The primary colors are Red, Green and Violet, forming a triangle.
The secondary colors are Yellow, formed by Red and Green
Blue, formed by Green and Violet
Magenta, formed by Red and Violet.
The tertiary colors are Orange, formed by Red and Yellow
Lemon, formed by Yellow and Green
Turquoise, formed by Green and Blue
Indigo, formed by Blue and Violet
Purple, formed by Violet and Magenta
Scarlet, formed by Magenta and Red.
Thus we have twelve colors, neatly arranged in a symmetrical form. What we usually call complimentary colors (Dinshah called it color affinities) are all opposite each other in this color wheel.
Notice the circle of degrees which represent the oscillation degree of each color, starting at red and 0 degrees. The colors broken down with a prism does not the 360 degree oscillation of light and its transformation into other degrees of oscillation (=colors). We just have to stop thinking in a linear way, and look at the more complete 3-D aspect of light, which is circular, or spiral, and oscillatory.
Dinshah calls all these colors attuned color. One cannot take any blue or any red for example. All the colors have to be specific. This has to do with the filters used. He used five glass filters of very specific colors, nowadays 12 plastic filters are used with the same result. Because one has to combine filters to create the other colors, if one filter has a slightly different shade of that color, then when combining with other filters, it might create a totally different color than the one desired for healing. One could discuss if it is really important if a colored light is slightly different than the one used in Dinshah Spectro-Chrome system. I think it will still have a healing value. However, there is a strong argument to keep all colors as in the color wheel shown, the so-called attuned colors. Why? Well, Nature likes harmony, symmetry. Music, for example, is harmonious and healing when all notes are in a particular relation to each other. When one note is off, it will sound odd, and affect us in a disturbing way. There is also the effect of harmonics. With the attuned colors it is primarily a question of having the right filters, although our bodies might prefer the attuned colors more than just any other color. It is something worth considering, and worth further study.
What brings us to the question of how do colors affect the human body?
Color Therapy is Energy Medicine
Energy healing systems are based on the principle that everything has a vibrational frequency, frequencies. Altering these frequencies in the human body promotes health or creates disease. Many different things can cause an imbalance in the frequencies present in the human body: environmental issues, toxins, medicines, electromagnetic fields, microwaves, sun light, and so on. we live in a ocean of vibrations. But what are we talking about when considering the human body? Dinshah grew up in India and was well familiar with its esoteric viewpoints of the human body. He makes an interesting division of the human being:
The visible physical vehicle = the body
The invisible physical vehicle = the aura
the vital vehicle = the breath or prana
the emotional vehicle = the psyche
the mental vehicle = the mind
the causal vehicle = the mediary
the cosmo-energy = the spirit
In relation to color healing we concern ourselves with the aura. Dinshah tells us that all matter has emissions, or radiations, of one kind or another. Thus, all matter of our physical body are emitting their individual radiations and together they produce an ovoid of iridescence around the body, what we call the aura, or the auric vehicle. It has been known by other gifted people that health and disease shows up clearly in the auric colors, even before disease has manifested itself into the physical body. Colored light will affect the auric vehicle directly and restore the balance. The aura will absorb what it lacks, and once it has accomplished balance, it will just discard the rest. Thus when shining colored light on the body, one cannot overdo it, unless, of course, you overload it. In other words, the energy body has a reasonable protection mechanism for overloads.
Dinshah treated people by shining a light (with an ordinary light bulb) through a colored filter (or combination of filters) on a person's body in a dark room. He divided the body in sections, to make it easy for people who want to treat themselves. He also made an extensive list of health conditions and their corresponding healing colors. An attunement (his term for a healing session) lasts at least one hour.
In his book Let There Be Light, he explained the practice in a clear and understandable way for the lay person. The book is practical and easy. In his second book, Spectro-Chrome Metry Encyclopedia, he goes into detail about a whole lot of issues, he explains the actions of the colors on the body, gives many examples from his practice, and more. This is more a study book.
Radiations
I mentioned that Dinshah bases color healing on the theory that the auric vehicle is a color light emanation of the physical vehicle. The physical body is composed of molecules and atoms. Each element (element as in the Periodic Table of Elements) has its own color radiation. It may sound a little esoteric, but there is a basis for this theory. Science has shown that each element radiates photons (=light) with very specific frequencies in the light spectrum. They are called spectral lines. When an element gives off its photons, the spectral lines are always the same for each element. Spectral lines are highly atom-specific, and can be used to identify the chemical composition of any medium capable of letting light pass through it. The emission of photons is related to the jump of electrons in the outer orbit of the atom.
Visible spectrum of hydrogen: