What color are the six persimmons?

(Color wheel retrieved from https://blog.closetomyheart.com)

"Religion begins with experience… [and] because the experience is of things that are invisible, it gives rise to symbols as the mind tries to think about invisible things.  Symbols are ambiguous, however, so eventually the mind introduces thoughts to resolve the ambiguities of symbols and systematize their intuitions.  Reading this sequence backwards we can define theology as the systematization of thoughts about the symbols that religious experience gives rise to."
-Huston Smith, The World's Religions

I find on my hands this morning an old idea using an old comparison, but in nuance of the ideas feeling somewhat insightful.

An old metaphor for the difficulty/impossibility of describing novel experiences is the color red; that having seen red, nobody could really describe it, only say that others would have to experience it because ultimately it is irreducible to other colors.  Red is red, and who knows even if everybody's red is the same.  It's a good way to illustrate the problem, that experience seems to lie at the heart of our thought and is necessary to supply the pieces with which rationality can work... while also bringing up the problem of how experiences can exist without a framework.  

This morning as I was musing on how I would explain certain elements of my spirituality to somebody, I turned to a similar idea to help clarify.  One of those interesting occurrences is how across many cultures the same colors "came into being" in the same order.  That is to say, we see early words for white and black, followed by reds and browns, greens and yellows, and ultimately blues (there is some debate about this ordering, but it doesn't impact the point here).  If you show color pallets to different peoples who don't have a word for blue, they have a more difficult time picking out blue hues; conversely, many languages have nuanced words for colors like green that English lacks, and they are rather more adept at noticing when two shades of green differ.  

I believe that there is an import here that goes far beyond color perception.  Namely, if we do not have words-concepts for things then we have a tremendously difficult time noticing or thinking on them.  And more deeply, I suspect that this reflects that all of our mental models are just one of a very large (infinite?) number of patterns that could be drawn from the world; the ones we do extract are typically useful and in many cases are the result of evolutionary refinement.  Our folk notion of mass may be completely illusory, but it does retain value in referring to something.

Returning to the realm of spirituality, I believe this has several implications.  First is that I suspect many more people have had spiritual experiences than they are aware, but that without any sort of conceptual framework they find themselves baffled as to express these new hues, and so despite their power they nonetheless slides from the mind.  I would know, because I believe I had the same happen to me; that in 2011 I must have experienced something powerful and profound which forever shaped my feelings afterward, but that I could neither explain it nor even remember it happening.  I am only so lucky in that it was related to an event I could identify later, an encounter with a piece of art, and so reference that work to help me explore what must have happened.  I was an archaeologist in my own mind; how strange to think.

This is why I suspect that reports of spiritual experiences drop in secular ages.  The skeptical answer is that because people stop being superstitious and begin to attribute to proper sources the events; visions become hallucinations, spontaneous swells of feeling are just the subconscious, and nobody any longer thinks Jesus is talking to them.  And I don't doubt there is some truth to this; I have sat in many a religious meeting where people shared their stories and I could only think that it was a vast misattribution on their part (especially when it comes to the Devil and temptation).  But I think there is more to it, that when people are no longer educated in any sort of spiritual tradition they lose the words and ideas that help these ideas take form.  This to me is why the Huston Smith quote up top is so insightful (although it may have been drawn from T.R.V. Murti): without spiritual geniuses to plow the way by giving us symbols, the rest of us become stuck in the drifts.  Again, I know this from personal experience; I had spent six years in an expressible fog with my 2011 experience, but after several months of reading on religion it was only then that I was finally able to begin to get a handle on what even I was trying to describe.  One cannot really realize why the religious vocabulary was created until one has the phrase "Amen" come spontaneously to the lips and know what a sentiment of reverential assent it contains.

However, what really turned me onto this color-perception analogy in this circumstance was that I realized it would help my mental opponent/pupil (odd how those two show up as the same) understand certain oddities of mystical speech.  His name is Justin, an acquaintance from the internet whom I disagree with periodically, but who here served as a focal catalyst.  It just helps to imagine one is talking to a specific person, and I can see why Plato structured his treatises as dialogues.  In fact, I will do so here, in a world where most people had not seen purple:

Me: I have seen a new color.  It was strange, not quite like any color I have seen so far.
Justin: How do you know it wasn't simply a delusion?  Most people haven't seen this color so that seems a lot more likely.
Me: That's fair enough, but it was also so immediate... I truly have a hard time believing it was anything other than real.
Justin: Okay, so aside from that not being very convincing, can you at least describe somewhat what it is like?  I mean, it's a color so it has to be sort of like other colors.
Me: Hrm.  I'd say it's kind of like blue.  You know how blue has that sort of deep, soothing sort of effect; that sense of being awash but undisturbed.  Blue isn't really a violent color, and this wasn't either.
Justin: So it's just another shade of blue?
Me: No... not quite.  It was also like red.
Justin: Red... you mean the aggressive, bright color at the opposite end of the spectrum from blue?
Me: Yes, just like that.  It was blue and red at the same time, but wasn't really quite either one of them.  It was sort of like green too.
Justin: ...now you're making things up.
Me: No, really!  Blue and red kind of feel like "pure" colors, you know?  Primary colors.  But this new color doesn't feel like a primary color; it's more like green in that it is a mixture, a bit of hot and cold.  Also even though it seems totally opposite from yellow (Justin: yellow?) I feel that it would complement it as well, like a natural pair.
Justin: So in the end, you're saying that this color is like all the other colors but not the same as any of them?
Me: I'd say that about summarizes it.

My poeticism is not quite on Plato's level, but I think it gets the point across.  Rudolf Otto quips in his famous The Idea of the Holy that if truly nothing could be said about the ultimate then the mystics would be silent.  As they are rather characterized by voluminous output, it would seem that some comparisons, even if they all fall far short, can be made.  It is like nothing else but also like everything else, and that despite being paradoxical it is not nonsensical.  My own particular expression of this came as a realization that after years of alternatively describing it as truth, beauty, and compassion that it was somehow simultaneously all of these, or like all of these, and yet none of them at the same time.  In no originality, I christened it Holy, and as above there is no way to convey why it deserves its own religious word without self-experience.

Ultimately, however, my goal here isn't to set it apart entirely.  I feel rather that these spiritual experiences only lie at the end of a continuum of a kind, and that it is only their distinct lack of ready-made biological-physical metaphor that causes them to be regarded as so problematic.  In other words, and in a topic to be more fully explored another day, we are all given shared mental structures and concepts to work with by evolution because they were, and often still are, useful for not dying.  To pick the patterns out of the world that correspond to color recognition had great value in determining food safety and quality; picking out God, not so much.  It takes much time and effort by our greatest souls to help us see outside these habits, and the result is so often the same: it is all mysterious, colors as well as Holy, and it is only waiting for us to notice.