The Air Element
The Second Element of a Happy Life
The Four Elements model from antiquity has a surprising resonance for the struggles most people face in their daily lives. Far from just being a historical curiosity, the model suggests that an end of human suffering is possible, and it provides a map for how to end that suffering.
We have already seen that the Earth Element represents the material world; it symbolizes the world of forms that you occupy; it contains all matter and energy, light and dark, and everything you can discern or measure or infer in the whole of the physical cosmos. We saw that mastering the Earth Element meant you were set up to advance to the next stage on this path; it means simply that you have a firm grounding in a healthy body and balanced emotional state. This is necessary in order to be in a position to make progress in your spiritual development and towards a more peaceful, harmonious and happy life. We saw that lack of mastery, or what we could describe as immaturity or imbalances in your Earth Element, will disrupt your body’s health or your emotional state. These imbalances will limit your ability to make progress and confine you to a state of suffering. Restoring balance in your body and your world allows progress from the Earth Element on to the next stage in the model, the Air Element. Depending on how bad the physical or emotional maladies are, Air Element progress can be seriously impaired by lack of mastery of the Earth Element. This is why Earth Element mastery is so vital.
But what is the Air Element? Just as we observe the air sitting atop the land, you can imagine that on top of this physical structure represented by the Earth Element, there can arise thoughts and ideas and other non-physical but very real parts of your reality that are manufactured by the human mind. For example, the way you communicate your ideas verbally and the way people process these communications and ideas fall under the Air Element. All these phenomena happen in a non-physical dimension that resembles air in its insubstantiality, hence the appellation Air Element and the notion that it is lighter than and sits above the Earth Element. In different times and places Breath, the Word, and Logos were terms used to describe this element.
One way to think about this model of Earth progressing to Air is from an evolutionary perspective: once you had Earth or matter, life as a manifestation of that Earth eventually arose through natural processes according to the laws of nature. We could say that life represents the culmination of the Earth Element, its highest or most complex expression. Once you have life, evolution continues and eventually gives rise to life forms capable of generating mental formations, creating the bridge from Earth to Air. The phrase ‘mental formations’ is a shorthand for thoughts, ideas and the ability to discern and deliberate and notice separations. In other words, the Air Element represents the content of your consciousness most of the time. These airy, insubstantial mental formations in your consciousness can all be organized under the heading of the Air Element.
Perhaps your most significant mental creation is the idea of a self. Once you have a mind that can think and differentiate, the most noteworthy idea is that you are a self, a unique and independent entity. An enormous amount of your mental energy is expended in sustaining this sense of self and its relation to the world. Doing this has great advantages, as evidenced by the individual experience of a life and the impact each person has as an individual on the world. But becoming completely absorbed into the idea that you actually are the self with a name and a body has serious disadvantages as well. This is because who you really are isn’t your body or your mind or the thoughts that your body-mind generates. Your complete identification with your body and mind limits your progress towards the truth. And it is the truth that you have made up the idea of a self, not that you actually are the self that unlocks the best life possible, and leads to the higher states of ‘enlightened’ consciousness that the masters of old spoke so much about. But you first have to have a sense of a self to transcend before you can transcend it. Without an understanding of a self within the theater of your consciousness, there will be no awareness of what it is you have to leave behind and what the higher consciousness will contain (or won’t contain). So you can’t skip this stage.
Just as the natural sciences like biology and physics can help us understand the details of the Earth Element, the depths of the Air Element can be plumbed by studying neuroscience and psychology and similar fields. It is an exciting time to be involved in these fields. The scientists in this area finally, and only very recently, have answers to some of the most basic questions about the brain and human consciousness. Because of the work of these path breakers across the globe, we are able to break consciousness down and talk about the Air Element in a number of different but very detailed and specific and testable ways. Scientists can measure the brain activity of people at various stages of wakefulness, they can identify the hormones that mediate different moods and behaviors, they can map specific images in consciousness to repeatable brainwave patterns, and they have unlocked untold other ways logging and describing and healing the human brain.
As with the Earth Element, it is easy to become lost in the endless variety and detail of the Air Element. An Internet search or review of any large university’s syllabus drives home this point. Fortunately, there is a symmetry between myth and science that can help you over this obstacle. The mission of the ancient philosophers and mystics who worked with the concept of the Four Elements wasn’t just to try to understand what everything in the world was composed of and how it worked. This science part was interesting in itself, of course, and occupied many a lifetime, especially of the alchemists, but the promise of mastering these Elements wasn’t just at the literal or scholarly level. Understanding these elements holds out the promise of understanding the nature of one’s existence and transforming that existence into the best it could possibly be.
With the Earth Element, converting the physical elements of the earth (like iron into gold, say) is a form of mastery. But it is not the most important aspect of Earth Element mastery. It is not about doing fancy tricks with matter or performing miraculous demonstrations either, though these were certainly evidence of Earth Element mastery. Instead, the real key to mastering the Earth Element is creating a stable platform to allow for mastery of the next phase, as represented by the Air Element, to be possible. In just the same way, mastering the Air Element isn’t just about going to school to understand philosophy or science or business or even art or literature (though, of course, these are all worthy pursuits). Instead, as with the Earth Element, mastery is about achieving a sufficient level of stability and control over the Air Element such that it doesn’t prove to be a distraction or an impediment to advancing to an even higher consciousness. Mastery in general means you can start something when you choose, keep it going for as long as you want and then cease it when you wish. Like the healthy body and emotional state with the Earth Element, this self-determined starting and stopping of mental processes sets the foundation for the next stage of mastery after the Air Element.
What mastery of the Air Element means in practice can be a little confusing. Often when people talk about mastery in everyday conversation, it is a different kind of mastery of the Earth or the Air Element (or some combination of the two) than the kind needed for spiritual advancement. When it comes to mastery, most people will be thinking about the individuals who have spent 10,000 hours becoming an Olympic athlete or a chess grandmaster or concert pianist. The story of self-mastery is actually much more complicated and involves dimensions of reality that go far beyond the physical or mental ones you are so familiar with. It isn’t about the content of consciousness. It’s not about snoozing versus wakefulness. It isn’t about developing the body for athletic prowess. Nor is it about developing the mind to the point where you can win a Nobel prize in chemistry. These are the sorts of feats that most people associate with ‘mastery.’
These are all forms of mastery, to be sure, but they are not the kind of mastery that has the power to transform consciousness or usher in a different, more peaceful and spontaneous and loving life experience. The degree of mastery that an Olympic athlete and Nobel Prize winner are demonstrating is a basic mastery over a particular physical (aka Earth Element) or mental (aka Air Element) technique. True mastery of the Air Element doesn’t just mean having the mental prowess of an Einstein or a Shakespeare. It means having sufficient distance from and control over the thinking and discerning mind itself that these aspects of mind can be stilled on command. Having this foundation of mental control and understanding positions you for your sense of self to be burned away. And once the self has been transcended, you are positioned to be baptized or ‘reborn’ into a higher state. It isn’t as though your actual body is ‘burned away’ or destroyed as part of this transformation. And your self isn’t annihilated or denigrated. The self and the body are useful and wonderful in all sorts of ways and there is no need to retreat from or disrespect your body, your notion of a self, or the people and things in the world. As part of the dis-identification with your self and the physical world there is no need to be extreme in these ways.
The degree of mastery that an Olympic athlete and Nobel Prize winner are demonstrating is a basic mastery over a particular physical (aka Earth Element) or mental (aka Air Element) technique. True mastery of the Air Element doesn’t just mean having the mental prowess of an Einstein or a Shakespeare. It means having sufficient distance from and control over the thinking and discerning mind itself that these aspects of mind can be stilled on command.
Moving beyond the Earth and Air Elements (i.e. the body and mind) doesn’t you’re your death or complete detachment from the world. Though this isn’t a perfect analogy, the change in identiy that we will explore in the next two articles in the series is like when you become a mother or a father, say. Just because there is that change in your identity that comes with the birth of your child doesn’t mean that you no longer identify as a sister or brother or daughter or son. Your old identity is still there but there is more to you than that now. What that means and the details of the transformations of Fire and Water are the topics for the next two articles in this series.
The Four Elements, a five-part article:
- INTRODUCTION
2. EARTH
3. AIR (this page)
4. FIRE
5. WATER
You can also listen to a couple of podcasts I recorded covering similar material.
For an entirely different (and quite esoteric!) take on the Four Elements based on the teachings of the Hindu classic, The Bhagavad Gita, you can listen to the reading of Rudolf Steiner’s 1905 lecture on the subject:
For more information you can visit the Happy Mind website.
