Last time at http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2432 I mentioned the idea of the "four temperaments" (choleric/fiery person, sanguine/airy person, phlegmatic/watery person, melancholic/earthy person).

I will  take the choleric or "fiery" personality as a starting point:

Choleric - Fire - Human Head - Tetrahedron

You can verify from your own experience that the choleric, being a rather forthright, even aggressive personality, will develop certain typical relationships to people with other personality types.  For example, with the Melancholic:

Melancholic - Earth - Human Limbs - Cube

There is potential for the greatest possible good and also the greatest possible evil in such a human relationship, in what takes place between human beings with choleric and melancholic tendencies.  I am sure you can find examples from your own experience of this.  It can tend to be a relationship of extremes, to say the least!

But here I wish to emphasise the connection between the human personality types and objective forces at work in human nature and in the physical world, including our own bodies.  We can come to the idea that there is a relationship between the physical reality of "fire" or warmth as it interacts with the physical, solid earth in many ways and the relationship between the choleric and melancholic tendencies.

We can take this further to make this still more concrete - think of when you touch something very hot, say a stove.  You will involuntarily withdraw your hand at the touch.  This is a reaction that appears to be "hard-wired" into our nervous system.

There is a polarity present in this archetypal meeting between heat and solid matter that we could characterise as a life/death polarity.  Excessive warmth, as we all know, can be very damaging to the life in our bodies, as we see for example when we suffer burns.  Taken to an extreme, the physical body can be completely consumed by fire, reduced to ash.

That is the negative, death aspect of the meeting.  But there is also a positive life-preserving aspect - you withdraw your hand quickly and the life in your hand is preserved.  And there has been a meeting, the heat has affected your hand - you have experienced the warmth or heat.

This brings us to the topic of the nerves and senses themselves and how they are built up out of the cosmos.  If we think of the conventional scientific view of how all of the matter in the cosmos has come to be there including our own bodies, we may see that it can be described as having followed something like the following stages:

1. Origin in heat energy of the "Big Bang"
2. Appearance of light or radiation phenomena
3. Appearance of chemical phenomena (atomic phenomena)
4. Appearance of life (and death)

Of course, this view is based on a way of thinking that only admits what is externally observed through the senses as real.  However, it is interesting that these four stages can be perceived in the findings of material science.

Our nerves and senses in this view thus represent something which has evolved the longest distance, as it were, from its primal state of heat energy.  They touch on and embody the very forces active in one of the great mysteries of the world - the forces of life and death.  And yet they retain an intimate connection to heat, for example through our ability to sense warmth.

In this view, reflecting on what has been gained so far, it may become apparent that there could be a deeper meaning inherent in such pictures as the one of the tongues of flame descending on the disciples of Christ in Acts 2 - a picture that points to the deepest forces at work in human destiny, in the cosmos at large, in our own bodies, in our inner lives and in our shared community life.