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http://elements.spiritalchemy.com/p2-fourelements.html
The Four
Elements
Introduction
Below is a very brief description of each element along with its
associated qualities. On the next page
starts a guided example that will help you experience these qualities directly
for yourself. The triangle images are
symbolic representations of each element that can give you a visual identifier
to refer to when thinking of an element.
Earth -
The Earth element is the base, factual level of the phenomenon. It is the ‘obvious’. It is the data of the sensory experience of
the phenomenon. It is any aspect about
which definitive statements can be made, such as “It is red”, or “it happened
at 4:30”, or “It makes me feel queasy.”
These are all facts; they can be recorded as statements, A, B, C. The Earth level of the phenomenon can
therefore be “true” or “false”, “correct” or “incorrect”. The Earth element seems unambiguous: it just
is what it is, and every fact seems more or independent from every other fact.
Water -
The Water element brings the facts of the Earth into relationship. No fact is stable, or exists in
isolation. Rather, every fact is a
precipitate that falls out of the interweaving contexts of its immediate
environment in time, space, and mind, just like a crystal of salt precipitates
out of a solution when the water evaporates.
Water is what is changing, what is moving from B to C and has already
moved from A to B. It is the immediate
past and immediate future of the phenomenon.
It is the tendency for the phenomenon to change the way it appears over
time. Water is the way the phenomenon
relates to other aspects of itself and other phenomenon; facts connect to other
facts to create a stream of evolving meaning.
In the Water realm, the truth of one fact leads naturally to the truth
of another, related fact.
Air -
In the Air element, the movements and changes of the phenomenon are
found to exist between sets of polarities, whether opposites, complements, or
reciprocals. The movement from A to B to
C is understood as existing somewhere along the polarity of the scale A to
Z. The facts are no longer static, nor
are they simply related to other facts.
Now the facts of the Earth level of the phenomenon are experienced as if
inverted or reversed. In Air we have the
experience “what if?”, and we see the phenomenon from one or more of the polar
points of view. We recognize that once
we get to Z, we go back to A – and moving the other way, A moves into Z, and in
the end A and Z aren’t quite so far away from each other as we may have
thought. Air is the space around the
phenomenon, what arises when we make the apparent solidity of its Earth nature
become as invisible and mobile as the air itself. In Air, the phenomenon presents aspects of
itself that are simultaneously one way and another way. Facts might be both “true” and “false” at the
same time, and the context of the Water level expands to include so many
additional aspects that it is like there is no real context at all, or that
everything is contextually relevant. We
may get very confused, and lose track of what seemed to be stable facts from
the Earth level when we reach the Air level of the phenomenon.
Fire -
The Fire element resolves the tendency towards dissipation of our
understanding at the Air level into a coherent, meaningful, encompassing
whole. It burns away all the extraneous
fluff and gives us a glimpse of some aspect of the phenomenon that makes us say
“Ah-ha!” to ourselves. We feel now that
we have some real understanding of the phenomenon that was previously
unavailable to us; we have an insight.
The facts from the Earth level, the movements of the Water level, the
reversals of the Air level now all fit together simultaneously as an ordered
whole in a way that makes ‘sense’ to us.
We recognize that in fact the Fire insight was present all along,
embedded at each level like a secret waiting to be discovered. We may feel like the insight came from
outside of us, as if the world is speaking to us in a language that we are just
beginning to learn.
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