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Doctrines of the elements
May 20, 2010, 3:19 pm
Filed under: Good to know | Tags: ,

It is important to have a series of events to achieve a sustainable impact on people attending one. Why five events? What’s up with the number 5? When thinking about the amount of events, I got inspired by the teachings of the elements.

Our beliefs are based on the Greek doctrine of four elements – water, earth, fire, and air. Aristoteles suggested later to add ether as the quintessence to the four basic elements. The very successful movie “The 5th element” (directed by L. Besson, 1997) proposed the idea to receive love as the 5th element by uniting the other four. Other non-western doctrines are already based on the teaching of 5 elements, like the Chinese “Wu Xing” (Five movements/phases/steps/stages), consisting of water, fire, wood, metal, and wood. All these elements are interconnected by generating and overcoming each other.

In Buddhist teaching, there are also five elements, consisting of the four elements based doctrine, but add emptyness as the fifth element.

According to Chinese traditional nutritional science, foodstuffs can be divided following Yin (cold), Yang (warm), and neutral. Parallel to that, edibles are divided into five groups, according to the elements. wood = sour; fire = bitter; earth = sweet; metal = spicy/hot; water = salty.

If I look at the 5 steps of production that the events of this project will be based on, you can easily find direct connections to the elements – water for growing, earth for the harvest, fire for the preparation, air for the consumption, and… the fifth element? Whether it be love, emptyness, or ether, it will be something very enjoyable…

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