“Of those who first philosophized, the majority thought that the only principles of all things are of a material nature. And that is that of which all things that are are constructed, and from which they are first generated and finally decomposed, however much their qualities change, they remain the same entity. This they call the element, the principle of things that are, and hence they think that nothing is generated or destroyed, since its nature is always preserved. Just as we would not say that Socrates ‘becomes’, in an absolute sense, when he becomes beautiful or a musician, nor that he is destroyed when he loses these dispositions, since the subject, Socrates, is the same.”
– Aristotle, Metaphysics
In its beginnings, humanity was animistic, making no distinction between animate and inanimate beings; all beings: animals, plants, but also mountains, rivers, rocks, natural phenomena as well as everyday tools and objects had an invisible spirit, all participating in a universal life force. And so it was until the first professional thinkers appeared, the first philosophers who considered, with the sole light of reason, how the universe works and what it is made of. And, as Aristotle says, “of those who first philosophized, the majority thought that the unique principles of all things are of a material nature”.
Thales of Miletus (625–546 BC), one of the Seven Wise Men of Ancient Greece, is considered the first Western philosopher to propose rational explanations for the workings of nature and the origin of the universe. Although he left nothing written, his thought, known through his disciples, established that water, an animate being that moves on its own and makes seeds germinate, was the basic substance that nourishes all things. He even suggested that the entire Earth floated on water.
Anaximenes of Miletus , (590 – 524 BC) a disciple of Thales, proposed that rather than water, nature is generated from air which, by condensation, forms clouds, which in turn condense into water: which can become solid, which becomes earth which condenses in the form of stones and minerals. And conversely, stones dissolve into earth, into water, into clouds, into air and this becomes fire.
For Heraclitus (535 – 484 BC) life is change to the point that everything is and is not at the same time, to the point that reason fails in its attempt to grasp an ever-changing reality: fire is responsible for the constant changes of nature. And finally, for Xenophanes (580 – 475 BC) the beginning and end of all things was the earth. In his line, Parmenides contradicted Heraclitus by considering that nothing changes, change is an illusion of the senses, everything is stable and subject to the rules of reason. Thus, in an increasingly materialistic drift, “all is one”, the primitive holistic vision, was first fractionated into the four elements, or primordial substances, until Empedocles (495 – 435 BC) made a synthesis by considering that it was all four that, mixed in different combinations, give rise to all things: love would drive the mixture, and hatred the separation.
The fifth essence
[The ether] “is a primordial element in the form of heat or fiery spirit, of subtle material consistency, which is present throughout the universe, giving it movement, communicating its parts and which can both deform and decompose any natural substance.”
– Apollonius of Tiana, De secretis naturae , sI
Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) included a fifth element, the ether, a substance that had already been spoken of since pre-Socratic times as one of the constitutive elements of the universe: it was the brilliant substance that the gods breathed, quite different from the heavy air that we mortals breathe. For this philosopher, the ether is the subtle, light, perfect, indestructible, almost divine substance that constitutes the supralunary world, while the sublunary world is formed by the combination in different proportions of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire.
The ether would therefore be a weightless, celestial substance, which, like a fluid, penetrates the sublunary world, and would occupy all the empty spaces of nature and also of the human body, since the void does not exist and cannot exist, for a weighty reason: only things that are exist. This idea that nature abhors the void, that everything is matter, was maintained for more than two thousand years, it is the horror vacui. The ether would therefore be the primordial substance, in the words of Aristotle, from which all life would emanate, thus becoming the reference author of a philosophical monotheism in which the breath of the gods of Olympus would be adapted by Jewish and later Christian and Muslim theology.
During the Middle Ages this fifth material element was called quìnta essentia, and was recovered at the end of the 19th century by Maxwell as a material medium supporting the light wave. The idea of the ether, like so many other Aristotelian concepts, has withstood the passage of centuries, and has not only dominated the field of science, but also that of alchemy, mysticism and occultism.
It has, however, had its critical moments, especially in the 17th century. A major setback came from Copernicus , when the telescope showed a very dented lunar surface, nothing to do with the spherical perfection attributed to the supralunar world. Newton “s law of universal gravitation demonstrated a movement of the stars that had little to do with Aristotelian dynamics. But above all, the thrust into the horror vacui was given by Torricelli” s simple experiment of 1644, which demonstrated both that a vacuum exists and that air weighs.
It seems that, based on work in the acceleration of hadrons, the existence of this fifth element has been scientifically confirmed, and the aether has been renamed the “Higgs Field.” And so it goes.
Towards a new conception of matter
Currently, there are not four or five elements, but more than a hundred, the combination of which constitutes everything that exists. So, even organized in structures as complex as cells, matter is composed of molecules, which in turn are made up of the hundred atoms grouped in the periodic table of chemical elements. Of course, in very unequal proportions; almost half of the mass of the earth’s crust is oxygen atoms, as are 65% of the human body and 20% of the atmosphere. We are indeed children of the earth, only that our oxygen is mixed with atoms of carbon (18.5%) and hydrogen (9.5%), and in smaller quantities, nitrogen (3.2%) or calcium (1.5%), while that of the earth is made up of silicon (27.7%), aluminum (8%), iron (5%) and calcium (3.6%). Regarding the universe, 99.9% are hydrogen atoms (88.6%) and helium (11.3%).
Matter, as we know it, has three states according to the degree of aggregation of its molecules: solids, liquids and gases. These three states, however, would only account for 1% of the matter in the universe. The rest, 99%, is in the form of plasma, which is neither solid, liquid nor gas, and is the matter of the sun and stars, hydrogen and helium.
Einstein demonstrated that matter (mass) and energy are interchangeable. E=mc 2 is the simple mathematical formula that relates them, and the revolutionary physical principle with which nuclear power plants and atomic bombs generate enormous energy with just a few small grams of matter. Science accepts the conversion of matter into energy, but the possibility of coexistence is not clear. Matter is matter until it ceases to be, transforming itself into energy: matter and energy remain separate concepts. Just as a liquid can transform into vapor, matter can transform into energy, but to find a scientific model that accepts a natural duality of both concepts we must delve into quantum mechanics.
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The great physicist Stephen Hawking realized that the faint radiation from black holes would be unexplained if it were not for the continuous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs in the ether. Black holes have such a strong gravitational force that not even light escapes them. Just as the earth holds the atmosphere around it, black holes hold everything, even light, swallowing everything and getting fatter in the process. They do, however, emit radiation due to the separation of certain particles from the their antiparticles on the periphery. This separation is by pure chance, on the periphery of the black hole, the so-called event horizon, where certain particle-antiparticle pairs are separated when one of them falls into the black hole while the other remains outside, detached from its partner swallowed by the hole, and emitting energy due to the disappearance of the bond that held them together. This somewhat convoluted explanation contemplates a constant change of matter to energy, particle-antiparticle in the fabric that forms the vacuum or ether, and manifests itself in a scientifically observable way in black holes, far from us. It is a kind of continuous dust in the ether; the particle-antiparticle analogy with yin and yang is revealing. The fact that science is only able to confirm yin-yang in remote areas of the universe and not in our closest environment, including the human body itself, does not mean that it does not exist. It is very curious that physics has had to come so far, and with such a delay, to realize a concept that Eastern philosophy has considered one of its pillars for millennia.
– Marcello M. Ghiglia
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Thus, according to modern physics, the void would not only not be empty, but would have an enormous potential for energy; so much so that it is claimed that if the amount of matter that fits in a thimble could be converted into matter, it would equal all that exists in the universe. An infinite source of energy available everywhere, it can also be healing energy.
Under this new perspective, matter would be made of light, and air, fire, earth and water would be manifestations of different densities of light, since it seems that for each material particle there are ten million photons.
These advances in science represent a very hard blow to a culture as materialistic as ours. Matter practically does not exist, it is a way of seeing: what we see are nothing more than condensations of energy. As the microscope increases in power, it has been seen that matter itself is empty, since assuming that the nucleus of the atom was the size of a basketball, the closest electron would be a coin orbiting more than 30 km. Each atom is like a solar system, it is nothing more than an electromagnetic field, as the Chinese said. We are nothing.
Qi and ether
Man is modeled on Earth, Earth is modeled on Heaven, and Heaven is modeled on Tao.
– Lao Tzu, 25
It is worth noting that the rest of the civilizations and cultures of the planet have been on the sidelines of these speculations. Although all have been interested in the origin and nature of the universe, they were originally represented through mythological figures or legendary heroes. The civilization studied it from a more rational angle, but with a logic far removed from Western logic, and which results from considering the world based on complementary polarities, instead of the exclusive concepts that our culture has inherited from Aristotelian logic, according to which things are as they are, and something cannot be A and not A at the same time.
In the Chinese worldview there is no creator or first causes: everything that now exists has always existed, but in the beginning it was all confused, without form. The universe as we know it began the day when this formless nebula was divided into two opposite aspects (called yin and yang) which, in turn, were divided into two, and each of them again into two… until giving shape to the world. It is a process very similar to what we know today of the development of life: from a single cell, by successive divisions, the embryo is formed that will continue to develop based on divisions until adult life. Thus, the Tao is the immaterial matter from which the cosmos has differentiated, and yin and yang are like the systole and diastole of the universe, the heartbeat of nature. In Chinese civilization, the fifth element is known as Qi.
This was explained in the article La energía vital , published in the Yogaworld Magazine: http://masgrau.net/es/portfolio/la-energia-vital-yogaworld-7-otono-2008-2/
“What the Orientals understand by energy, which in China they call qi and in India prana, is a concept completely alien to our way of thinking. From the West, it is not easy to understand this notion, because we have always separated matter from energy, and based on this duality, we consider one as the opposite of the other. Qi or prana includes on the one hand matter and on the other energy; it is energy about to materialize, or matter about to become energy. It is an energy material, like a vibration in matter.
That is to say, that the traditional oriental concept coincides with the conclusion that physics has reached, that the ultimate reality of matter is in this game between matter and anti-matter; a vibrational universe, in which everything is particles in motion, some at a very low frequency, like minerals or inorganic matter, and others with a faster movement, in plant and animal life. Therefore, it would be advisable not to translate the oriental concepts of qi and prana by energy, since this word is always understood as opposed to matter, while the oriental concepts allow us to free the language of materialism that permeates our culture. In the same way that there is no essential difference between matter and energy, neither is there between body and spirit, since everything that exists shares the same nature, with a wide range of nuances that goes from the most dense to the most subtle, just as the same element water can acquire different states: solid, liquid and vapor. More than energy, qi is a substance, common to everything that exists; when the qi of the Earth and the Sky unite, it gives rise to all things, in the same way that a new being is born from the qi of the father and mother.”
Being and non-being arise from the same background And this single background is called darkness; To darken this darkness, behold here is the door of clairvoyance.
– Lao Tzu
The fifth element in medicine
To see everything in a primordial unity, not yet differentiated, or to see everything from such a distance that everything merges into a unity, here is true intelligence. We are not concerned with distinguishing, but with seeing everything in unity.
– Chuang Tzu
The fifth element, whether it is called ether, quintessence, plasma or qi, what is really important from the point of view of health is that it highlights a unitary vision of the world. Our science has excelled in the analytical vision of reality, but it has always had great shortcomings when it comes to making a synthesis of it. When the West wants to consider unity, it must elaborate it from the different parts, but it is never the same to put together a fragmented object. Whereas the vision of reality as a continuum starts from an underlying unity despite observing certain aspects and forms of it. This vision of reality as a continuum would be a qualitative leap for all sciences, but very especially for medical science, which is still very much anchored in mechanistic paradigms and fragmented into specialties.
One of the repercussions of this unitary approach would be to free oneself from the limitation of reasoning and acting only on the basis of what can be measured.
Reality is too complex for the human mind to comprehend. As Zhuangzi (4th century BC) said: “Our existence has a limit, knowledge does not. To rely on what is limited to achieve what is not, that is what is dangerous.” If our mind is much more limited than the object it seeks to grasp, all we can do is approach it, thus recognizing that there is much more that is unknown than that which is known.
From the awareness of the whole, the vision of the disease and the sick person changes; in the sense that there is always more that is good than that which is bad. The therapeutic strategy also changes, which instead of limiting itself to fighting the disease, prioritizes promoting health.
According to Eastern therapeutics, it makes no sense to divide medicine into different specialties, nor does the common consideration that two phenomena that coexist in time and in the same person have nothing to do with each other. In the same way, it would make no sense to isolate the disease from the patient, the body from the mind, and focus on the pathology, leaving aside everything that works well in general, which is the majority, and above all, ignoring its ability to cure dysfunction. A great shortcoming of medicine, when more than a century has passed since the development of quantum physics.
In this way, we could transcend the concept of linearity of Aristotle’s sublunary world, in the sense of freeing ourselves from this series of causes and effects that still fetter our thinking today. The straight line is virtual, it does not exist in nature, it is an abstraction created by man: life, like roads, is full of twists and turns and ups and downs.
In health, it is not so much the description of what is there, of inert matter, as the observation and knowledge of the movement of life, which is in constant change. To the extent that everything is one, a small change has repercussions on the entire system. In the recovery of health, the ability to act on what is understood as energy has more potential than acting on matter itself, since it is more difficult to act on what already has form. This is how the ancient Chinese understood it, who considered life as the result of what has been translated, by analogy, as the five elements (fire, water, earth, wood and metal). But, in fact, they are not material entities, but symbols of the five movements of the cycle of nature, which allow us to describe human physiology and correct its imbalances.
The fifth element, qi, prana, ether or whatever you want to call it, is what allows us to understand the universe as a unit, of which we human beings are part; we are subject to the electromagnetic fields of the earth, and even our material particles are a product of nature’s recycling. None of our atoms stay in the body for more than a year; from a material point of view we are also a flow of nature.
If everything is considered as a continuum, it is also possible to act on the most subtle aspects, in truly preventive medicine.
Text: Miquel Masgrau, acupuncturist
Illustration: Daniel Martin Diaz
