Contemplative Chromatography
Originally published 2025-02-21. By Stewart Kahn Lundy.
developing the human being as an organ of perception
“[T]heosophy does not have an iconography—itself a science of images… theosophy uses images designed to reveal the transcendence of images.” - Arthur Versluis, Wisdom’s Children
Picture-forming methods are not just for analysis, but contain within the practice an approach to developing dormant capacities of the entire human being. You could almost say that through the disciplined use of picture-forming methods from soil we develop the inner picture-forming powers of the soul. Picture-forming methods are not about mere fanciful daydreaming but instead, a kind of exact imagination that becomes, with enough practice, as objective as our senses.1
In some ways, chromatography is a simple concept: soil is dissolved into water, and then the solution is separated into distinct layers on paper. This is a mirror of alchemy in which solve et coagula is witnessed in reverse: first, we draw everything into a single homogenous solution, and then we differentiate the solution as patterns on filter paper.
As a flowing river both carves through rock and leaves behind sediment that tells a story of its past, so does every plant grow as an expression of the conditions of the soil below and a peculiar desire to return to its Source — each according to its kind.
So, too, with circular chromatography, capillary action stimulates the supernatant fluid to rise and coalesce into differentiated layers of deposits. A chromatogram expresses the diverse patterns of enzymatic and otherwise hidden activities from within the innermost invisible heart of the soil. In the chromatogram, we have an objective representation of the life of the soil.
The mind reflects on experience like the moon reflects the sun, which mirrors the solar light radiating from the heart. What is not felt is not noticed, and what is not noticed does not even stand the chance of becoming a normal memory. A “dull” man (or plant) does not register the presence of very real things. Through the heart, experience enters, and through the mind, experiences are retained in the form of concepts. As blind (or closed!) eyes both alike render a lit room dark, so a hardened heart or a darkened mind renders our perceptive abilities dimmed.
What happens in chromatography is not just soil analysis but a preliminary preparatory practice for training the practitioner to meditate. Everything about the precision and cleanliness of the laboratory, the preparation of the sample, and the impregnation of the paper with photoreactive silver nitrate is an external embodied practice of the heart of meditation. As without, so within. As Rudolf Steiner says, “[W]e must reach a point in our technical research when the bench in the laboratory becomes an altar for divine service.”2
It is not a coincidence that we use silver, the metal of the moon and the traditional metal for mirrors, in circular chromatography. We let these sterling images develop in reflected light because all reflected light is like moonlight. Similarly, we develop vague forms of ideas born from experience, and then, with additional time given over to reflecting on these experiences, the meaningful forms develop more tone and detail and become not just vague outlines but organizing thoughts imbued with colorful feelings.
The philosopher Kant famously says, “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts blind.” In circular chromatography a unifying form without the coloration in a chroma is empty. Conversely, colors without a round form are illegible. Someone without a prepared mind is like paper without photoreactive silver: no amount of experience develops a clear picture if the proper preparation has not been made beforehand.
The imagination is tinged by the tones of what our physical senses perceive. We take in a sensory experience, and it permeates the soul. The clarity of the picture depends on so many things: the balance and even weave of the soul, the consistency of the sample taken, the barometric pressure of the astral environment, and the patience of the observer. Are there any grubby fingerprints marring the image? Do we wish for anything other than to love the image before us? “Adam knew his wife” — living knowledge is generative love that does not ask how something can be analyzed or commodified. If we seek to know the natural world, we must love it intimately and selflessly — even if it means discomfort — because to love means to selflessly will the good of the other.
If an experience is cut short before its inner lesson can be discovered, a dense, muddy shape arises, an unreadable mass. Like swallowing unchewed food, the nutritive value of an experience is not assimilated unless we ruminate on it long enough. The truth is still latent within an undigested amorphous blob, but the premature evaluation of external stimuli renders a unifying spiritual idea undetectable.
We must be able to resist things in order to perceive them. We do not perceive gamma rays because they pass right through us, but we perceive the density of a table when we bump into it because our body offers resistance. The same is true in the realm of the soul: we can only perceive feelings or thoughts objectively if we can resist them. We must be able to think a thought even if it is uncomfortable, to find its truth. Eating food that is bitter or spicy is not always easy, but “sweet” feelings are not always nutritious. Some of the truest thoughts are difficult ones that shed light on my own faults. Truth is not always a pleasant feeling, but nonetheless, it is an immeasurably good thing to experience.
Some of our best feelings are found in contrition for what we could have done better and our resolve to do better now. It is bad to feel good for the wrong reasons, but good to feel bad for the right reasons. There is nothing inherently wrong about discomfort, but a life that only seeks bodily pleasure quickly becomes unfree. Someone who seeks only their own emotional pleasure can never see phenomena clearly because they are too attached to whether stimuli affect them pleasurably or not.
In chromatography, this means resisting all personal opinions and suspending all subjective judgments. Precisely by trying our best to remain opinionless, we gradually become open to the objective mood alive in each phenomenon. You could almost say that we begin to hear the song of the universe again.
On the other hand, if the viewer waits too long to “resist” the experience (or is inattentive), the image within overflows, and a definite feeling for the whole is compromised. If experience is not circumscribed by a unifying concept, it easily slips through our fingertips. We must be patient so a clear form arises and also know when to arrest the process before it overruns our edges.
Discovering Spiritual Concepts in Nature
“If we want to attain a living understanding of nature, we must become as living and flexible as nature herself.”
The chief purpose of picture-forming methods is neither statistical analysis nor generalizations based on external consensus but rather objectively expressing hidden life in a sense-perceptible way.3 This is a mode of perception that overcomes the subject-object divide to approach things as they are. Forming pictures and debating their meaning is not enough — to do so leaves us in the wasteland between truth and falsehood: the desert of opinion, which is always an adulterated mixture of what is somewhat right and somewhat false. This is the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil: what is true mixed with what is untrue.
Our first approach to pictorial forms must be suspending our own likes and dislikes. We must set aside our own identity and become (temporarily) empty, filling ourselves with the dynamic qualities of what we observe. The primary aim of picture-forming methods is to develop you yourself as the most advanced “technology” for qualitative assessment in the entire universe. This means setting aside prejudice and, as Steiner suggests (at least for the moments of deep investigation), setting aside all stimulants. Psychostimulants exaggerate experiences, and such temporary distortions — much like personal opinions — tend to get between us and the living phenomenon.4 While not everyone seeks spiritual initiation, avoiding agitating psychostimulants is indispensable during contemplative observation of phenomena if we wish to avoid adulterated conclusions.5 Wishful thinking is like a plant with excessive watery “moon” forces: yes, seeds appear to form, but then they rot instead of retaining their germinal power because excessive fanciful desires corrupt the seed. Living thoughts must have enough feeling to be animated, but not so much that they produce strange fungoid growths.
Take a chromatogram, and forget everything you imagine you know about it. Look at it deeply, focusing on all its aspects, not one over another. Close your eyes and try to recollect all the original details you can. Then open your eyes and see how much you missed. Repeat this process, continuing to look and look and look again.6 Always presume there is more to learn, which means there is forever more I do not yet know.7 Continue this over and over until your entire imagination is filled with the feeling of one image alone. When nothing else but this singular imagination permeates your consciousness — when your normal tastes are set aside — take note of the mood this image evokes. Someone once suggested that meditating on a clear blue sky, once you get beyond associative connotations of the color, evokes a deep feeling of devotion.8 But have you ever tested his words yourself? Here, we stray into a controversial theme. With enough discipline, we can arrive at an objective feeling that is not based on our own idiosyncrasies but rather a truth born out of direct participation in the natural world. “[T]heosophic imagery speaks only to those with eyes to see; it mandates the inward transmutation that it represents. Without reference to this inward call, theosophic imagery is without meaning.”9
Western meditation centers on seeing the truth through forms in nature and does not treat appearances as “illusion.” Conventional Eastern approaches to meditation sometimes seem to demand bypassing phenomena to an experience of the All at the expense of the constituent components. But the totality includes everything, and everything includes an image of the whole cosmos. Western meditation seeks the All in the small.
If phenomenological meditation is continued, one develops the capacity to enter a clear imagination more quickly. With less resistance, the natural world begins to speak clearly, the form of each phenomenon as an utterance from the divine world. There is no consensus here except for minds that have set aside egotistical attachments, but objective subjectivity can be attained. Unfortunately, only those who can set aside themselves can adequately evaluate whether someone else is reaching the same feeling objectively. Consider a mathematician. Only someone who knows some math can correct the calculations of a mathematician. Similarly, only someone who can objectively perceive the inner feeling of a phenomenon can evaluate whether someone else is doing so. From the outside, all evaluations can seem equally arbitrary. However, with clairsentience and “exact sensorial imagination,” we approach something close, not just to clear and impartial physical sensing but also to something akin to objective inner feeling. This may sound impossible to some, and it is relatively uncommon, but so are Olympic athletes. The scarcity of exceptional souls is no evidence of their nonexistence.
If this exercise were taken further, one should be able to approach the original soil samples from which chromatograms were made and obtain the same objective feeling even in a double-blind trial. Clear and objective feeling that is repeatable and even “scientific” (in a spiritual sense) may seem unthinkable because, in a subjectivist era, we like to imagine that everything is all in the mind of the beholder and have an inherent fear of any objectivity that would hold our lives morally accountable. But the objectivity of the moral and feeling world is all around us: a tree is what it is because it loves being a tree, and its entire form is a meaningful expression of its particular mode of feeling.
The great theosopher Jacob Boehme has a striking passage that bears much contemplation and mirrors the entire process at work in soil chromatography — and in the purification of the imagination. See what rings forth in your own soul when you contemplate its meaning:
“The dried water is the true Pearl-ground in which the subtle life-force of the mobility of the Unity in the centre is contained.”10
Ehrenfried Pfeiffer developed circular chromatography similarly to Lily Kolisko,11 who developed capillary dynamolysis. These “rising picture” methods have a more refined sibling that Pfeiffer formulated using copper chloride crystals. Pfeiffer even earned an honorary doctorate for the sensitive crystallization method for identifying with some 80% accuracy whether or not someone had cancer — and in what organ system — from a pattern developed from a single drop of blood. To my knowledge, Pfeiffer’s accuracy in diagnosing from sensitive crystallization images has not been replicated, and I have contemplated this for years. I have concluded that Pfeiffer did not develop a system for analyzing externally the patterns made by copper chloride but instead took them into deep meditation — and from the inner mood evoked by the visible image, was able to pinpoint the location of cancer in a client. Pfeiffer may not have been fully clairvoyant, but 80% accuracy is far more accurate than most of us.
Chromatography is not merely for systematic analysis, nor are other picture-forming methods such as sensitive crystallization. On the contrary, these are secret prompts to develop inner human capacities for objective feeling. Our task is to develop what Goethe refers to as “exact sensorial imagination.” Biodynamics is a path of the will, which is to say, it is a path of refining a lawful imagination that faithfully obeys the phenomena contemplated without distortion. To borrow from Owen Barfield’s terminology, may we gracefully transition from homo sapiens to homo imaginans et amans: from the passive inheritance of old wisdom to active imagining-and-loving awareness of all phenomena.
Lest a reader object and say that our senses are “subjective” — the senses are objective communicators of stimuli according to each medium. Our emergent inner experience is subjective, but that which the senses communicate is an objective experience that others can experience.
R. Steiner, The Human Soul in Relation to World Evolution (GA212, 7 May 1922, Dornach)
See: R. Steiner, Spiritual Thinking as a Spiritual Path
Though, on this point, we should remember that “to the clean all things are clean” — but also that the righteous never consider themselves to be righteous. “He who seeks initiation must achieve the utmost calm. This includes the avoidance of all stimulants.” - R. Steiner, The Gospel of St. John, Lecture II (GA94, 26 February 1906, Berlin)
Rudolf Steiner himself recounts sharing wine with his driver and often drank coffee, so this is not a recommendation of total abstinence.
Lege lege et relege
One of the key facets of a chela’s education is “presumption” — namely, the presumption that I do not know it all, which is the only driving force for perpetual investigation. As soon as we assume we know “enough,” we cease learning.
The Virgin Mary is commonly depicted dressed in blues.
Arthur Versluis, Wisdom's Children
Jacob Boehme in Christosophia (1624)
Lili Kolisko changed the spelling of her name to Lily, which we will respect here.
