My inspiration to blog about this comes from a chat with a friend A who shared about her and her friends’ encounter with a fortune teller.  She and that group of friends were all ladies, single and had not much luck in love all these while.  In fact, one of them, let’s call her B,  had considerably worse luck in this aspect as she was hurt twice by jerks in the course of her romantic encounter.  It was one of those days when the mood beckons that B decided to pay a visit to this fortune teller for consultation and naturally brought along her group of single friends which included A who was single thenand other friends which included another lady C.

This fortune teller’s modus operandi comes in the form of reading people’s fortune by pulling out poker cards that were shuffled by the client.  It was not clear if the ladies had unwittingly let out some information of the state of matter for B in the course of conversation with the fortune teller.  But he was able to predict that B had bad luck in romance because she always meet “bad Peach Blossom烂桃花” in Chinese, which means that she, in terms of  her romantic relationship matters, always meets the bad guys.

The solution proposed by the fortune teller? A pair of scissors to be placed in the Southwest corner of the room/house of lady B.  He reasoned that the scissors will cut away the negative “Peach Blossom” and that Southwest is the love corner which is reserve for Fengshui-ing romance and love matters.  The ladies were curious and enquired whether the scissors will “cut” away all romantic relationships alike, whether it be with good or bad guys.  The fortune teller then justify by explaining to them that good guys or good romance will not be cut away and the scissors only acts on bad guys and bad relationships.

He then proceeded to display his “generous” and “altruistic” side by telling the rest of the single ladies that Southwest is the universal love corner in Fengshui.  Since the ladies are single, they can turbo-charge their love corners in the Southwest by placing flowers and crystals.  Like typical girls starved of good romance, these ladies with the exception of A, are willing to try the cures for romance recommended by this fortune teller. The reason why A did not follow the recommended cure is because the Southwest corner in her room is placed the bed, and she could not place those items suggested by the fortune teller.

Now, fast forward to 2-3 years later and what is the romantic fate of these girls?  For Ms B, she is still single and in fact, had not gone on dates with guys since activating the Southwest corner of hers.  For Ms C and the rest of the unnamed gals, they are still single.  As for Ms A, who had fortunately or unfortunately not adopted the recommended Fengshui cure, she is married! 

Now, with the facts of this case, it would strongly suggest that the Southwest may not be the universal Fengshui-able love corner.  Even if it is, it may not be effective enough just to activate this corner by flowers and crystals.  The outcome to Ms B also suggested that good guys or good romance are not invincible against the scissors as claimed by the fortune teller.  As for the outcome to Ms A, it shows that a stroke of good luck and her own sensible action in seeking romance is more effective than those poorly thought-out cures.

Is it possible to use Fengshui or Chinese Metaphysics knowledge to enhance the chances of good romantic encounters?  Yes it is possible but defnitely not as simple as activating a universal love corner!  In Zi Wei Dou Shu, it is certainly possible to differentiate where the good and bad romantic encounters are coming from and tune accordingly.

Ken: “Oh congratulations so did my fengshui help you have second one? hee”

Friend: ” It sure did.  Thanks.  Will consult u one more time…..”

This is the exchange of text messages with a friend yesterday.  You see, after having their first kid, the wife of the friend developed chronic back spasms and that has been a huge stumbling block on their efforts to have a second child.  Marrying the methods of Zi Wei Dou Shu and Xuan Kong Flying Star, I set up to tune their house Feng Shui with procreation as one of the chief objective.

It feels good to have indirectly helped to create marital bliss and bring a baby to this world.

Chinese Metaphysics, or what layman know as Feng Shui, is often ostracized by non-believers for instigating people to believe in superstition and supernatural when scienctific explanations would have been much more convincing.  As such, it has led to a plethora of attacks on the Feng Shui practice, like what the TV hosts Penn & Teller has sought to achieve in their show.

It is very easy to discredit a practice like Feng Shui because Metaphysics is defined by Wikipedia as “investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science”.  When it transcends science, how many mortals can understand it and explain it convincingly to detractors?

Feng Shui is not superstitious.  It merely looks superstitious because it is beyond science and hence science cannot explain it and neither can humans.  How do you expect a kid to explain the action of his parents?  Since Feng Shui transcends science, one cannot get a satisfactory explanation of Feng Shui using scientific principles.

Furthermore, the development of the Feng Shui practice has not been helped by its followers.  A lot of the followers of Chinese Metaphysics and Feng Shui are Chinese themselves.  Throughout the history of China, Chinese has demonstrated a streak of selfishness and tendency to fight within themselves.  For example, Chinese Medicine has a history of more than 2000 years old which is several times older than that of Western Medicine.  Yet, the world has embraced Western medicine as the defacto source of cure and they cannot envisage that Chinese Medicine has cures that even Western Medicine do not possess.

Another example of this self-destruction among Chinese is the penchance to try to outperform or discredit fellow enthusiasts or practitioners in the field of Chinese Metaphysics.  Frequently we see incessant criticisms and attack by a person on another person or group practising or following another method which he viewed as as a rival faction.  Like the Penn & Teller show, it is too easy to find an obscure example or clever manipulation of the environment or parameters to discredit a Feng Shui practice.

If even Feng Shui enthuasiasts and practitioners can be going all out to discredit someone with the same beliefs, what more outsiders who are like Penn & Teller?  Sometimes I wish fellow enthusiasts in Chinese Metaphysics wisen up and not be the proverbial “divided loose grains of sand”.  If we help each other in this interest group or profession, Chinese Metaphysics & Feng Shui as a whole stands to gain.  We as enthusiasts and practitioner of the same field stand to gain too.  After all, one famous Chinese saying by the victimized Cao Zhi in the Romance of the 3 Kingdom goes “Why cannibalize one that is of the same family?”

How can we help each other?  By treating fellow practitioners and enthusiasts as allies and suggest areas of weakness as points to consider for improvement.  By not treating fellow practitioners and enthusiasts as rivals and going all out to attack one perceived point of fallible practice or advocate.

Some Feng Shui Masters also like to advertise themselves as being the anointed Feng Shui Masters for celebrities, politicians and VIPs.  The destiny and luck of such high profile persons are markedly better and hence even an average Feng Shui Master may be made to look better than they are by riding on the good luck of such high profile persons.

Avoid Feng Shui Masters that appear regularly on television programs because such programs typically are sponsored by these Masters and sponsorship costs can be prohibitive.  You get a good sense of who is the end customer who is eventually paying for such prohibitive sponsorship cost.

An overly commercialized Feng Shui Master will logically have little time spend to upgrade his knowledge to stay relevant.  While Feng Shui is an art that originated from ancient time, we are living in modern society whereby the houses are built and customs are practised very differently from the times when those Feng Shui classics were written.  A lot of the Feng Shui methods handed down from such classics may no longer be relevant in modern society.  Hence, choose a Feng Shui Master that is hands-on and flexible whom you can trust to tailor their Feng Shui methods according to the needs of people living in the contemporary society. 

Do not be surprised that the above is critical because Feng Shui also evolves with time like any other services.  Ask yourself whether a man living in contemporary society like you will like a dish that was cooked exactly the same way 1000 years ago? Hence, avoid Feng Shui Masters that repeats like a broken record, that they practices only Classical Feng Shui. 

I have also noticed that the half-baked Feng Shui practitioners tend not to be in the business of teaching Chinese Metaphysics presumably because they run a significantly higher chance of meeting and being embarrassed by enthusiasts who more often than not, are students instead of service-procuring customers.

Lastly, an overly commercialized Feng Shui Master is overly focused on profit and fame that they may be dodgy in the process.  For example, some of them claim to know Zi Wei Dou Shu but what they really did was to outsource the reading of Zi Wei Dou Shu to another firm.  If you approach them personally to discuss Zi Wei Dou Shu, they will find excuses not to entertain you.  They will also not give free Zi Wei Dou Shu advice because they need you to pay so that they can pay the firm whom contracted the Zi Wei Dou Shu reading assignments.    

Another unglamorous act of such overly commercialized Feng Shui Master is to subcontract authoring of books to little known Feng Shui academics that write for a living.    Releasing an avalanche of books that includes such Yearly Horoscope or Forecast books can boost their visibility and reputation.  What comes as a surprise to many is that the contents of such books are usually shared or circulated among Feng Shui practitioners who have formed an alliance.  I have come across quite a few instances whereby a few of such books are uncannily similar, word for word and page for page.  In any case, such books are usually ineffective simply because using 12 zodiac animals to speak of the luck of the people is as general as talking about the luck of people in the 7 different continents!

Feng Shui is a quite a sophisticated and abstract subject to the average man in the street.  To the layperson, hiring a Feng Shui practitioner is quite a challenging task because he would not know how to assess the competency of the Feng Shui practitioner.  Yet, if he did not get a highly competent Feng Shui practitioner, he would, at the minimum, be wasting the fees he is going to pay for the Feng Shui audit.  However, if he gets really unlucky, he could hire a Feng Shui practitioner that accelerates the death of his son or the rape of his daughter.

Feng Shui being such a highly abstract and yet unregulated industry, has naturally seen to the proliferation of quacks who are in this industry to make easy money.  It is unfortunate that these quacks are giving the Feng Shui profession a bad name.  For the benefit of our readers who are believers in Feng Shui, I have come up with some simple questions and considerations for clients to ask and consider the professionalism of their prospective Feng Shui consultant. 

For a start, customers may ask if the prospective Feng Shui consultant knows Ba Zi and Zi Wei Dou Shu.  It is highly preferred that he knows both these art of Chinese Astrology.  The next question is ask is for him whether he thinks consideration of Chinese Astrology affects the Feng Shui recommendations he is going to make.  The acceptable answer is only yes.

Following this, the customer may ask him to describe how he would use Ba Zi and Zi Wei Dou Shu to carry out the Feng Shui recommendations.  Admittedly the answer to this question may be beyond the comprehension of most customers but yet it is pertinent to assess his confidence and the reasonableness of his answer.

Prescribing cure blindly

Chinese Metaphysics consist of many individual fields which can be classified into broad categories of Astrology, Feng Shui, Divination and Strategy. One of the common misconceptions is that these are stand-alone fields and that practicing one does not require knowledge and streamlining with other fields of knowledge. In addition, many held the belief that Astrology subjects like Ba Zi (4 Pillars) and Zi Wei Dou Shu (ZWDS) are merely tools to foretell our fixed-capacity destiny and fortune and Feng Shui solely holds the key to betterment of one’s outcome and luck.

In actual fact, destiny is not entirely fixed.  If destiny is entirely fixed, what is the use of consulting a doctor or surgeon for one’s illness? Geomancy tools are effective only up to the extent it complements one’s destiny and the key to betterment of one’s outcome and luck lies in using holistically using Geomancy, Divination and Strategy to support one’s destiny.   A simple way to view this is to look at human as the object and Feng Shui, Divination and Strategy as the tool. Astrology is tool to decipher human’s well-being and hence takes precedence over Feng Shui, Divination and Strategy in the scheme towards improvement of one’s outcome.
 
Providing Feng Shui solution to client without considering their Ba Zi & Zi Wei Dou Shu charts is like a doctor prescribing medicine to patient without his own diagnosis. A Geomancer prescribing Feng Shui tools to improve wealth for his client upon request is like a doctor who prescribes aspirin to his patients because he relied on his patient to tell him the symptom of headache but did not investigate or is incapable of investigating if the headache is a symptom to other underlying illness.
 
It may cure the symptoms in the short run but problems may surface in the long term. For example, clients usually engage a Geomancer to improve their wealth. If this consultant did not consider the ramifications of the client’s birth data, he may hasten the windfall his client had asked, but in the long term this client may lose his health or life. Or he may get the career advancements he asked for but end up losing his wife to divorce. The various aspects of one’s life are intricately linked and you seldom can improve one aspect without losing out on other aspects. Destiny is also a zero-sum game.

How important are knowledge of 4 Pillars and ZWDS towards the execution of Geomancy?  Stay tuned for the answer in my next article.

What is Fengshui? Fengshui is an art of Chinese Metaphysics that seeks to identifies and seeks to harness the energies of the universe to improve the outcome to individuals.  Fengshui is thought of by non-believers as superstitions while by believers as a tool to improve luck. While there more accurate but technical definitions of Fengshui, it can fit loosely into the layman description of a tool to improve luck.

Many people had the mistaken impression that luck is random and it is futile to use Fengshui to tap on “good luck”. In actual fact, there are 2 types of luck, one of which is strategic, while the other type is random.  Fengshui is designed to tap on the strategic aspects of luck we normally termed as “Opportunities” and “Performance” rather than other type of luck that is random in nature. Using the simple analogy of a soccer player, Fengshui seeks to improve his ability to create more shooting chances and his rate of successful conversion of opportunities.

How does Fengshui achieve this objective? It seeks to deliver the environment that is most suitable to one’s talents and endeavours. So what are the characteristics of such environment that are in line with Fengshui considerations? Essentially some of the characteristics of good Fengshui like peaceful, good air quality, clean environment, conducive temperature, lighting are apparent to all. They all bring about a great living environment that will bring benefits to its occupants which ultimately translates to better personal performance in their endeavors.

Besides these apparent characteristics of the physical environment, there are other aspects of Fengshui considerations, both physical and non-physical that are less apparent. The less apparent physical consideration would be how the landforms around the house we lived in are shaped and situated. The less apparent non-physical considerations would be governed by the Fengshui formulas. 

Note that physical landforms have the same Fengshui impact on different people. An electric pylon will exert the same effect on the people living at the same house or units of a block facing it. However, the outcome on the different people is not the same and can be attributed to an individual’s astrological influence at birth. The Fengshui formulas determine who are affected by the physical landform as well as which are the type of Fengshui energies suitable to each individual and how the house will help him in harnessing the suitable type of energies for his type of endeavors.

So is Fengshui a superstition? No, unless we were to say the same of the soccer player who trains himself to create more shooting chances and higher rate of conversions. Another big no if we consider Fengshui also abhors noise, air, visual and other forms of pollution like science and common sense do.