Matter, in the spiritual view, comes out of the original substance of the Spirit for the purpose of manifestation. The Spirit substance is luminous and plastic, like the radiance around the Sun. But this is too subtle for building stable forms. So this original substance undergoes further modification and changes into ether with the property of extending endlessly into Space. Its Wavelike mobility gives birth to Time. This ether gets further modified into the aerial and then into fire, which undergoes further modification into liquid and earthly state. The earthly matter as it is presented to our experience is made by the combination of these five elemental states of matter, which appear more as forces, energy, vibrations. But there are subtle states of Matter based on the predominance of other states, giving to it different qualities and properties. What we perceive as solid Matter is, as Science itself now says, simply a play of forces and energy impacting our senses. Each sense then perceives one or the other aspect of the five main elements in a limited way according to its range. Finally, the mind steps in to integrate all these different sense perceptions and give us the sense of concreteness of material objects. But this is an appearance created by the mind and senses, useful and practical, but not the complete truth of Matter itself.
Sri Aurobindo discusses these and other things in detail in The Life Divine, especially chapters 24 to 26 of the First Book. Here is a passage describing the mystery of the five elements, a truth towards which Science itself is moving in its own way.
‘Matter is the presentation of force which is most easily intelligible to our intelligence, moulded as it is by contacts in Matter to which a mind involved in material brain gives the response. The elementary state of material Force is, in the view of the old Indian physicists, a condition of pure material extension in Space of which the peculiar property is vibration typified to us by the phenomenon of sound. But vibration in this state of ether is not sufficient to create forms. There must first be some obstruction in the flow of the Force ocean, some contraction and expansion, some interplay of vibrations, some impinging of force upon force so as to create a beginning of fixed relations and mutual effects. Material Force modifying its first ethereal status assumes a second, called in the old language the aerial, of which the special property is contact between force and force, contact that is the basis of all material relations. Still we have not as yet real forms but only varying forces. A sustaining principle is needed. This is provided by a third self-modification of the primitive Force of which the principle of light, electricity, fire and heat is for us the characteristic manifestation. Even then, we can have forms of force preserving their own character and peculiar action, but not stable forms of Matter. A fourth state characterised by diffusion and a first medium of permanent attractions and repulsions, termed picturesquely water or the liquid state, and a fifth of cohesion, termed earth or the solid state, complete the necessary elements.
All forms of Matter of which we are aware, all physical things even to the most subtle, are built up by the combination of these five elements. Upon them also depends all our sensible experience; for by reception of vibration comes the sense of sound; by contact of things in a world of vibrations of Force the sense of touch; by the action of light in the forms hatched, outlined, sustained by the force of light and fire and heat the sense of sight; by the fourth element the sense of taste; by the fifth the sense of smell. All is essentially response to vibratory contacts between force and force. In this way the ancient thinkers bridged the gulf between pure Force and its final modifications and satisfied the difficulty which prevents the ordinary human mind from understanding how all these forms which are to his senses so real, solid and durable can be in truth only temporary phenomena and a thing like pure energy, to the senses non-existent, intangible and almost incredible, can be the one permanent cosmic reality.’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/21/conscious-force#p2)
Affectionately,
Alok Da
