Against Interpreting Chromatograms

Originally published 2026-09-15. By Stewart Kahn Lundy.

chromatography and remaining open to the new

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.” — Susan Sontag

Rising secretly through the veins of the plant, currents of liquid light wick up as the plant transpires and strives towards the sky; the tightly closed bud breaks forth and reveals what was always there: the flower unfolds the inner character of the plant in its fullest form, making visible what was long hidden from sight and offering itself back to the cosmos.

Over the past one hundred years, under the broader banner of anthroposophical endeavors, various “picture-forming methods” have been developed to see the “forces” at work behind appearances. Lilly Kolisko and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer both developed such methods using filter paper and specific photoreactive elements. In Kolisko’s case, vertical capillary dynamolysis; in Pfeiffer’s, circular paper chromatography, as well as sensitive crystallization. These methods reveal inner qualities that are real but usually not apparent to the naked eye. It quickly becomes clear when an image lacks complexity or “vitality,” but exhaustive analysis of these pictures is not their most important function.

The purpose of picture-forming methods is not chiefly to give us answers, but primarily to develop within the human being an intimate and literate feeling for these things without calculations. While automation has many uses, it lacks feeling, and we can tend to bypass feeling (and thought) altogether when results are produced with a single click. In the current times we find ourselves in, the hardening of hearts has progressed so far that we cannot even entertain a thought that isn’t already part of our belief system.

This inflexibility is pervasive. It is how we are taught to write in universities: the thesis statement is formulated first, and only then is an argument reverse-engineered to support it after the fact, giving the illusion that the conclusion was produced by a sequence of logical reasoning when it is exactly the opposite. The logical scaffolding was erected only after the intuitive flash, and erected to obscure the heart of thinking. You know how in math you are told to “show your work”? In academic writing, the exact opposite is done: this natural process of intuition, self-criticism, and revision is hidden from view in the final work.

This process of self-criticism and revision is essential to the unfolding of thought— but if genuine thinking were to proceed organically, it would be from one intuition to another, not recursively fortifying a cold intellectual castle around some small newly discovered opinion.

Rudolf Steiner indicated that it is easy for a farmer to develop “clairsentience” — clear sense-perception unclouded by prejudice — because their entire livelihood depends on it. A farmer must look and look and look again at plants and animals to make sure they are healthy, and a superficial glance is never enough. What a farmer easily develops is exact sensorial imagination: they see what they’re seeing, and it is reproduced faithfully, without embellishments or cutting corners, within their own soul. This is not quite “clairvoyance” — literacy in the unifying cosmic language spoken into existence — but a healthy place to begin, because clear senses and a clear imagination provide a rich soil from which clairvoyance may emerge. We can find the organizing dynamic forces at work in living forms, but we can’t if we aren’t first paying close attention to appearances. The farmer’s heightened sensitivity is not something that arises as easily for ordinary people, whose jobs and hobbies do not require such precision or whose tasks remain detached from living phenomena.

It is difficult for people to admit they don’t know something — and often more difficult the more letters after their names — so I’ll begin with that: I don’t know what chromatograms mean, not in any final sense. After nearly a decade and a half and countless chromatograms, I have developed something of a feel for how these unfold and their relationship to their source samples. Sure, I have an intimation of what they might “mean,” but I don’t like to talk about that part. Focusing too much on interpretation is like going into a shrine and, instead of sitting with devotional reverence, beginning to “explain” the meaning of an icon to people praying in front of it.

I inevitably have some opinions — that none of you have likely ever heard — about chromatograms, but as much as possible, I know that my opinion is inadequate, and thus remain perpetually open to learning more. I care much more whether someone using chromatography sits and meditates with them than whether they have the “correct” interpretation of them. Similarly, I care far more about whether someone has a spiritual bhakti practice than about whether they’re on the “right” spiritual path. There are many who have spent their entire lives comparing — a cardinal sin in Buddhism, by the way — that they never walk any particular path at all. This is an enormous problem in the rather indulgent field of “comparative religion,” where people often become supposed “experts” in things they have no experience practicing. Imagine someone comparing maps their entire life, but never traveling — that is the ever-present danger of comparing opinions without experience.

When the farmer considers the garden in winter, it has become a blank canvas. One imagines the entire picture of what will emerge, what plants may go where, and what successions will follow previous gestures, until the canvas has transformed into a complete painting. There are always beds that get away from the gardener, of course, but holding a picture of the whole and where it will go is essential to avoid getting buried in the day-to-day slog of endless little tasks.

This is part of why I cannot commit all my time to the Josephine Porter Institute for Applied Biodynamics. I continue to farm, because I am keenly aware that as soon as I were to pause farming, the wellspring of phenomenological insight would be in danger of drying up. So we continue to grow enough for market and a large CSA, as well as tending cows, sheep, and an orchard. This means that I am working most of the day, every day, from one task to another, but I also recognize that the vitality of my insights would fade into memories as soon as I ceased farming and gardening as actively. At some point life may force my hand, but for now, when you receive my words, they are in the small amount of time I can carve out that is not JPI work and is also not farming. What I share here is born out of those labors, not from an armchair.

One must remember, when approaching chromatography, what Steiner himself says about health: there is no such thing as “health” in abstraction. There are as many healths (plural) as there are individuals. As such, too, there is no perfect chromatogram. How a desert soil can and must behave is radically different than a tropical soil or a rich temperate soil, and we can have no expectation that even the best managed desert chromatogram will look like a healthy chromatogram from Poland.

We must remember that every single farm individuality must therefore have its own health that is distinct from anything else. Imagine trying to treat plants in the tropics the same way you would in Alaska. What an absurdity! Similarly, what constitutes “healthy” soil will vary wildly across different geological and climatic conditions. Any idea of an abstract “health” is like a nutrition label derived from an average of averages — but there is no “average” broccoli in the grocery store. It may be more (or less) nutritious than the label, but it is certainly never exactly what the label says. Any aspiration for a single “health” for chromatograms made from distinct farm individualities will tend towards luciferic abstraction. None of this yet tells you how to read what you are looking at, but each chromatogram should help you understand the substance you are testing, to reveal its character.

This is the same motivation I have with reading and studying anything: the more I learn, the more keenly aware I am of the poverty of my knowledge. Only someone who knows very little is easily satisfied with their own explanations.

I keep my nascent opinions to myself because I know that to utter them prematurely is for them to incarnate stillborn. Instead, I let them gestate in secret, quicken in solitude, where they are totally free to evolve because I have never bound myself to defending any of them publicly. Unuttered opinions are contained in the womb of the soul, given the amniotic space of feeling to develop and one day, surprise us with their nativity.

The greatest “technology” we need to develop is the human being. So my question is: how can these picture-forming methods help develop the human being? It is certainly not by receiving ready-made interpretive rubrics that the soul is evolved, as if the art of life can be reduced to a dead “knack.” On the contrary, virtually everything Steiner did strove directly against the modern tendency to kill everything into systems through which phenomena can be filtered. But any such system is invariably incomplete: the deadening gaze of materialistic prejudice stretches or cuts down to size any outliers that should overthrow its paradigm, like Procrustes and his notorious bed.

Steiner’s entire project was not to have people merely believe and regurgitate his ideas, but to test them with their own experience: a unique antidote for modern human beings who no longer wish to believe something inherited but wish to know. It is precisely in this that Steiner opposed the prevailing Rosicrucian tendencies of his time, where maxims and definitions could be memorized without any of it having been experienced. This isn’t to say he necessarily disagreed with their concepts, but rather with their methodology. Two physicians may both agree with the diagnosis and disagree on the proper treatment. For example, if you compare Max Heindel or Franz Hartmann’s work with Steiner’s, there is (at least to me) precious little conceptually that disagrees, but the method of communication is markedly different. Heindel spells it all out in systems and charts that are easy to memorize without necessarily experiencing them. Where one approach makes things easy, Steiner makes it more difficult. In precisely this difference, I suspect it is Steiner who holds a particular antidote to modernity.

This problem is pervasive, not just in esoteric schools. I even spoke with an older local Catholic woman who remarked on the same thing in pre-Vatican II Catholicism: everyone could repeat the answers to the Baltimore Catechism questions, but if you asked them any follow-up questions, they’d just stammer, not knowing what to say! This is a widespread problem, and there is no reason to think we are immune to it because we hold differing opinions.

“There are, of course, good and bad definitions—some are comprehensive, others less satisfactory. In order to understand the things of the earth, definitions may be helpful; but when it is a matter of understanding realities—above all super-sensible realities—one cannot define, one must ‘characterise’; for then it is necessary to contemplate the facts and the beings from every possible vantage-point.”1

Which is to say, every individual experience of a farm brings us closer to an understanding of the whole, as countless tangential lines can eventually, in an apophatic way, give us a feeling for the empty space of a circle or sphere. But to imagine we can “define” satisfactorily — in languages almost exclusively tailored to physical, sense-perceptible things — supersensible dynamics of vitality, astrality, etc. is the dragon of materialism rearing its head yet again.

Steiner plays hard to get, but by doing so, generates two kinds of anthroposophists: on the one hand, those who memorize and regurgitate remain safely quarantined in their false belief that Steiner’s statements are final conclusions — turning Steiner’s oeuvre into yet another Vatican, and one is quite enough, thank you very much; on the other hand, a radically different group who experience Steiner’s words not as final destinations but rather as vectors of vital force heading to something arriving from the future, a “something” that you must unfold yourself through your own active participation and experience that neither contradicts what Steiner said, nor heads in its own way. The former group, which paradoxically thinks in exactly the same way as the rest of the world, tends to be closed off and to see a sharp line between “us” and the world. Paradoxically, it is the latter who embody a living anthroposophy, who do not see such a line but rather experience Sophia active throughout all of humanity to varying degrees. This isn’t to suggest an “anything goes” relativism at all, but simply that wisdom’s children recognize one another, and their work is universal. That the darkness has not understood the light should be no surprise.

If you fire an arrow from a bow, a single freeze frame gives you a picture of what Steiner said in 1924, but that arrow is moving swiftly through etheric space. To say the arrow turned suddenly left or right or went backward would be an irrational hallucination — but to say the arrow is still frozen in the same place Steiner uttered his sentences is just as absurd. Steiner’s words are imbued with force going in a particular direction — willful movement towards a trajectory over the horizon. But no one gets there merely by memorizing his words, as if a snapshot from a century years ago represents exactly where we are now.

Steiner warns in Theosophy:

“This book cannot be read the way people ordinarily read books in this day and age. In some respects, its readers will have to work their way through each page and even each single sentence the hard way. This was done deliberately; it is the only way this book can become what it is intended to be for the reader. Simply reading it through is as good as not reading it at all. The spiritual scientific truths it contains must be experienced; that is the only way they can be of value.”

I believe the same is true of picture-forming methods. The point is not the deduced conclusion or making it expedient but “the spiritual scientific truths it contains must be experienced; that is the only way they can be of value.” Which is to say, this is precisely what I want to see developed in the “eye” of each individual, which cannot be done by reading someone else’s interpretation. As Susan Sontag writes in her famous essay, Against Interpretation, “The modern style of interpretation excavates and as it excavates, destroys; it digs ‘behind’ the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.”

The science fiction writer, Ted Chiang, critiques AI, noting that using it for a school assignment is like using a forklift in a gym. The purpose of school assignments (or exercises) is the difficulty itself, not the arbitrary assignment. It is our very wrestling that contains the potential to develop a new capacity. A ready-made answer is useless, just as rattling off that “the human being has a physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego” means nothing at all if these are not experiences.

There is a dangerous tendency in all esotericism: insisting on a meaning that contradicts or circumvents appearances inevitably reduces phenomena into illusory maya. On this point, Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances is a work everyone should revisit. The desire to “skip” appearances or to treat them as inconsequential is a rampant form of spiritual bypassing.

That, of course, is not the biodynamic way nor the healthy anthroposophical way. Instead, after Goethe’s approach to nature, we experience physical, sense-perceptible images as a kind of iconography of the spiritual world that display a partial — but not false because it is partial — image of the dynamics of the invisible spiritual world. Everything about a tree is completely true, and the mirror of nature is our window into the spiritual world.

Imagine a teacher holding the “hidden” heart of a lesson that the student must strive towards, giving their own educated guesses, with the teacher pushing back with questions, pointing out things they may have missed, and guiding the student gently to their own participatory conclusion, that has their own personal flourish born from their own experience. After all, there is no greater “technology” than the human being, rightly developed. The great difficulty about living knowledge is that it cannot be communicated. Therefore, interpretations that can be communicated by definition always lack something vital. Even these words here: by themselves, they are cold artifacts of my own experiences waiting to be revivified by your own participation, waking to life by your own imagination and feeling. If you listen to an audio recording of this, you will have more of my feeling given to you, but if you are reading this and giving of yourself, these words rise to new life within your own imagination like seeds quickening in springtime.

As they say, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. The same is true for every student. You can point out details that might have been missed and nudge the student’s attention to ever subtler details, but without their active participation, there is no experiential knowledge. What can be imparted easily is a dead husk or a dormant seed — the truth must germinate anew in each soul, which awaits conditions no teacher can force.

I have come to see how much of Steiner was intentionally difficult not because he was obscurantist, but because he wanted everything to be a spiritual exercise. That is why we carefully abstained from interpretation in our chromatography video. Not because I don’t have opinions, but because I don’t want my opinion to interfere with the user’s experience of the phenomenon itself. As soon as opinions are introduced — the wasteland between falsehood and truth — errors also encroach. Just because someone can perform a good technical experiment does not necessarily mean they can draw the correct conclusions from it. We imagine that technical sciences require training, but no one seems to imagine that thinking requires training or discipline! Steiner himself remarks that many of the errors in modern science arise from interpretations of otherwise quite good technical experiments. We really need two kinds of people: the precise technician to perform the experiment and the clear thinker to avoid premature extrapolations from insufficient data. Almost no one seems to imagine thinking well is as difficult as building a house, when clear thinking is even more strenuous.

A physical house falls apart if you make too many mistakes, but not so for erroneous thinking, where the structure erected is invisible and floats in the ether! The only healthy thinking has within itself self-criticism, checks and double-checks its work, and strives always to make sure everything is (so to speak) “up to code.” Many errors in developing science can be found in the interpretations of experiments — the kind that make the newspaper headlines and are soon forgotten — which could be avoided if we respected the discipline of thinking as much as we did external technical sciences.

We cannot live without opinions, and we cannot live in the world without a view of it; nonetheless, we can practice withholding judgment to see more before coming to a conclusion. Recovering a “beginner’s mind” is a constant struggle, because the intellect wants to kill everything new that might cause a paradigm shift — the intellect wants everything to be over. It is perpetually asking, "Are we there yet?” This is why scripture says, Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. Amassing intellectual knowledge is like having a swollen head that only knows dense, heavy things. True knowledge is love, and love naturally becomes action: if you love something, you will provide habitat for the thing you love, tend to its health and well-being, and none of it will seem like a burden. If you approach any plant with any other motive, you will find its utility, but not its own presence. The lover will never be satisfied with any definition or explanation of the beloved. Anyone satisfied with less does not love what they are describing.

During our chromatography workshops, I tell my assistants never to presume to tell our students what the chromas mean. I want people to dwell with the phenomenon itself, true Goethean observation — to look, look, and look again. Let them ask questions, compare, sort them naively by quality, while knowing almost nothing about them. Interpretations of other people’s opinions close us off to the phenomenon itself if we let those opinions stand between us and reality. As soon as someone speaks their private interpretations, a wall goes up between the students and the living form in front of us.

As Rudolf Steiner himself says, “Once people have an opinion, they cannot entertain its opposite.”2 The need to “conclude” observation is a kind of impatience — or incontinence: “It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it with something else.”3

We should cultivate an insatiable appetite for observing without interpretation — which is akin to erotic love — and this is not something that comes easily or naturally in the modern world. Goethe would call this “science without hypotheses.” Can you imagine such a thing? As soon as we stop perceiving new things, we begin to describe the cages in which we’ve locked ourselves, when that dynamic, rhythmic animal becomes trapped by those cold bars — but this does not satisfy our inner panther, nor does capturing anyone else:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

Rilke, The Panther https://allpoetry.com/The-Panther

After 14 years of making chromas, I realize there are so many variables: the time of day you make them, the climate, the weather that day (a thunderstorm makes very different pictures!), the mood of the person making the chromas, and even astronomical conditions such as an eclipse. The same sample can yield surprisingly different pictures depending on timing considerations, so I begin by suspending judgment and look, look, and look again!

As someone is only functionally literate if they have read hundreds of books, much the same is true of chromatograms: unless someone has made hundreds, it is unlikely that person knows what they’re talking about… and even if they do, only someone similarly fluent will rightly be able to recognize that fluency.

As the sage Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī writes:

“Knowledge is conventional and borrowed
when its owner is annoyed
by people who aren’t fascinated by it.”4

Given the anthroposophical context from which biodynamics is born, we must concede that there is a kind of “objective feeling” that can arise from unprejudiced observation sustained over time and reinforced by experience, but such an experience is something private, not easily conveyed, certainly not easily systematized. Look how difficult Goethe found it to communicate his notion of the Urpflanze to others! I have never met anyone smarter than Goethe, so if we think it is easy to articulate what we perceive, we are either exceptional geniuses or our observations are so superficial they are barely worth mentioning. The alchemical maxim lege, lege, et relege applies here: read, read, and re-read [the book of Nature]!

Let our opinions remain provisional at most, always open to their own destruction and the birth of the new, ever open to life.