The Fifth Element : Quintessence; Ether, Aether, Dark Energy, Divine Cosmos

The fifth element is the quintessence and in the ancient world it was considered to be Aether or the "air that the divine breathe".

In our modern day scientific world if you were to ask a physics professor what quintessence is then he'd probably explain it as dark energy or phantom energy that drives the accelerated expansion of the universe along scalar and vector fields.

To a homeowner that same dark energy could be mentioned as phantom energy where appliances or other electrical devices that are plugged in but turned off somehow continue to consume energy in the form of electricity.  If you want to save 1 to 5 percent of the energy used in a home then simply consider unplugging those "vampire" appliances.

But not everyone is passionate enough about physics and mathematics to understand the complexity of the fifth element which the scholars advance.

So what can we do to try to get a layman understanding of this quintessence ?

We dig...we know that the first four classical elements were fire, water, air, and earth.

We can quickly find references to old world writings that suggest that the Hindu and Buddhist of ancient India, and China were aware of a fifth essence and in Greece, the great philosophers talk of the same divine energy as Aether or Aither.

It isn't difficult to find the four classical elements at work in the human body.

Human anatomy 101 will tell us that we have 206 bones. Those bones are nothing but dust without the rest of the elements. Therefore the skeletal system is earth element.

The human body is abundant with fluids including plasma, blood, lymph, and others. These juices are the water element.

The human cells are breathing mechanisms. In with the good and out with the toxic waste. This cellular metabolism creates heat. Therefore the fire element is present in the human body.

The human species is an aerobic species therefore we require air in the form of oxygen in order to survive. So with the air element we have covered the four classical elements.

But where does the fifth element fit in ?

It wasn't so long ago when it was discovered that even at the atomic level most space is empty. Countless atomic particles form bigger molecules and billions upon billions of molecules form the complete human.

But the complete human wouldn't be complete if it weren't for the empty space or the quintessential fifth element of divine energy.

And it is similar in all of nature, from the microscopic view to the macroscopic view or from the body of the cosmos to the body of the individual.