FBA Podcast, “The Six Elements,” Ratnaprabha introduces us to earth, water, fire, air, space and consciousness as the mystery of human experience. He then describes how to use the elements in meditation and life.
Free Buddhist Audio
The Six Elements
(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for Your Life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - What I'd like to do is to give a little introduction to the six elements in Buddhism. A bit of a talk about both what they're about, what they're trying to convey as it were philosophically, but also how you can use them as part of your practice. Now, four of them are the physical elements, and those are the easiest to relate to in a way, but even with those, don't you think they're a bit mysterious? I put these emblems on the table, but what exactly is earth? What is water? What is fire? What is air? Now, if you did physics at school, you'll probably either think, oh no, of course, now we know that there is the table of all the elements, and there are 101 of them, whatever many it is now. And of course, really, these are the ancient Greek ideas that the four elements are out of date, but then you look a little bit more deeply and you discover that in physics, there are the states of matter, solid. Liquid. And gaseous. And there's also a fourth state of matter as well. I don't know if anyone knows what that is. Plasma, that's right, which is fire. So a flame is not solid, a flame is not liquid, and a flame is not a gas either, because it's made up of completely ionized and highly energetic particles. So these four states of matter in physics do correspond to the four traditional elements, which you'll find in most parts of the world. Certainly in the Mediterranean, you'll find it in ancient India, you'll find it in Japan as well. In China, they're a little bit different, but in Japan and India and the Mediterranean, so they have these basic four elements. But even so, I think they are quite mysterious. We've got a sense of the solid, the liquid, the plasma, the flame, and gas air. We've got a sense of what that means, and maybe we've got a sense of it from physics, but in Buddhism, they're used in a different way. They're not to do with the material universe directly, only indirectly are they to do with the material universe. They're to do with the qualities, the ways in which we experience the world, the elements to do with experience. So in terms of experience, Earth is the experience of solidity, of support, of inertia, if you like. And also the experience of either hardness or softness, the quality of hardness or softness, that's the Earth element. The experience, they say, of bearing things, of holding things, a framework for things, a support for things, that's the Earth element. That's our first approximation at least, to start with that. And then as the water element, and the quality of experience of water is flowingness, but also cohesion, holding things together. So water is the ability for things to come together and stay together. I mean, water is very interesting, isn't it, in that it, if you let it be, it will just form itself into one mass, a liquid does that, and it'll find its own level. Unlike solid, with solid is bitty, isn't it, it's made up of bits, but water is not bitty in that same way. Unless it's raining, perhaps, it flows, it holds things together. And then fire, a fire element, is to do with temperature, is to do with heat, is to do with energy, if you like. And it's said in traditional Buddhism, that it matures and maintains things. And I think one thing they're referring to here is the fire element in our body. So unless you're very unfortunate, you're not actually on fire, but yet we do have the fire element in our body. It's not just that we maybe, you know, you maybe go for a run, you feel really hot, that's the fire element. But whether you're hot or not, there's always energetic work going on your body. The food that you take in is releasing its stored energy. Your reserves are releasing their stored energy. There's all sorts of stuff going on in the cells, as you probably know, that is producing energy. So there is this sense of the fire element maturing, making new things come into being. The chemical processes, and maybe even the alchemical processes that make things come into being, the transformation that is affected by fire. And it's interesting, maybe you'd say, oh, hang on a minute, you know, it should be earth, water, air and fire. That's the way the Greeks have it. And in a way, that might seem more obvious. But in Buddhism, it's not. Air is a more refined element than fire. You go through refinements, that the really solid stuff of earth, the liquid, the flowing, but on a level of water. And then fire, and the main movement of fire is which direction do you think? It's upwards, it's an upwards movement. It's something that, but air moves in all directions. So that's why it's regarded as more refined. So air is mobility. It's the ability to move, to fill space. It's also associated with vibration. And of course, air is the thing that carries sound, the borrow vibrations of sound. And it's also associated with expansion. Air will always fill whatever space it moves into. And again, if you've studied physics, you'll know about the amazing, well, in fact, the explosive ability of air, of a gas to fill a vacuum. It's just, there it is straight away. Just relying on the incredibly fast motions of its individual molecules. So those are the four material elements. But according to Buddhism, there are two other elements. And they are very different in a way. They're very different. And they are space and consciousness. Now, space in a way is, you say, well, yeah, that's only missing if you don't include space because where are the other elements? They've got to be somewhere. They've got to sort of be accommodated in a way. They've got to put up their little notice in the news agency. I'm looking for accommodation. I need some space, I need a room. So space is room. You know, I need some room. That is what space is. And everything needs room to exist. So all the other elements are accommodated in space. And for now, I'm going to talk a little bit more softly about space later, but for now, let's just see it in those terms. And then finally, there is consciousness. And in a way, consciousness is a different thing. And I'm going to go a little bit into that because the consciousness is the very experience that takes in everything else, all the other elements. It's the awareness that does it. And that's what I, in a way, I was trying to sort of do in the meditation downstairs a sense of, could you actually be aware of what the elements are like? And I thought we'd just try it mainly with the Earth element. Could one actually be aware of it? And what does that mean to be aware of it? And what part of the Earth element is inside? And what part is outside? So according to Buddhism, there's a very fundamental mistake that every normal, reasonable person makes. And if you didn't make this mistake, you'd probably be mad. And that mistake is to split the world into inside and outside. And we have to do that to survive. We have to do that to sort of be able to manage life. We have to think, here's me, and there's everything else, and there's the world out there, the inside and the outside. Our selves and what is not ourselves. And there's another way you can look at this split. And this is the split into awareness and the great magicians. This is the way the ancient Buddhists talked about it. Awareness and the great magical qualities of the great magicians. And that was their name for the elements. I'll just write the word up for you, in case you're interested in these things. So it's the Maha Buddhas. Maha means great. And the Buddhas, the elemental qualities, means a magical transformation. And I don't know if we can see why the elements should be called magical transformations. But this is the split in the world. There is our awareness, there's us, and then there's what impinges on us. And what impinges on us is not the elements directly. According to traditional Buddhism, you can never experience the elements directly. This is why they're magicians. They're transforming powers. We infer, once we meet something resisting us, we infer that is the Earth element. Once we meet something flowing and that holds things together, we infer that is the water element. But if there's a sense in which we don't actually know them directly, they are sort of Darren Brown. They're trying to sort of pull the wool over our eyes. They're trying to make us feel that things are happening in a particular way. I know this is the weird way to talk, 'cause they don't have any consciousness of their own. But this is the way that they're looked at, the great magicians. And that might become clearer as I go on as to why they're called the great magicians, the Mahabutas. So we've got consciousness and we've got the Mahabutas, the inside and the outside. And the outside elements are forms of experience. They're ways we experience the world, if that makes sense. They're ways in which what we see as outside, the outside world, responds to us when we engage with it. We reach into the world. We reach into the world by trying to sense it, by trying to see what's going on. And if it responds back, it has an answer. When we reach into it, with our senses, it has an answer. And that answer is in terms of the four elements. And the amazing variations the world offers. It's never the same. It's always different. It's different combinations of the elements. And also I should say of the, what are called the secondary qualities, the secondary elemental qualities. So, for example, you might have an assense that there's a picture here, which is element earth, or something solid. But you'll also have a sense of shapes and colors in that picture, and those are the secondary qualities. And so there's, I mean, you might think this is a waste of time, but the ancient Buddhist went into this in great detail. What exactly goes on? When you're having an experience, when you're perceiving something, what is going on? And they tried to work out what the different factors were. And they said, well, maybe you'd experience the earth element, something solid. But not just that, you'd experience the shapes, you'd experience the colors that are there in the earth element. Maybe you'd experience the water element, but that water element would also have a temperature. Fire element is involved. It would be cold water or hot water or somewhere in between. And I'll go a little bit more into some of those secondary qualities later, 'cause they're very interesting. So what there is, which is outside in the situation we're in, in the perceptual situation, is called, in Buddhism is called form. And again, if you don't mind these, the technical words, sometimes it's useful to come across them. It's called ruper. So ruper means form. And ruper is whatever is not you. So there is the inside and the outside. Ruper just sums up the outside. It includes all the elements, it includes all the secondary qualities. And the most important things in ruper are the elements. That is the most important aspect of ruper. Interestingly, ruper, the word ruper, also means beauty. And that's another one of those little mysteries. Why should that word mean beauty? And it may be a clue as to what is the best way to experience the world. Because it's as if you can experience the world in two different ways. You can either experience the world as to what's in it for you in a way. And in that case, you'll tend to have responses of either, yeah, right, one more of that. I want to have that, I want it to be with me all the time. Oh, yeah, I want less of that. I want it to go away. I don't like that. It's pain, that is illness, that is rejection or something. But the alternative way to experience the world is in terms of beauty is just to see it as allowing it to be as it is and realize that even a crisp packet in the road is something of enormous beauty. So Rupa, the possibilities in Rupa, are the possibilities of beauty. I'm only guessing, I'm not quite sure why, but that might be why the same word is used for both beauty and for what we experience as outside ourselves. But it's a little clue as to how you could experience things in, I think, a more creative, much more enjoyable way. It's very, very difficult to do because inevitably, like if you come in a room full of strangers, it's really difficult just to say these are amazing, phenomena. You know, and they have got years of history behind them and ancestry. They're full of talent, they're full of weirdness, you know. But instead, we look around and say, oh yeah, man, woman, man, woman, young, old, young, old, attractive, unattractive, attractive. You know, so we're doing that. We're just categorizing. We're in terms of our needs, you know. Is this something, oh, an interesting person? Oh, boring person, dangerous person. You know, this is the way we tend to do it. If you could imagine Rupa as just beauty, you'd come into a room of people and you just feel surrounded by the beauty of those individuals. And in a way, this is the reason that one does the contemplation of the elements. It's to see if you can make a shift from seeing things in terms just of relating to me and mine and what I want and what I don't want. And instead, just relating to it. This is just the way it is, you know, and I'm going to appreciate that somehow. Not that you're passive, you can still engage with it and do things with it, but you appreciate it as beautiful. So what these elements are, Rupa, is whatever is perceivable. Rupa is whatever you can perceive. It's so it's not really, sometimes it's translated as matter, because you might think, well, that's the way that in the West, we think of things, there's mind, that is the inside, there is matter that is the outside. But Buddhism doesn't look at things that way, and it's actually really difficult for us to get that different perspective. So the equivalent of mind and matter in Buddhism is Nama and Rupa. Nama means the names and Rupa means the beauty, the names and the beauty. So in a way, that's the inside and the outside, but Rupa is not physical matter, it's the way we perceive, it's the way we engage, it's the way we experience the world. That's my understanding of it, at least. And it's a long way, I'm a long way really from coming to grips with it fully. But if you think of modern science, matter reigns supreme. You know, if you think of what scientists talk about, they're interested in, here is some wood. I can look at it under the microscope, I can work out that it's made of lignin, it's made of a particular cellular structure, that is made of molecules inside the molecules, they're little atoms inside the atoms, they're little electrons and nucleons, they're the nuclei, they're little quarks going round, and there's maybe even a Higgs boson there, somewhere, if we could only find it. And you look outside, in the microscope, the microscope, you look outside in the sky at night, you see all these stars, you see the sun, you see the moon, and you think of all this stuff as being stuff. Everywhere you look, there is this stuff, this dead matter. And that is the scientific way, and it's very successful, it works very well. That is how you can develop technology by having that very strong view of matter following particular laws. And that's the way that Westerners will think of the elements. The substance of the universe, the substance of everything, even the substance of our own brains, and the thing that produces our own minds. Our minds being like something which leaks out of the brain. But in Buddhism, the elements are different, the elements are the ways in which we encounter resistance. That's the way it's put, it's as if we perceive things and the things get in our way, in a way, and they get in our way in a number of different ways. And in particular, they get in our way in other solid ways, liquid ways, fiery ways, or airy ways. Those are the four broad definitions of the way things get in our way, of the resistance that we experience when we come across them. They resist us, if it's Earth, they resist us by being hard and unyielding. If it's fire, that's another form of resistance. It resists us by being hot, or by being cold. It's as if that is what it's doing. There's this load of nonsense, and it's sort of beginning to make, if you get a little sense of the way that Buddhists look at the elements. I also mentioned that Rupa, the perceivable, the objective content of the perceptual situation, if you want to say it's very, very complicated, is not just the elements, it is also the secondary qualities. And I'm not gonna say very much about these. I've already mentioned, in some extent, like the secondary qualities here. The primary quality is the hardness, the matter, the Earth of it. But the secondary qualities, the shapes, and the forms, and the colors that you can see in it. So, secondary qualities, to some extent of that, you think of all the senses, and so the sense of smell, and things that you smell, is the secondary quality of Rupa. The sense of hearing, and the things that you hear, and so on. So you go through all the senses. Those are secondary qualities. The shapes and the colors in the things that you see. So those are all secondary qualities. The textures, and the shapes, are the things that you touch, and whether it's soft or not. And then, in very early Buddhism, these are the basic things. It was particularly color, smell, and taste. And then the last secondary quality was food. And I've not quite discovered why that was. It may just be that people are always really interested in food. And if you think of, when you look around you, you know, what is the most interesting thing about the world? Well, at least initially, you know, and if you're not hungry, it's not a problem. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier, weren't you? If you've just been in Sicily, and you've been stuffing yourself with pasta for weeks, it's not very interesting. But then, once you're a bit hungrier, then food becomes a dominant quality of your perceivable universe. And the way it's put in Buddhism food, again, has an emblematic meaning. It's nourishment. It's what you take in, in order to transform into your life and your experience. So, no, there are many other forms of nourishment. So your food may be conversation. It may be art. It may be music. It may be walks and exercise. You know, it may be competition. All these things may be food, and they are part of your experience. That's a secondary quality. But in later Buddhism, in later Buddhism, they started elaborating this. They started thinking about it. Actually, there's a lot of other things that are important in what we can perceive. The first thing they came up with was gender. So gender is a quality of ruper. The distinction between masculine and feminine. They said, this is something we really take an interest in. We're really, you know, maybe too much of an interest. We want to know. It's something that almost unconsciously, when you meet somebody, you want to know what gender, well, I do at least, I don't. And it's not like something I'm sort of deliberately saying, oh, this is really important. I must remember to discover it. It's a man or a woman, you know. It's more, it happens at a very deep visceral level. You meet somebody and you need to know, in order to be able to relate to them, it seems you need to know whether to relate to them as a man or as a woman. And if somebody's a little bit on the edge between the two, we feel a bit nervous. You know what I'm saying? God, I'm not quite sure, you know, which it is. So gender is a secondary quality. Another one is vitality. So I think this is interesting. You meet, again, meeting people, because people are a very important part of the outside world that we're encountering. And vitality is an important thing that you're interested in. You know, are they lively? Is there life there or not? That's what we respond to. Are they actually very lacking in life? We respond to that as well. Heart is another one. Gestures, physical gestures and vocal gestures is another secondary quality. And then finally, I'm not going to go into these, but the qualities of buoyancy, plasticity, wieldiness, how easy it is to shove things around, integration, maintenance and decay. So that could, you could do a bit of a study and all that, couldn't you? Like, I'm trying to understand those different secondary qualities of Rupa. But there's one element I haven't really talked about very much so far. And that's the element of space. The element of space is not one of the four material elements. The element of space is usually not regarded as part of Rupa. It's something a bit different. And there are two meanings for space in Buddhism. There's one meaning for space in the West and that is, well, what was originally called Newtonian space. In other words, the space through which particles moved and then Einstein discovered it wasn't like that at all. And he came up with an idea of space that is almost impossible to get into your imagination. But in Buddhism, there's something different. I mean, there's something a bit similar, which is the room that things take up. So things need to have a place where they are. They need to sort of have some elbow room. So everything needs to be positioned in space. Everything relates to other things according to their relative positions in space. So that's the sort of fairly straightforward kind of space. And you can relate to that yourself. We have our own space. You know, we've got like a space shaped like our body, but it seems to follow us around. You know, if you move around, that space is always with us. But the interesting thing about it is it's not quite confined to that. Our space extends out a bit, doesn't it? You know, and there's always this stuff, isn't it? For an English person, their space extends out about this far. But I like, if you meet sort of, I don't know, a Palestinian, it extends about this far. So you constantly chase each other around the room while you're trying to sort of get the space right. So we've got this larger space. But not only that, the space that is ours is our own bed, our own chair, our own room, our own house, the place where we sit, where we're at work. Do you know what I mean? You know, space is very, very important to us. And if somebody else sits in our chair or goes to bed in our bed or turns up in our house and uninvited, you know, we are, you know, a little bit shaded. That's not something we really want. So we've got this very strong sense of my space and it's not just what's around our body. We associate with other places as well. And it's very poignant if, you know, if somebody close to you dies and you go into their room, I don't know if this has ever happened to you, go into their room, that is their chair. That's where they always sat, isn't it? That is their bed, you know? And they're their things around them. That is their desk. They've arranged that. They put up these pictures on the wall. So somebody's space is such an important part of their personality, I think. So that's the more straightforward kind of space. But there's another meaning of space, which is in a way more fundamental and deeper and in a way more to do with the Buddhist life. And I've thought of a word for this kind of space, which I think I may have invented this word. I'm not quite sure. Jananda will tell me if I haven't. So, this kind of space is called the "imaginarium". So it's a bit like an aquarium. So an aquarium is the "imaginarium" for fish. So we also have our own aquarium. And this is the space of our mental experience. And this is an extraordinary thing. It's an absolutely extraordinary thing, the space of our mental experience. It's whatever is illuminated by our awareness. So initially you can see it quite straightforwardly. If you look around in this room, it's as if your awareness is able to take in the space that is enclosed by these walls. So it's as if, when you are looking at it, it's as if you could, you know, metaphorically, a light is going out from your eyes. It's lighting it up. You're looking at that picture, it's lit up by your awareness. You look away, is it still lit up by your awareness or not? Maybe it is because maybe you can still hold it in your mind. You close your eyes, that picture is still there. In that case, your "imaginarium" still encloses that picture. But now it encloses the picture in a different form. It encloses it in a form that inhabits your own imagination. So you can do the same with the rest of the room and the people. But you can also close your eyes and go home. So you can now imagine you're putting the key in the lock, you're opening the door, you're going into your home, and there you are. Your "imaginarium" includes your home. You can go through time with your "imaginarium". You can remember the home you lived in when you were a little child, and you can say, yeah. Yeah, I can remember that, yeah, not all of it, but I can remember, yeah, that's right, we had a lawn outside and there was a little bird bath there. There's a swing where he used to play. That's right, there's the back gate, he's got through the back gate, catch the bus. So you've got that, it's all there in your "imaginarium". Your "imaginarium" is vast. You think of the solar system, if you like watching the Hubble telescope pictures, your "imaginarium" can hold a whole galaxy. So ordinary space, the space of Einstein is very, very small compared to your "imaginarium". Your "imaginarium" extends through time. It extends into the distance, into a far distance. It includes things that don't actually exist. It includes dreams there as well. And it includes, when you sit down to meditate, you close your eyes, the thoughts die down a bit, and there you are in your "imaginarium". The light of your awareness is coming out. It's illuminating your body. Your body is filled with that awareness. Because, so far, I've been using the metaphor as if it's all visual stuff, but of course it's not. It's felt sense as well. Your "imaginarium" includes the felt sense of your body. Your "imaginarium" includes the sounds that come from the pub, all that kind of thing. That's all there, the voices outside. Are there in your "imaginarium". But you can put them out. Sometimes you're not aware of that at all. It's no longer in your "imaginarium". So, that is really the meaning of, the deeper meaning of the Buddhist concept of space. And the word for this is "akasha". This is the Buddhist word for space, but it does not mean the space between the stars. It means the space of your mind that illuminates your awareness. And it's a beautiful word of "akasha". I think it's a nice one to know that word of "akasha". It's used in Hinduism as well, I should say. You often get this confusion, which has a little bit of a different meaning. And also, the old Theosophists took it up. So you'll hear about contacting the "akasha" grounds and things like that. But in Buddhism, it's particularly the space. It's a space that you can inhabit most fully when you're very aware. So you inhabit it in meditation. And in Tibetan visualization practices, you start off always by having a sense of an enormous blue sky. And that blue sky is the attempt to make your imaginary and clear and bright blue skies. If you're on the top of Box Hill, lying your back, little clouds going across the occasional pigeon, but most of it is just blueness, pure blueness. And where does the blueness come from? It's not like a ceiling. The blueness comes from everywhere. The blueness fills the whole space. That light comes from every particle of the atmosphere. And that blue light. And that's what you inhabit when you're doing a visualization meditation. And then in the middle of that blue space, very gradually, a Buddha will appear. So it's coming out of that empty space, out of that emptiness, out of the "akasha". And earlier on, Bodhilila talked about the mandala of the five Buddhas that she's doing a course on in October. And each of these is corresponded to one of the elements. And the Buddha corresponding to space is the central Buddha. And in fact, usually in Tibetan depictions of the Buddhas, they are shown as both a male Buddha and a female Buddha. And the two of them are in sexual union. So she's sitting in his lap. And they are in ecstasy, embracing. And this is very, very symbolically significant. So who are they? The Buddhas of space in the center. And she is the one who's most strongly associated with space. And she's called, her first part is "akasha". And the second part is "darteshvari". "akasha darteshvari". And this means the sovereign lady of the Imaginarium. So this is her name as a Buddha, the sovereign lady of the Imaginarium. Ishvara means a ruler. Ishvari means a female ruler. So she's "akasha darteshvari". And she represents the space that is illuminated by the light of awareness. And so you can probably guess what the male form represents. So the male form, he's called vorochina. And vorochina means the illuminator, the shiner. So the usual emblem for vorochina is a sun. So you have the sense of a sun shining in a vast blue sky. "akasha darteshvari", she represents the vast blue sky. Vorochina represents the sun. So it's a very beautiful image. I think that one for space. The space element associated with the Buddha, right at the center of the mandala. And he is in union with the female Buddha, "akasha darteshvari", the sovereign lady of space or of the Imaginarium. So if you might have questions about this, there should be plenty of time for questions. But I may as well, should I just carry on to the end or do you want to interrupt at this point? It's not too confusing, I hope. Incidentally, just as an aside point, space in Buddhist tradition is said to be one of the very few things which is unconditioned. In other words, it's not affected by anything else. The only other thing is enlightenment. So you have this rather strange situation where there are two unconditioned dharmas, as they're called, enlightenment and space. So space and awareness in this Buddhist sense are inseparable. This is why "akasha darteshvari" and "verochina" are in sexual embrace. It's showing that they're completely united. That sense that you can have with somebody who you love deeply, that is if you feel completely at one with them, that's the emblem there. So awareness must have a space and a space must have awareness in Buddhism. That's what it means. Space doesn't mean the gaps between the galaxies and the stars. It means that which is illuminated by awareness. That which is filled by awareness. And so in a way, it's the most subtle of the dualities, that duality between awareness and the space that it fills. Because usually, that blue sky isn't just a clear blue sky. It's full of loads and loads of stuff. The other four elements have come in. They've jostled in. They insist on a place. Lumps of earth, sort of trickles and drops of water, sort of rather burning bits of fire and all that kind of stuff. That is all there, filling space. But if you can imagine, in depths of meditation, it can sometimes feel as if there is just awareness and that awareness is just spreading out into whatever is around it. That's the most subtle duality. And there are meditations which go into this. There are deep meditations which are the meditations on, first of all, infinite space and then infinite consciousness. In other words, you can meditate so you have the sense of enormous spaciousness. And then you deepen that meditation until you have a sense of an enormous awareness that fills that space. I don't know if you can get a sort of a hint of that from that description. But you do need to be very, very concentrated to be able to do that sort of meditation. But you say you might get a bit of a hint of it, at least sometimes where you may take it. You may just feel as if, oh, I think it's so open. Oh, this is such a relief. I'm not so hemmed in. It's as if my sense can be of spaciousness and of my awareness filling that spaciousness. It's a lovely, really lovely sort of reward of meditation if you can have that sense of spaciousness with it. So awareness may be of objects. And the awareness of objects is not so much because, I mean, I put it rather crudely when I said that lumps of earth and trickles of water got in the way. It's more to do with the way we respond to our experience. There's always a lot going on. Even if you're in deep meditation, there's a lot going on. But if the question is, do you obsess about it? Do you start wanting to know what it's all called? And then the way this is the thinking process, the thinking process wants to start to grab hold of all this stuff and put labels on it and work out what it all means and work out what it can do for me. So there's nothing wrong with that. It's a perfectly normal thing to do, but it just gets so busy, the thinking process. So that's when space, the space, the imaginary, fills up with things, it fills up with objects and people as well. And they all have their role. We put them there, we're trying to get them arranged. We're trying to get them sorted out. We're trying to get them under control. And this is the way we live our lives. Again, in a way you need to do this. You need to learn to do this as a child or else you'd be mad, but if you can drop it to some extent once you learn to meditate, if you could not be so obsessed by having to want to know what everything is and what its significance is and what it can do for you, then you can make a lot of progress. It doesn't have to be, we don't have to be identifying things, wanting to name things all the time. Because before that, all we have is awareness, meeting forms of resistance. And those forms of resistance are what we call the elements, the four elements. And they seem to be filling what we think of as space. So you could try that, a little exercise. You know, you might just, so you go for a walk in the park. And at first you think, oh, litter bin, oh, tree, all right. Oh, poster, you know, oh, dog. And you're going like this and have that whole time, you know, as you're watching the park. But just try walking through the park and experience just the elements. So, you know, feel the earth elements, you know, under your feet as you walk along. Feel the breeze, without calling it a breeze. You know what I mean? Feel the sounds that are there. Feel the flowingness of it. Maybe there is water there, literally, or something that can take the place of water. Feel the temperature as you move around. So it's a lovely exercise to do. You can do it sitting on the cushion as well as we were downstairs. But you can do it while you're going for a walk. Just see if you can just have your experiences, experience of the elements. At first you'll need to use words. You'll need to use those simple labels, earth, water, you know, fire, hair. But in the end, you may be, you don't even need the words. You'll start to experience the forms of resistance that the world is offering you as your awareness passes through your life. But you can also practice with the elements in many other ways as well. And I'm going to mention one or two of those. First of all, I want to talk about mindfulness of the elements. And I mentioned how you can do that while you're walking. But you can also do it in terms of your own body. And there is a traditional Buddhist practice where you actually go through the body saying, hair of the head, nails on the fingers, nails on toes, skin on the bottom. So you just sort of go through the whole thing. Liver and spleen, heart and bones. And there's a long list. There's a list of 36, which they... I mean, I don't think it matters exactly how you do it. And if you're an anatomy student, you might want to do it. You might want to some name all the bones you go through. But you sort of try and have it... Of course, a lot of them, you can't let you go liver. But you can't really, unless you've got a pain in it, you can't really feel your liver. But at least you can have a sense that it's there somewhere. So this is a kind of an enumeration meditation. Well, you just have a sense, and why should you do such a thing? What strange things to do? The reason for doing it is to realize that you're just, in a way, made up of parts. You're just made up of all sorts of bits and pieces. And you say, which one's me? No. You know, is it the nose? Is that bit, you know? Is it the saliva? Is it the blood that causes through my veins? You know, the other watery element? Is it the air inside here? And in the end, you say, I can't locate myself. Well, I better not say that. Maybe you won't say that. Oh, yes, I got myself. I'm in a pineal gland. Yes, at last, I located where I am. That's what Descartes thought, apparently. He decided the self is located in this tiny gland just behind the forehead up here. Maybe he was right. Who knows? So that's one, the bones and the hair and the flesh and so on, and the urine and the saliva, and the heat in the body and the air. So you can do it in those terms. Or you can experience the external elements. See how close you can get to those great magicians by touching them, by feeling them, by just sitting there with a sense of the elements around you. And even you can go out into a landscape. You know, a really glorious landscape would be good for this. Go up the Lake District or something, stand up a hill and just look around you and take in the elements in that landscape. Remember, it's ruper, it's beauty. Or even, you know, go up, I did this. You go up on the, the sort of the lift thing that takes you over the river, the new thing, there's no one being up in that. It's fantastic, it's really good. And you only have to use your oyster card. You go over the river. So you just go up there over London, look down over the river, that water flowing. See the clouds, see the smoke coming out, the chimneys. See all those buildings, you know, the trees and the streets and the cars. You know, have a sense of that great landscape filled with the four elements. And see if you can just have that sense of the elements. It's something more primordial and primeval than wanting to know. You know, oh, there's the gherkin over there. Oh, there's the house of Parliament, you know, like a tour guide. You can do it that way, but why not just go and do it in the sense of like bare, deep experience? What is the experience, the sparkling on the water? So a landscape is a good place for that. The sunshine is the fire element as well. The animals and the birds around you, you know, having a sense that the pigeons go by. The fire, the fire, the energy that moves those pigeons through the air, amazing. Or you can use your imagination. You can have all those elements there in your imagination. You can sit there and think of a volcano, a solid mountain, the liquid fire that pours out that volcano, the smoke and all that kind of thing. It's amazing what you can do in your imagination, isn't it? You know, so if I say close your eyes, think of a volcano spewing out lava. Can you do that? You can, can't you? Isn't it incredible what you can do? So that's having fun with the elements. And it may just sound like a stupid thing to do, but actually it's really good. It's a really good thing to do. And the reason it's good is because it breaks down your sense of possession. It breaks down your sense of specialness. And you realize that I'm just part of this process, these elements, these flowing elements. And so this moves us on from mindfulness into the elements, into insight into the elements. And the insight practices are those ones which challenge one's self-cleaning. They challenge your sense of being really crucial and important. And therefore actually causing a lot of trouble to yourself and to other people because we tend to be so defended. And so the element perhaps is trying to do that. You reflect deeply on your experience of the elements. You'll use some thinking to do this. Think it through a bit. So look at your experience of what seems not to be you. And you can get a very liberating penetration into what causes problems. Because all that stuff that seems not to be you is imbued with all your expectations. And it lets you down. People let you down. Things don't work. You try and start your moped and it won't work. It's as if all this stuff is going on. So just reflect on that. Reflect on our attitudes to the world outside to the external elements. And that's a liberating penetration. You realize you've made mistakes in your expectations. You've made mistakes in your identification. This is mine. This is useful. This is attractive. This is horrible. You know, this is dangerous. All that kind of stuff. And that's the function of the six element practice, which I think you're not in the lead through last week. So I don't know if some of you may have been here last week when that was led through. And there are lots of ways you can do that. But you just reflect on each of the elements in turn and the order which I've presented them. And so for example, with Earth, you might just say to yourself, the element Earth. And then you might say to yourself, there is Earth in the outside world. And as you do that in your immagilarium, there is mountains, cobblestones, loaves of bread. It's all there. And then in my body is the element Earth. And you have that sense by your bones. I can feel it. I can feel the solidity. You know, there is a skin, the hair. And then in me, it's not special. It's not special. It's the same stuff as is out there. It's dependent. It's not, it's constantly affected by everything else. It's impermanent. It changes all the time. The Earth element in me is basically the same as the Earth element outside. It's derived from the Earth element outside. That's what it comes from. Every seven years, every cell in our body changes, doesn't it, shall I say? Some of them are more often than that. So it's derived from the Earth element outside and it constantly returns to the Earth element outside. We're a river flowing through the world. We're not, you know, we think we're so stable. And we do look roughly the same from one year to the other. You're sort of recognizable, but actually we're flowing. If you took a sort of a really fast camera shot with really good, you'd see a skin constantly flaking off in all direction. You'd see this flow of excrement pouring out of one hand and food pouring into the other hand, you know, wouldn't you? Air pouring in and pouring out again, all this stuff. Water sort of all going down, coming out, you know, before it's almost, if you just speed the door up, that's what I'm saying, you'd see this. You'd see yourself as a river, wouldn't you, as a flow? When I die, all the Earth elements in me will finally be given back to the Earth element outside. So you've got to be careful with that reflection. It's not a morbid thing. You're just saying, one day, I'm going to give it all back. Yeah, I don't need to hang on to it forever, do I? You know, it'll just go back, go in a grave, you know, rot, currant crematorium, or whatever. You just say, well, that's just a fact, you know. And then you say, but why wait? Why not let it go now? Not in the sense of dying now, but in the sense of not hanging onto it quite so tightly and just seeing it as this flow of this river. And then you can reflect, it's not mine. It's not I. Finger is not I. You know, knee is not I. You know, stomach is not I. They're important to me, but they're not I. And then you can say, you rest in the joy and freedom of disentanglement from the Earth element. So you just sit in that sense of not being tangled up in it any longer, and you do the same for water. You do the same for fire. You do the same for air. You even do the same for space, you know, the space that you occupy, constantly changing. You're borrowing it in a way. You know, I move from this place to this place. I've given that bit back. I'm now taken up this bit, haven't I? Now I move back again. I've given that one back and I've taken up this bit. I'm constantly deriving my space from the space outside and giving it back again. And when I die, there'll be some time. There'll be no, the space won't be identifiable as me anymore. And my shape will be lost entirely. But the sixth element, consciousness, is different. And the reason it's different is because we've got Rupa, what we perceive. But consciousness is the awareness, the light, that fills the space around us, that contains the other elements. So you have to deal with consciousness a little bit differently. But the aim is the same. You might think, oh yes, at last, that's good. Consciousness, that's what really is me. That really is mine, isn't it? You know, at least that is what I'm left with is my awareness. At least I've got something to hang on to. But unfortunately, Buddhism says, no, sorry. You can't even hang on to that. And in fact, the Buddha once said, you know, to think that your body is you is not completely unreasonable because it's fairly, it's fairly stable. But to think that your mind is you is a bit potty because what is less, you know, what is less, the mind is just shifting the whole time. It's not stable at all, you know. So in a way, there's very, very little you can really hang on to there. And you have to be, you have to have all these desperate games of sort of describing, yes, I'm somebody who likes Marmite. Yes, I'm good, I've got myself defined. Fantastic, that's good, yeah. I'm somebody who's not very good in crowds, you know. Oh yeah, good, right, thank goodness for that. You know, I'm somebody who's got really nice eyebrows. And that you sort of go through all this stuff where you're trying to define yourself, you know, in terms of your likes and your dislikes and what you identify with. You know, I'm the husband of so-and-so and I'm the dweller in London and I'm English and all that stuff. That's what we do. So the sixth element is the illuminator itself, the illumination of awareness. And you can reflect like this. A limitless variety of states of consciousness are possible. It's amazing what the imaginary can do. So a limitless variety of states of consciousness are possible. In me, the element of consciousness is bound up with the other elements in my body because I so strongly identify with those other elements. And this consciousness is very dependent on my body and what happens with it is dependent on my senses, it's dependent on my ability to think. And that means it's limited, it's limited by these things. But yet this consciousness is just a flow of momentary mental events, one after the other, little events in awareness, happening one after the other. In me, limited consciousness is not special. It's very dependent, it's very impermanent. So I don't have to hang on to it. I don't have to try and make it special. I don't have to constantly reassure myself about who I really am. It's not me, it's not mine. And then you can rest in the joy and freedom of unlimited consciousness. And you may have a sense of that sometimes in meditation. What awareness is like if it's like, you know, Akashya, Darteshri and Virochina, that enormous spaciousness, which you can, you don't have to just do that in meditation, you may get it at other times as well. You know, it may be that you're in a situation which is normally a bit difficult. Someone's been critical of you, but you're in a really good state of mind and you feel the space and you just think, they've been critical of me, haven't they? There's something objective in that, something useful. There's something which you just do with them, you know, but it's okay. I don't have to get so hot and bothered about it all. So that is the sense of your consciousness at least being less limited and usually we're really limited. And I think meditation practice can be very useful in giving a sense of a less limited consciousness. Then you can sit at ease with your awareness, just permeating the elements, not worrying about what is inside, what is outside, experiencing the freedom of not hanging on to the elements, the elements that we regard as ourselves or a special. But also having a sense of the preciousness of the human body, because otherwise it could be alienating. You might be just thinking, yes, I'm totally detached. I'm sort of walking through the water. I don't care about anything. But then you remember that this body is the precious vehicle that life can be meaningful. And you can actually have a really beneficial impact, especially if you're not too tightly bound with identification, with this particular personality, this particular body. So it makes like a bit of a paradox, being aware you need to regard the body as precious, but not special. Does that make sense? It's precious, really valuable, worth looking after. It's the boat that we sail through life in. But it's not special. Everyone's got their own boats. There's loads of them out there, you know. Maybe even to some extent the boats can join together. So I hope that gives you a little sense of working with the six elements in Buddhism. And I think I'll stop at that point and see if you have any questions. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at FreeBuddhist.io.com/donate. And thank you. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]