On Yellow

My brain has been much too shot to dig very far into Plotinus lately, so I've been reading some lighter material. Yesterday, I finished P. M. H. Atwater's Beyond the Light: The Mysteries and Revelations of Near-Death Experiences. I'm never sure how seriously to take this stuff, as it's so heavily colored by Evangelical Christianity and New Ageism (neither of which I have much respect for, I'm afraid), but one thing stuck out to me of unusual interest.

Atwater's thesis is that near-death experiences are simply one of many kinds of spiritual awakening, just like more "standard" mystical experiences or those brought on by rigorous training or austerities, and that they exhibit the same range of symbolic communication. And as an example of a symbol, she offers the color yellow:

For those near-death survivors who could recall, the first color encountered during their experience was usually either yellow or yellow-gold. Some described it as just plain gold. Others saw it as more of a yellow-white, gold-white, or radiant white. Invariably, survivors commented on how different that color or light seemed; bright, and yet somehow easy on the eyes and not at all like the yellow-gold tones of the earth. [...]

People who are learning how to have an out-of-body-experience go through basically the same range of color hues in the initial manner as do near-death experiencers. Their first awareness of sight is usually as if through a yellow screen or filter. Yellowish colorations often continue until full separation between consciousness and body connections are made, then colored vision is restored. The more advanced the individual, the less yellow tinge to what they see. (For ten years I taught people how to "astral travel." The yellow filtering occurred so often, that I came to depend on it as a signal that some type of genuine separation was taking place.) [...]

In the language of symbology, yellow is considered a cross-over color—the harbinger of change. Tradition has it, for instance, that the sudden preference for yellow signifies that a person's life is about to change, that new, exciting times are ahead, with increased energy, enthusiasm, and upliftment. Yellow has always been thought of as a revitalizing tonic, a sign of spring, vigor, cheerfulness, new birth.

The reason this is interesting to me is that both of the two "transcendental" experiences I've had came with the sense of seeing the world through a gold-colored filter. In fact, the second of these is memorialized very simply in my diary:

29 Sep 2011

everything is glowing gold

The memory of that experience is very, very dim these days, but if I remember aright, I was going through a period of unbearable stress and was walking to work across town on a damp, overcast morning. While walking, I was watching one of those little streams that form after a rainstorm on the sides of roads, running down the street and pooling here and there in little, foamy ponds. I was watching one of these when, suddenly, a "switch" flipped in me and everything—the puddle, the clouds, the trees, people, buildings, everything—seemed to glow from within with golden light. I had the sense of joy and peace and of simply knowing that all these glowing things were connected, beautiful, and perfect and right just the way they were. (In fact, this was a source of some hilarity to me: I lived and worked in the rust belt, and the town was a literally crumbling old industrial city, as ugly as can be—and yet here it was, ugly and indescribably beautiful at the same time!) The color and glow and sense continued for about thirty-six hours as I went through my normal workaday routine, slowly fading over that time.

Strangely, after the experience faded, nothing seemed changed; and while I kept on meditating and studying, other than an odd experience or two, everything stayed the same as ever until 2019, when I bumped into geomancy during another period of unbearable stress, which opened the door to a proper spiritual life.