II. COLOUR QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
What is colour? What has it to do with healing? These are the questions about which an attempt will be made to find appropriate answers.
The answers should be significant. For whilst colour is becoming increasingly a part of modern consciousness, in art, clothing, interior decoration, and in healing, there are as yet few of us who are quite clearly aware of what colour really is.
This is not surprising since the theory of colour developed by Sir Isaac Newton in the 17th century, has been the foundation of our education and thoughts about colour ever since. Through this Newtonian Theory, colour has been relegated to a secondary place in our scientific picture of the universe, whilst in our visual experience it creates the strongest impressions. So we have an anomalous situation.
We live in a coloured world, respond to colours in our emotions, use colours consciously to enhance these emotional responses, and create our own colours and colour moods within our own soul life. We even use colours physically in colour therapy either to work through the soul upon the organs or even directly upon the physical organs themselves.
Yet do we know what colour really is? Though we may heal with coloured rays, the process is largely empirical and not clearly understood. A theory of split-up light, and of vibrations of varying speeds, increasing to unthinkable rates of wave movement does nothing to help us to decorate our houses suitably with colour, nor to paint pictures with coloured pigments. This is a theory which we must and do learn to cheerfully disregard in practice.
Yet without this theory, we may be left stumbling entirely in the dark about colour, guided only by likes and dislikes. We may go forward using feeling alone, as do most painters for their incommunicable colour sense. Or we may, with Turner, take up Goethe’s colour theory, (see Goethe’s “Theory of Colour”), and therein find more satisfying explanations of the phenomena observed, a more accurate examination of the part played by the beholder himself, in his colour impressions.
Or again, we may leave colour aside as something intangible, and only of secondary importance to life, only waking to a faint uneasiness when we hear of an increasing prevalence of colour-blindness in our contemporaries. Not to know anything about colour may also have its dangers.
Yet colour, if it awakes in us lively sense-impressions can work on us strongly. It can become the gateway to new worlds of experience wherein thinking and feeling together play their part. Let me recall a personal experience of this kind, strong enough to remain undimmed in memory over thirty years.
I stood, with others, on a little ridge between two groups of mountains. The sky was filled with wet tawny yellow vapour, as the last rumbling of thunder was dying away to the east, where a brilliant double rainbow arched itself high against the inky background of clouded hills. To the west the red disc of the sun was sinking below a range of mountains. When we turned to the left, there appeared to be a high arc of golden light extending from the sun to the rainbow. We turned to the right, and again, there appeared a similar arc of golden light. We gazed upwards, and the heavens were filled with this mysterious red-gold glow. So far as the eye could see we were as though enclosed in a mighty bowl of golden moving coloured light, which bowl had a double rainbow rim.
It was an experience of awe and splendour. Here were we, insignificant specks in a vast cosmic drama of light and colour, yet in some sense also its creators. For the rainbow appeared just there where it was, the arcs of golden light just there where they were, only for our eyes. For someone else at a distance from ourselves the focus would change according to their position between the sun and the darkness. We were the centre of this appearance. And to left and to right the light took on the form of an arc because our eyes could see it only in that way. We were the centre of all the glory our eyes revealed; tiny beings enveloped in a world of splendour, which nevertheless revolved around us as its centre. What had we as human beings to do with all this magnificence which awoke in us only wonder?
I knew most of the answers as taught in the text-books derived from the Newtonian theories, but they did not satisfy. Colour, we are told, is split-up light, molecules in motion, vibrations of varying speeds ranging from thousands of wave lengths per second, to billions and trillions, in the so-called ether. What had speed to do with the emotional experience of colour?
Further we learn that colour can not be said to have any real objective existence. So and so many wave lengths impacting the eye produce the sensation yellow. Who shall say where yellow exists – in the eye, in the wavelengths, or somewhere else?
Colour is also, we are told, a secondary quality of objects. How it is attached to the objects is unclear. The observer re-acts emotionally to colour but why he does so is also unclear, since all that is established is the speed of the vibrations or waves connected with the phenomena of colours. So we are no nearer to any satisfying answers.
The double rainbows faded and the green wooded hills shone wetly in the splendour of the dying sun. Colour glowed from the luscious green of vegetation to the rose-tinted air, to the green-blue sky, and the scurrying clouds, now crimson. So my questioning on the nature of colour faded with the sunset to the dark night of speculation on which the.stars looked down.
There is a peculiar significance about the asking of questions. Galileo and the swinging lamp, Newton and the falling apple are symptoms of the spirit of enquiry which possesses the man of the fifteenth to the twentieth century for his further evolution. Equally significant is the direction of the enquiry, as also the moment of time, in which a particular question is first asked.
There are instances in ancient mythology which illustrate this point vividly, notably the legend of Parsifal. For failing to ask the right question at a particular moment, Parsifal was thrust out of the Castle of the Graal, and had to wander for seven years acquiring wisdom through bitter experience before he was again allowed to enter.
After his period of trial, by asking the right question, he acquired the power heal the wounded king, Amfortas, and to become himself ruler of the Castle. The legend has grown out of an ancient wisdom concerning the spiritual evolution of man. The picture it contains could be equally applied to our own times.
For the Castle, symbolizing the head of contains his human intelligence, in which all sorts of questions arise at different levels, with differing aims. We have asked more questions in the last five centuries about the phenomena of the earth, than were asked in that direction in the preceding millenium. None the less we have by no means exhausted the questions which may be asked.
Through not asking the right questions now about colour, mankind may find itself thrust out of its Castle of the Graal. For colour is the earthly key to a portal of the worlds of soul and spirit, of which modern man knows so little.
NEWTON’S COLOUR THEORY
Prior to the seventeenth century, colour was considered to be directly created through refraction by the sunlight. In 1766, Newton made his discovery by his use of a prism, that all the colours exist already in Solar light, and can be separated from one another through refraction. This concept persists in the textbooks to our day.
Without using any prism it is easy to convince oneself of this theory by a familiar experience. We put a tumbler of water on to a white tablecloth where sunlight can catch the top Of the glass and by refraction reflect on to the cloth, and we notice the rainbow colours appear. Colour is split-up light, we explain to ourselves.
Yet the colour only appears on the edge of the light where there is shade. not in the centre where the light is the strongest. If it is all contained in the strong solar rays, why does colour cling to the shadowed edges?
Another experiment we can make easily is to look through a prism, if we have one. If not, through a bit of glass from an old chandelier from a second-hand shop. With the prism at the right angle, e.g. level and horizontal to the eyes, we look at a sheet of white paper. First we see only whiteness. Then colour – at the edges of the paper! Yellow, orange, red is above, and green-blue, blue, and violet below. They are just like the colours of the rainbow, but the green is missing, and there is a wide space of whiteness between. The colours again appear only where the whiteness meets the darkness beyond the paper.
Let us go a little further, and put a brushful of black watercolour paint on to the white paper. Look again through the prism. Colour leaps into view: yellow, turquoise, peach-blossom, magenta, violet. The most-brilliant ones appear just where the darkness is strongest. It almost seems as though we could just as legitimately say that colour is split-up darkness. But what then of Newton’s theory? Let us ask the physicists.
Professor Eddington answers this question for us. In a chapter entitled ‘Discovery or Manufacture’, in his ‘Philosophy of Physical Science’, (“Philosophy of Physical Science”, Prof. Arthur Eddington – Cambridge University Press), he suggests that the direction of the thinking of the scientist may influence the results of his experiments. In relation to the colours in the solar rays, and the theory arising from Newton’s experiments, he says:
“The mistake was not in saying that a green component already exists in the sunlight, for that is, at any rate, a legitimate form of thinking, but in claiming that we could decide experimentally between two equally permissible forms of description. And by our oversight, it happened that the form of description we condemned was rather more natural and appropriate than the one we undertook to defend.”
This puts the matter very moderately. Goethe felt much more strongly about it when he remarked to Eckermann:
“An error in thinking can lead centuries astray.”
GOETHE’S THEORY OF COLOUR
As Goethe gave the first importance to his Colour Theory, and much time and thought to exposing Newton’s error, as he thought, in this field, we can hardly doubt that he had this particular error in mind. Goethe could well understand that the way we put our questions influences the form of answer we obtain. He believed that Newton and his followers had erred because they put the question wrongly and not this question alone, but many more, whose effects are experienced to our day.
The idea which was held by thinkers before Newton was that the light creates the colours by refraction. This seems consistent with our experience of colour as the most fluctuating and impermanent of all phenomena our senses perceive. Colour comes into being in the flowers, flourishes, and fades. It plays over the earth and heavens in the sunset and sunrise; it glows transiently in the rainbow. Except in the metals, it has always the character of impermanence.
Newton reflected the spirit of his time when he looked for colours as something permanently contained in the light, e.g. encased in every ray of sunlight. To him, colour was not part of a process of creation, but each colour was an already existent entity -a permanent reality
Goethe saw colours arising through a process of lightening and darkening: the darkness of infinite space seen through the light-filled air creates the blueness, likewise the darkness of distant mountains; whilst light struggling through a darkening medium, of clouds, dust or fog, creates the ragged orange of the storm, the yellow of a street lamp, the deep red of sunset. He saw the creating of colour as a living process, not a separating out of something pre-existing, but an active interplay of light and darkness, continually creative.
These three distinct concepts of colour seem to be related to the times in which they were thought.
When men thought of the universe, as the work of a Divine Creator, the concept of colour and beauty as a continuous revealing of the creative process, was a natural one.
When the marvellous discoveries of physical science seemed to be showing material causes for everything it was easy to form the concept of colour as a material something imprisoned in sunlight, and from thence to be separated out.
Goethe, however, was ahead of his time in discovering his idea of colours created by lightening and darkening. He knew, from inner awareness, that the colours had a spiritual significance which was being overlooked. He believed that the questions of the physicists were all being put in a way biased towards materialism and that many such errors would result. His view of colours was only one of the many scientific concepts in which Goethe in the nineteenth century was a forerunner of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science in the twentieth.
What then is the way to put the question about colour in our own times?
We do not really believe any longer in the theory of the split-up rays of light. Neither, if we understand Prof. Eddington rightly, do the physicists. He describes how a demonstration of the theory might be staged to convince an incredulous ‘ spiritualist’, and how it would fail, “Yet”, he writes, “I think it not unlikely that even an expert might fall into this trap today – such is the glamour of a historic experiment. He really knows better; but one does not always recall one’s knowledge when it is wanted. “
It may be inconvenient for the physicist to frame his questions in a new way. Goethe’s form of questioning was only understood by the rarest souls amongst his contemporaries, and is only now beginning to awaken general interest. But humanity cannot wait for the physicists. We need to know the truth about colour, for colour goes far beyond physical science.
THE REALITY OF DARKNESS
One difficulty we have immediately to face. If colour is created by an active interworking of light and darkness, we can no longer regard darkness as a nullity. Darkness must itself be an active force.
For Goethe, as a Rosicrucian, this was no unthinkable proposition. But to his contemporaries, as to many Western thinkers of today, it seemed nonsense. Darkness is thought to be only absence of light.
It is, of course, peculiarly Western thought -which denies reality to darkness. To Eastern philosophies, Tin and Yang, Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman, had equal and polar reality.
We shall try, in a later chapter to show how the reality of Darkness as an active force may be justified even in our own experience. Darkness can be active spiritually in the souls of living men. Since Hitler few will deny this. We have lost our nineteenth century equanimity about soul-darkness, and the active power of evils
In such ways the understanding of colour leads on of itself towards a healing reconciliation between the two worlds in which man functions, the world of sense phenomena and the worlds of soul and spirit. For if Darkness is active, so also is Light. The Light of the World illumines the conscious human spirit.
Just as an unbalance in the human being to either side, the physical or the spiritual, a leaning too much to either sphere of experience, can precipitate illness, so an equilibrium maintained in the soul between the two spheres equates the poise of health.
Because colour is perceptible to the outer senses and also to the inner senses it is a borderland reality, true and perceptible in both worlds, therefore invaluable for the healing of both soul and body.
To reach to clear perception of colour in an inward way necessitates a way of self development for which our age is ready but yet unaccustomed to pursue.
To realize the intimate connection between physical sight and the inner activity of the soul is yet another step in consciousness.
Further still is the realizing of colour as an active power in healing, not alone in the physical treatments of Colour Therapy but in a more psychological and spiritual way, as direct tonic, or curative treatment of the stresses of the soul.
The way to such development is open to the man of today. The condition of the world about us cries out for a spiritual science, an initiation knowledge, of which a true experience of the nature of colour may well become a first and most significant step.