What each element brings to the tabAs postmodern humans conditioned by pluralistic values, we are used to looking at the One from the perspective of the many. What does it mean to look at the many from the perspective of the One?
From an absolute perspective, the mind of enlightenment when looking at the five elements (the relative world) recognizes only its own expression and nothing else. Each of the five elements is liberated through manifestation of its virtue as all virtue is absolute and never relative. The step back to the center of the circle is the same for each of the five elements as is the price to be paid for taking it; letting go of all reference points familiar to the conditioned mind-the ego’s fears and desires-the illusion of a separate self. Living any of these tenets will instantly result in an experience of the higher potentials inherent in freedom.
Constitution will likely persist physically and, perhaps evidence in the personality, but consciousness is free of it. Constitution is never an excuse for any particular behavior.
These five tenets, or principles of enlightenment within each element, allow the practitioner to hold an enlightened relationship to clinical practice. To the degree that any practitoner sincerely lives these tenets with integrity, he or she will have the ability to liberate the function of that element in another through the practice of medicine. Anything short of striving to live these principles will only allow the practitioner to help the patient feel better about where he or she already is.
Water; Will
Fire: Volitionality
Wood: Perspective
Metal: Transparency
Earth: Integrity
The point of my article is:
1. Only to the degree that a practitioner actually wants to be free more than *anything* else will they be able to liberate the water element in a patient.
2. Only to the degree a practitioner actually IS taking full responsibility for his or her life circumstances having renounced victimization can they liberate the fir element in a patient.
3. Only to the degree that a practitioner is Facing Everything and Avoiding Nothing and has renounced the right to hide *anything* from him or herself can they liberate the wood element in a patient.
4. Only to the degree that a practitioner is transparent (there is nowhere in his or her life they would mind others looking) and has renounced the right to take things personally can they liberate the metal element in a patient.
5. Only to the degree that a practitioner strives toward integrity and expresses gratitude for life through giving fro a selfless motive
can they liberate the earth element in a patient.
Anything less is collusion and can only help a patient feel more comfortable about who he or she already is. In this context, Chinese medicine is anti-evolutionary, in other words, conservative!
If I set my intention on freedom, more than anything else (water), I will take absolute responsibility for my life circumstances (fire), and be ready to face into whatever I must (wood) hiding nothing from myself, thus revealing that nothing is personal (metal) and that my own liberation is for the integrity of the whole (earth).
WATER: Will, Intention.
Setting one’s will on freedom “more than anything else” is the foundation of the spiritual path. Everyone has a bottom line and that bottom line will determine one’s actions under pressure. Conditioned water wants power, or the avoidance of power, more than it wants freedom. Fear transforms into wisdom in direct proportion to how much we gain knowledge of emptiness.
The mind, as a manifestation of the nervous system, is built evolutionarily to orient us in time and space through storing memory of our experience and our relationship to our experience. The human mind is compelled to know as a way of avoiding the fear that comes from facing emptiness. In the face of the unknown the mind goes crazy making up scenarios to fill in the blanks. These usually fluctuate wildly between the best and worse case outcomes. When we come to the edge of emptiness, that place where if we take even one more step risking that we will fall forever and never return, the mind demands to know what our life will look like on the other side. The mind wants to know *before* we take the step what the outcome will be before hand. But we can never know.
Before leaping, moving ahead is our worst fear because we may see something that causes our values to change. Things that were very important to us may no longer be and things that weren’t so important might become *very* important. If our values change our relationships might change. We might literally die to our former life.
After leaping the greatest fear is of ever going back to who and how we were.
Step after step, and never returning as our will is set on progress we gain confidence and conviction in the process and direction of becoming itself.
Faith is the conviction to proceed forward in the face of our fears for the sake of manifesting undreamt of potential, not for ourselves but for the evolution of consciousness itself.
FIRE: Volition
Fire is the emblem of that which never moves; consciousness itself. The North Star, the Sun, the Emperor, the Guru, and the Heart are all centers that must never move so that we have an absolute reference point to guide by. The emperor bares ultimate responsibility for alignment with the will of heaven evidenced by action rooted in emptiness (fire penetrating water). To the degree fire is conditioned, one experiences him or herself as a victim who has been betrayed, wounded, and traumatized. Conditioned fire wants connection, or denies connection, more than it wants freedom. Fire grants the capacity to recognize, in discovering emptiness as it’s source, that nothing ever happened or could ever happen to its pure motivation to create a more wholesome future.
In fire we realize that all past wounds or traumas are insignificant compared with our present and future potential.
Shen, spirit, is that part of ourselves that is interested in depth and its manifestation as ever higher potentials in the world.
Compassion means that we recognize only the authentic self, the highest, within all others as being real and are willing to take a stand for their own identification with that best part of themselves. Compassion means caring more for our patients integrity than we care about being liked by them.
To liberate fire we must:
1. Take responsibility for all our past actions that have created suffering for others.
2. Take responsibility for the consequences within ourselves for everything we have experienced.
WOOD: Perspective/humility
Humility means that, even though our perspective is rooted in heaven, we stand on earth. Because we are capable of perceiving the absolute does not mean that we *are* the absolute. After all, we live in a relative universe and, after 15 billion years of cosmic development matter has only begun to awaken as us in the last few thousand years. Humility means seeing clearly the nature of the gap between us and what has been revealed in our highest perspective to be possible. Wood empowers the ability to strive to close that gap by bridging heaven and earth.
Conditioned wood wants to be right more than it wants freedom.
To liberate wood we must: Face everything and avoid nothing.
This means that *everything* is always on the table for examination. We *want* to see our conditioning for the sake of being free. We literally renounce the need to have to hide anything that’s true from our own awareness. We become more concerned with truth than with preserving *any* structure from the past. We endeavor to hide nothing from ourselves and we seek relationships where nothing is hidden from us. Having the confidence that only that which is unwholesome will ever have to be let go of, we grow into the future without self imposed constraint.
Metal: Transparency/impersonality
Righteousness, the virtue of the metal element translates as, “not my will but thine”. In righteousness we surrender our will to the will of heaven recognizing the natural hierarchy between us and the absolute. Hence, the character yi, for righteousness, depicts the character for “self” under that for “king”.
To the degree that metal is conditioned, it identifies with surfaces and to the degree metal is liberated it identifies with depth. Metal is the mechanism by which we personalize our life experience. Literally nothing ingested is inside us until it is absorbed through the membrane of the lung or large intestine which literally define the boundary of self and not self. Pride is a self reflection on the surface of who and what we actually are. It is a self image that we imagine we are reflecting to the world. Pride is the quicker than quick response to hide from ourselves any action we may take that proves that we are indeed not perfect. Pride is the ego’s instantaneous response to deny our actual condition as revealed through our words and actions.
Conditioned metal wants affirmation more than it wants freedom.
The liberation of the metal element is through discovering the truth of impersonality. In this we renounce the need to possess any fixed sense of self. We recognize that we are, in fact, the leading edge of the process of cosmic development itself. The righteous relationship to this realization is the renunciation of pride and the acceptance of our responsibility with dignity.
Objectivity is realized in wood to the degree that metal has renounced the illusion of a fixed self. In metal we discover that nothing is personal that there is no fixed self structure that we invested in preserving.
Earth: Integrity: For the sake of the whole.
Earth represents the evolution of the motive for spiritual development. In water we set our site on freedom, “more than anything else” because we wanted to be free. We wanted relief from our own minds and the minds of others. In earth, our motive transforms to wanting freedom not for our own sake, but for the sake of the integrity of the universal process of evolution and development itself.
Conditioned earth wants comfort more than it wants freedom.
Integrity is a state in which center is maintained through constant development. In this fifth stage of development we now have firm ground on which to stand, from which we can unceasingly create a more wholesome future.le from the perspective of liberation.