The first class in the cosmology series by Heiner Fruehaf. He basically laid out the philosophical foundations for the material we're about to study; ideas that are both relatively foreign to "western" thinking as well as integral to the Chinese medicine framework.
One of the central ideas was of the nature of reality and man and the idea of "levels of reality": This map of reality has 5 realms which start with the dao, which can be thought of as the world before it was manifested; the ultimate energetic and ethereal realm. On the opposite end is Qi, the material world (the character for Qi is a vessel surrounded by 4 dogs which might represent the guarding of earthly possessions). In the middle is the realm called Xiang, halfway in between the realms of energy and matter. This is the realm in which chinese medicine operates in.
Hierarchies of thought, of energy, reality thus play an integral role in the medicine. "Energy informs matter" and thus the root of any physical manifestation can be considered to be a primarily energetic and spiritual phenomenon. The highest level of physician, "Shang Gong", can operate and influence the patient on this energetic level, where the lowest type of physician, "xia gong", has only the capability to practice "cook book medicine", looking up specific remedies for physical symptoms without necessarily addressing the underlying energetic cause.
Because the very nature of reality is so elusive in this worldview, the study of Chinese Medicine makes great use of symbols. The organs as specified in Chinese medicine are not the literal structures in the body but rather symbolic descriptions of functional energetic patterns. Thus, "every cell has a liver". Each organ is described with several different symbolic frameworks in order to shed light on different facets of its nature.
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