![]() It is Shi-va – “that which is not.” Akasha is “that which is.” Ether is not space it is a subtle dimension of existence. The word “ether” is not quite accurate but it is the closest translation. But if you do not take care, fire can quickly go out of control and consume everything.ĭo not mistake akasha for empty space. Without the fire burning within us, there is no life. ![]() The two faces are symbolic representations of fire as a life-giver and a life-taker. In Indian culture, the element of fire is personified as Agni Deva, a god with two faces who rides on a fiery ram. Hence, a large number of Yogic practices are structured around vayu or air. Among the five elements, air is the most accessible and relatively the easiest element to gain reasonable mastery over. In the Yogic tradition, we refer to air as “vayu,” which means not just air as a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide and other gases, but as a dimension of movement. Knowing and experiencing the element of Earth from within is part of the Yogic process. ![]() Though the element of Earth is part of physical matter around us too, it is best we start to perceive and understand it from the basis of our lives, because most people only really experience their own body and mind. The Earth element is the basis that all the other elements build on, and of our physicality. So how you approach water is very important. If you just generate a thought looking at the water, the molecular structure of the water will change. Today, there is substantial scientific evidence to show that water has tremendous memory. ![]() Earth, Water, Air, Fire” by Josep Lluis Mateo & Florian Sauter (Eds.Sadhguru: Whether it is the individual human body or the larger cosmic body, essentially, they are made of five elements or the pancha bhutas – earth, water, fire, air and akasha. This text, an extract from the book “The Fourth Elements and Architecture. This is a book produced in the warmth of the teaching experience, which uses this ephemeral (and, for the student, initial) encounter with the project as a material which, divested of the anecdotal, can be elevated to category. In the Romantic tradition (on which all of this argumentation is based), the ruin and, in general, the expressive value of the unfinished, of what has been undone yet is still to be done, also emerges as a possibility… At the other extreme, the fragile tent of the nomad (remember Buckminster Fuller and the dabblings of the 1960s). Having ruled out modernization as the uncontrolled application of the tired old prototypes of the metropolis, the intelligent, sensible manipulation of the elements provides the basis for specific projects that are, at once, rooted and globally comprehensible.Īt an initial stage of project development, the relation with the elements as the origin of the project refers us to archetypes: pure protection, the bunker (echoes of Paul Virilio) or the cave. In the present-day state of globalization, in which the identity-modernity equation is appearing in a new light, the elements reproduced in all cultures as an initial moment with which human construction activity is related form part of a general vocabulary of common arguments. Our activity, at a primitive, archaic but present level consists in modelling the earth to geometrize its surface or piercing it to build foundations, erecting walls and roofs that protect us from rain and snow, and using the energy of fire as light and heat that make the resulting space habitable. The elements save our activity from the pure mathematic abstraction on which technology is based. The elements relate us to nature as a physical phenomenon that can be experienced with the senses and is therefore directly connected with architecture, which, as we know, addresses the real construction of the world, the alchemic operation that turns concepts into material. In this context, a vindication of the presence of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) by means of which the pre-Socratic philosophers envisaged humankind’s relation with nature seems extremely useful to the discipline today. It is a frequently abstract, formless argument with religious overtones (appealing more to faith than to reason), utilizable in political verbalism and which drifts easily towards engineering technocracy. Sustainability as an economic but also a moral and political argument is clearly a consensus in our societies. Whereas in our recent past the paradigm by which architecture was measured was the city, now, the collective reference surrounding our design activity is the relation with nature.
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