Elements – The Great Wisdom of the Elements

(Revised 14-February 2016)

Understand the elements and you understand it all.

Dawn at Bellanwila, Sri Lanka 2015.  Photo by: Anusha Attapattu

Pure consciousness is pure radiance, it is luminous emptiness. It is like no other radiance, no other light.  It is beyond conceptualization, out of thought. It is incomparable to light of lightening or not, bright or brighter or not, a thousand fluorescent lamps or xenon lights or not. 

It is like the fire before the fire. There is no comparison.

And then there is separation, like the prism shone light, or rainbow in its dazzle, when luminosity shows itself, its manifestation. These are its elements. They are seen as yellow, red, white, and green. They manifest qualities of earth, fire, water and wind.

Earth, fire, water and wind as they are figuratively known are everything, mind and matter. They transcend lives, life times and dimensions. They encompass everything we know and don’t, unlike what we know of the periodic table. All of its qualities are subjective and personal, of a physical and mental state.  The evaluation of our experience of them is created by separation, to which extent we are deluded.

They are known as the primary elements as they are inseparable. When they combine with derived secondary elements, 20 other elements and consciousness we can separate them, sense them, experience them, and evaluate them. Primary elements are elements by itself, without consciousness they mean nothing to us. It is the quality of intent (or no intent) in consciousness that enables our manifestation of the qualities of the elements, our reality. This is the way to understand the elements. Adducing qualities to elements by themselves is conjecture. 

This understanding of the elements and the classification of atoms and elements in atoms in our virtual world of reality is what sets apart the Buddhist classification from the rest of the classifications based on elements. However, we can express our experience and evaluation in terms of the qualities of the primary elements. 

Earth is hardness, solidity or shape. It is the base of all things on which the other elements can find support to stage its manifestations. 

Earth Yellow.
Earth is form. 
Earth is aversion, anger and hatred 
Examine Earth and you find the Wisdom of Mirror awareness  - of non-duality, of no separation and ever united with its 'content' as a mirror is with its reflections, out of which union nothing is in awareness. 

Water is fluidity. It brings things together. It has no shape of its own and is shaped by what it encounters. It is also our feelings. Master your feelings to master your world.

Water is White. 
Water is pride.
Water is feeling.
Examine Water to find the white light of the Wisdom of Sameness or equality of all things, phenomena.

Fire is heat. It has the effect of melting and combining. It burns earth and disappears into where ever it goes, into the divine space. It can give us life and also take it away.

Fire is red.
Fire is perception and conceptualization.
Fire is desire.


Examine Fire and find the wisdom of discriminatory awareness, so we appreciate the conceptual and non-conceptual, what is true and what is false. 

Fire comes from nowhere into our conceptualization and goes out into nowhere out of our conceptualization
But a fire can certainly leave its mark in its wake, whilst in our conceptualization. 

Wind is what drives all of it. It is what keeps our bodies erect. It is what propels our minds to thought. It is what propels our elements, the collection of elements from one place to another, one being to another, one life to another. 

Wind is Green.  
Wind is jealousy
Wind is mental formations or experience. 
Examine Wind and find the All Accomplishing Wisdom – Free from partiality and Grasping. An awareness and equanimity through which one spontaneously accomplishes all things for benefit of all beings.

Take the wind off of your sails and you go nowhere. Yes. We know it well. When we are winded our minds go blank. When we are lethargic our mind lazy, we have no wind in our sails.

And, there is space; it is the space within our hearts that our minds rest. It has all of the four elements.

Space is blue, clear and luminous, like the sky unlimited and

unclouded. 
Consciousness is Space.
Consciousness is Wisdom.
Consciousness is Ignorance.
Examine Space and find the Wisdom of Suchness – the bare non-conceptualizing awareness, and of all the other four elements

Wind and Earth combines to give Sensation, Smell and Sound that result. It is what happens when wind hits your ear drums that creates more wind in vibration to make fire light up earth to give you sight and perception. 

Earth and Fire combines and Sight results.

Light your fire red and hot to end up wanting it in desire.

Earth and Water combines and it is taste that result. Eat food, salivate and have taste that feels. Yellow and white combines to give more or less yellow as in tastier or not so or not at all. Mix it with green as wind and make it bitter or sweet.

All the elements in good combine and we are in our element. It is ease, peace and contentment. Too much of one thing is no good for another thing. It is disease, war and discontentment. 

Too much of earth makes us heavy, sloppy and lazy. Too much of wind makes the base earth tremble. And, when the base earth trembles, all of the rest crumbles.

Disease and disharmony in the winds can be seen through anger and depression, stress and pain, and other mental disease. It is also what makes our blood and bile to malfunction. And so we have pressure upsets and wind. 

Fire, earth, and water bring cohesion. Cold, earth, and water bring less cohesion. It is when we have like and attachment, dislike and aversion.  

Water in harmony is cohesion in equanimity, when in harmony with earth, fire, water and wind, the absence hot and cold, like and dislike, and attachment and aversion. 

Fire and water out of proportion is out of harmony or in dis-equilibrium, when there is like and attachment, lust and greed. 

What is in ease and harmony is in joy and in attraction. What is in disease and disharmony is in pain and non-attraction.

Harmony is wholesome; disharmony is unwholesome. Harmony is equanimity; disharmony is lust, desire and greed. It is the simple truth of all things. It is the universal Law of Attraction and the universal Law of Repulsion.

When winds run up to our minds subjective and objective minds result. When the winds are at the center it makes thoughts from the heart and of comfort.

When winds makes the earth crumble there is disturbance, destruction and disintegration. What happens in the mind and body can be seen outside of the mind and body, of war and destruction. 

So we witnessed when we saw all of the paving stones unearthed from the winds of anger and thrown at the Police in Mongkok, Hong Kong, just last week on 11 February 2016. 

Rulers could take heed, from some wise rulers of yore, who took note of earth, the one that provides stability. Earth is the base, of our basic needs, of housing, food, of all that is required for our ease of sustenance. When fire of desire of forces outside of the realm fires the earth it creates a whirlwind and explosion. Address these issues and solve the problem of disease and division, of disturbance and destruction. What is required is the harmony of the elements. 

Dao has shown us the way, of harmony and ease, of meeting wind with wind. Creating disharmony, ruling by division, creating divisions by whoever it maybe will sow the seeds of disintegration. 

Understanding the elements is to understand the mind, understand the body and understand the self. Managing the elements is to manage oneself. If we learn to manipulate the elements we learn to manipulate ourselves.

Where the mind or thought goes body and form follows. When we think we can see form or shape. And with wind, we move and create, to make it, to physically manifest. So we can make things and make things as we do. 

If we think below our navel or of our feet our body can relax physically, our mind becomes clearer. When we do that we are directing our minds to the door, one of the doors, that opens to consciousness. And that door is the door at the earth or the base channel wheel or chakra.

Elements converge at various spots in us. It is how things are. If we concentrate our minds on our stomach, at the secret place, the door of fire, we can make our bodies warm. 

Wisdom is consciousness. It is the combination of all the elements. Each of the doors can make the elements dissolve in consciousness, the central channel in our self.

At the basic level we are vibrations. Earth and wind make this vibration possible for us. Earth at the coarsest level ends with solidity. Earth at finer level takes form and shape like the rainbow. Earth is made of vibration. We are made of vibration. 

This vibration makes the various forms and shapes. It is what is

referred to as Secret geometry. It is what the letter “Om” symbolizes, the frequency of the sound of “Om”. It is beyond the wavelength of delta on the Electroencephalograph.

Everything can be seen on an electroencephalograph. It is not just teachings of the Veda, but that refined over time with our power of interpretation. It has been so possible with the wisdom of the great teachers in our times, with their ability to reach

the place of wisdom and break it down to us in more understandable terms. We are now able to validate and appreciate it with the tools available to us, to man, within his limitations.

Thought is mind, that wind gives mobility, that enables us to give it mobility and direct its path back to equilibrium and not to the upper part of our bodies out of equilibrium in a right or left channel that it likes to take, away from equilibrium at the center. It is this that results in our subjective and objective minds, away from our mind of one, of whole.

Where thought goes mind follows. So does body and form. So matter follows the mind. Since we think we have mass we make the wind move this mass to where our mind is. This is what we do when we intend to go anywhere. This is our limitation; a limitation set by our perception of solidified mass.

If we think or perceive mass as an element then it is our element that follows the mind and not mass. So mass, our own or mass of the environment creates no obstacle. Will it and you are there. Dare you, me and try it. We do all the time. Just like in a dream or in an outer-body-experience.

We live in our created environment. We have misconceived the elements and created our limitations. This is our reality. We live with these limitations all of our lives, ingrained in our minds as knowledge, experience and habit. It is the mis-manipulation of misunderstood elements, in ignorance out of ignorance. 

Likewise we do in our dreams. Fish live in theirs. So do spirits, ghosts and beings of other realms, in theirs. Insects do, in a dimension below ours, greater in solidity than ours, coarser in vibration than ours, and so does our mountains and rocks. 
  
If we solidify each element we create complete immobility of mind and matter, a dimension one or less if there is such a thing. We are at dimension two operating at dimension three by manipulating our perception – by the element of fire with wind. We do that by having two 2D eyes at just the right distance to give us 3D.

Blow wind on fire and you make the fire dance, which would have been otherwise immobile. Wind creates, and it is mental formation – all the ingredients that give the other elements their ability to use each other. Consciousness is the leader, the master, who enables it all, who knows it and is made to know it.

So we have the subject and object, and the experience and knowledge we impart on it. Fire and wind, red and green, makes it yellow or form. That is what we see as shape in our minds, which in turn break down to red as in perception and green as in experience. 

Experience and knowledge must combine the knowledge of all the elements with the knowledge of knowing or consciousness. It is both green as in wind and all of the colors. Taken by itself as a body it shows off as blue or a blue hue as in knowledge or consciousness. 

Tighter the combination, clearer the color, and finer the result, of knowledge and wisdom. If the leader or consciousness has clouded vision then what combines will be clouded in ignorance. Finer they combine clearer the vision and purer the knowledge. 

He who sees through tainted glass does not see anything other then taint. Clarity in taint is but taint in clarity.

Greater the separation coarser the vibration, denser the vision and cloudier the perception. 

And so we are different to the insect that has 2D vision and a hundred eyes. 

If we use fire and wind on earth we can move mass or earth. We can do so if we fan the fire with wind and blow it on earth. Move your wind into the door of fire to fan the fire on the earth and we can have levitation. When we move wind with our minds we can have lightness in body, as we have at times of meditation.        

When we begin to feel, to see and to experience the elements in this way we are already on our way to transcending this dimension to one of greater wisdom. 

"The first step towards wisdom consists in getting the elements into view. This requires considerable knowledge, practice and skill, but it is the indispensable basis for all that follows" – Edward Conze

"Those who do not have harmony in elements are condemned to suffer in their disharmony."  - Luminous Light, 13 February 2016