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Another way to center yourself is by bringing the energies of the four elements into harmony within your own being.  These are the four classical elements of earth, air, fire and water, which the ancient Greeks believed to be the basis of all physical reality. 

Now the preceding statement might sound slightly ridiculous.  Isn't the whole idea of four elements completely out of date?  Has not modern physics identified more than a hundred elements which constitute the physical reality of our universe?  Yes, of course, but... if you start talking about elemental energies instead of physical matter, the whole idea of four elements starts to make sense.  Not just to me and to the ancient Greeks, but to countless poets and philosophers over the years.  I long ago lost count of how many great minds interpreted reality in terms of the energies of the four elements, up to and including Empedocles, Aristotle, William Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and J.R.R. Tolkien.  Says Northrop Frye in his preface to Gaston Bachelard's Psychoanalysis of Fire (1968):  "earth, air, water and fire are still the four elements of imaginative experience, and always will be."

I am convinced that only when these four elements are balanced in your psyche will you be centered.  In reaching this conclusion I have been influenced by psychologist Carl Jung, who believed that our personalities possess four distinct aspects:  thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.  I must admit that I have never been overly impressed with Jung's obscure prose and lack of scientific rigor.  But his theories of personality were based on his long study of the elemental aspects of alchemical literature, and they make sense to me.  My own experience of life tells me that you can reasonably interpret both life and experience through the energies of earth, air, fire and water.  This is especially true when you work with Tarot.  It has long been noted that the minor arcana in the Tarot deck correspond not just to the four elements, but to the four sides to our personality, which can be defined as follows:


Element Quality Jung Tarot
Earth Physical Sensation Pentacles
Air Mental Thinking Swords
Fire Spiritual Intuition Wands
Water Emotional Feeling Cups

So if you want to be centered, you need to bring your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual energies into balance.  If any of these energies are out of proportion, I can guarantee your life will be a mess, you will make bad decisions, and you will never get what you want.  In other words, you will go through your life uncentered.

Which is something you see a lot of here in 21st century America, where emotional extremism is the great curse of our times.  I used to think that people nowadays were so overly obsessed with air energies (thinking, communication, information) that they could never achieve any kind of harmonious balance in their psyches.  But excesses in the realm of air are nothing compared to the kind of chaotic emotional turmoil which constantly poisons the life of millions.  Everywhere you look these days you find emotions out of whack:  political hysteria, corrosive relationships, lust for creature comforts, chronic self indulgence, or--worst of all--the kind of suffocating complacency you get when your vanity tells you that you are a superior being who's got everything figured out.  This last is the worst.  I am referring to those zillions of unimaginative egomaniacs who have decided that their political or social or religious beliefs are the correct ones, that they have positioned themselves on the side of the angels, and that there will never again be any need for reevaluation of their most cherished views.  Talk about utter stagnation.  This is not success in life--it is emotional excess taken to its absolute frozen limit.  Settle down in a rut like this, and you will find yourself as imbalanced as a human being can get.

Well, there is a way out of everything, up to and including excessive emotions.  My own experience has told me that nothing kills off watery emotional turmoil like the spiritual energy of fire.  Bring more fire into your life, and all that nasty emotional excess will evaporate.  Not that I'm recommending church attendance or adherence to a traditional religion, both of which are growing more and more irrelevant as we move into the Aquarian era.  But when you start turning your thoughts from the temporal to the eternal, from the physical to the spiritual, from the endless crap you have to deal with to the cold clear light of the universal, you will find that all those KILL! thoughts just aren't there any longer. 

And there are also two very practical exercises you can do to dampen down your emotions:  first, make time to practice Nadi Sodhana every day, and then start doing affirmations whenever you are hypnagogic.  Every day in every way I am growing more and more serene...

You might also take a look at the books of one of my great heroes, Gaston Bachelard, one of the few 20th century philosophers who actually had something worthwhile to say.  His four books on elemental energies are the best place to start:

A few of Bachelard's early French texts are online here. 

There are also two interesting sites (in French) devoted to him:

 

...next


Centering   •   M.C. Richards   •   Tea   •   Stones   •   Exercises   •   Meditations   •   Breath   •   Chakras  •  
Four Elements  •   Daoist Scriptures   •   Cult of Tranquility   •   Etc.