The Five Phases

"Oh, Protector Star of the Center!
Mysterious Perfected and Powerful Ruler
Of the Unified Energy of the Yellow Middle!
You spread brilliance and flowing brightness
Through all the Nine Heavens"

                                                                          Kohn p.115

The Fusion of the Five Phases formulae honors the connection to the center without losing the five individual qualities of your personality. The five candles represent the five shen. Each one reflects a different color but it is one flame. The original chi, streaming out of the void, radiates through different filters out like a prism, to different streams of chi and serves different functions but it always connects back to the void, to its origin.

On the postnatal plane all energy is fused into one central pearl which is your local consciousness. If you are fragmented it is hard to shift levels and this makes it difficult to see yourself from a deeper level. This practice works to unify your consciousness and allows you to go deeper inside to open the door to prenatal chi and the sea of jing. With practice, you can learn to hold the door open and allow grace to radiate out from inside of you.

Metal- lesser yin: color white or gold, Lung and Large Intestine channels

Water- greater yin: color blue/black, Kidney and Urinary Bladder channels

Wood- lesser yang: color green, Liver and Gallbladder channels

Fire- greater yang: color red, Heart and Small Intestine, San Jiao and Pericardium channels

Earth- the center: color yellow, Spleen and Stomach channels

The five agents are associated with the body's innate intelligence that the Chinese called the shen, or spirit. This is the inborn intelligence that tells the body to sweat when it is hot and shiver when it is cold. It makes the chi flow through the channels in an ordered manner. The five shen are the functional aspects of your personality. They are the committee that is running the energy body and the autonomic nervous system 24/7. Each shen reflects a different color but it is one flame, one life force. The original chi radiates out of the void through different wavelengths to different streams of chi but it all goes back to the origin.

"Order them all

To fuse together and be single-minded…"                       Kohn p.110

The Chinese visualized the shen as spirits who controlled the flow of chi in the paired channels associated with each of the five zang fu organs as follows:

The kidney jing is considered the root of the chi of the body. Being the Water element the kidneys have water's ancient wisdom of how to survive in this world of form and substance. Its negative virtue is fear, it fears losing form in this body. Spirits are undifferentiated energy and can not understand form, they have to combine and come to this dimension to learn about form. In Taoist literature the blue pearl is associated with the Blue Maiden or the Goddess wisdom.

The Liver is the Wood element and its virtue is kindness. The liver moves energy, it takes action. It extends energetically out into the world and shares the kidney's wisdom with everyone. It has true compassion coming from a neutral space. Its negative aspect is anger, anger at the loss of form due to breakdown of the body, anger because the wisdom of the kidneys is ignored. Wood fuels the fire.

The Heart's element is fire and its positive virtue is love and acceptance. It is not worried about life and death; it just seeks love and shines its light on all around it. Its negative aspect is hatred and intolerance. If there is no support from wisdom and kindness then the heart can become hard and cold, filled with hate and rage. It has no patience if the other shen won't support it so it can shine.

The Spleen's element is earth and virtue is trust. The earth holds the center for the other shen to be able to meet. Its negative aspect is faithlessness. Without trust the center doesn't open, there is no ground for the positive charge.

The Lung's element is metal and its virtue is personal integrity. The lung is considered the ruler of the other organs and is an agent of change in the rest of the body. It is your personal consciousness; it manages the kidney energy and helps it form a container for the jing which becomes the physical body. Through personal strength it continues to breathe in air for our entire life span. It desires to keep life going, to stay connected to the other shen. They generally tell that you are dead when you stop breathing for any length of time.

This practice helps us to trust the ocean of our own body, the prenatal sea of chi. We have to trust that whatever we need is in there, we don't have to look outside of ourselves. We don't have to ask anyone for our own healing potential and so we don't need to worry about them withholding it from us. We respect masters, past and present, but we also realize that our higher shen are inside of us and so this is an internal process.

We don't need energy from another when we have it already and so no power-over relationships are created. We then can build healthy community relationships based on sharing and teaching, not energy vampirism. This is the precise place where Taoist practices are often distorted and used for ego fulfillment and power over relationships. The path becomes "crooked" and the communities dark and cult like.