start to see it as like, okay, this is all just the weird fucking drama of like people who are trapped in their own egos and trying to get ahead in the world and stuff like that. With the ick resistance comes compassion. And this is where if you like really pay attention to people who have ick, people who have ick lack compassion. These two things cannot coexist, right?

Ick is when I reject a person and I'm not able to see, okay, there's like, there's a fundamental good human being that's underneath all. the ick, and that's the person that I should have compassion for. This person may evoke the ick, but imagine what their life is like. If they're evoking the ick and all these other people, they must be so lonely. And so this sense of compassion also comes in the Eastern traditions. We sort of say that, okay, each of us has the spark of divinity. And one of the ways to develop this compassion is to recognize that every person has a spark of divinity. And so all the ick that you're seeing is just the crud on the surface. It's like there's a diamond that, has been at the bottom of the ocean for a while and has accrued a lot of like junk on top.

But if we pick it up and if we clean it off, there is divinity to be found within. The last thing that I want to say is, I'm going to be honest, I think this is where real aura comes from. I think it comes from basically a failure of all of your emotional and intellectual and social defense mechanisms that keep you intact. But I would highly recommend that you do not go looking for it. Even if you're listening to this video and you're like, how do I find this? I want this. So this is what's so tricky is

You're wanting that comes from your ego Right? And if we go back to the dark night of the soul We see that a key part of this is the dissolution of that ego So even if you are hungry for it, that is that's not going to work So like I don't know if this kind of makes sense If you're hungry for it, you're trying to be great But the people who have true aura are not great They may be measured as great from the outside

That's not what they strive for And that's not what they feel within They simply are. And there's plenty of evidence around psychedelics and ego death and stuff like that that sort of correlates with this, right? So we have some science to back it up. But I would say don't go chasing this thing. And this is where, you know, a lot of y'all may say, so I've worked with a lot of people who are very depressed and very suicidal. And they're like, but Dr. Kay, like, aren't, haven't I hit rock bottom?

And it's like not really. I hate to say this, but the people who are very depressed and very suicidal are almost moving in the wrong direction. So they are still, they have a lot of these weird psychological defense mechanisms that really keep them from rock bottom. For many people, their sense of depression, anxiety, whatever, the negative things that you want to get rid of are actually very, very strong protective mechanisms that your brain has evolved to have. And they're pathological. So it's not like they're always balanced or good for you or things like that. And I've worked with people who are suicidal and are suffering very, very immensely. That's where I don't have all the answers yet.

feels different to me. So if you're someone who longs for true aura, I would be careful, right? So I wouldn't recommend that you go finding this stuff. On the one hand, it is transformative and great, but on the other hand, I'm not sure that it's worth it for that moment. And what really scares me is I've worked with people who long for that moment, who are tired of their lives being sort of like ground down into nothing and they long for a moment where they will break or be reborn. They kind of want to go all in on life. And I strongly would not recommend it. What I think is way better is going back to what we talked about originally, which is

like life has bad stuff and life has good stuff. And spend your time trying to build up as much of the good stuff as you can and reduce as much of the bad stuff as you can. I think that's the best way to live life. Because if finding true aura is in your destiny, it's going to happen to you anyway. Thanks for joining us today. We're here to help you understand your mind and live a better life. If you enjoy the conversation, be sure to subscribe.

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