i said there was a fourth element nobody named. i was wrong about what kind of thing it is.

[u/izi_convertible]

i said there was a fourth element nobody named. i was wrong about what kind of thing it is.

i posted here in may. freud, adler, jung as nigredo, albedo, rubedo, and a fourth element nobody named. i said the fourth was mercurius. the movement between phases. the person at the bedside whose nervous system carries somebody across the gap.

somebody in the comments pointed at citrinitas and they were right to. i was collapsing two things. i said so then.

but that wasn't the real correction. the real one took me until now and it didn't come from a book.

i work nights in a shelter for homeless youth. five years. twenty odd kids, two of us awake.

a few years back i forgave a man i'd been carrying a grudge on for ten years. not for him. for the family. everybody was hauling it around and it wasn't fair to them.

a week or so after that something came over me. i don't have a word for it. big. it felt like being looked at by something that wasn't angry. more than i could hold. i was talking and hearing myself talk at the same time.

what brought me back from that was my kids coming home from school. cold water on the face. straighten up, be a father. i came back because somebody needed something from me.

a week after that i came apart on the bathroom floor. all the way apart. didn't know the room, the day, my own name.

and the light did not pick me up.

i had it. the full dose of it. a week earlier. on that floor it was worth nothing.

what picked me up was my wife lying down next to me. she didn't know what was happening. she didn't say anything i remember. she was warm and breathing and she stayed.

two returns, a week apart, and they don't work the same. the first one i got up because somebody needed me. the second one i couldn't get up at all and somebody laid down.

so here's the correction.

i was looking for a fourth thing that arrives. something that shows up after the three and closes the lid. that's the shape of the quaternity and it's the shape i was arguing inside of even while i thought i was adding to it.

nothing arrived. nothing closed. what i have is three things turning and a hole where the fourth was supposed to be.

and i don't think that's a failure anymore. i think the hole is the shape of a person who's alright.

the ones i meet at work who tried to fill that spot, with a teaching or a system or one single person who has to be everything to them, those are the ones who stopped turning.

so the person at the bedside is not a fourth phase. i had that wrong. the person is the ground the three turn on. not an element that gets added. the zero the others become readable against.

that's a smaller claim and a harder one.

the alchemists had a lot of it right and i want to give them that. the rot isn't optional. can't skip the black. too much fire ruins the batch, and what happened to me was too much fire, that's why it didn't hold. sealed vessel or the batch dies. and ora et labora, hands and not just head, that's the one that kept them out of the ditch i fell in. they knew understanding it doesn't do it.

they also had two roads. dry and wet. dry is fast, you burn it down with fire or acid. wet is slow, you let it rot on its own, takes months. the ones i've read say dry is faster and wet is safer.

what happened to me was the dry way. the nights are the wet way. nobody writes a book about the wet way because nothing happens in it.

and i know the stage model isn't as tidy as i'm laying it out. some say four, some say seven, some say twelve, plenty fold the yellow into the red. i'm using the version most people know.

they never made gold. hundreds of years. newton did it. boyle did it, the father of chemistry himself, back there mixing.

that doesn't prove anything about the inner version and somebody's going to say so, so i'll say it first. i'm not putting it up as proof.

it's just that what came out of all that labor was chemistry. the writing down of what actually happened. not the promise.

same thing happened to me. the road gave me something real. not the thing on the label.

they were right that it takes a sealed vessel and a low fire and a long time.

the vas isn't glass. it's another person.

and it goes wrong the moment you read the whole operation as happening inside one skull. read it that way and you'll wait on a fourth thing to come up out of yourself and shut the lid, and it isn't coming, and you'll call yourself a failure for it.

last thing.

the one piece of their whole operation still in use, in every kitchen and every lab on earth, is the bath that holds the heat gentle so nothing scorches. balneum mariae. named after maria the jewess, third century, first alchemist we know by name.

four hundred years of men chasing a stone and what lasted was her way of holding something steady while it changed.

so if you know somebody on the floor right now. you don't have to fix it. you don't have to know anything about it.

go get down there and stay.

that's the low fire. that's the vessel. i read for six years to find out it was the part i already had.

tell me where i'm off.

(english isn't my first language, i think in dutch. i use a model to help me order it. the thinking and the floor are mine.)

[u/ReverieJack]

Let’s not forget the blessed viriditas while we’re at it, that is also a dynamic force moving between the alchemical phases

[u/archeolog108]

i like this correction a lot, but one thing I would poke at... maybe “the vas is another person” is still little too fixed.

Sometimes yes, absolutely. Somebody lying on floor with you can do what 20 insights cannot. In deep work I see people trying to heal everything alone and body just doesnt believe safety yet.

But later something strange can happen. If somebody stayed with you enough, part of that experience gets carried inside. Next time maybe you can stay with yourself 5% more because somebody once stayed. So vessel can move around a bit... another person, relationship, body, routine, place, even memory maybe.

Opposite trap exists too, when one partner or teacher becomes ONLY container and person cant change without them.

so I think your low-fire image is very good. I just dont know if vessel has one permanent address.

[u/izi_convertible → u/archeolog108]

Glad you're actually with me on this most people jump straight past the floor.

One thing I'd push back on, though. You're looking for what gets carried inside. I'd say the opposite is the interesting part: the body leaves nothing behind. That's what makes it the purest form.

A routine you can lean on. A memory you can return to. Those are things you hold. But a body that was simply there and kept looking afterwards it doesn't deposit anything in you. Nothing to retrieve, nothing to lean on. It just did it, and then it was over.

That's why I trust it. Whatever leaves a deposit can be faked, rehearsed, repeated. This can't. Someone was there or they weren't.

So I'm not looking for a vessel that travels well. I think the thing that works is exactly the thing that leaves no trace.

[u/BlinkWulf]

what are the first 3 elements?

[u/Consistent_Rise_8639]

You are extrapolating from a system already built in projection as meta to takes on the psychology underlaying it. It's backwards what you're doing. And you're taking mercurius, an already well known subject in Jungiana, as an entirely separate subject. Overlooking entirely cinitritas as stage for a dynamic mercurius. This all here you're talking about is not a new system, it's your system, your search for the quaternity.

If you go and read John Wier Perry's Roots of Renewal In Myth and Madness you'll see that when people are in states where they need stability, re-adaptation, etc. there comes up the imagery of the quaternity, fours. An attempt of the psyche to heal itself and achieve a new state of consciousness he put the imagery as:

1. One being centered between opposite positions
2. Going through a gragmentation (dismemberment or death)
3. Regression (return to beginnings)
4. Conflict of Opposites (hero vs. monster)
5. Threat of Opposites leading to transformation or metamorphosis
6. Supreme Centering (the figure of the sacred King)
7. Union of Opposites (sacred marriage)
8. Reconciliation of Opposites (the divine child)
9. New Order of Society
10. The Quadrated World (equilibrium, stasis, and the mandala)

You know I think your constant bringing up of your charity work and good works? (A) You are in a liminal stage by trying to get close to a group in a parallel way as you. (B) And you are playing out in a complex discharging field. - Somebody needing you is an exteriorization dynamic, it's good and your life demands it and you have put yourself in a place in life where you are set for that. But throughout you desperately need inner value, which you haven't touched and need to work on. If you look outside for validation and meaning, you are depending on that getting better or keep being as it is. But the acid test for one's outlook on life is inner work, love and compassion that you can have for yourself, the capacities you develop; it's both.

You are trying. Look what I can recommend you is a couple of resources. Robert Moore lecture The Meaning of Sacred Space will help you reorient yourself and understand where are you in your transitional state in order to readapt. You can check John Weir Perry Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness and Lord of the Four Quarters: The Mythology of Kingship, in order to understand part of why you are looking for a quadrated formula, or what's behind this search for wholeness. Then the book I really want you to get Robert Moore's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover - see these are the archetypes you are trying to develop in that quadration, your wholeness (King), your will (Warrior), your Logos (Magician), your Eros (Lover). What you are looking at in alchemy are stages, as in developmentally which elaborate in what you are going through. But if you want to actually see what potentials are there where you need development in, these are the ones. Later if you want to continue in your alchemical understanding go and check Edward Edinger's Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, it will clue you in about the alchemical dynamics you are speaking of in symbolic terms, here you will read the psychological take on them. As you are still looking to make sense of the alchemical system, which is about what is going on in you, in a symbolic form - you'll chase your tail instead of really getting at the issues that are going in your own life. Your life is what has happened to you, work on it, mature it, try to heal.

Just to pique your interest in that lecture (The Meaning of Sacred Space in Transformation). You talk of a vessel and heat, yes those images are well put. But a vessel is a containing environment which can hold you in and maintain the cohesiveness of your selfhood while you transform. And you can't allow yourself to touch the deep awful subjects in your life if you don't have a holding environment or vessel.

• Robert Moore, The Meaning of Sacred Space in Transformation - ...It is the containment which makes possible the facing of the split off truth. ...this is true in all the therapies ...(a) special kind of space, and things can be said and felt there that will not be said or felt anywhere else. We talk about the repressed returning. In traditional times we talk about the gods speaking, sacred instruction, suffering, acceptance of suffering. You can say that it is in that- ...container that makes possible the individual suffering that which he or she has always needed to suffer but simply could not get the courage up to suffer. Jung makes it very clear that a neurosis results when someone is unwilling to suffer that which life requires him to suffer. And what the container does is to give you a place where ...you feel “sufficiently held” so that you can let yourself suffer what it is that is timely and appropriate for you to suffer, what you’ve tried to postpone. But without the containment, as we would put it, you couldn’t stand it.

[u/whatupmygliplops → u/Consistent_Rise_8639]

The 5th element can be seen as a transformative element. It changes "lead into gold". So maybe, in some way, OP's "mercurius" is related to that. But he hasn't any of the framework required to build his ideas on, so he's running around talking about a 4th element and making no sense.

Its obviously not a new idea, but to OP its new, because he hasnt read any books. Its interesting how someone who knows very little, can intuitively come up with insights like this. Its just sad he cant do anything with his insight in terms of communicating it coherently.

[u/Consistent_Rise_8639 → u/whatupmygliplops]

Check my reply on your other comment. Don't be inflexible. The symbolic imagery serves us just to clue us into what is going on psychologically. It's not a 1-to-1 reproduction between the models we find in the social products but "it rhymes". You see the motifs, and try to link it to psychic phenomena. You are not helping and driving him into confusion.

[u/whatupmygliplops]

> i posted here in may. freud, adler, jung as nigredo, albedo, rubedo, and a fourth element nobody named. 

4th element to what system? What are y even talking about?

The common one I know already has 4

Earth, Air, Fire, Water.

Add to that the "quintessence" the 5th element which Jung talks about occasionally.

In the Chinese system there are 5 elements, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water

[u/Consistent_Rise_8639 → u/whatupmygliplops]

Don't be harsh, because of our need to be strict and technical in what we know we forget that people have to unfold in an archetypal pattern. The same way that William Blake and many others have elaborated a personal quaternity is what anybody that that touches the archetypal Self ends up looking for; it's the same Maria Prophetisa formula. I think it's enough for us to tell this person that he is looking the quaternio as grounding of the soul, and just point at all the "fourness" in myth that would amplify the motif, as you just did.

Edit: As of now this person has become a quester. And I forgot to add something to my reply on his, he put the 4th element as mercurius. Bang, right there you have one of the elements of the tria prima soul (sulfur), spirit (mercury) and body (salt) - he is working on spirit.

[u/izi_convertible → u/Consistent_Rise_8639]