Over three hundred years ago Isaac Newton
demonstrated this magical fact of our everyday existence, which is
still as fresh, startling and awe-inspiring today as it must have been
to his original audience. He created a dark room with a
screen. In one of the blinds he made a small, neat hole which
allowed a ray of sunlight to pass onto the screen. Then he placed
a prism (a piece of cut glass with at least three sides) between the
pinhole and the screen. The clear light of the sunbeam separated
into bands of light, each displaying a different colour - Red, Orange,
Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet - the colours of the
rainbow. This we call the spectrum, a word which means simply
spectacle or appearance. Most of us will have been intrigued by a
similar demonstration in the science laboratory in school. Since
colour defines form, it follows that all the objects of our awareness
arise in a similar way. This brings us on quite naturally to
another analogy which is often used to indicate the nature of
meditative awareness and the difference between being and becoming.
