Colour and Global Consciousness
Global consciousness became visible when this photo of the earth from space appeared on our television screens in 1969. The dominant daylight colours are reds and oranges through to browns and blues. Reports from astronauts and films of the earth from satellites describe the spectra at the edges of darkness and light as an unearthly experience.
This outwardly focussed global consciousness has developed to the point where the earth is seen as a small place and that our resources are finite. 30 years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, there is no permanent space station and the space research programs have not developed as was then expected, owing to the high cost of such research.
And yet from a western perspective the finiteness of the earth’s resources and habitable space has turned the mind inward to begin to explore the inner space, so well charted by eastern and preliterate cultures which until now the western world view has deemed inferior.
But there have been western philosophers and scholars, frequently dismissed by mainstream institutions, who knew and experienced global consciousness from applying the human intellect inwardly to penetrate the layers of human consciousness. Johannes Goethe in 1810 wrote Fahbenlehre (Colour Studies) in which he drew on ancient esoteric teachings which suggest that the eye has been created by light in order to see light. It is only with recent embriological research that science has recognised that the eye is an extension of the human brain and composed of the same substance. Goethe demonstrated that it is the nature of the eye to seek wholeness and this was only scientifically validated in the 1960s after quantified research into Ewald Hering’s Opponent theory.
Goethe demonstrated his holistic or global consciousness in his exploration of colour phenomena as they emerge at the edges of light and darkness but instead of travelling by satellite into the universe he took the exploration through the prism into the relationship between the eye and its interdependence with light and darkness within the human body, soul and spirit as well as with that of nature.
The Goethean Colour wheel is a map of Global Consciousness as it emerges between the light of yellows and the darkness of indigo. Global Consciousness bridges the spectrum of human experience between the incredible lightness of being to the dark night of the soul, requiring a reconciliation between the body soul and spiritual aspects of human nature.
The phenomenological colour exercises outlined by Goethe but further developed by a number of people in the twentieth century such as Rudolf Steiner, Lois Schroff and Gladys Mayer, cross this bridge by including the perception of the oberver along with that of the observed, in their scientiific method.
Colour inwardly and outwardly experienced is a language which can cross cultural divides, stimulate and integrate brain function and reawaken archetypal memories so as to reconnect the individual with the repressed and alienated aspects of human consciousness.
Sensing colour from the inside out is like clicking the mouse to rotate the globe to view every country on the globe. The mind is the satellite capable of viewing the globe from every perspective and every angle. But the whole is more than the sum of the parts and the intricate interdependence of every land mass and ocean becomes a metaphor for the mind set which knows and acts consciously in the knowledge that the bomb ignited in New York affects even the flight of butterflies in the Himalayas!
References
Goethe, Johannes von (1840) Goethe’s Theory of Colours (applied by Maria Schindler) New Knowledge, Chichester, 1964
Mayer, GladysColours: A New Approach to Painting Mercury Arts, Stroud, 1990
Schroff, Lois A Painter’s Handbook: Experiencing Colour between Darkness and Light Newlight Books, Herndon, 1985
Steiner, Rudolf (1910) Colour Anthroposophic Press, New York: Public Lectures, 1924
