Spiritual correspondences refer to color psychology as they’ve developed in unison. Regardless of your personal lifestyle, humanity on whole has a deep long standing reliance on spirituality. Many religions are spiritual, many hobbies, philosophies, goals, careers, events, arts, stories, and histories are spiritual. Color is no different in how we’ve built our bonds. Our spirit (or deepest psyche?) has absorbed countless stories regarding the almost supernatural power of our surroundings, stimuli, perception.
(optional reading: part 1, part 2)
Modern study into the psychological effects of color include its magical history. As much as we wish to separate modern sciences from spirituality, they’re intrinsically bound through the inseparable nature of mind and spirit. Those who don’t believe in an essence, soul, or divinity can find an equivalent in the powers of nature (ecology, biology, astronomy, etc). Our descriptions tend to turn into synonyms and none is more correct than any other. Scientific questions come from a mindset that could be called spiritual, just as spiritual questions seem awfully scientific. “Where do we come from? Why?”
Where do our connections to color come from?
We have theories, small answers, and bigger questions.
Ourselves being part of nature, we’ve learnt most of all we know from nature. This is a physical, sensory world of creation and connection.
Red may indicate anger and aggression due to blood, our vision goes red, our face flushes. Red is energetic as a racing heartbeat increases flow through our veins. Love and lust have similar associations. These meanings are important. These are our experiences of life.
There are omnipresent symbols we absorb beyond color which impact all influences.
The blue of the ocean and sky have suggested both tranquility and a vast, deep, lonely melancholy. Sadness of blue references a spacial symbol, an acknowledgment of space. In nature, the ocean and sky are huge and there’s an instinctive aversion to such open areas. Aimless, scary, lonely, foreboding, these other contexts impact our connecting blue to sadness. Opposite (depending on the color theory) is orange and yellow, bright colors associated with the happiness and energy of sunlight versus the calm sadness of blue.
There’s many relationships in the color spectrum, where they mix together, contrast each other, merge in meaning and interact in meaning. Groups form, palettes, families, categories. Again, there’s nothing simple about color.
Our connection to color is that simple magic. An instinctive compiling and cross-referencing of experience going on effortlessly in the background, we don’t even have to think about color psychology to feel the effects. We’re intrinsically bound to the color, it has come from within in both physiology and psychology. It’s a concise bond.
It just happens. Science has theories on everything because there’s always a layer we can’t prove. We advance a little further everyday, but there’s always a missing context, a motive, a reason for why nature occurs the way it does. The religious call it god. I call it magic, but it’s mostly just a wondrous, inspiring unknown.
This unknown has tremendous force, it involves systems within systems and continuous interconnectivity, and it’s scientific. It’s also magical. It may even be divine. All of the above is likely true– I’m a believer in symbiosis if not union, in lieu of contradiction.
We accept the many meanings of color. There’s always a positive and negative association, contrasting meanings, and none negate each other because they draw from the same sources.
Living productively with the many truths of reality means accepting what we can understand, accepting there’s some things we’ll never understand, but always seeking to know more than we already do.
Actively acknowledging our associations is a vital skill in how we grow as human beings. We identify bias, prejudice, we take notice of what we value, what’s important to us, we root out childhood trauma, we notice what we associate with comfort, discomfort, with confidence, and if they’re truly healing associations.
Color psychology is a level underneath our conscious thought. Digging into that layer can be painful. Symbols are helpful with the distance between reference point and meaning, as there must be space otherwise there’d be nothing to decode. Taking the time to explore the space, connection, and source is an important progression of a symbol’s use. A protective measure is only useful so long as we see past it to learn the truth.
We’re capable of deep, profound feelings which reflect our inner self. As we work through our connections to color, the detail and context of those powerful emotions speak louder.
For every conscious thought, our brain makes infinite connections seemingly smaller yet so much grander. Being unaware of them doesn’t take away any power.
Sustaining Practice 
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