Color

As soon as little kids start to talk, we start to teach them their colors.  This seems very strange to me because the idea of color is so abstract.  How is it that the color of a lemon and the color of butter can both be yellow?  How is it that navy blue and sky blue are both blue?  What is it that makes up blue-ness in our minds?

And why do most of us have a favorite color?  What constitutes an awful color?  Is it our associations with things that are those colors?

If you go to a doctor of Chinese medicine they might ask you what color your pain is.  Pain has color?

What about auras?  And in all fairness we need to acknowledge that auras are not an invention of new age hippies.  How many religious paintings have images of light (halos) emanating from certain characters?  Is our favorite color the color of our aura?  Is a hideous color the color of our pain? Here's a color wheel showing the supposed meanings of auras:

In English if we are depressed, we are "feeling blue".  Blue also happens to be the favorite color of a majority of Americans.  Russians are very fond of red, but in English we say that a person is "seeing red" when they are really really angry.

We know that all colors of light together are a white light.  Black is the absence of color/light.  When we "black out" does it mean that we are momentarily disconnected from all these forms of light?  People who have had near death experiences talk about going toward a bright white light.

Here's a different color chart.  This one is an image of sefirot used by the Kabbalists (Jewish mystics) to try to help understand the unknowable.  G-d is at the top in the white circle while we are at the bottom in the murky circle.  (That's a huge over simplification, but it takes a long long time to explain it in detail.)

I couldn't find a pain color chart, but you get the idea.  Where we were born and the language that we speak must hugely shape our views on color.  It seems like it might be an infinite field of study.  Anyway, it's something to think about.