The Ego & Color Perception - Rudolf Steiner

If you try to ignore all sensory content, that in the vast majority of cases, and in the vast majority of people, there is a certain tendency to sink into a kind of sleep state; but that means just dampening the ego. It may be remarked that the ego-consciousness, as it is in daytime awakening, is essentially linked to the presence of sensory content. So that we can say: We experience our self at the same time with the sense content. Actually, we do not experience our ego for the everyday consciousness other than with the sense content. As far as the sense content is concerned, ego-consciousness is present, and insofar as ego-consciousness is present- at least for ordinary life- the sense-content is sufficient. It is perfectly justifiable, starting from the point of view of this everyday consciousness, not to separate the I from the sense-content, but to say: by red, by this or that sound, by this or that sensation of warmth, by tactile sensation, this or that taste, if the sensation of smell is present, the ego is also present, and insofar as these sensations are not present, the ego, as it is experienced in the usual waking state, is also absent.

"I have put this more often than a finding of soul observation. In particular, I have made it clear in a lecture I gave at the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna in 1911, where I tried to show how what should be experienced as the ego should not be separated from the whole range of sensory experiences. We must therefore say that the ego is essentially first bound - I always speak of experience - to sensory perceptions. It's not true that we do not now consider the self as reality; on the contrary, it is only in the course of these three lectures, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, that we want to point out the ego as reality. We now want to focus on what we call the ego experience in the realm of our lives."

( Ref : GA 206, p. 118f )

With every perception, the ego and the astral body, which live in the psychic-spiritual outer world, are brought into the body. Rudolf Steiner explains this using the example of color perception. The colors have no physical reality, but nevertheless are not merely subjective phenomena, but belong as objective mental reality to the soul-world.

"Physics must be content with the light that is in the room. You cannot undertake the consideration of colour at all without first lifting it into the region of the soul. For it is sheer nonsense to say: Colour is something subjective which produces an effect on us. And if one goes further and says, — and in doing so one conceives an inexact picture of the Ego — that there is some external objective inclination which affects us, our Ego, it is rubbish; the Ego itself is in the colour. The Ego and the human astral body are not to be differentiated from colour, they live in it and are outside the physical human body in proportion as they are bound up with colour out there; they only reproduce the colours in the physical and etheric body. That is the point. So that the whole question of the effect of an objective on a subjective colour is nonsense; for the Ego, the astral body, already exist in the colour, and they enter with it. Colour is the conveyer of the Ego and the astral body into the physical and into the etheric body."

-Rudolf Steiner 

( Ref : GA 291, p. 59f )