Colour is created by the light, irradiating the darkness.

Every night and every morning the mantling darkness meets the light, and the earth is transformed in a glory of colour. Every morning and every night, the light of the spiritual world meets and touches the fringe of our earthly darkened consciousness. The migrant soul is filled with colour, in dream, or in waking pictures.

Sickness nearly always betokens, in some sense, a rift between the earthly personality and his spiritual sources, between the incarnated soul and his discarnate spirit.

Many grave illnesses are preceded by severe depression; for example, an acute physical illness such as cancer, or an acute mental illness, of suicidal or homicidal nature.

In such illness there may be a kind of psychic darkness, experienced not only by the sufferers themselves, but even by the persons around them also. I can testify to this out of my own experience in healing, and I believe many people who have worked with mental patients will be able to support this statement. Something like a cloud of darkness, bringing acute depression, attacks one. The healer must be aware enough to confront it, otherwise he too could be overcome.

Many examples of this are too harrowing to relate. I have one patgient in mind however who recovered, so far as I know, completely. A young man, he said to me once, despairingly: “The world is growing grey for me. I long for colour, and can find no colour anywhere.”

Apparently then he was in fairly good physical health, and I was puzzled. Actually, he was on the edge of a complete mental breakdown, which happened a month or two later.

 

MAN IS THREEFOLD

Just as we, as souls, live always in colour, between light and darkness, so do we also live, in feeling, between thought and will. AB we are air-beings, when in our breathing, we inhale and exhale rhythmically, so are we Light-beings, when the thinking we are unfolding is living in the light, yet do not know it, because we live within it.

In his lecture on ‘Thought and Will’, in the collection of lectures entitled ‘Colour, (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Go., London), Rudolf Steiner explains this contrast at some length.  Thinking is living in the light, whilst Will is unconscious.  Thus man can understand himself only if he takes himself as a seed of futurity, enclosed in the past, in the light aura of thought, “…Light shines out of the past; darkness leads into the future…” In Will is revealed finally the continually beginning, the continually germinating world.”

A healthy balance of thinking and will is maintained through feeling.  In a like way, the balance is maintained physically between the head system and the metabolic or limb system, through the rhythmic interplay of blood circulation and breathing.

It requires a lively and imaginative power of thinking to enter into this concept of health as a mobile balance, between opposite kinds of forces.  Yet it throws great light on the complex nature of the human being, (see “The Human Soul in Sleeping, Dreaming and Waking”, F.W. Zeylmans van Emmichoven, M.D., New Knowledge Books).

Our head and nerve-senses system is continually destroying nerve substance as we achieve consciousness.  So the present age is nervy.  Too much activity in the head nature in early life, may result in thin spidery limbs; in later life, it may cause Sclerosis-in thinking, it may produce an intellect without imagination and without feeling.  For these conditions art in education is corrective.”

The metabolic activity is continually upbuilding substance. If this becomes excessive it can produce corpulence, sluggish thinking and sometimes false growths, tumours etc.  A helpful corrective is to arouse enthusiasm in exercising the creative faculties in the arts.

A peculiar illness which occurs through an unbalance between the digestive and head nature, is called migraine.  If we were clairvoyant we might lie down after a heavy lunch and see colours.  The digestive system creates colours. This is a fact which might profitably be studied by the Sur-Realists.

In migraine, one is suffering from the digestive activity extending upwards into the head, and a symptom may be to see lights, or colours moving rhythmically in a blinding brilliance, which symptom often precedes sickness and headache.  This illness is not generally well understood.  My own impression is that it can be caused by meditation made too soon after a meal, so that forces are drawn too strongly into the head. I find that a strongly willed meditation on one colour can banish the irregular many-coloured symptoms and avoid headache, if taken in time.  Also there is a medicine which helps to restore balance between head and metabolism.

Polarities of head and metabolism are balanced in health by the rhythmic system of blood and breath in the “middle-man”.  Because this system should be healer of the other two, illnesses which affect the breathing, such as asthma, or hysteria, are difficult to heal. These can be helped most through the arts; through colour, music, rhythmic movement and rhythmic occupations such as weaving in colours, or through rhythmic speech or breathing.

The soul has always to find and keep its balance between all these polarities; between head system and metabolism, between thinking and will, between light and darkness, between past and future.  In all these, health is not a static, but a mobile condition of balance.

The soul that can not find and keep its balance between all these polarities, finds illness instead; and out of illness may win the new consciousness that helps to re-establish its balance in health.

 

ILLNESS CAN BE A BLESSING

Illness is not necessarily a misfortune; it can be a great blessing.  For through illness we may find ourselves able to take time to survey the whole of life and to realize more of its meaning and aims.

Whereas the person who always enjoys ‘rude health’ may enjoy his body so much that he forgets the beginnings and ends of life; rather as a small boy, running an errand for his mother, may enjoy the diversions of the way so much that he forgets what he started out for. We are all rather like children in this respect; and illness may serve to remind us of our spiritual origin, otherwise too frequently forgotten.

The conflict between thinking and will, between light and darkness is familiar enough to us all.  “For what I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that do I.”  The struggle between all these is the Ego’s effort for spiritual self-realization.

In black darkness we can do nothing.  Darkness is hostile even to life.  But light transforms darkness. In light life thrives and lifts itself up to its highest manifestation, in the consciousness of man.

How then do the colours bring healing?

The whole living world radiates colour.  Though it is true a pale plant may be grown in a near dark cellar, its life will then be as frail as its colour.  From the splendour of tropical flowers to the rosy blossom of an infant’s cheek, the living world glows in colour endlessly.  The colours fade in sickness and death, as the plant-world dies into carbon, or coal-blackness.

Colour can be stimulated within a living being, either from outside, or from inside Colour healing which involves the use of coloured lamps, is principally concerned with treatments from outside.  Other means we may now consider are concerned more with awakening an inner consciousness of colour.

 

COLOUR THERAPY

In the early part of this century Rudolf Steiner foretold that Colour Therapy would play a great part in the coming times.  We are now seeing it used in different ways in Colour Treatments.  Of these perhaps the most widely known are those which use coloured lamps for treatment of the patient externally through the skin, either directly on to affected parts, or through so called “colour baths” where the patient is immersed in a space filled with and surrounded by one colour.

Most of this work is in a stage of immaturity which does not court publicity, but many beneficial results are claimed for healing inflammatory conditions, and treating sensitive conditions not responsive to other medical treatments.  Rudolf Steiner distinguished two kinds of colour treatment, one which acts directly upon the organs, and one which acts more through the organs of consciousness.  The latter is the means generally employed in the clinics and curative homes which have developed out of the indications he gives.  Here again, the treatments through colour are in process of development, and only a few indications can be given, though those interested could follow these up at the institutions mentioned, (Rudolf Steiner Camphill Children’s Homes, Aberdeen; Arlesheim Clinic, Switzerland).

 

COLOUR AND THE EYES

The use of colour naturally plays a considerable part in the treatment of the eyes.

Colour treatments are more potent if contrast re-actions are used.  For example, red and blue may be used to correct short or long sight by a rhythmic succession of contrasting experiences of first one colour, then the other, ending with the one most needed.

Blue lures the vision outwards, and so helps short sight; red drives us back into ourselves so can help to correct long sight.  Activity m the eye can be increased by a rhythmic and balanced alternation.

The use of colour is not confined to treatments of the eyes.  It is still more potent m affecting consciousness.  In the Curative Homes of the Camphill Community colour is used in combination with music to affect the disordered or undeveloped soul condition of what are generally called “defective” children, e.g. children in need of special care.

The use of moving coloured shadows thrown on to a screen, in a room coloured appropriate!^ and filled with string-music, can have a wonderfully healing effect on spastic children and others suffering from the nervous conditions’ of our age, if it is used with an adequate artistry.  One needs to become an artist in healing to use such methods effectively.

 

THE USE OF RED AND BLUE

Colours can be used to heal illness of either the upper or the lower organism, through concentrating the effects of red, or blue; through, for example, making one room entirely red in walls and furnishings, and another entirely blue, and letting the patient experience the rooms alternately.

The isolated effect of one room or the other is less significant than the contrasting re-actions through the rhythm changing.  Blue walls deflect functional activity from the head to the rest of the organism.  In a completely red room the effect is reversed.

Rudolf Steiner gave indications such as these, as to how colour may be used effectively in restoring a healthy balance in functional activities.

Experiences in colour therapy show that colour plays a part in our wellbeing, even in the physical organism.

Psychological treatments also reveal that a patient’s illness may often be shown through his paintings, both in his choice of colours and of forms – in other words his illness reveals itself in his soul.  The self which forms the mirror for our life’s experience may get clouded or dull and the colours it reflects may take on a greyish hue.

Alternate red and blue treatments will not do much here, for the patient has now to take in hand the enlivening of his own soul life, through his own efforts, and to do so, there can be few things more helpful than painting, used not in a diagnostic, but a curative, and ultimately an artistic way.

For the first step in healing is the inner effort of the self to hold itself erect in its environment.  Through an awakened sense of colour, one begins to awaken to the world around us in a new way.

The soul lives and rejoices in colour. With awakened perception of the world around us we begin to respond livingly to the life around us revealed in a coloured world. Colour speaks to us, and our soul’s response is a renewed joy in living.

Through painting, and all its aesthetic laws of colour harmony, balance, etc., we learn to balance ourselves.  Through creating out of colour, we discover the inner creativity in ourselves; through discriminating selection and imagination, we learn to draw upon our sensed observations our balanced judgement, and the limitless wealth of images which the world beyond dream supplies, and find, out of our own sources, we are creators.

In the physical space-world to which we have been rather closely tied during the past five or six centuries, painters have placed things side by side, or behind or before each other conforming to the laws of space, where certainly two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same moment.  Perspective has ordered these spatial arrangements for us by making the near things larger and the far things smaller, and so on.

But the soul sphere, behind the dream and behind the artist’s imaginative faculty, has no such limitation; one object can appear out of another, like the Genie out of Aladdin’s Lamp.

Colours are transparent and weave through each other like a luminous coloured smoke. Forms are not static, but in a constant process of change.  Life weaves through everywhere, soul gleams through every colour. Spirit speaks through colour, movement, light.

 

COLOUR EXERCISES

Through colour exercises we can establish a healthy and harmonious balance in the soul.

Taking flowing water-colours, and making them flow freely on the paper as sunshine flows freely through the air, we do not at first need to think of depicting anything, but only of living into the mood and movements of the individual colours.  So to spread outwards with the yellow and to feel a condensing and drawing together in the’ blue, can be like a soul exercise in inbreathing and outbreathing.

One can make pictures of moonlight or twilight, and find images out of the colours; or one can just paint for the enjoyment of the colours themselves.

It is effective because the soul’s life is lived in colour, and it is good to remember now and then, in the hurly-burly of existence, that we each are possessors of a living soul.

We may paint with all the colours eventually, but at first it is best to take them singly as a means of entering more deeply into their individual characters.

Each colour shades off into two others; e.g. Yellow to greenish and orange-yellow, blue to purple and green blue; and so on.  Each colour has its own character, e.g, orange gives courage, green gives tranquility and balance, and so on.  Each one provides a voyage of discovery in its many tones and nuances.

Or again one may stimulate each by the use of complementary or contrasting colours.  A pair of complementary colours are a colour drama.

To find the complementary, one has only to paint a bright spot of colour on a white paper, gaze at it for say, twenty seconds, then transfer the gaze to another uncoloured paper, till the eye conjures up the appropriate complementary.

One can use colours in other ways than painting, without resort to a ‘treatment’-coloured lights, coloured reading lamps or coloured hangings may help.  I have one friend who found it impossible to sleep under an orange coloured eiderdown, but slept peacefully under a blue one.  In regard to these things one must learn to use one’s own discrimination.

Fainting however has one great advantage. It builds independence in us.  We are alone with ourselves and the colours.  Nothing happens’ until we can take courage and begin.

We reveal our own emptiness or are astonished at the creative imagination we discover unexpectedly in ourselves.  Either way it can be a wonderful path of self-discovery, and what is negative soon becomes positive, if we persist.

 

COLOUR AND THE FOUR TEMPERAMENTS

The individuality is the key, the one true Self finding its way between all the colour varieties of temperament – sanguine, melancholy, phlegmatic or choleric.

The sanguine temperament flits gaily like a butterfly from colour to colour, as from occupation to occupation in life, its illness is restlessness and indetermination.

The melancholic temperament enjoys sympathising with fellow-sufferers, and descends deeply into blue and violet.

The phlegmatic pursues an undisturbed slow course through life and his colours may be muddy and undistinguished, but not that nor anything else troubles him overmuch.

The choleric seethes with energy, and rejoices in fiery red colours, unless, as sometimes happens, his temperament goes too far even for himself to contend with.

For example, a lady who attended one of my lectures, stood up at the end and complained of my saying that colours were of spiritual origin.  “Look at Red!” she declared.  “How can one say Red has a spiritual origin?  I loathe Red”  One felt, from her tone, that to her, Red had something of the character of original sin.

I looked at the lady, and understood her trouble immediately.  She was choleric to the verge of illness – absolutely bursting with redness, and this outburst was characteristic. She could not stand any more of red in her vicinity.

Paradoxically, in the treatments of the Rudolf Steiner Curative Homes for Children in Need of Special Care, an intensely choleric child is dressed in red, with the purpose of exciting an opposite condition inwardly, by the re-action of the complementary colour, green or blue, to develop tranquility.

In adults the colours seem to work differently.  The soul seems to strive towards the colours it longs to acquire, but has not yet achieved, in its own aura.

The colour of clothing used to be a reflection of the aura. For a long time now at has been what fashion prescribes for us Coming generations will feel again for the’ colours which reflect the changing aura through life.  We can all do this to some extent already.

Colours are the enliveners of both our inner world, and our outer world.  They are objective realities, and individual necessities.

We can not indicate a colour prescription for individual ills, for no two souls are alike, but with a few such indications as have been given, the individual can find his own colour.  The finding will also be healing for this will in itself be an individual spiritual deed.

 

COLOUR MEDITATIONS

Whenever we forget that we are primarily spiritual beings, we may easily let the affairs of everyday life overwhelm us with anxieties; we may fritter energy in over activity, in meaningless occupations, or get depressed because we are not achieving any spectacular success in any chosen direction.  Disasters in the earthly life may overwhelm us.

At such times, when it is essential to realise the inner life of spirit, we may find it most difficult to sleep.  As sleep is everyone’s way into the life of the spiritual worlds, there is no better means of healing than first to re-establish the rhythm of sleep.

Colour therapists recommend a dark-blue lamp at the bedside to induce sleep.  But if one takes instead the way of meditation, then one must know how to meditate.

For meditation is intended to enhance consciousness, so that one can retain a certain awareness in that condition of sleep in which we normally have no awareness at all.  For this kind of inner control and development of higher faculties we should refer to Rudolf Steiner*s books “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and “An Outline of Occult Science”, (Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London, Anthroposphic Press, New York).  Otherwise an attempt to meditate without guidance, might achieve the opposite effect from that intended.

All meditation must begin with an emptying of oneself from all outer sense impressions, with the exception of the one chosen for the meditation.  Take the colour blue.  It is difficult to exclude unwanted thoughts and impressions, so to begin with one may use a memory picture.  Remember as strongly as possible a blue sky, perhaps a night sky filled with stars.  Or a blue sky over the sea where the blue is reflected in a myriad lapping waves, moving rhythmically.  Or picture a blue cloak, and imagine oneself wrapped in it, so that the blue garment envelops eyes and ears.

There are two elements; the one the separating of oneself from unwanted thoughts, by holding one selected thought in the forefront of consciousness; the other the Blue. which has the character of lifting one’s consciousness beyond earthly concerns to the awareness of the greater world which we experience in sleep.  Insomnia is an earth-bound condition.

I remember a patient who suffered from sleeplessness, and told me that she had been dreaming that she was trying to get into the wrong house.  This was an excellent illustration of what we all tend to do when we try to carry the concerns of waking life with us into sleep, instead of preparing ourselves, through thought, prayer, or meditation for the spiritual worlds we enter through sleep.  To lift oneself to the immensity of the blue vault of heaven, in picture, can be a good preparation.

In a lecture by Rudolf Steiner in London, now printed as a booklet entitled “Man as a Picture of the Living Spirit” (Anthroposophical Publishing Go., London), he gave a meditation which can lead us to some understanding of what is behind sleep. He referred to this meditation as one which reaches out to the true “I”.

The meditation is as follows:-

I gaze into the Darkness.
In it there arises Light –
Living Light!
Who is this Light in the Darkness?
It is I myself in my reality.
This reality of the “I”
Does not enter into my earthly life.
I am but a picture of it.
But I shall find it again
When with good will for the Spirit
I shall have passed through the Gate of Death.

“Entering ever and again into a meditative saying of this kind”, said Rudolf Steiner, “we can confront the Darkness.  We realize that here on Earth we are only a picture of our true Being, that our true Being never comes down into the earthly life.  Yet in the midst of the Darkness, through our good will towards the Spirit, a Light can dawn upon us, of which we may in truth confess: This Light am I myself in my reality.“