Colour Psychology Quotes

To be quite accurate, human nature is simply what it is; it has its dark and its light sides. The sum of all colours is grey - light on a dark background or dark on light.

What colour was Millie's room Grace?' 'Red, Millie's room was red.

Q. Surely it is easier to be objective about other people than about oneself? A. No, it is more difficult. If you become objective to yourself you can see other people objectively, but not before, because before that it will all be coloured by your own views, attitudes, tastes, by what you like and what you dislike. To be objective you must be free from it all. You can become objective to yourself in the state of self-consciousness: this is the first experience of coming into contact with the real object.

The new trend of capturing pics instead of enjoying the experience is not new. Human mind has been doing that for ages. Your mind tries to capture the experience by naming, defining, judging, comparing and categorizing everything. As a result, your soul misses the live dance of colours, sounds, shapes and sensations happening before you.

If I look closely I can see we have the same colour eyes, not me and Simon, but me and the boy who is also me, the boy who I can no longer recognise, with whom I no longer share a single thought, worry, or hope.

You are not who you think you are. You are not who they want you to be. You are not merely your colour, class, gender - and so on - these are quite narrow things. You are not the ideas you are given and gather. You are not what you own or lay claim to. You are not even your life story - for that changes through time, perspective, emphasis and many things. You are what resides before, between and beyond all these things." - R. Ogunlaru

The colour of the water seems to be the colour of the glass into which it has been poured

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend ‘the One, the All’. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all the opposites.

What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity And’. You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.

The mind which is immortal makes itself Requital for its good or evil thoughts, Is its own origin of ill and end, And its own place and time; its innate sense, When stripped of this mortality, derives No colour from the fleeting things without, But is absorb'd in sufferance or in joy, Born from the knowledge of its own desert.

Red leaves the other colors blushing with emotions.

No matter what you say, different people will understand it in different ways. Sunlight has all colours in it but some objects absorb red, some blue, some yellow and so on.

Turn off the sound and watch a slap scene in a movie. Even if the gap between hand and check remains one feet, sound effect makes you feel that slap is real. When the picture is incomplete, your mind fills in your own colours in the gaps. If you are madly in love with someone, you will believe their most absurd lies. If you hate someone, you won’t even believe absolute truths told by them.

It was love. That pure, naive, untarnished emotion which seeds into you when you read fairy tales. Listen to honey-imbued words served by melodious voices. Avoid looking at your bitter squabbling parents. It skulked into me, making me its home.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct.

[O]ur percept is an elaborate computer model in the brain, constructed on the basis of information coming from [the environment], but transformed in the head into a form in which that information can be used. Wavelength differences in the light out there become coded as 'colour' differences in the computer model in the head. Shape and other attributes are encoded in the same kind of way, encoded into a form that is convenient to handle. The sensation of seeing is, for us, very different from the sensation of hearing, but this cannot be directly due to the physical differences between light and sound. Both light and sound are, after all, translated by the respective sense organs into the same kind of nerve impulses. It is impossible to tell, from the physical attributes of a nerve impulse, whether it is conveying information about light, about sound or about smell. The reason the sensation of seeing is so different from the sensation of hearing and the sensation of smelling is that the brain finds it convenient to use different kinds of internal model of the visual world, the world of sound and the world of smell. It is because we internally use our visual information and our sound information in different ways and for different purposes that the sensations of seeing and hearing are so different. It is not directly because of the physical differences between light and sound.

I see the last two millennia as laid out in columns, like a reverse ledger sheet. It's as if I'm standing at the top of the twenty-first century looking downwards to 2000. Future centuries float as a gauzy sheet stretching over to the left. I also see people, architecture and events laid out chronologically in the columns. When I think of the year 1805, I see Trafalgar, women in the clothes of that era, famous people who lived then, the building, etc. The sixth to tenth centuries are very green, the Middle Ages are dark with vibrant splashes of red and blue and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are brown with rich, lush colours in the furniture and clothing.

Goethe's theory of the constitution of colours of the spectrum has not proved to be an unsatisfactory theory, rather it really isn't a theory at all. Nothing can be predicted with it. It is, rather a vague schematic outline of the sort we find in James's psychology. Nor is there any experimentum crucis which could decide for or against the theory.

Deep in the psychological caves of their mental platonic darkness, there is no rainbow colour or light of reason in many areas of their psyche, their inner mind. Instead they have married themselves to a dragon of a creature, so terrible that even Jupiter feared this monstrosity of pompous ignorance. Their hope of the beauty of Cupid is just a lovemaking session in the dark room of ignorance of both science and religion.

Our mandala is indeed an 'eye,' the structure of which symbolizes the centre of order in the unconscious. The eye is a hollow sphere, black inside, and filled with a semi-liquid substance, the vitreous humour. Looking at it from outside, one sees a round, coloured surface, the iris, with a dark centre, from which a golden light shines. Bohme calls it a 'fiery eye,' in accordance with the old idea that seeing emanates from the eye. The eye may well stand for consciousness (which is in fact an organ of perception), looking into its own background. It sees its own light there, and when this is clear and pure the whole body is filled with light. Under certain conditions consciousness has a purifying effect. This is probably what is meant by Matthew 6 : 22ff., an idea expressed even more clearly in Luke 11 : 33. The eye is also a well-known symbol for God. Hence Bohme calls his 'Philosophique Globe' the 'Eye of Eternity,' the 'Essence of all Essences,' the 'Eye of God.' By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within. By day no light is needed, and if you don't know it is night you won't light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness. This is not an edifying text but a mere statement of the psychological facts.

Alchemy is neither a premature chemistry nor a psychology in the modem sense, although both of these are to be found in alchemical writings . Alchemy is a symbolic science of natural forms based on the correspondence between different planes of reality and making use of mineral and metal symbolism to expound a spiritual science of the souh For alchemy, nature is sacred, and the alchemist is the guardian of nature considered as a theophany and reflection of spiritual realities . A purely profane chemistry could come into being only when the substances of alchemy became completely emptied of their sacred quality. For this very reason, a re-discovery of the alchemical view of nature, without in any way denying the chemical sciences which deal with substances from another point of view, could reinstate the spiritual and symbolic character of the forms, colours and processes that man encounters throughout his life in the corporeal world.

For our more modest psychological purposes we must abandon the colourful metaphysical language of the East. What yoga aims at in this exercise is undoubtedly a psychic change in the adept. The ego is the expression of individual existence. The yogin exchanges his ego for Shiva or the Buddha; in this way he induces a shifting of the psychological centre of personality from the personal ego to the impersonal non-ego, which is now experienced as the real “Ground” of the personality.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

No day passes that the mail does not flood the doctor’s office with suggestions about what to use in his clinical practice. My desk overflows with gadgets and multi-coloured pills telling me that without them mankind cannot be happy. The propaganda campaign reaching our medical eyes and ears is often so laden with suggestions that we can be persuaded to distribute sedatives and stimulants where straight critical thinking would deter us and we would seek the deeper causes of the difficulties. This is true not only for modern pharmacotherapy; the same tendencies can also be shown in psychotherapeutic methods.

You should look at certain walls stained with damp, or at stones of uneven colour. If you have to invent some backgrounds you will be able to see in these the likeness of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, woods, great plains, hills and valleys in great variety; and then again you will see there battles and strange figures in violent action, expressions of faces and clothes and an infinity of things which you will be able to reduce to their complete and proper forms. In such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of bells, in whose stroke you may find every named word which you can imagine.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

A percept, I should say, is not knowledge, but merely something that happens, and that belongs equally to the world of physics and to the world of psychology. We naturally think of perception, as Plato does, as a relation between a percipient and an object: we say 'I see a table.' But here 'I' and 'table' are logical constructions. The core of crude occurrence is merely certain patches of colour. These are associated with images of touch, they may cause words, and they may become a source of memories. The percept as filled out with images of touch becomes an 'object', which is supposed physical; the percept as filled out with words and memories becomes a 'perception', which is part of a 'subject' and is considered mental. The percept is just an occurrence, and neither true nor false; the percept as filled out with words is a judgment, and capable of truth or falsehood. This judgment I call a 'judgment of perception'. The proposition 'knowledge is perception' must be interpreted as meaning 'knowledge is judgments of perception'. It is only in this form that it is grammatically capable of being correct.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

As an example, let us examine a previously differentiated experience: a sunny day in spring that endless generations before us have often enjoyed. To reproduce the experience, we must consciously differentiate the shapes of the trees, grass, and sky, conforming to the current content of consciousness. We no longer are concerned merely with a spring day, but with our own special, personally coloured spring day. On the other hand, when this differentiated product enters another individual's psyche, a re-transformation occurs. Conscious processing by another involves his personal impressions of a spring day. In addition to conscious processing, the image falls into an unconscious ‘working through', moving the current personal impression down to the ‘Mothers' and dissolving it. In the unconscious, we may find the spring day broken down into its components, the sun, the heavens, and plants that are organized (or perhaps more correctly, moulded) according to mythological forms known to us from folk psychology. In each declaration of a thought, which is a portrait of an image, we establish a generalization in which words are symbols, serving to mould universally human and universally comprehensible ideas around the personal, i.e., the impressions are depersonalized.

The psychological objection is more serious, at least in connection with Hume. The whole theory of ideas as copies of impressions, as he sets it forth, suffers from ignoring vagueness. When, for example, I have seen a flower of a certain colour, and I afterwards call up an image of it, the image is lacking in precision, in this sense, that there are several closely similar shades of colour of which it might be an image, or "idea," in Hume's terminology. It is not true that 'the mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each.' Suppose you have seen a man whose height is six feet one inch. You retain an image of him, but it probably would fit a man half an inch taller or shorter. Vagueness is different from generality, but has some of the same characteristics. By not noticing it, Hume runs into unnecessary difficulties, for instance, as to the possibility of imagining a shade of colour you have never seen, which is intermediate between two closely similar shades that you have seen. If these two are sufficiently similar, any image you can form will be equally applicable to both of them and to the intermediate shade. When Hume says that ideas are derived from impressions which they exactly represent he goes beyond what is psychologically true.

The psychological objection is more serious, at least in connection with Hume. The whole theory of ideas as copies of impressions, as he sets it forth, suffers from ignoring vagueness. When, for example, I have seen a flower of a certain colour, and I afterwards call up an image of it, the image is lacking in precision, in this sense, that there are several closely similar shades of colour of which it might be an image, or 'idea,' in Hume's terminology. It is not true that 'the mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality without forming a precise notion of degrees of each.' Suppose you have seen a man whose height is six feet one inch. You retain an image of him, but it probably would fit a man half an inch taller or shorter. Vagueness is different from generality, but has some of the same characteristics. By not noticing it, Hume runs into unnecessary difficulties, for instance, as to the possibility of imagining a shade of colour you have never seen, which is intermediate between two closely similar shades that you have seen. If these two are sufficiently similar, any image you can form will be equally applicable to both of them and to the intermediate shade. When Hume says that ideas are derived from impressions which they exactly represent he goes beyond what is psychologically true.

Schiller’s formula could be carried out only by applying a ruthless power standpoint, with never a scruple about justice for the object nor any conscientious examination of its own competence. Only under such conditions, which Schiller certainly never contemplated, could the inferior function participate in life. In this way the archaic elements, naïve and unconscious and decked in the glamour of mighty words and fair gestures, also came bursting through and helped to build our present “civilization,” concerning the nature of which humanity is at this moment in some measure of disagreement. The archaic power instinct, hitherto hidden behind the façade of civilized living, finally came to the surface in its true colours, and proved beyond question that we are “still barbarians.” For it should not be forgotten that, in the same measure as the conscious attitude may pride itself on a certain godlikeness by reason of its lofty and absolute standpoint, an unconscious attitude develops with a godlikeness oriented downwards to an archaic god whose nature is sensual and brutal. The enantiodromia of Heraclitus ensures that the time will come when this deus absconditus shall rise to the surface and press the God of our ideals to the wall. It is as though men at the close of the eighteenth century had not really seen what was taking place in Paris, but lingered on in an aesthetic, enthusiastic, or trifling attitude in order to delude themselves about the real meaning of that glimpse into the abysses of human nature. In that nether world is terror, And man shall not tempt the gods. Let him never yearn to see What they veil with night and horror!48

It would, therefore, be pointless to call upon consciousness to decide the conflict between the instincts. A conscious decision would be quite arbitrary, and could never supply the will with a symbolic content that alone can produce an irrational solution of a logical antithesis. For this we must go deeper; we must descend into the foundations of consciousness which have still preserved their primordial instinctivity—that is, into the unconscious, where all psychic functions are indistinguishably merged in the original and fundamental activity of the psyche. The lack of differentiation in the unconscious arises in the first place from the almost direct association of all the brain centres with each other, and in the second from the relatively weak energie value of the unconscious elements.83 That they possess relatively little energy is clear from the fact that an unconscious element at once ceases to be subliminal as soon as it acquires a stronger accent of value; it then rises above the threshold of consciousness, and it can do this only by virtue of the energy accruing to it. It becomes a “lucky idea” or “hunch,” or, as Herbart calls it, a “spontaneously arising presentation.” The strong energic value of the conscious contents has the effect of intense illumination, whereby their differences become clearly perceptible and any confusion between them is ruled out. In the unconscious, on the contrary, the most heterogeneous elements possessing only a vague analogy can be substituted for one another, just because of their low luminosity and weak energic value. Even heterogeneous sense-impressions coalesce, as we see in “photisms” (Bleuler) or in colour hearing. Language, too, contains plenty of these unconscious contaminations, as I have shown in the case of sound, light, and emotional states.84

Between the extreme limits of this series would find a place all the forms of prestige resulting from the different elements composing a civilisation -- sciences, arts, literature, &c. -- and it would be seen that prestige constitutes the fundamental element of persuasion. Consciously or not, the being, the idea, or the thing possessing prestige is immediately imitated in consequence of contagion, and forces an entire generation to adopt certain modes of feeling and of giving expression to its thought. This imitation, moreover, is, as a rule, unconscious, which accounts for the fact that it is perfect. The modern painters who copy the pale colouring and the stiff attitudes of some of the Primitives are scarcely alive to the source of their inspiration. They believe in their own sincerity, whereas, if an eminent master had not revived this form of art, people would have continued blind to all but its naïve and inferior sides. Those artists who, after the manner of another illustrious master, inundate their canvasses with violet shades do not see in nature more violet than was detected there fifty years ago; but they are influenced, "suggestioned," by the personal and special impressions of a painter who, in spite of this eccentricity, was successful in acquiring great prestige. Similar examples might be brought forward in connection with all the elements of civilisation. It is seen from what precedes that a number of factors may be concerned in the genesis of prestige; among them success was always one of the most important. Every successful man, every idea that forces itself into recognition, ceases, ipso facto, to be called in question. The proof that success is one of the principal stepping-stones to prestige is that the disappearance of the one is almost always followed by the disappearance of the other. The hero whom the crowd acclaimed yesterday is insulted to-day should he have been overtaken by failure. The re-action, indeed, will be the stronger in proportion as the prestige has been great. The crowd in this case considers the fallen hero as an equal, and takes its revenge for having bowed to a superiority whose existence it no longer admits.

can be horribly fallible, and is over-rated in courts of law. Psychological experiments have given us some stunning demonstrations, which should worry any jurist inclined to give superior weight to ‘eye-witness’ evidence. A famous example was prepared by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois. Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other, and we, the experimental subjects, watch the film. The players weave in and out of the circle and change places as they pass and bounce the balls, so the scene is quite actively complicated. Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. At the end of the test, the counts are duly written down, but – little does the audience know – this is not the real test! After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. ‘And how many of you saw the gorilla?’ The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film, a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest as if in belligerent contempt for eye-witness evidence, and then strolls off with the same insouciance as before (see colour page 8). He is there in full view for nine whole seconds – more than one-third of the film – and yet the majority of the witnesses never see him. They would swear an oath in a court of law that no man in a gorilla suit was present, and they would swear that they had been watching with more than usually acute concentration for the whole 25 seconds, precisely because they were counting ball-passes. Many experiments along these lines have been performed, with similar results, and with similar reactions of stupefied disbelief when the audience is finally shown the truth. Eye-witness testimony, ‘actual observation’, ‘a datum of experience’ – all are, or at least can be, hopelessly unreliable. It is, of course, exactly this unreliability among observers that stage conjurors exploit with their techniques of deliberate distraction.

Kshemaraja says: Let people of great intelligence closely understand the Goddess Consciousness who is simultaneously of the nature of both revelation (unmesha) and concealment (nimesha). The best attitude is to regard everything that happens in the group as the play of Chiti. Revelation is Shiva and confusion is also Shiva. However, there is always recourse to A-Statements, statements of present feeling. An A-Statement (I feel mad, sad, bad, scared or glad), is already at a higher level than a statement in which the A-Statement is not acknowledged or expressed. A person might be angry and not know it. That anger will colour all his opinions and attitudes and distort them. The simple statement, ‘I am angry’, is much closer to the truth and also much less destructive. Making A-Statements keeps thought closely tied to feeling. If thought wanders away from feeling, that is, if it is unconscious of the feeling underlying it, it can and does create universes of delusion. When thought is tied to feeling, it becomes much more trustworthy. If I were to look for a scriptural justification of the concept of the A-Statement, I would point to the remarkable verse (I.4) from Spanda Karikas: I am happy, I am miserable, I am attached—these and other cognitions have their being evidently in another in which the states of happiness, misery, etc., are strung together. Notice the A-Statements (I am happy, etc.). Of course, the point that Vasugupta is making has to do with the old debate with the Buddhists. He is saying that these cognitions or A-Statements must exist within an underlying context, the Self. The Buddhist logicians denied the existence of a continuous Self, saying that each mind moment was essentially unrelated to every other one. Leaving that debate aside, the verse suggests the close connection of the A-Statement with the Self. The participant in Shiva Process work makes an A-Statement, understanding that with it he comes to the doorway of the Self, which underlies it. I think of the A-Statement as a kind of Shaivite devotional ritual. The Shaiva yogi sacramentalises every movement and gesture of life and by making a perfect articulation of present feeling, he performs his sacrament to the presence of divinity in that moment. Once the A-Statements are found, expansion takes place via B-Statements, any statements that uplift, and G-Statements, those B-Statements that are scriptural or come from higher Consciousness. Without G-Statements the inquiry might be merely psychological, or rooted in the mundane. Without A-Statements we are building an edifice on shaky foundations. Balance is needed. Mandala of the Hierarchy of Statements. Self-inquiry leads to more subtle and profound understanding. A-Statements set the foundation of present feeling, B-Statements draw on inner wisdom and G-Statements lift the inquiry to higher Consciousness.

A trivial thing, for a teenage boy to be colour-blind, not uncommon or noteworthy, unless it simply, unalterably, thwarted everything.

When the psalmist saw the transgression of the wicked his heart told him how it could be. ”There is no fear of God before his eyes,” he explained, and in so saying revealed to us the psychology of sin. When men no longer fear God, they transgress His laws without hesitation. The fear of consequences is not deterrent when the fear of God is gone. In olden days men of faith were said to ”walk in the fear of God” and to ”serve the Lord with fear.” However intimate their communion with God, however bold their prayers, at the base of their religious life was the conception of God as awesome and dreadful. This idea of God transcendent rims through the whole Bible and gives color and tone to the character of the saints. This fear of God was more than a natural apprehension of danger; it was a nonrational dread, an acute feeling of personal insufficiency in the presence of God the Almighty. Wherever God appeared to men in Bible times the results were the same - an overwhelming sense of terror and dismay, a wrenching sensation of sinfulness and guilt. When God spoke, Abram stretched himself upon the ground to listen. When Moses saw the Lord in the burning bush, he hid his face in fear to look upon God. Isalah’s vision of God wrung from him the cry, ”Woe is me!” and the confession, ”I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.” Daniel’s encounter with God was probably the most dreadful and wonderful of them all. The prophet lifted up his eyes and saw One whose ”body also was like the beryl, and his face as the appearance of lightning, and his eyes as lamps of fire, and his arms and his feet like in colour to polished brass, and the voice of his words like the voice of a multitude.” ”I Daniel alone saw the vision” he afterwards wrote, ”for the men that were with me saw not the vision; but a great quaking fell upon them, so that they fled to hide themselves. Therefore I was left alone, and saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me: for my comeliness was turned in me into corruption, and I retained no strength. Yet heard I the voice of his words: and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I in a deep sleep on my face, and my face toward the ground.” These experiences show that a vision of the divine transcendence soon ends all controversy between the man and his God. The fight goes out of the man and he is ready with the conquered Saul to ask meekly, ”Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?”  Conversely, the self-assurance of modern Christians, the basic levity present in so many of our religious gatherings, the shocking disrespect shown for the Person of God, are evidence enough of deep blindness of heart.  Many call themselves by the name of Christ, talk much about God, and pray to Him sometimes, but evidently do not know who He is. ”The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life,” but this healing fear is today hardly found among Christian men.

Don’t even think about it, Mimi. You are not coming out with me if you have garlic breath.”   “But I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. I could brush my teeth twice,” I offered.   “No. We don’t have time. You haven’t even finished your costume yet. We’re in and out, OK? Maybe Rachel’ll put some in the fridge for you.”   “You’re heartless.”   “Like that’s news to anyone. Stop whining.”   Rachel poked her head out of the kitchen, a baguette in her hand. She pointed it at Jack. Pointing is a Luci-family thing. Beatrice does it too, only she’s usually holding a sharp dental instrument, so it’s considerably scarier.   “Are you bullying Mio again?” Rachel demanded. The warm light from the kitchen made her pale brown skin glow, and her long, toffee-coloured hair – the same colour as Jack’s before she bleached it – gleam. Jack and Rachel’s grandmother was from Barbados, which means they both have an amazing all-year-round golden tan. Unlike me. According to the manga I read, if I lived in Japan, my naturally pale skin would be totally sexy. Shame it only counts as pasty in the UK.   “No,” Jack said.   “Yes.” I did my pitiful expression. “She won’t let me have any dinner.”   Behind trendy square glasses, Rachel narrowed her eyes at her sister. “If you’re thinking of developing an eating disorder, you’d better know right now that I will intervention your ass off, Jacqueline.” Rachel is a graduate psychology student. She likes to work that into the conversation as often as she can.   “Oh, save it,” Jack said, yawning for effect. “We’re just in a rush, that’s all. We’ve got a party to go to.

The unity of the object will remain a mystery for as long as we think of its various qualities (its colour and taste, for example) as just so many data belonging to the entirely distinct worlds of sight, smell, touch and so on. Yet modern psychology, following Goethe’s lead, has observed that, rather than being absolutely separate, each of these qualities has an affective meaning which establishes a correspondence between it and the qualities associated with the other senses. For example, anyone who has had to choose carpets for a flat will know that a particular mood emanates from each colour, making it sad or happy, depressing or fortifying. Because the same is true of sounds and tactile data, it may be said that each colour is the equivalent of a particular sound or temperature. This is why some blind people manage to picture a colour when it is described, by way of an analogy with, for example, a sound.

This is because our brain is biased towards the first piece of information we are presented with; this is known in psychology as the anchoring effect. Psychologists have known for years that how we are introduced to a subject will colour how we then think of it and process subsequent information about it.

The moor has always been part of my life. It’s like a muse: the colours of the heather and the sky; how you can see the savagery of the wind in the way the dwarf pine trees are bent double, the bleak lines of the landscape in winter when everything save the moss and the grass are dead, stones like bones, poking through a thin skin of bilberry bushes, rushes reflected in black bog water.

Tesco at the best of times is soulless – but it’s so much worse at 6 in the morning. It’s not as empty as I thought it would be. Who the fuck shops at 6 a.m.? e florescent lights flicker. e shelf upon shelf of coloured cans make my eyes go funny. Everything is hard and shiny and there’s so much fucking choice. Why do I have to choose from thirty kinds of granola? Do I want Country Crunch or Rude Health? Raisins and almonds or tropical? Goji berries and chia seeds or Strawberry Surprise? I’ll just buy the Tesco range – that’ll be easiest. No, wait, there’s Tesco finest*, Tesco Everyday Value and Tesco Free From. What can be so damn fine about granola? You eat it everyday and what could it be free from? It hasn’t got anything unhealthy in it! What could one possibly take out? Actually, we don’t need any fucking granola.

Lies only color the world black.

Imagine if the adult sections of all hospitals were filled with cheery pictures, illustrations, bright pops of colour – well, perhaps not the fluorescent variety that currently graces Burger King’s eating areas – but an equal measure of artistic and psychological research done into what makes humans happy and apply those images to hospitals.

You don't have to read these words. You can see them as just random patterns of white colour on black background. Similarly, you don't have to engage with the thoughts. You can see them as random patterns of energy in Time and Space.

We can all identify with all the colours on the surface of the skin, but we are all filled with blood from within.

The colour of your skin means nothing to the blood circulating in your body.

History also shows that the oppressiveness of racism is exacerbated by its arbitrariness. No one has shown that differences between people living on opposite sides of national boundaries, which were usually the result of dynastic accident or the fortunes of war, are related to ‘deep psychology’ or genetics. Neither has anyone shown that tiny genetic differences of people with different skin colour have any effect on cultures. Moreover, the differences within nations are as great or greater than those between nations. Yet the very vagueness of their principles permits racists to adapt their ideas to whatever purpose they espouse.

The colours of true love exist in helping a stranger rather than helping those familiar to you, or your own kind only.

To speak of love after we had barely spent a morning together was to encounter charges of romantic delusion and semantic inaccuracy. Yet we can only ever fall in love without knowing who we have fallen in love with. The initial movement is necessarily founded on ignorance. So if I called it love in the face of so many doubts, both psychological and epistemological, it was perhaps out of a belief that the word could never be used accurately... As love was not a place, or colour, or chemical, but all there of these and more, or none of these and less, might not everyone speak and decide as they wished when it came to this province? Did this question not lie beyond the academic realm of true and false? Love or simple obsession? Who, if not time, - which was its own liar - could possibly begin to tell?

With these innovations, however, the succession of reductions employed by the impressionist method is by no means exhausted. The very colours which impressionism uses alter and distort those of our everyday experience. We think, for example, of a piece of ‘white’ paper as white in every lighting, despite the coloured reflexes which it shows in ordinary daylight. In other words: the ‘remembered colour’ which we associate with an object, and which is the result of long experience and habit, displaces the concrete impression gained from immediate perception; impressionism now goes back behind the remembered, theoretically established colour to the real sensation, which is, incidentally, in no sense a spontaneous act, but represents a supremely artificial and extremely complicated psychological process.

..they hope for the best and will see nothing wrong, and although they have an inkling of the other side of the picture, yet they won't face the truth till they are forced to; the very thought of it makes them shiver; they thrust the truth away with both hands, until the man they deck out in false colours puts a fool's cap on them with his own hands.

The other member of the small band of friends was Daisy, a fawn-coloured dairy cow with a lovely heart. She was a gentle, kind, dreamy soul, who loved nothing more than to slowly wander the paddocks, trailing her nose through the long grass in search of an eating experience she had once had years earlier. Her inability to ever recreate that “incredible grass eating day” was a topic she often returned to.

Developing the courage to think negatively allows us to look at ourselves as we really are. There is a remarkable consistency in people’s coping styles across the many diseases we have considered: the repression of anger, the denial of vulnerability, the “compensatory hyperindependence.” No one chooses these traits deliberately or develops them consciously. Negative thinking helps us to understand just what the conditions were in our lives and how these traits were shaped by our perceptions of our environment. Emotionally draining family relationships have been identified as risk factors in virtually every category of major illness, from degenerative neurological conditions to cancer and autoimmune disease. The purpose is not to blame parents or previous generations or spouses but to enable us to discard beliefs that have proved dangerous to our health. “The power of negative thinking” requires the removal of rose-coloured glasses. Not blame of others but owning responsibility for one’s relationships is the key. It is no small matter to ask people with newly diagnosed illness to begin to examine their relationships as a way of understanding their disease. For people unused to expressing their feelings and unaccustomed to recognizing their emotional needs, it is extemely challenging to find the confidence and the words to approach their loved ones both compassionately and assertively. The difficulty is all the greater at the point when they have become more vulnerable and more dependent than ever on others for support. There is no easy answer to this dilemma but leaving it unresolved will continue to create ongoing sources of stress that will, in turn, generate more illness. No matter what the patient may attempt to do for himself, the psychological load he carries cannot be eased without a clear-headed, compassionate appraisal of the most important relationships in his life. “Most of our tensions and frustrations stem from compulsive needs to act the role of someone we are not,” wrote Hans Selye. The power of negative thinking requires the strength to accept that we are not as strong as we would like to believe. Our insistently strong self-image was generated to hide a weakness — the relative weakness of the child. Our fragility is nothing to be ashamed of. A person can be strong and still need help, can be powerful in some areas of life and helpless and confused in others. We cannot do all that we thought we could. As many people with illness realize, sometimes too late, the attempt to live up to a self-image of strength and invulnerability generated stress and disrupted their internal harmony.

In a sleepless ordinary night like any other, Black is the warmest colour...close your eyes to see better.