A woman in the audience said she saw his aura and it was heart-shaped and orange.

There was good news last week for those who seek the tools to get in touch with their unlimited beings and to tap into the energy of the universal psychic team.

An MIT graduate, who also happens to be a Burbank native, came home for an evening to share the fruit of his studies--the simple, step-by-step techniques that he has developed to help people raise themselves from the physical to the psychic plane of experience.

Pete Sanders Jr. has abandoned city life for the psychic purity of Sedona, Ariz. He said during his brief return that he believed in psychic phenomena even while he was a student at John Burroughs High School in Burbank.

“I was fascinated, but felt it was something that belonged to a very few, select, people,” Sanders said.

Then, while studying biomedical chemistry and brain science at MIT, Sanders said, he discovered that anyone could harness the power. “You no longer have to go to someone else to get psychic experience,” he said.

To spread the good news, Sanders in 1980 founded an a nonprofit organization called Free Soul. He said he has trained 150 teachers around the country who can show anyone how to use “the tools to your unlimitedness.”

Last Wednesday, Sanders rented a meeting room at the Burbank Holiday Inn to give a sample.

About 50 people came, each paying $5 to get in.

Sanders, a dark-haired, broad-shouldered man in a light blue three-piece suit, told them he was glad he had grown up in the psychic pollution of Los Angeles because that exposed him to “every fraud, rip-off, guru and phenomenalist.”

He said he was determined not to be like that.

And so, he promised “rather than wow you, rather than to do something that is just a phenomena show, a parlor game, a night’s entertainment, to speak to you from a point of view that these are practical responsible skills that you can acquire . . . .

“Almost all the unlimited potentials you have are hinged to simple techniques,” he said.

In one exercise, Sanders asked the people in the room to feel their auras with a technique he said worked like a “slingshot effect.”

He told them to focus their awareness at their feet.

“Gradually start to shift your focus upward,” he said. “Feel it in your chest, your shoulders. Keep shifting, all your awareness focused in your head. Let your focus shift up and out. Feel the barriers come off. Explore. Sense the depth of your higher self. Feel the extensiveness.”

Then he called them back. A look of contentment passed over the audience, as though they had all felt their auras.

All but one skeptic, me, taking notes on a pad the whole time instead of focusing my awareness. Sanders noticed this and, in a mildly scolding tone, urged me to try to participate in the exercises. I nodded noncommittally.

Before going on to the next one, Sanders invoked a few spiritual concepts.

“You have the freedom to be unlimited,” he said. “In that soul part of you, or that unlimited part of you, you can explore some of the unlimited potentials that are your birthright, things like the ability to blend and be one with the universe.”

Frequently, Sanders used simple analogies to express deep concepts such as the universal consciousness. He called it the team.

Anyone can get on the team, he said, by taking his 10-week, instructor-led classes, reading his self-study course book or listening to his cassette tapes.

He also pitched his 1 1/2-hour private psychic profile. In this $30 consultation a trained instructor senses which of the four psychic senses a person is best at.

Sanders said he is best at psychic vision. He told how one person can see another person’s aura by using the psychic vision receptive area situated on the forehead just above the eyes.

A woman in the audience said she saw his aura and it was heart-shaped and orange.

He interpreted that as “an indication of the caringness I am trying to project in what I am doing.”

Then he taped a white sheet over the blackboard and he asked a woman from the audience to stand in front of it.

He walked to the back of the room for about two minutes to study her aura. It was compact and round, he said, suggesting peace of mind.

A second woman’s aura troubled him. She was surrounded by a large black circle, he said.

This “would usually go with somebody who is surrounded by pressure,” Sanders said. “That didn’t fit, so I said, ‘It’s not black, but it’s blue black.’ Blue is a color that comes out a lot with caring lovingness. The way I would interpret this is that this lady might be surrounded by some very loving people who are pressuring her in a kindly way.”

Everyone seemed to have seen it, except, of course, me.

But my resistance broke during the final exercise.

The audience split up into pairs to feel each others’ psychic energy by holding their hands close together without touching.

“I don’t want to say too much to bias you, but you’ll find that different people have a different auric energy that interacts with yours,” Sanders said.

Some would feel warm, others cold, he said.

At the beginning, I kept my seat.

But then an attractive young woman approached.

“I want to feel your hands,” she said.

I held my hands out. I felt something warm pass through. She apparently didn’t. She moved on.