Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Beyond Visible Light

In order to stretch into the unknown, we must be able to imagine the unimaginable ~ like colors we've never seen. In my June newsletter, What Shines (now available as a trio of pdf eBooks, with a special bonus offer for June!), I wrote that it's "notoriously difficult to explore what we can't conceive, such as colors beyond the visible spectrum."

Yet Santa Fe glass artist Paul White, whose first spoken word was "light", responds that he's already gone there in meditation. So, what do colors we've never seen "look" like? Here's Paul's insight:

"In my mind's eye the colors have been somewhat velvety and more of the feeling of color. I'd say the colors are something like the dichroic glass I work with but deeper somehow. There was always a warmth to them."

According to my computer's dictionary, "dichroic" means "showing different colors when viewed from different directions, or (more generally) having different absorption coefficients for light polarized in different directions."

Intriguingly, I myself had been trying to imagine colors of a, well, different color ~ it had never occurred to me that the color could become multidimensional, changing hue according to perception and direction. This is precisely the kind of quantum leap we need to make as we "excavate the boulders of belief that cloud our consciousness," as I wrote in the newsletter.

Paul, thank you for your prismatic contribution to our collective evolution, refracting clarity!

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