There are four elements everyone is familiar with, Earth, Water, Air, Fire. These four elements were first postulated by the ancient Greeks when they were thinking about the makeup of physical things. They probably got their knowledge from the ancient Egyptians, who may have gotten it from somewhere else, but we still have many of the old Greek books, so they get the credit. Their model of the physical world has long since gone by the wayside, but alchemists are used to allegory and continue to use the four elements as a guide to the makeup of the material world. The way I see it, the elements can be broken down into the four states of matter. Earth = Solid, Water = Liquid, Air = Gas, and Fire = Plasma. As you will come to find out as you research deeper, the modern meanings of the ancient words are often only a piece of their ancient meaning.
There is a fifth element that everyone already knows about. The quintessence or what I’ll call Spirit to make it easier for me to type. It has nothing and everything to do with the Spirit that is part of the Body, Mind, Spirit. They are similar, but definitively different. I think.
If the world is a model airplane, Spirit is the instructions to build that model. It’s what everything is based on, and there would be no universe without it. There isn’t a whole lot of scientific knowledge about Spirit, because most scientists would like to assume it doesn’t exist.
Herein lies the problem with Spirit for scientists. Spirit is subtle. It doesn’t tip voltmeters, it doesn’t activate any of the five senses. It moves through matter without causing any disturbance whatsoever. Observing Spirit is like trying to grab water the same way you would grab a baseball. Its going to drain out of your hands, and because it has no surface tension like water, you won’t even be left with wet hands to know it was there. So how in Science’s name do we understand something we can’t interact with? The answer is to find a middle ground. Like the old adage, you can’t see the wind, but you can see the effects of the wind, we must attempt to find something that Spirit does affect. The answer to that, is energy fields.
Scientists assume fields are created by certain geometric structures of certain atoms. Align the atoms of iron together, and you end up with a magnet. Run electricity through a properly configured set of copper wires, you get an electric field. Fields are what happens when energy runs through matter in a certain way. Everything, and I do mean everything, has an electromagnetic field of some sort. It may be hard to detect and so weak it can’t interact on a visible level with iron, but it’s there. The field in the human body can be anywhere from -2 to 6 volts per meter. I’ll go into why it varies later, for now its important to understand that everything has an invisible aura that, like gravity and light, never diminishes, only decreases in intensity by the square of the distance. Is this electric field the same thing mystics see when they discover the ‘aura’ around things? The decisive answer to this is: “maybe?”.
Fields are poorly understood by most people probably because they require levels of calculus that most of us will never learn. If you have 100’s of hours of spare time you can go to MIT’s open courseware and get the basics here: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-02-electricity-and-magnetism-spring-2002/. And by basics I mean everything there is to know up to the 1920’s, which, as far as the theory goes, is as far as we’ve gotten. This is the last physics course you can take without getting into relativity and quantum mechanics, so it’s the farthest a layman can get without devoting a monumental amount of brainpower and time.
Relativity works best on scales of the very large and quantum mechanics work best on scales of the very small. Which, you may ask, works best in the middle, where we stand? The answer to that is neither, or a weird mixture of both. For the physics of the human level, we’re still using Newton’s mechanics, which you can learn here, http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/.
Now you might wonder what all this has to do with a discussion of the element Spirit, and to be honest, almost everything. I want you to understand how scientists think, and how that thought has evolved since Descartes put together the process that became the scientific method in the middle of the 16th century. Once you understand that thinking, you may begin to see why even an intelligent person can begin to abandon it and look to the occult mindset of our ancestors for answers. This too can lead down the wrong path.
Both sides have their pros and both have their cons. The only truth I’ve discovered from learning as much as I could from both sides, is that neither side has The Answer. They can both be useful models depending on what you’re trying to do, but the real secret is not being afraid to use either one, or both, at your discretion.
This, my friends, is what Spirit is all about. It takes what it has at its disposal and uses it with purpose. Purpose is the quintessence. It’s the reason for all the anthropomorphizing that chemistry and physics teachers use when they describe particles and their myriad of combinations. They say electrons have a negative charge, and because of this they want to move towards a positive charge. Hydrogen has a net positive charge and because of this wants to combine with another atom with a net negative charge. Do these atoms actually have a desire to have a net neutral charge, or is there something else behind it? Even if they do have this desire, where would this desire come from? The atoms aren’t alive and conscious…are they? Even Newton was guilty of this. An object at rest tends to stay at rest. Where does this tendency come from? Is there perhaps a form of matter in its teenage years that has a tendency to move out and go to college?
Without realizing it, or perhaps not wanting to realize it, scientists have given everything Spirit. It is the one thing all the other elements have in common. They have laws that govern them that cause them to act in certain ways. They be what they are, but the reason behind it, is because of the guiding Spirit . The examination of the next four elements is easier to understand with the model of Spirit. What Spirit does when it is surrounded by Earth for example. It makes crystals, in a set pattern based on what configuration the element is best suited to. As for the how, I’ll cover that when I cover Earth, but for the why, you need Spirit. It is the guiding principle that scientists refuse to acknowledge.
waywardalchemist 