I’m going to start by listing five premises my post will depend on. I want to make it clear I’m not talking down to anyone, but I’m merely letting you know where I come from in terms of interpretation, and I give a few examples that are colored by my interpretation. I tried to be objective, but the underlying subjectivity involved in being a reader and a fan may distort my words.

1) Channeling is a very simple magic system that is needlessly complicated by the wording chosen by the author. Focus on the definition, or what RJ was trying to get at, and don’t get hung up on trivial terms such as ‘strength’, ‘dexterity’, ‘ability’ or etc. RJ, in case you haven’t noticed, is a very wordy man, and he often uses more words to describe something that could be summed up in one or assigned an unchanging term.

2) Men and Women are equal in power. Saidin and Saidar are equal in power. They use different means to get the same effect. Magnitude is not determined by strength, nor dexterity, but a combination of both. The greatest differences are between individuals, not whole populations, just as in the real world. Thus Nynaeve, who can channel lesser amounts of the Power than Rand, is so much more powerful and effective than him with Healing that she makes him look on the level of an Accepted, comparatively speaking.

3) Rand does not enter full-blown deus ex machine mode until the beginning of Book III. Before then, his progression in power is quite consistent with how males and females progress in their ability to channel and control the One Power.

4) Don’t ever trust the Forsaken or Aes Sedai. They don’t know everything. For example, a Forsaken is often said to be “almost as strong” or “just as strong” as Rand. This is false, mainly because A: Males have no reliable way of determining this outside of an inherently unreliable test (how do we know if a male holding his maximum at the moment to the point of strain might not jump in the volume of Power he could channel the next day?). It is often conceivable and well argued, that the Forsaken matched Rand at various points because he was still gaining his full ability to channel the One Power. Thus, Sammael’s attacks could be “almost” as strong as Rand’s one day, and then in the next book, a considerable gap would be noticeable if one had the time or the willingness of both channelers to look.

5) RJ often answered questions at Q+A sessions with numbers and statistics, needlessly leading readers down the rabbit hole of trying to draw some information from the responses. Don’t bother trying, because the series is written with words, and unless I’m gravely mistaken there are no State Department style appendixes in the back of the book listing exact populations for each country. Heck, if you notice, we rarely see more than two or three cities or towns in each country to figure out relative sizes . So hearing things like “2% of the population can learn to channel and a lower number are born with the ability” or some such just means “there is a really small chance of being born a channeler, slightly larger chance of being able to learn and a much larger chance of not having the ability at all”. Don’t even bother trying to reconcile what “Going by Aes Sedai standards, 3x.xx% of Ashaman could reach the shawl.” That way lies madness. In fact I think the last one was superfluous, Light bless the hearts of those who have tried to glean some applicable knowledge from it. You might as well just throw it out because we already know the strongest channelers are not at the Tower at all – they never sought it out. The Tower represents a subset of the entire population. Even if the entire population of female channelers were at the White Tower, and the same number were at the Black Tower, I think RJ misspoke – mainly because there was this whole prophetic “The Servants will balance the Guardians” line, which sort of becomes ridiculous if the populations are not really equivalent. There is info in there to be gleaned, but it is an over-complication, and a wordy one, at that.

The One Power has two expressions – one accessible to males called saidin and one accessible to females called saidar. They are closer to being mirror images than separate forces. The Five flows/Powers are smaller reflections of these images. They aren’t different. In fact, channeling the One Power can be done without rendering it into one of the five flows. Channelers do it all the time. When they channel, the “flows of the One Power” enter their body. Notice it’s not “the One Power and the five threads” but just “flows of saidin or saidar”. You’ll also see as the books progress that you can channel the One Power into things…such as ter’angreal, or draw the One Power through other things, such as angreal. The One Power can be seen as a neutral flow, and after you contact it, you can turn this neutral flow into five active aspects (I would say the ability itself is the passive part of the whole deal). You can even channel the One Power into mundane physical objects…this is what is generally done when testing to see if it is an angreal or not. The One Power, however, unless it is expressed as a Flow, doesn’t do anything, unless it is being channeled, channeled into a terangreal or through an angreal/sa’angreal.

That being said, let me tackle your first question, about flows, strength in flows and volume of the Power. Once again, you’ll notice how many words were thrown about. This is very easily confusing, because there is a difference between the size of the flow you can channel and the volume of the Power you can channel. In The Shadow Rising, Elayne is much stronger than the Windfinder she sees channeling, however the Windfinder is channeling huge, cable-like flows of Air and Water, far beyond what Elayne had ever practiced in the White Tower. After some practice, Elayne realizes that she can channel thicker flows of Air and achieve more powerful effects as a result. Notice the difference at the beginning. Despite already being able to hold a greater volume of saidar than the Windfinder, Elayne’s flows were still smaller. The key term is practice. So it is possible, and we’ve seen this with Nynaeve, to have an extremely strong channeler who is weaving such small or delicate flows that the magnitude of what they can achieve is limited.

With that out of the way, there is a second issue with flows – by “Greater ability”, it can be inferred that RJ was referring to how channelers exhaust themselves physically while channeling at a rate greater than that of physical exertion. So a channeler holding the One Power for an hour, might need six to eight hours rest as if they had spent the entire day running a marathon, while a channeler who seized their full volume of Power and put it into an attack would find that their physical reserves were draining very quickly by immediately taking their maximum and wielding it. During their duel in Tanchico, Nynaeve noted this, and she also noticed that Moghedien was sweating – neither women had enough strength to spare an effort, and Nynaeve’s POV notes that she didn’t really have to pretend to slump, as she was already bone weary and close to that point. That being said, some channelers don’t tire themselves out channeling certain flows – Egwene notes that she never had to think to use Air or Water. Those flows came so easily to most of the women in the Tower that they could channel these without effort, meaning they didn’t exhaust themselves as quickly while working with Air or Water. Rand, on the other hand, noted that channeling Earth and Fire came so easily to him, that he also barely needed to think to use it. Now the big contrast comes when we notice a plot point that I think RJ inserted to show us the difference between Egwene and Rand: One of the things Egwene can do very easily is manipulate Earth. She has many abilities related to it, and the flow itself doesn’t tire her out when she works with it. She can cause explosions, finely manipulate the stone of buildings and other structures and delve beneath the ground. Rand, on the other hand, has none of these capabilities – he has to concentrate to smooth the tracks left by Darkhounds in stone. Despite his greater ability to hold a large volume of the Power, and a male-born capacity for working with Earth, his actual ability with it is less than Egwene’s. I’m not touching on what we’ve seen him do with sa’angreal and angreal, because generally speaking, he relies more on Fire and Air than any other flow during major battles. The difference in magnitude seems to be practice - Egwene practiced how to weave it under the sul’dam and suddenly she can create massive explosions that can split apart entire streets at a point in the books when Rand never showed the capacity at all – it may be (this is supposition, but see my first answer above) that the sul’dam taught her how to weave thicker cables of Earth, and combined with her Talent, this places her level of effectiveness with it above Rand and the Ashaman’s. We’ve seen Ashaman work together to create explosions (Rolling Rings of Fire and Earth) – but we’ve seen Egwene do the same with an area effect more widespread than their individual weavings. Plus we’ve seen Egwene modulate the weave, when she makes it so weak that all it does is scare a Whitecloak’s mount with no discernible effort. Contrast that with Rand’s careful weaving of Earth for fine work, and the Ashaman’s need to work as a team to get the full effect. Basically, on a general level, men have more ease and less exhaustion using Fire and Earth, but Egwene exceeds all the men we have met so far. Indeed there are hints that even the Forsaken never thought weaving cable-thick flows of the Power was possible. One of them witnesses an unremarkable group of Windfinders use a ter’angreal “in a way that would have required more Circles and strong Aes Sedai during the Age of Legends and still not display the same skill”. Strangely speaking, the Forsaken are like uber-Aes Sedai (3rd Age Aes Sedai, that is), but we are daily meeting third-age channelers that are outstripping them and matching them in the most raw common channeling denominators which are individualized skills (also called Talents) and magnitude. Try to avoid the POV trap and look at what we’ve seen 3rd Age channelers accomplish or duplicate without the benefit of Age of Legends training programs and based on intellect, instinct and insight, and it is no surprise that Min saw pinpoints of Light around the other characters – the channelers in Rand’s corner at the time, Egwene and Nynaeve, are capable of outstripping the Forsaken, and have already started to do so, but they needed time to grow and mature. Heck, even Verin figured out Compulsion from studying wilders (who were operating on instinct), and if the fact that an Aes Sedai, with all her biases and an average strength in the Power, could do that, I'm pretty sure the 3rd Age population is a step up and less coddled than the AoLers.

Finally, the last comment I’ll make is related to the last word I used: Maturity. Naturally, as channelers work with the Power, they realize their full strength (please keep in mind that as in my first post, you can reach your full strength, and still be limited in magnitude by the thickness of your flows). This can take women about forty years to achieve over a gradual process and men do the same in a shorter period of time in jumps and starts. However, this doesn’t mean much. Because all channelers can force themselves to reach their full capability in the volume of Power they can wield by handling large amounts of it. 1) Part of the purpose of the Eye was to give the Dragon Reborn a fighting chance by exposing him to a large amount of pure saidin. Why is that so important? Two reasons: Over the course of his life otherwise, he would have gone insane from the taint before reaching his full strength. And by being exposed to such a massive amount, he was Forced to a higher capacity of Power volume than he would have reached that quickly. And this is keeping in mind that Aginor was siphoning part of this off before Rand could be exposed to it. Rand, at least in volume, was now a more powerful channeler than any Aes Sedai in the Tower. 2) Egwene is taken by the Seanchan, tortured and Forced to master her channeling abilities and “Talents”/individual skills. Within a few weeks, she was more skilled than Verin, one of the oldest Aes Sedai, and stronger by far than all the channelers currently in Tar Valon, including Nynaeve, who was still growing and inconsistent. For the largest part of the series (and one of the reasons, I suspect, Egwene draws so much ire) is that she was the strongest and most capable Wondergirl, and Jordan had her off learning how to Dream. Important, but it is hard to reconcile the risks Elayne & Nynaeve were taking with serving tea in a sweat tent – we are nothing if not judgemental as readers and it doesn’t seem quite fair. Anyway, I digress. 3) Nynaeve was Forced by handling pretty much all the saidar in the world over the course of an hour or so during the Cleansing. Afterwards, she reached her full potential. Basically, even though both genders “naturally” reach their full potential of Power volume in different ways, if they are conscious of how or under the care of an experienced channeler, they progress in strength faster than someone completely ignorant.

That is what the One Power boils to: ignorance and superstition. You’ll hear it from the characters, but if you look at the series, you’ll almost never see those superstitions rewarded. And guess what the Forsaken count more highly than strength in the One Power? Yep, skill and knowledge. Which dovetails into your last question: Channelers hold more of the One Power when a cetain task requires changing a physical law of the universe rather than merely a physical, planetary law. You’ll notice that all channelers can create breezes, light flames even create changes in weather. But for the big stuff, making it rain in a place with little moisture, opening the fabric of space time or turning back time through a directed blast of anti-time, you need to go “against the Pattern” to such an extent that you need to tap more deeply into it. That is my thought on the matter in a nutshell. Now it is easy to just dismiss this part and just say “oh, because it requires more Power to do so and so”, but my point is that you will always notice that “so and so” tends to magnify pretty quickly when dealing with the laws underling the universe. It’s almost as if “drawing more the Power” brought you closer to the Creator, to be allowed to transgress these universal laws, but it escapes the truth. For example, lightning bolts. Now you could say “You need to be able to hold X amounts of Power to control lightning”, but the fact of the matter is that if you are a channeler (and a smart one at that a la Verin), you’d sidestep that inconvenience and simply set up the conditions for a lightning bolt by diverting the weather or better yet, use a weave that summons the ambient electric energy in a room. Not quite the same, but effective thought to a lesser degree. Now some channelers are not able to weave much of saidar or saidin at all, such as Morgase, so obviously they can’t hold enough of the Power to change or affect most serious circumstances but we do see that the most primitive and basic are within their reach. At the end of the day, I think strength in the Power has something to do with a channeler’s t’a’veren nature being expressed as the capability to change the threads of the Pattern – this may be why Min’s Viewings are scrambled when the subject is one of them..their threads may be connected to multiple other threads, and the stronger they are as a channeler, the more their threads register as possibilities within the Pattern.

I hope I didn’t confuse you, because this was certainly longer than I expected, but I think the largest factor to keep in mind when reading the books is that a large theme of the story is dealing with ignorance, superstition and communication – even the villains don’t really understand the force they are serving, or that the civilization they destroyed lead to the civilization they now deride as contemptuous. Noone knows anything, the readers least of all, and I think RJ meant to keep it that way. Any answer he gave is very similar to an Aes Sedai answer (or one the Finns would give) in that it answers an aspect of a question but not satisfactorily. I think he wanted to keep some tricks up his sleeve and was often surprised by how much detail we demanded of him.

Last but not least: I love this system, because it is very philosophical. I think trying to explain our different conceptions of it have lead to enjoyable diversions into the thought processes of other people, which is a lot of fun for me .

P.P.S. I’m longwinded.

P.P.P.S. Channelers are my favorite characters! (I want a Verin smiley...)