Spiritual Meaning of Colours

Helen is here, also Harry. He has been waiting to tell you of several things you might use to advantage. Sister, it is about colour as a factor in spiritual advancement. I know you have felt vaguely its influence. That was intuition. That phase of our art study belongs to you. Colour has value as it vibrates, either with or against the rhythm of personal harmonics. You see it is allied to music, and to me tone and colour are so closely linked I speak of each in terms of the other. Each of us is related through the law of vibration to some tone and colour which represents our stage of development. From the lower rates of vibration to the higher there are millions of differences, and as a true progression the soul must pass through each.

The more a soul concentrates the clearer is his or her colour. No matter how low in the scale of evolution one is living one should be intensely all that plane indicates. It is the lukewarm attitude which is so deadly. Be all that you feel at this time, but be all of that fearlessly and freely. Get out of each situation all it holds of experience and feeling. Do and be, heartily and sincerely what you feel at the time. If you are on a wrong track the sooner will you reap the harvest of your mistakes and see their error. Then, seeing clearly that such and such things cost more than they are worth, you see the point and change accordingly.

Experience alone enables one to graduate from one plane into another. As if we began with fire, say, enjoyed it, felt its warmth, then played with it until it grew and consumed us or what we loved most; then we learned that fire must be governed, controlled, to be of real use to us, and that fire in itself is not at all to be desired or striven for.

When we learn this and raise ourselves to something else, we pass beyond the plane where fire, the passion, and the red, rule. Our own vibratory rate is raised above red, and we have entered the upward path. Red we know and value in its place, and we use it, but we never after abuse nor let it consume us. Pure, clear red is what no soul can pass by. It is fundamental force. It does things. It is the colour of the heart's blood, the inner fire of the earth. No song, no picture, no music, can be vital without red and what it represents. It is the dull, muddy shades of red, the passion tinged with selfishness, the fire where sulphurous smoke poisons, the smothering smoke, the dulling, clogging mixtures, which are disheartening to work with. It is never the fearless villain one dreads; it is the sneak, the selfish coward. His personal note is a blur of sound, and his colour muddy red. Get him once to be frankly what he is, and there is hope for him.

Colours each have a spiritual or moral meaning. It is the personal law of vibratory rates which gives colour a value as an indication of advancement. Each colour has as its companion a personal tone which is a harmonic of the colour value or note. I find the terms familiar to you hard to use with any real effect. We have an entire vocabulary for this study of musical colour.

As we advance we add form as well; then other things whose connection with colour seem to you yet more remote. We pass along normal evolutionary lines up the scale of colour, each step indicating growth, from simple primary to complex and delicate shadings, ever toward the centre and mother of all colour which is light—vibrant, palpitating, life-giving light, a single ray which is blinding to all but perfected souls. You there haven't seen real colour or heard one pure musical tone yet. Your nerves couldn't endure it. Whenever a great artist strikes a tone even approaching ours, your hearts melt and you are so emotionally stirred that you are worthless as workers. Fancy how intense life would be with all one's hours filled with such, and far, far better, more thrilling and melting. One must be intense throughout for one's nature to be able to exist in such a tuneful atmosphere.

We are each born with some colour and tone dominating us. Harry thinks that to be an indication of a previous life, as each starts at a different point of development. Little John, now, is living in the blue. That is a far more spiritual colour than any of us started out with. Harry's note was intense red, a red of power and life. Now he has gone into yellow-orange which indicates spiritualised power. The blue is one of the higher notes, but needs to develop yellow and red to master material success. It is a brain colour. Ideas live in it. Harry says it's a high-brow colour, a forerunner of the concrete thing men use. Dreams, inventions, books, lie within it, but they are never concrete facts until the soul with that note adds another, either red or yellow, when at once the dream becomes available. As a matter of interest, watch what colour next attracts John; green, red, purple, or yellow. He has such keen intuitions you can tell whether it will be power or money he will turn toward. Red, or its mixture, purple, means power or force; green, commercial success.

Sister, we hope we can finish today about the third colour, yellow. We were saying yellow is the colour of happiness. It is also the colour of the life element, the higher life element that strikes you as the sunlight. The sun isn't truly golden, but white; only as it passes along toward you it goes through a sort of reducing process or element which cuts it down to the rate of vibration you can endure.

You see we earth-born souls are pretty low down in the scale of evolution, as you may guess by what you see everyday about you. An intelligence so primitive that it must seek personal satisfaction in physical violence or material possessions is very low indeed. It is the infant mind merely, to which such means of satisfaction appeal.

If we have time now let us finish the colour story. Yellow is one of the fimdamental colours, yet it runs higher even than the blue with you. It has the life element in it. It is the sunlight of vital force toned down from the pure white so as to be endurable to those on our planes. You see we too must live in the light stream. Though we can bear far higher rates of vibration than you, still we have our limitations of both endurance and perception. There are points beyond which each would lose consciousness. The machinery they carry would fail to register anything. Only the gradual growth of all one's senses enables one to see and hear and feel what transpires about us when on an elevation above our normal or present one.

Enfolded within each is the germ of everything,—the capacity to become. It is no greater miracle than the oak within the acorn. It takes certain exterior agents or conditions to develop the oak, just as it does to develop higher perceptions. Light exists, life exists, over, through, and about us; but we perceive it only gradually. The life without calls to itself within, and then petal by petal, idea by idea, the flower and the man's heart open.

Life, love, light! It's all one. It is always calling to its enclosed self to come forth and complete its fimctioning on that plane, that it may make the circle of life again higher. The yellow represents the joy of living, of motion, of doing. It is the symbol of happiness, as red is of force, and blue of mind.

Helen