Law of Five Elements, revisited
July 29, 2024•662 words
As mentioned in the Law of Five Elements post, this law states that every living thing goes through five stages of birth (and unstoppable growth), maturation, peaking, declining and eventualy dying.
These stages in perspective of a human life, look like:
birth and unstoppable growth until about the age of 20. This first phase is so powerful that we never saw a baby remain a baby. Think about this miracle of life - no disease or a condition has ever prevented a human from becoming a toddler before continuing to evolve to a grownup. This first stage of life is called the Wood stage as we see little saplings have the power to break stone and concrete, bursting through on their way to maturation.
the maturation stage is the time of connection - this is when we are focused on "finding our soul mate", looking to connect with others on all levels and to couple up, if we can. This is a time of intellectual and physical maturation as well and the time for passion and fire. It is represented by fire - this stage in our life is called Fire element and it takes another 20 years.
by the time we reach 40, most humans stop looking for a partner, at least before the "40 is the new 30" came along. While leaving the connection behind, we actually enter the phase of Earth - we are at the top of our might in every way: smarter and more experienced then any 20 year old, we can run circles around the young people. Our physical strength peaks somewhere in our 40 or early 50 and so does our stamina, the long distance energy. The only thing that the younger people would have on a 40 something year old is explosivness of a sprint - in every other regard they are struggling to compete. Earth is the phase where we are mature so we are ready to become "mother Earth" to others - to give, take care and contribute. Like Wood and Fire, Earth is also a 20 year phase.
the fourth phase is called Metal phase for the rigididy people in their 60s and 70s display. Churchill observed this when he said that "if you're not a liberal in your 20 - you have no heart but if you're not a conservative in your 40s - you have no brain". The pattern is universal - all things as they age become less flexible and more rigid. In humans, we don't see this just on the physical level, we see it in our thinking (intelectual), our emotional self becomes settled and difficult to shift, our spirituality seems to rise and the questions of religion and conservation seem to become more interesting...
finally, in the Water phase, humans achieve wisdom that is not available to the young ones. We used to celebrate the gray haired elders for the wisdom their experience gave them and we used to think of the elderly as people who pursue deep subjects and understand things better then the average person. In Chinese culture there is still great reverence for the ancestors and their struggle to bring us to the level we are at now... the image for Water Element is the still waters of the mountain lake, dark - almost black, deep and mysterious.
Chinese medicine took the Law of Five Elements to a next level and identified the organs (officials) that correspond to each Element as we saw in the post on emotional HIY test. But they didn't stop there - they show us how different organs form relationships between them as the energy in the human body flows to feed every one of them (as mentioned in the Body Clock post). And they explained that the Five Elements explain our emotions and the imapact our emotions have on specific organs in a two way relationship of the effect becoming it's own cause.