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FOUR ELEMENTS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

In order to fully understand Transcendence techniques, it is necessary to obtain at least basic knowledge about these four elements. Their presentation, which follows, will be longer than my usual explanations. In it I will point out some scarcely known insights of the alternative and avant-garde sciences, which are slowly penetrating the official sciences. I believe this knowledge will be useful to most readers, and will make possible a broader view of the world, as well as a more complete understanding of themselves and many additional phenomena.

In my previous works I repeatedly pointed out that in countless human experiences no one thinker managed to find something other than these four elements: psychic image, emotion, bodily sensation and thought, or, most often, their combinations.

This is true of both the simplest and the most complicated experiences, from a feeling of irritation we might have toward someone, to the most sublime experiences of listening to our favorite music, looking at paintings by the great masters, or hugging a person we love. Our experiences are mostly made of combinations of those elements.

All other human experiences, which appear under the disguise of different names such as beliefs, values, attitudes, judgments, convictions, decisions, justifications, apologies, conclusions, efforts, fantasies and so on, are nothing but different manifestations of the four elements and their combinations. Proof of this assertion is simple and any practitioner who even once puts it to trial will be convinced of its validity: when we confront those four elements in a DP4 process, only emptiness will remain in our minds in the place where even an exceedingly complex experience used to be!

Alchemy and magic in the Middle Ages speak of these elements using different names. I mentioned this in my book Invisible Influences when I referred to Paracelsus, who elaborated on mastering the elements in his works. In the above-mentioned alternative disciplines a fifth element – akasha – is also spoken about. Akasha is above the basic four elements; it is the source of everything that has ever existed, that exists or will ever be manifested in existence.

In Indian philosophy akasha is the all-encompassing medium, or background of all existing things. It is real, but so subtle that it cannot be noticed until it appears in the manifest universe through countless existing things and phenomena. However, it can be experienced by means of spiritual practice and this is precisely the way in which many mystics, primarily the ones in the East, have experienced it.

Akasha is called quantum vacuum in modern physics. It is the meta-universe behind manifested universes, which creates those universes in an endless sequence. It is a field from which subatomic particles, atoms and molecules, planets and galaxies, physical bodies and everything that can be perceived by the senses enters into manifestation. Akasha is a medium filled with prana – infinite cosmic energy that eternally fluctuates. The vacuum of contemporary physics consists of akasha and prana inextricably connected into one.

I have decided not to dwell on akasha in this book in order to simplify the system described in it as much as possible. Now I will point out the congruence of our four elements with the elements of alchemy and magic.