Editor’s note: The author co-founded the Institute of Applied Metaprogramming and teaches this framework through the Certified Metaprogrammer (CMPr) course. The course is offered through Psychedelics Today’s Psychedelic Education Center under a revenue-sharing partnership. This piece was edited to PT’s standard editorial guidelines.
Every culture that has taken psychedelics seriously has eventually needed a map. The visionary states these substances open are too vast to navigate without some kind of coordinate system, something that tells a person, or someone guiding them, roughly where they are and what to expect next. In the American psychedelic underground of the 1970s, that map arrived largely through Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, whose 8-circuit model of consciousness has quietly shaped how several generations of psychonauts think about non-ordinary states. In classical Chinese medicine, another map has existed for over two thousand years in the theory of the five phases, elaborated with real psychological depth by Leon Hammer, MD, in Dragon Rises, Red Bird Flies. I’ve spent much of the last decade working at the overlap of these two systems, and I want to sketch what that overlap can offer clinicians doing psychedelic-assisted work today.
The Circuit Model, Briefly
Leary and Wilson proposed that consciousness develops through a series of neurological circuits, each imprinted during a developmental window and each capable of being reactivated or expanded later in life through a process of re-imprinting, or “metaprogramming,” via applied self-reflection. Non-ordinary states, psychedelics chief among them, are one of the more reliable ways to catalyze that process, which is a large part of why the model took hold so quickly in psychedelic circles. The first four circuits track roughly with developmental psychology: bio-survival patterning in infancy, emotional-territorial assertion in toddlerhood, symbolic and deductive reasoning in later childhood, and socio-sexual role-taking in adolescence. The second four, activated less by chronology than by specific practices or substances, describe more expanded or transpersonal modes of awareness: sensory rapture, metacognitive perspective flexibility, access to collective or ancestral memory, and non-local, unitive awareness. It’s this second set, largely inaccessible without deliberate intervention, that gives the model its particular relevance to psychedelic work. Wilson often described the threshold into it as Chapel Perilous, a state of ontological shock in which old maps of reality collapse before new ones stabilize, a description that will sound familiar to anyone who has sat with a client mid-session while their sense of self comes apart before it reorganizes.
The Five Phases, Briefly
Chinese medicine’s five phases (Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal) are usually taught as correspondences: organ systems, emotions, seasons, tastes. What Hammer’s work makes clear, and what I explored at length in my book Circuits and Shen, is that the five phases also trace a developmental and psycho-spiritual sequence, an unfolding of identity from earliest constitution through to transpersonal dissolution. Water grounds simple existence. Earth establishes boundaries and bonds. Wood asserts differentiation, the capacity to push back against the world. Fire claims positive selfhood and expressive will. Metal incorporates authority and refines the spirit through discipline and breath.
Where the Two Maps Meet
Reading these systems side by side, I’ve found consistent correspondences worth sketching here, along with a sense of what each pairing tends to look like when it actually surfaces in session work.
Earth corresponds to what has been explored as Circuit Zero, the prenatal and perinatal field overlapping with Stanislav Grof’s perinatal matrices, as well as to the threshold of Chapel Perilous itself. Earth governs boundary and incarnation before there’s a separate self to survive or assert. When that boundary destabilizes in a session, what surfaces often has the flavor of gestational or birth material, and patients frequently struggle to find language for it at all, since it predates language.
Water maps onto Circuits One and Five. Kidney-Water is constitution itself, the raw fact of being alive, which parallels preverbal bio-survival patterning. But Kidney yin, in Hammer’s language, is also the capacity to rest into something larger than oneself, closer to Circuit Five’s somatic, hedonic rapture than to survival instinct. In session work this pairing often shows up as an early, almost pre-verbal register of whether the body feels permitted to exist, before any specific content arrives.
Wood maps onto Circuits Two and Six. Liver-Wood governs assertion and boundary-testing, the territorial imprint of early childhood, and also governs the Hun, the aspect of spirit responsible for dreaming and for the perceptual flexibility that lets a person hold multiple reality-tunnels at once, close to a working description of Circuit Six. It’s a pairing I see often in higher-dose sessions: a patient moves within minutes from confronting old territorial anger toward a parent or partner into vivid, symbol-dense imagery with no obvious connection to that anger, as though the same charge is simply looking for a different circuit to move through.
Fire, particularly through the Small Intestine and Triple Burner organ systems, maps onto Circuits Three and Seven. Heart-Fire governs Shen, the spirit mind, and the capacity for symbolic awareness, closely tied to Circuit Three’s semantic reasoning. The Small Intestine’s job of separating the pure from the turbid is a physiological description of discernment. The Triple Burner functions less like an organ and more like a coordinating field across the whole body, a fair analogy for Circuit Seven’s neurogenetic, collective-memory function, the territory clinicians sometimes hear described as ancestral material that feels older than the patient’s own biography.
Metal maps onto Circuits Four and Eight, along with a secondary relationship to the Heart-Pericardium axis governing intimacy, sexual imprinting, and expansive shen states. Metal incorporates authority and social roles, a close match for Circuit Four’s social intelligence patterning, while its function of refining spirit through breath and letting go points toward Circuit Eight’s non-local, unitive awareness, the register patients most often reach for religious or mystical language to describe. In Hammer’s sequence, the return to unitive experience ultimately lands back in Water rather than terminating in Metal, which suggests the eight-circuit ladder may be better read as a circle than a straight climb, reflected in the psychedelic literature through Grof’s work and in transpersonal discussions of the Ground of Being, or in Chinese medicine terms, Dao.
What This Looks Like In Practice
For those well trained in them, classical TCM pulse and constitutional diagnosis (the core of Hammer’s clinical method) is able to give a practitioner a physiological read on which phase, and by extension which circuit territory, someone is currently resourced to work with, information that’s difficult to get any other way before a substance is administered. Someone whose Kidney yin is depleted may be poorly resourced for the kind of Circuit Five or Eight material a high-dose session can open, regardless of how ready they feel psychologically, which has direct bearing on dosing and how much unstructured time a session should include. Someone whose Wood phase is constrained may find Circuit Two material, anger, boundary, assertion, surfacing unexpectedly during work aimed at something else entirely, to be flagged to a sitter or therapist well before the session starts.
Where the eight-circuit model offers useful language for naming what kind of experience is unfolding, five-phase diagnosis offers an embodied, physiologically grounded way to assess whether someone’s constitution can actually metabolize what that circuit territory is asking of them, before the session even begins. In practice this shapes three concrete decisions: whether a patient is constitutionally ready for a given circuit’s material, how a session should be paced once it opens, and what kind of integration work will actually land afterward, since Water material calls for different aftercare than Metal material does. It also gives integration a second vocabulary. A patient who returns from a session with imagery they can’t yet name in Western psychological terms will often recognize it immediately once it’s offered back through phase language, because that language was built from physiology rather than theory.
This same phase-mapping extends naturally into traditional herbal medicine, both in preparation for and in integration support after a session. Formulas that address the Water phase to support the kidney and adrenal systems can help stabilize a person’s constitutional ground ahead of deep transpersonal work, while Wood-softening formulas are often useful in the days following a session that surfaces Circuit Two anger or boundary materials, easing the tendency to constrain rather than release. Fire phase oriented herbal combinations can settle an agitated mind after Circuit Three or Seven material proves overwhelming, Earth phase level grounding can help re-center and support perinatal territories when they come up, while Metal-based approaches can support through the grief that often follows letting go. None of this replaces the psychotherapeutic and somatic work integration requires, but it does provide targeted physiological support exactly where a session can place the most strain.
Classical Chinese medicine offers one more layer of value here: the I Ching, or Book of Changes, which I have explored at length in The Eight Dimensional Book of Changes. Where the five phases describe physiological and developmental territory, the I Ching’s sixty-four hexagrams, composed of 8 trigrams, each with a correspondence to the intelligence types in the 8-circuit model, work more like a mythopoetic grammar – a symbolic vocabulary for the specific quality of transition a person is moving through within a given circuit or phase, rather than a name for the territory itself. Exploring the I Ching provides insight as an image-based language for a state that plain clinical description tends to flatten – the same role myth and archetype have always played in mapping consciousness.
Western consciousness models and classical Chinese medicine rarely get put in direct conversation. Psychedelic practice is where they belong in the same room. One offers a map of the territory, while the other offers a way of reading the traveler.
