I. THE IMPORTANCE OF UNDERSTANDING COLOUR
If I were gifted with a knowledge sufficient to compass every subject on earth, and if an angel guided my pen to write wisely and well, I would think no subject more worthy than this one, the subject of Colour. For this is no small and unimportant matter, but a great matter and one of the utmost importance, and in the following pages I shall try to show how and why this is so.
To do this I may be obliged to make many apparent detours, in order to approach from many different viewpoints, some of which may seem at first to have very little to do with the subject in hand, yet if the reader will have patience with me, we may discover together that a right understanding of colour is central to most of the problems of sickness and healing, both individual and social in our world to-day.
OUR SICK WORLD CAN BE HEALED
Evidence that our world is sick is not far to seek. A visitor from another planet would find it strange perhaps to see so many nations and individuals hard at work devising and constructing weapons which, if put to serious use, could probably destroy our planet. This might appear to him as convincing evidence of the will towards suicide of the human race.
Hardly less evident would be the instances of individual retreat from life. Too many lives seem to be dominated by fear in one or another form; fear of life, fear of poverty, fear of love, fear of emotion, fear of inferiority to others, fear of illness, fear of death. Prom childhood to the grave our pathways seem beset with fears leading to various kinds of escape from life, ranging from the simple one of daydreams to hysteria, neurosis and the taking of drugs, to drink, sexual excesses, mental breakdown, to actual suicide.
Sickness of mind seems to be sometimes due to a prior sickness of body, and the bodily sickness in turn due to social ills over which the individual has little control. Sometimes the sickness seems due to sheer mental and Spiritual bewilderment.
Our world has become so very clever yet its cleverness does not seem to help us to live any more wisely, nor any more satisfactorily than we did before we developed such cleverness. True, we have many physical aids to achieve a a comfortable existence. But what do these serve, if the will to live is diminishing? The most dangerous moment in sickness is when the patient has no will to recover. Likewise in human affairs.
HAVE WE A PHILOSOPHY
A doctor treating a young man on the edge of a mental breakdown said to his patient, “What you lack is a philosophy”. How many of the men and women of our modern world have a real philosophy that will serve them in times of stress?
We are obviously entering no easy times. From the beginning of this century life has become ever faster, and has developed ever more strain and stress, which shows no likelihood of easing. Quite the contrary. Our forbears would have found life in this century difficult to bear, but they would have brought to it a lively religious faith, a belief in a Divine all-ruling Providence Who would somehow look after them. We are not so secure.
Throughout all the Christian centuries until our own, religion was a powerful aid to men in coming to terms with their life-tasks. But what has Christianity become for a vast number of our contemporaries? Not a powerful aid certainly; more often a last resource, when nothing else offers. Christianity has declined into meaning morality only to many minds, perhaps a moral ideal, but also an ideal that seems hardly realizable.
Such an ideal may come to our aid in a crisis calling for decisions. But in the steady pressure of events directed not by men’s faith but by men’s reason, we are forced into compromise again and again till we weaken, and lose our certainty of judgment. Human thought faces a mighty rift between the reasoned thought due to our everyday sense experience, and the deeper not-reasoned confidence most men have in some other world of soul and spirit. Because we have no clear thoughts to justify our irrational confidence, that confidence can be readily shaken – an illness, a friend’s death, a reverse in our fortunes – all kinds of shocks may be sufficient to make us unsure.
And what kind of philosophy can we form for ourselves, when, living between two spheres of being, only one of them seems wholly real, whilst the other erupts into our life’s experience in all the irrational elements of human behaviour, or in the psychic experience of mediums and of other clairvoyant persons, in hypnotism, and in everyone’s experience of occasional intensely significant dreams.
These two worlds of experience exist side by side in our thinking, but are apparently unrelated. Some modern thinkers have attempted to relate them.
Sir Winston Churchill once related how as a youth at Oxford he was puzzled by the problem of these two kinds of knowledge of which he was well aware, one for which one struggled through logical thought, and another which appeared more directly in consciousness without the intermediary of logical thinking. The Battle of Britain showed both the one and the other in action in him, with the results which the world knows, and history will never forget.
But not all thinkers can live so freely between the two. Some recognise both but try to keep them, as it were, in separate pockets, as the truths of science, and the truths of faith. Some deny them an equal verity, and so suppress one or the other. Most of us live in an uneasy uncertainty between these two worlds of experience. For nothing can be more certain than that we are all born. Out of what? And it is equally certain that we shall all die. Into where? The hardiest Agnostic has no answers which extend beyond the span of one short human life; science has no answers; and the rosy dream of eternal bliss pictured by faith fails in this age to be entirely convincing.
BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE
What then is to bridge the gap between faith and knowledge, between inner and outer knowing? Without a bridge between these two we can form no practical working philosophy for the guiding of life. So the problem is vital.
Knowledge in our day has come generally to mean scientific knowledge. This again, since the fifteenth century has come to mean knowledge of the structure of the physical universe, in terms of number, weight and measure, and of the relations of its parts. In this sense, the modern physicist may be compared with a horse wearing blinkers to avoid the temptation to look right or left and so be led away from the pursuit of his objective. The objective for the physical sciences seems to be a mathematical understanding of a mechanical universe, and of how it works.
This concept of the universe presented by modern physics is peculiar, in that it does not in the least correspond with anything which we can see or observe for ourselves through our senses. We live in a world full of colour, of singing birds, of music, of the rippling of running waters and the majestic beauty of natural phenomena, of mountains and meadows, of oceans and skies. But this, according to science, may all be an illusion.
The senses respond characteristically to an electrical stimulus. Applied to eye, ear or tongue, the same stimulus excites impressions of colour, sound and taste. How then can scientific knowledge be based on our subjective sense impressions?
The physicist therefore has thought up a universe which is free of the unreliable evidence of our senses. It is colourless, soundless, and empty of beauty. It appears also to be rather meaningless, spawning life in an aimless kind of way. This colourless universe consists of vibrations, whose speed can be measured, which cause in us this or that sensation of colour, sound or taste; it has also mathematical relationships which can be measured. It is free of all illusions; or is it?
We continue to believe that we see a blue sky, and a green earth, and rejoice in them.
Opposed to this, faith gives us a world of soul and spirit, where not quantities reign, but qualities; the qualities of truth, beauty and goodness. In this world of qualities, where colour, sound and moral inspiration are basic, we believe, not as physicists, but as whole human beings.
What then creates this cleavage in our human thinking? It exists everywhere between all the branches of outer knowledge, and the certainties of inner experience without which life would be meaningless.
THE NEED FOR A DEEPER KNOWLEDGE OF COLOUR
Colour focuses this problem. Left out for so long as a ‘secondary’ quality in the physicist’s picture of the universe, it is demanding increasing attention as psychology, Chromotherapy and new discoveries in art, make a deeper knowledge of colour essential.
Various books on colour have appeared of recent years written usually from one or other of two widely differing points of view. Both are concerned with colour in relation to healing, the one interpreting colour more from the physicist’s viewpoint, the other more from old Eastern knowledge of colours, or from some kind of clairvoyance. Any connection which is created between these two kinds of approach is generally empirical. Colour is effective in healing… How and why has still to be ascertained.
The reason for this dual approach is not far to seek. It exists in our present forms of thinking. If we look only for physical explanations, we shall find what we are seeking for; if we look only for spiritual ones, we shall find these also. But does this mean a duality in the universe of spiritual and material? Or does it only mean a duality in our thinking?
This is a far reaching question towards answering which we have made little or no progress during the past five centuries. Science has taught us exactness in thinking, but only through limiting our field of observation. The time may be has come for its widening.
In a series of lectures on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (see “The Redemption of Thinking” by Rudolf Steiner. obtainable from New Knowledge Books, London;, Rudolf Steiner showed that the greatest problem which existed for the philosopher in the thirteenth century, exists still for us today: namely, “How is thought made Christ-like?”
After a thorough analysis of the philosophic thought which was there in the inheritance of Aquinas, and of that which our own inheritance contains, he concludes with these significant words:
“As we have been placed in the world, as we axe born into it, we split the world in two. The fact is that we have the world-content, as it were, here with us. Since we came into the world as human beings, we divide the world-content into observation, which appears to us from the outside, and the idea-world which appears to us from the inner soul. The matter is this: I look at the visible world, it is everywhere incomplete. I myself with my whole existence have arisen out of the world, to which the visible world also belongs. Then I look into myself and see just what is lacking in the visible world. I have to join together through my own self, since I have entered the world, what has been separated into two branches. I gain reality by working for it.”
Thus, we are born out of a world of soul and spirit existence into the sense-existence of our physical bodies. In the moment of birth we split our world in two. Henceforward we experience an inner and an outer life, In the inner life of feeling, in sleep and in dreams, we experience the life of soul which is our inheritance from before birth. We experience the spirit in the idea, the element of truth and spiritual reality in our thinking. In the outer world we learn gradually objective perception and objective reasoning.
These two worlds exist for us apparently little related until our human consciousness lifts itself to the requisite spiritual level. To achieve this goal in thinking may become not only a human necessity to become whole man, but also and paramountly, a world-necessity for the healing of western civilization.
SCIENCE, ART AND RELIGION
To achieve this new synthesis there are three ways, those of Science, Art and Religion, or in the individual experience, of Thinking, Peeling, and Willing. We may struggle with the problems of thinking with five centuries of later experience to add to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. The problems have not diminished. But the weapon of thought itself has become blunted by technology and some stimulus is needed from the side of Art or Religion to lift thinking beyond a mere intellectual cleverness.
We may struggle with the problem of a moral world-order, and arrive at abundant evidence that such is urgently needed. But to achieve it there must be more than a moral revival, there must be a quickening of soul and spirit, through genuine spiritual experience. And where should we experience this, without sacrificing consciousness, other than in the lighting up of thought. Or we may, with Goethe, struggle to achieve a bridge between the inner and outer worlds through the understanding experience of Art, and particularly of Colour. To attempt this, latter is our present intention. Or we may in a renewal of the Sacraments, seek to approach divine certainty through the experience of ritual.
In the end, the three ways may be seen to coalesce, and Science, Art and Religion may become healed from their separateness in the wholeness of spiritual vision.
So in this connection there can be nothing more necessary to our purpose than a deeper understanding of the Rainbow Bridge of Colour, which can unite once again the two worlds of experience in which we have our perpetual life and being.