I want to understand it but everything I read about it oscillates impossibly between vulgar metals -> gold and some kind of spiritual transformation metaphysical stuff
What is it and what can be legit gleaned from it in an empirical or useful sense?
Does it have utility outside of use as a metaphor or allegory or whatever?
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A man enters a room and leaves with a box. In the process of picking up the box, he became a man carrying a box. This is not transmutation.
I put some beans on my toast. In the process, it becomes beans on toast. This is not transmutation.
Two things became one combination of two things. Neither thing has fundamentally changed.
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…You just answered your own question. He was delivering supplies. That’s the point.
Although, in the case of oxygen, he was picking up trash (carbon) to take out with him. And he went through the whole place to make sure he got it all.
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No thing is becoming any other thing. 2 things, one from the air and one from your body are getting tied together.
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They ‘arise’ from the food the mother eats, inhales, etc… Her body processes and converts molecules, not atoms. She doesn’t create iron and calcium from other elements.
We don’t often speak of anything that matches your misunderstanding of how physics and chemistry work.
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This is gonna be my last reply in this. You just don’t understand how matter conversion, mass conservation, combustion, energy conservation, animal and plant reproduction, and many other things work. I can’t teach you middle and high school science in comments on the internet, there are better resources out there. Best of luck and holy shit please do look into it and don’t make any assumptions or judgment calls because they are all wrong.
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Sorry m8, I wasn’t exaggerating, and I just don’t have the time.