Principles of Alchemy
There are some things we can say about alchemy that are common to various traditions. They all are disciplines that work to manifest insight and harmony into the relationship between our body and the body of the universe, between inner and outer experience, between microcosm and macrocosm, and this is achieved by means of an experiential inquiry. Alchemy can be described as a science, a science of the mind. It is scientific because it is a discipline that aims to understand the universe based on observation and because it is based not on theory but on application of theory beyond speculative ideas. It is a science in that it is the pursuit of a kind of "unified field theory," a symbolic system which, when understood, imparts real benefit and harmony to ourselves and others.
This type of symbolic system goes to the source of the power of language, for it is language that has the power of transcendence. Symbols and language are useful, but the act of defining things can also be a force that divides and isolates. Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death identifies and explores this specific problem. He writes about the challenge of isolation we face in the west today as a crisis of meaning, and he articulates precisely how this crisis is expressed by drawing our attention to the way institutions communicate to us through the media. This crisis is brought on by the deluge and speed of communication in our lives today; we are inundated by concepts and information coming at us from every angle. And it seems that we have reached a point in our development as human beings where our main problem may no longer be thought of as a lack of information, but a lack of coherence of the information we already have. The question then becomes, "How do we take all this information we have and make any sense out of it so that we can live our lives more powerfully and more in harmony with each other?"
With this in mind, we must turn and take a closer look at the scientific community, the community that has tried to lead us out of this swamp of meaning for the last two hundred or so years; the institution that has laid claim over the mantle of rationalism, the institution that claimed to have finally buried its ties to alchemy long ago. Upon closer examination, it seems we have been lead on a long winding journey by a scientific tradition that has sold us a kind of snake oil. The ongoing problem with this supposed remedy is the fact that western science continues to claim it stands at the pinnacle of our civilization based on the supposed triumph of the human intellect over nature.
Scientific rationalism is based on a notion of unbiased observation, but a true discipline of unbiased observation must begin with an inquiry that western science has ignored: it must question the questioner. We often forget that a close examination of the questions being asked and the expectations behind these questions are usually more important than an accumulation of answers. We also seem to forget that observation is not a purely passive act; we bring meaning to what we see because as humans we can't help but make experience mean things.
At present, we have a scientific tradition that has not yet realized that it is seeing only what it is looking for. Quantum physicists have conducted experiments that have illustrated this, but these works have been and continue to be ignored at our peril. Unfortunately, the most difficult thing about being stuck in the particulars is that it is hard to notice the signs of a larger design.
It seems that the powers of vision that modern science claims, this "rational and unbiased observation" has only given us new names and descriptions for more and more things that it doesn't fundamentally understand. What I mean is that science can often tell us how things work, but not why. And even more essentially, most of the questions that have existed for over a century now about how the universe works have persisted, unanswered, and it is not because scientists have been idle or because the universe is just complex. Scientists have avidly explored complexity: mostly the complexity of our own confusion. What has advanced in science? Many innovations have brought us many benefits. But science also has a backside, and that backside is the problem that has created much of the crisis in the world today. What has also "advanced" in science is millions of dollars poured into the invention of names and descriptions of terrain, a kind of conceptual or phenomenological colonialism. Our universities are full of academics who rush into careers that feed the military and energy industry, two economies that are always concerned with who the loser is rather than where the harmony is. We also find the "advance" of a proliferation of specialization that has seemingly given up on understanding anything in exchange for cozy enclaves of obscurity and more dangerous ways to live.
Western science, like the alchemists, is interested in the understanding of whole systems. But where they part company is the inquiry into the heart of things. Science comes up with names and descriptions of things then attempts to discern how these things interact with each other. Based on the relationships it observes, science tries to sketch it out as a system. But without fundamental appreciation of what things are at their essence, there is no understanding of the system, no matter how clear the relationships may seem, because a fundamental understanding of the essence of things is actually a fundamental understanding of ourselves. In trying to take subjectivity and bias out of the laboratory, science has inadvertantly convinced us that we are no longer inextricably part of the universe. Of course, no matter how hard we try or no matter what our conviction is about this, we have no choice but to be intimately connected to everything and everyone in the universe. It is almost impossible to ignore the person who lets us in on the highway onramp, or the fact that the speeding ticket we just paid is going into someone else's pocket someday, and so on and so on.
The fundamental understanding of what things really are is a process where the intellect stops in its tracks, for it is the place beyond language, the place where the dualities of logic, of language, and even all concepts of unity fall away. This is the realm in which the alchemists dance. So the symbols used by alchemists are self-transcending symbols, which means that they bring together diverse experiences rather than create further divisions and concepts. They act as gateways to the unspoken rather than things that divide. So for instance, when Buddhist alchemists talk about "fire," they mean not just the phenomenon of what we see when something burns. They also mean the color red, and also the manifestation of heat in the human body, they mean the western direction, and the wisdom of discriminative appreciation, and so on. To explore these correspondences more, the mandala of the elements diagram describes these relationships. So the power of the elements as symbols is the gathering together of ideas and concepts, a kind of fractal language, where the symbols are shapes that not only reflect specific qualities of the overall design but also transcend their own separateness by their vastness as placeholders for diverse experiences.
These symbols transcend their own separateness through the understanding of people who bring alchemy to active inquiry in their lives. When we begin to look closer at the universe and ourselves with the tools of this system, we being to understand how these symbols transcend themselves. We begin to notice that these elements are not just separate "things" that bump against each other, like objects organized into different boxes. They actually interpenetrate and dance both with and within each other in various ways.
For instance, although we may say that tea is a manifestation of the earth element, when we look at the development of the tea plant, we see that the growth of any plant actually depends on the union of earth with all the other elements. It is the union of earth and water that awakens the seed. It is the union of earth and space that allows the shoot and root to grow in the ground. It is the union of air and earth that allows the gas exchange, the plant's breathing, to occur. It is the union of fire and earth that actually creates the light factories of cholorphyll's photosynthesis within the cells. If we look at the world, we can make similar observations wherever we look; the five elements interpenetrate and dance everywhere in this way. It is in the formation, shapes and movement of clouds and the surging and breaking of waves. And finally, as we begin to look more closely at the dance of the outer elements as phenomena and our inner experience of the elements, as we begin to work with ourselves in this fashion, this system of symbols actually transcends itself through its application, for the true test of any science is whether its insights actually brings coherence and harmony between human beings and our world.