Bloom, and area of discontinuity: if you survey plants, and fruits in particular, and certain flowers and certain petals, sometimes it might be more obvious than others, there is upon them a thing called bloom. Do you realize that the least touch in most cases, and it’s either damaged or removed? It’s an astonishing matter, and of the utmost importance, and hopelessly delicate. This is the reason that you have already been led into, the utmost care in your pricking out and transplanting. You realize that you prick every plant out as much as you can without touching it. This is not merely because of the endless hairs of which the plant is made up, and damaging those, but it’s principally because of this bloom.
When you damage that bloom, you remove an area that is of the utmost importance to it. The area of discontinuity and the bloom connect. It is a procedure of all growth—and of more than all growth, as we’ll look into it, it’s in all living matters as a matter of fact—that enables a pulsation to take place: an intake and an output. It operates in a sense like an autostatic valve. You would perceive that areas often have duplications of this such as fruits do. A fruit has a bloom upon it, and a seed within its area usually has a bloom upon that, but it’s not very visible. It is an obvious mistake to think that because you can’t see the bloom on certain things that it is not there. This bloom is variable in its manufacture; it can be what appears to be a smoke. It can also be a type of shellac or varnish. It can also be an oil, and not only can it also be those, but it can change from one to the other.
Now the very statement that an apple swims and a pear drowns—and you realize that this is totally true: if you drop those fruits into water, the one will definitely float, and the other will definitely sink—here is concerned almost entirely the area of discontinuity and the bloom. It is well known that if you damage the bloom on a grape, you cannot get fermentation. That grape will not ferment properly. Also, you cannot dry fruits truly and well if you have damaged and removed the bloom. We have got to deal with this in discussing it, jumping about; it’s so delicate a matter.
Now, take this into account. When you take a tomato, or a cherry, or a peach, or a plum, we’ll take those fruits, because they’re rather more the obvious, here you have an area of discontinuity; a skin, a very thin skin. And upon that skin, which are a number of skins, on the outside is a bloom, a very definite bloom.
If you want to perceive what bloom is, you should just send this (carnation) around, and any of you as you go, wipe your finger on one of these leaves, or on the stalk, and observe where you have touched it. You will see that the bloom is gone. It’s obvious on the carnations simply because of the texture and the color. Don’t wipe too much, or else nobody will have anything left to wipe. You all know it probably, you’ve all noticed it, in one way or another. It’s just that it’s obvious on this one.
With that area of discontinuity on the tomato, as the tomato grows, so does that area of discontinuity of the skin. In other words, it’s stretchable, it’s elastic, it changes. It also changes its textural capacity, extremely. It is playing a part all the time. And when the fruit is what you would call complete, that has the capacity of maintaining it in that condition for a period. Whereby you could say, if you wanted to, you could keep a tomato in a reasonable temperature for three weeks or for a month, if you picked it not too ripe, not overripe. And yet, you have only to pierce that area of discontinuity with the smallest pinprick, and within a few hours, in less than a day, the entire tomato has started to collapse. You must begin to see the enormous import that this area of discontinuity is playing.
In other words, it is like the most delicate of gardens that is capable of receiving in and of giving out and yet maintaining within it the ego of the whole matter. You will see the repercussion of this as an environmental procedure with us ourselves.
It is well to just quickly look over that and see the astonishing interplay of area of discontinuity with mankind. The moment that you have a photograph or a picture, it doesn’t mean a thing if it hasn’t got an area of discontinuity. It must be framed at once, or there’s nothing to separate it from the room. The moment that you put a window in the wall, it’s got to have a frame. Otherwise it’s just anything. And the moment that you have a room, you’ve got to have a door. You’ve got to have an area of discontinuity by which you come in and out. And then you have to have a carpet on the floor, an area of discontinuity between your foot and what’s beneath.
And then again, if you came, for instance, to a theater—it’s very fascinating here, that you have come to observe either an ideal, or an observance, or even an entertainment. But you’ve got to have a complete discontinuity of the curtain, and a proscenium arch which is the division between a magical world and the general public. And when you go in, all the lights are on in the auditorium, and the curtain is down, and the area of discontinuity, the proscenium arch, is there. As soon as everybody’s in, and you are going to have the magic turned on, all the lights go off in the auditorium, the area of discontinuity is removed and the lights are put on to the magical world. It’s an area of discontinuity, of complete relationship and dis-relationship. It is a complete copy of everything that we are observing and living within Nature all the time. Why do ladies put powder on their face? Bloom.
So you get this interplay, and you find that it comes, for instance, to photography and drawing. The only matter about drawing and photography, is really, a silhouette. You draw an edge around something, which is the area of discontinuity of it, on the side. But as soon as you come to use color—in other words, painting—you’ve entered a deeper world altogether. The whole object of painting, of color, is to get rid of silhouette. And the great art of painting is to remove the edges, so that you have no silhouette. And you can go around behind something. That is what color entertains.
Now, when you begin to look into the revolutionibus, when you perceive that color as a force must come from the planets—and does come from the planets—and that it is not at that time a color but an energy, a power, you begin to see that somewhere this bloom, which is on the area of discontinuities, is both a reflector and a receiver.
Now it is a theory that leaves appear green, because the leaf itself—or the duties of the leaf— absorb those colors which are not blue and yellow. And a red flower likewise appears red because it absorbs all of the other rays—but not the red—and reflects them. When you watch bloom, you will see that it changes with the growth of the day, as well as with the growth of the plant, and the growth of periods of climates, too.
You have heard all the ancients—for instance the Persians, and Pliny in particular—on speaking about the Lilium candidum (Madonna lily), that is the most ancient of all white lilies. And everybody in their obtuseness of not looking, saying that the lilies are white. But Pliny and all of the ancients who regarded the matter said, “No, lilies are gold.” And whenever you look endlessly into a lily, you will perceive this. When you look at the petals of certain flowers, particularly begonias, and particularly pink begonias, because the color makes it practical to be visible; when you look at certain white petals like Nicotiana (flowering nicotine) sufficiently, you will suddenly
see that they are gold, and not white. You will begin to see this. This is because you are looking into bloom, so that you are beginning to look into areas.
Now this bloom is utterly important. It is said that in this area is the most important nutriments. It is well known that with apples and pears, and the other fruits that you want to keep, you must maintain this bloom with the utmost care. If you damage it they will not keep, unless of course you keep by artificial means. I talk about gases and deep temperatures, and so on, as that. But to keep a fruit in its natural way, which is perfectly simple, those blooms must remain. Therefore the fruit must be collected with utmost care. Now Steiner and others pointed out at that time that it was of greatest importance never to wash vegetables before eating them. Because if you do, you wash off one of the most potent and important matters containing a nutriment which is vitally important, and that is bloom.
And indeed he taught us, and I remember it so well, that we would take oranges and lemons, and the citrus, and in the evening, keep cutting them, before using them in any way, all the seeds, the pips, were put into a basin, a china basin. They were then just covered with water, and a cloth put over the top, and put in the larder. And in the morning, the results were eaten with brown bread, with a spoon. Around all of those seeds had formed an absolute gelatinousness that was solid. The bloom of the seeds had caused this matter to take place.
It is said to be very important that if you make preserves of plums, and of stone fruits and such like, that you should apply the stones preferably into that preserve, as they are. If not, at least to take the kernels out and put those in. There is the reason behind that, of that matter. If you take butterfly wings you will see there a very similar bloom to what you would get on flowers. Then again, if you take certain flowers such as buttercups, you will see that there appears to be no bloom on the flower, but that there is on the foliage. And then if you look at a dragonfly you will find a similar thing. That there is not actually a bloom on the dragonfly as there is on the butterfly, but there is, and it is a varnish or a veneer. Therefore you begin to perceive the differences in these blooms.
I am sure that you must at some time have come to the conclusion that there is bloom on stones. And you must very obviously be aware that there is bloom upon flowers. You can’t but see it every time. It is very obvious. And you see the change of it going on all the time on flowers.
Now there’s another matter which concerns this that goes even further and is more delicate still. You are aware that after plants flower, the whole petal business goes, and the seed procedure takes place. You must have noticed that at a certain period of the revolutionibus, an entire blossoming of the seed now takes place. Often, much larger than the bloom of the flower. And
here you see a bloom form in the area of the blossoming of the seed, that is unique again. For just as spiders all on a certain day, obviously produce an emanating bloom, whereby they become lighter than air and rise as a cloud. So do seeds by their manipulation of catapultation, and floating and flying, so do they achieve a bloom which becomes relatable, and beyond relatable, to atmospheric pressures and airs. They can become lighter than the air itself, and in this way, being divorced from moistures and so on, can actually take flight.
In this way, comes the view that the seed of fern taken on the night of St. John’s birth induces invisibility.
When you watch dawns and you watch a sunrise, and pre-sunrise and pre-dawn, you see this matter take place in the sky. You see therefore that it’s not a question of light, it’s not a question of the Sun, and it’s not a question of dark. It’s a whole wave of floatation which is taking place. You must be aware, that particularly during the night, the whole area of bloom changes.
You must now be aware that the whole area of soil has bloom. This is why it is bruisable. This is why it is damageable. Just as there is an area of discontinuity, the very skin of the Earth, so that skin, being the surface of the soil, develops—and that is the word: develops—a bloom. That bloom is in contact all the time with changeability of atmospherics and climatics and revolutionibus. For you must now be aware from what we have been studying already, that the soil of spring has no relationship to the soil of fall at all. Nor the soil of summer to the soil of winter. They are totally different capacities. Oh, you could say that’s quite unstatable if you like. But the results prove that the whole matter is so.
You must also perceive from this that the whole atmosphere produces at times bloom. You are aware at certain times of looking along and perceiving things in the air that you cannot nominate either as cobwebs or dust.
And here comes very much the origin of the whole procedure of elfdom. Elfdom, as you realize, all of those names come out of the elements. Before people spoke adamantly about north, south, east and west; hot, cold, wet and dry; earth, fire, air and water; the four elements that are the intermediaries between the visible and the invisible—these are nominated, at a certain time of language, as fairies, undines, nymphs, elves and the rest. Because they bring about the change between the visible and the invisible. When people got tired of stating it was the intermediaries, they talked about fairies and undines and elves. And you will find in the ancients about the elves of light—that they actually emanate and give off a bloom that is lighter than sunlight. And that they live in color itself, and are only perceived in rays.
Whilst those elves of night, of darkness, the manufacturers of Thor’s hammer, and those that lead horses astray in bogs, and catch the Moon, and bury her in the bog and release her for half the time, to shine—are all matters concerning these intermediaries.
But you will see in this matter that bloom is so important. You will see that we have bloom upon our skin. You will know it. You must know the intricacies of the effects of your hair. One day it is bright and shiny, and another day according to your mood, and what is happening, as to whether you are sad or happy, your hair is either dull or glittering. And that there are those herbs, such as the delicious Verbascum (mullein), that will restore that for you almost regardless of your mood. Because they have that capacity of the invection of bloom. If you look at Verbascum, you will perceive this extraordinary surface on that plant. It is absolutely extraordinary. You can’t even find out where it begins and where it ends.
But now what are we talking about? Where it begins, and where it ends? Where does anything begin, and where does anything end? And bloom is in a sense that very matter. It’s the finest entity that makes the area of discontinuity between something and everything. Therefore it is as
delicate as delicate, and is obviously tremendously important. Serious. It interplays the revolutionibus into ego.
Out of it comes further thinkings and observations, you realize. The whole procedure of the capacity of seeing auras, which exist around everybody. Emanation. You are, I am sure, aware that are there are certain plants, certain flowers, which at certain times of the evening give off an intense emanation. You will read it in all botanical books, there’s a whole list of them. And that if you observe and sit and watch, as the equinox of evening comes, you will see that you will no longer see these flowers as a group of flowers at all, that the formation, in other words the outlaying of the area of discontinuity goes, with the light, and suddenly there’s a blaze of color above them. An emanation.
There are many that do it much more obviously than others, but all do it. For instance, the whole thing about peony is in this area. The peony is governed by the Moon, and therefore it gives off an emanation at night of luminosity. The whole of these flowers, if you really observe periods at night, really do produce a luminosity around them. But in actual fact it is actually very little of the flower that does it, and you are somewhat deceived by this fact. It is, indeed, the seed. The seed contains the area of luminosity. And so much so, that in the Aegean where this plant grows, the shepherds all hunt for the seeds only at night. And find them.
Do you understand this extraordinary matter about the luminous, the halo? The aura? That when the painters came to the end of realizing that they could not paint God—deity—
you will see that in all true attempts to paint this matter, they will never give you the eyes. The eyes are always removed downwards, so that you cannot look into them. Because it would be impossible. You would have to look into eternity, and that is not possible in painting. That is the only way they can do it. So, they achieved the method of the emanation, the bloom, the aura. Which was an endless shining above.
And here you begin to see the whole importance of understanding this, and perceiving it, and becoming aware of it. You realize that according to your procedure, according to the procedure of plants, in relationship to the area of the environment, so is an aura, an emanation outside of
this area of discontinuity which is the bloom, which goes and mixes the two into infinity. This is full of touch, of sense. But the whole world of birds and insects and plants are extremely and
utterly sensitive to this. And this is the relationship between bees, and why they either do or do not sting. Or birds and butterflies, and other matters of why they come to you or do not come to you. Of why animals and plants retreat from humanity: the emanation is not desirable.
When you are a gardener, how imperative it is to stop this word-thinking, and to be able to apply emanation. Give off and intake. The sense of reception, and the sense of infusion. Surely
you must have become aware then, that this bloom that concerns the hummingbird, that concerns butterflies, that concerns plants, that concerns every living thing, really, must be a form of reflection and deflection. And here must lie a whole seat of the appearance of color, and of scent, and of flavor, of lushness, and indeed of the acceptance or the de-acceptance of fertility.
Now you begin to perceive why a particular strawberry will have an intense flavor at three o’clock and none at six o’clock. And you will say, “Impossible! The flavor’s there. It’s in the strawberry, my dear.” Oh, are you sure? Is the scent always the same? Is the scent the same in the Nicotiana at noon as it is at midnight? And what about mignonette? How often have you gone to mignonette, wishing, and have nothing? And how is it that you go on smelling and not exhaust that smell, if it would be in the thing giving it off, like a juice? You could exhaust it. Do you? Do you exhaust looking at color? Now do you begin to perceive what we are talking about? Or rather what we’re looking at? This incredible matter of bloom, of areas of discontinuity, and then the inner ratio, which is this separation.
Now you begin to see that all life is waves, that indeed insects and birds and plants are really not removed from each other. They are waves of forces that are governed by the revolutionibus, and they’re expressions. And there’s little removal. It is only our individual focuses of thinking of ourselves as males and females, and this and that, and knowledgeable and unknowledgeable, and twice two is four, that puts everything in categories and boxes, up in the attic in blocks. I can’t really go any further than this, but to say, open the perception, open the sensitivities, and open the observances. Do not say, “I know, and this cannot be and that cannot be.”
When we make a plate we take a piece of clay and we bake it in the oven. And having done so, it still has an area of discontinuity and almost—in fact it does—have a bloom. Because you see bloom is not form, by touchable. Bloom is very much what we were referring to when we said iodine is not made in the sea or in the air. It is made in the spume by the turbulence of the ocean meeting the air, in the area of discontinuity between the two.
Do you realize that you could form a water bubble on top of a water bubble, via a splash, and that that bubble would actually float on the water, and it’s water floating on top of water, which according to science books is impossible? It suddenly has an area of discontinuity of its own, and the bloom of course. It must have. So I am not trying to give you anything, or to tell you anything. But it is a perception, and it’s a perception of the greatest importance.
Now, you should begin to be able to perceive so much better than thinking in words what happens to a fig at a given moment on a given day. It has been full of cotton wool; you can do what you like the day before. You can take it off and bite it, and you would have to spit it out, because it is just cotton wool. It’s quite horrible. You can’t even swallow it. In actual fact that you realize they’re all membranes, there again those electric wires going to all the seeds which are all inside the fruit this time. They’re all facing each other inside, with the whole of the skin outside, but there is a little cavity in the front. And then as to allow that wasp to enter, the only insect which can enter that hole. It is the only thing that can pollinate the blossoming of the fig inside.
But at a given moment of the revolutionibus, the whole of the area of discontinuity and the bloom, permits of an entry, of a new issue, which was not allowed to enter before. And all of the cotton wool is turned suddenly to the most liquid, luscious, juicy pulp imaginable. The intermediaries. You could never work it out. Now you begin to see what bloom is, and how important it is. Now you can begin to see how careful you must be in touching a plant, in walking upon the soil, in cultivating the soil.
Perceive an egg: an egg has an incredible bloom upon it. That bloom is a container that the shell, which is the area of discontinuity, and the skin within the shell, which is a further area beneath the discontinuity, are all breathable, in and out, can receive and exude both. Necessitous.
Therefore, I bring the focus of bloom, which you can see so clearly on the carnation, upon a plum, upon a grape. I bring it and say: realize that this is on everything that grows, and that it is changeable as it grows and it is not static. It is one of the most magical areas of interweaving into totality. And the effect of our living, of our approach in the garden, gives off an emanation, a bloom. Now do you see why you must perceive this? Why you must understand when you put your foot in the garden bed? Why you cannot go into a field as a robber and say, “I want this and will have it!”? Of course you will. But the emanation is there; it was there with the thought, before the thought. And the whole world is conscious of it. It’s vast. It’s total.
Do you want to talk about it?
Q: I understand about the grape and the plum. The bloom is obvious. But when you spoke about the orange and the seeds, that I wasn’t able to get.
You have looked at a tithonia, carefully? You have. What have you perceived? Anything in particular? What have you perceived as a shadow? Anything or nothing? Well then observe it. But I’ll tell you what you will perceive, inevitably—and some of you have obviously—you will see the cerulean blue of the sky. You can’t mistake it, it’s there in great patches. This is a reflection of bloom. It’s the recipient and the throwing off again. Here you have this with the orange. It is there for a time, and then it becomes a texture that we refer to as oils. It is no longer the powdery thing, the smoky thing. It becomes an oil.
Within the attentions of Goethe, which refer to intelligence, intellect, and reason, and ideé,
is this matter: that in the exuberance of the growth of all plants is the paraphernalia metamorphosis of all of the changes. In exuberance, in the seed, it is the minimum of metamorphosis and the total of idée. In the growth of a plant, it is the minimum of idée and the maximum of metamorphosis. You will perceive that all seed, as we spoke of the buds of trees, has an area of discontinuity around it, which is a separate to the discontinuity of the actual fruit itself. For perceive that where you have a pit in an apple, and where you have stone in a peach, you have that little seed in a strawberry—on a strawberry indeed, as often happens on others also. In the raspberry, it is each seed in a lobe.
And so you get this. I am trying to refer you to leave the attic and to perceive totality. To get out of the thinking of a pit or a seed, and to see acutely what it is. Therefore, this area of discontinuity around the seed is a different area of discontinuity, but that the fruit is the protector of that. Now you will go in circles outside that, and here you will find soil and air. And there you will find sky and atmosphere, in which the stars float. And so you could go on ad infinitum of course, and I can’t lead you there. But that both of them have areas of discontinuity, and both of them have bloom. And if you apply them at different times, with different sauces such as milk or water or honey, you will find that they give off their invection. The seed of the citrus, and indeed all seeds, give off this enormously: tremendous vitality is given off, if you use a method of a synergist to produce its bloom and area of discontinuity to give off its secrets. Does that explain to you a little?
You must think in a sense again, and I jumped it of the buds in a branch in the boughs of a tree, are all separate entities, just like your eyebrows and your cheeks that you don’t really
dominate, they live in you. But what an enormous quantity of parts are a part of us that we have no concept of at all, as you found with your living this morning.
Anything?
Q: With the drink that you had in the morning, that you put the seeds in…
Yes, it was not a drink, it goes into a complete gelatinous solid. You could cut it with a
knife and eat it with a fork. Sometimes they used lemons for a particular reason, and sometimes we used orange for a particular reason. The lemon having more procedure over certain things. It was used as an herbal treatment, and at that time we were doing endless experiments in nutrition and diet and control.
Could you do it if it was a bean seed, it would ferment…
Yes, precisely. Most enormously so. Oh yes. In different ways. Oh, this is endless. I mean, you take even the use of Euphrasia (eyebright), what else do you do? You take some blossoms of Euphrasia, which is the best fresh, and you pour not-quite boiling water upon it, you allow it to settle, and you both drink it, and use it over your eye. And its restorative powers are immediate. Is that not so? Euphrasia will still do wonders when you have styes and such matters.
Just be careful not to put it on the inner eye…
You are naughty. There’s a more important one than that, than Euphrasia, and that is Hieracium (hawkweed). But you can’t use that in the same way, it’s completely internal, and this is most interesting, and this begins to apply—we’re really going further than we intended to today at all—but the oil of Hieracium goes from within to without. It goes through your bloodstream, and it goes into your higher nature’s perception brilliantly.
Known as hawkweed. Do you realize that all birds see more clearly than most other things in the world. And birds, including hawks, will go for that particular seed of Hieracium more than any other seed that there is. And it is said that afterwards, it has been perceivable that they are incredibly more accurate than they ever were before. But it is very astonishing, you see, you can have a hawk, literally a mile up, and it will see a movement of a shrew under leaves, it hasn’t even come out. So their perception is absolutely unique. And also they have a quality of this bloom matter which is extraordinary.
And you see here again you take this matter of puffins. When the puffin lays an egg, which they do upon stones, upon cliffs, the egg, it has a bloom on it and an area of discontinuity which is equivalent to the stone and rock. Do you perceive that as winter comes certain animals’ fur goes white? You must have noticed so continually how certain caterpillars are colored exactly like the foliages they are upon. You see this interplay of bloom and emanation, intake and give-off. It’s so obvious.
Q: I had a couple of questions about the revolutionibus. Do you consider the signs of the Moon at all for planning, or for sowing, or transplanting, or…I was just talking with somebody that said that was very important, and I said that I kind of thought it might be less important than the phase of the Moon, whether it was waxing or waning, and I thought that maybe you could tell us something about that.
They interplay. The inclination and declination is what you might call the imperative issue. The other is secondary. You will lead into that in due course, so I won’t go into detail.
I gave you the two intense periods of magnetics: two nights before the new Moon is the first one and is minor. The major is half Moon to full. Alright? You also understand the inference of the whole period of the inclination with the Sun, and the whole period of the declination. Other than that the ruling calendar is there, and you can survey it, and you will begin to see it, and we shall explain this as we go along. Alright?
Oh dear. Anything? Well, at least we don’t end with violent argument.
Archive ID: CA1051
Type: Audio
Title: Bloom and Area of Discontinuity
Date: 12 Sep 1975
Location: Covelo Village Garden, Covelo, CA
