Snow White and Rose Red

Among the numerous interesting processes in the human organism we find the polarity of thinking and willing. Their physiological basis appears very early, between the seventeenth to twenty-first days after conception, when two contrasting events occur simultaneously in the embryo. Through the midst of the generally undifferentiated cell material, a line appears, a groove which eventually folds to become a fine tube. This is the primal form of the spinal cord, with the brain stem, and ultimately the brain forming at one end.

At the same moment a rhythmic beating occurs, a pulsation in the midst of the cell formation, which in turn will become the primal form of the heart. ‘Form is the envelope of pulsation,’ a Tantric saying tells us. Thus we see it happening in the embryo: first there is a pulse, and then there is the heart.

This is a marvellous polarity: a line, a delineation, a clear differentiation of form, something hardening through the midst of the cellular structure; and pulsation at a particular place, movement without form, but formative. Here, by the end of the third week of pregnancy, we find in the human being the first signs of the presence, in terms of the fairytale, of the Snow White activity in us, and the Rose Red activity – the basis of what will become thinking and willing respectively.

Snow White always prefers to remain at home with the Mother; she tends to be quiet, reflective, conscious of what is happening. Rose Red however loves to run exuberantly through the woods, always active, adventurous, quick to respond. In Snow White we find the still calm centre of the brain / central nervous system activity; in Rose Red, we experience all that lives in the vital pulsing of the blood. Together, holding hands, they are whole, forming between them the weave of ensouled feeling.

In this regard, in each one of us there is the realm where Snow White and Rose Red are living still.