One Power
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  1. (verb) To control the flow of the One Power (The Eye of the World,Glossary)
  2. (noun) The act of controlling the flow of the One Power. (The Eye of the World,Glossary)

The One Power comes from the True Source, the driving force of Creation. The male half of the True Source, saidin, and the female half, saidar, work against each other and with each other to provide the force that turns the Wheel of Time. The True Source cannot be used up just as a river cannot be used up by a mill wheel. (TEotW,Ch12)

Only two to three percent of the population have the ability to learn to channel. Only a small fraction of those will ever channel without training. Of those who do begin channeling on their own, most will die without training. (Guide)

In the Age of Legends(info) about 3% of the population had the ability to learn to channel. In the current Age that is down to about 1%. (Tor Website Q&A(info))

Men with the spark inborn develop the ability later than women, often after they are twenty. (LoC,Ch28) Men grow strong in the One Power faster than women. (ACoS,Ch7) Even after being raised to the shawl, Aes Sedai may take another five years before they reach their full strength. (NS,Ch17) Excessive luck and sudden unexpected rises in prominence can be early indicators of the ability to channel in men. (NS,Epilogue)

Men can only weakly detect other men holding saidin(info). (TFoH,Prologue(info))

The female Forsaken(info) know how to mask their ability to channel so that Aes Sedai cannot detect them. (ACoS,Prologue)

When channelers (men or women) hold the One Power it blurs the images that Min sees. When they actually channel it's even worse. (ACoS,Ch2)

Channelers slow. Between the ages of twenty and twenty-five they begin aging more slowly. (ACoS,Ch24)

Some animals can sense the ability to channel. Cats are attracted to Aes Sedai while dogs react with fear or aggression. The opposite is true for Asha'man. (TEotW,Ch41, LoC,Ch46, WH,Prologue(info))

The second-learned weave limitation - once a weave is learned to perform a task it is very difficult to learn a second method of doing the same thing.

Relative Strengths#

Ryans Bettens has a One Power Model v1.1 with a detailed analysis of relative strengths of characters, though it is only current through Lord of Chaos. Dave Rothgary and Karl-Johan Norén also have a Tentative Listing of OP Strength.

<a name="op">!! Five Powers</a>

<BLOCKQUOTE> "There are threads to the One Power, and each person who can channel the One Power can usually grasp some threads better than others. These threads are named according to the sort of things that can be done using them - Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit - and are called the Five Powers....While Spirit was found equally in men and in women, great ability with Earth and/or Fire was found much more often among men, with Water and/or Air among women." (The Eye of the World,Glossary) </BLOCKQUOTE>

<BLOCKQUOTE> "To the channeler, the flows seem to originate in his or her very immediate vicinity, not to emanate from themselves, although to another channeler, those flows do seem to be emanating from the channeler. The latter is the actual case, as the One Power is passing through the channeler, one of the reasons for individual limits on how much of the Power a particular person can handle. (And you have seen characters react as if to a blow from having a flow snapped or cut.)
A channeler sees the flows as colored very faintly, according to which of the Five Powers is involved (red = Fire, Blue = Water, green = Earth, yellow = Air, white = Spirit), although the "feel" of the flows are also different to a channeler, so that a channeler can tell one from another without actually seeing them. (That is how someone can tell that somebody else has channeled, say, Fire and Earth, in their vicinity without seeing the flows.) It isn't a physical feel; you might almost as well say that they have different flavors. They appear to be smooth and nearly transparent, tinged with color." (Tor Website Q&A(info)) </BLOCKQUOTE>

References#

Copyright (c) 1998 by Gary Kephart