Taomeow

Great question. You actually use both true north and magnetic north in feng shui. Magnetic readings relate to qi of the Earthly Branches, and that's what you're working with when you take compass readings. True north relates to qi of the Heavenly Stems and is also taken into account but by different methods. Feng shui in its entirety is a study of interactions of heavenly, earthly, and man-made qi. So you take into account the action of the period, yearly, monthly cosmic qi on a particular configuration of earthly qi in a particular place. Man-made qi in the form of all manner of electrical devices (e.g.), metal doors, etc., mostly distorts the flow of earthly qi (a phenomenon known as "electromagnetic pollution") unless they are installed with knowledge of the appropriate placement (hardly ever the case). So when they interfere with your compass readings, you have to understand that not only must you re-take the readings away from such interferences but also note their existence and be aware that they interfere with YOUR magnetic field (and your qi) as much as they do with your compass. This "stray" or "distorted" qi (known to the Yellow Emperor as Ni Ta Qi, meaning "emptiness in a weak state exposed to perturbing forces") is not always man-made, much of xuan kong feng shui is dedicated to detecting and avoiding it. (Feng shui, like all Chinese health sciences, is highly preventive.)

Love the metaphor -- spot on! yes, rearranging furniture on the Titanic didn't do much for the several hundred industrialists who opposed the installation of the Federal Reserve... but don't let me deviate from the subject too far into alternative, and true, history. Rule of thumb is, the larger (cosmic, planetary) feng shui takes precedence over the local landscape and climate; the local landscape and climate take precedence over the architecture and orientation of the dwelling; the architecture and orientation of the dwelling (as well as its energy supply and waste disposal, i.e. electricity and plumbing) take precedence over the arrangement of the furniture inside; the arrangement of the furniture takes precedence over routine maintenance; routine maintenance takes precedence over feng shui remedies selected with xuan kong methods; feng shui remedies are very efficient if all the bases mentioned above as taking precedence are covered, and unable to function otherwise. Another rule of thumb: if everything in the house is good FS compliant but things go wrong all the time, look to ancestral graves for the problem, and fix it if possible. (It's not always possible. The second best way to enlist ancestral help is to install an altar and feed them. I'm not kidding.) Asians who use FS spend about 10 times more on yin feng shui (for the graves) than on yang feng shui (for their own dwellings). As for the compass readings, first, you need a good reliable compass. If yours is funky, get a good one. (I had a military one before I got a luopan.) Next, store it away from electromagnetic fields, and take measurements where no electrical anything is interfering. Make sure it's on a level surface when you take the measurements. If it's still acting weird, see if you can find out what lies beneath...

Oh, Yang style. Well, it's good to know that the long form is identical to Chen Manching's -- I am very wary of teachers who "invent" forms. Chen Manching got his Yang from Yang Chengfu, and it has to be identical unless he's a close blood relative (no one else has the right to change the family form -- or, if they do, they have no right to claim lineage, they have to present the form as their own. No taiji master in his right mind will do this to a lineage form. Only movie stars like Bruce Lee and other ego-driven showmen/women. ) But if it is identical why is it called something else? Unlike "what" to teach, "how" to teach it is up to the teacher, what you describe is not different from the way you would learn any long form piece by piece. Different teachers will spend different amounts of time on each move. We spent a few years on the form I practice (Chen laojia) with an incrementally increasing detailing of each move, did the whole form for a couple of years, and then started from the beginning at an even slower pace, again each move by itself but this time with more and more fine-tuning. It's great. The second time around it's like a different world. Not my experience. I've no idea what "seeing the frequency of energy" means, but I've seen great compassionate folks, friends some of them, who are formidable martial artists. The state your teacher describes is right on I think. But "there's no telling it anything" is for those who are not, how shall I put it, "entitled" to interfere. Someone who operates in tune with tao does not surrender her free will, only her free whim, so to speak, wrongful impulses to "do" or "not do" -- but not the capacity for co-creation, tao's gift to her children who are never, ever, at any level, her puppets. But don't let me digress too far.

Which school is that? The way I am taught, martial or healing or spiritual are all aspects of applications and they are all taught simultaneously, while the "level" is determined by your skill, not by which application you are using it for at a given moment. It is not a linear progression from martial to healing to spiritual. You can't view "martial" as "the lowest level" because it doesn't go away at the "highest" level and does not transform into something else without your intent, the area of application of your free will at all levels of training. How you are going to use your taiji and what for is a spiritual task for you to determine, which is there at all levels of your proficiency. In other words, taiji does not tell you what you want it for. You tell it what you want it for. As Chen Bing put it when he was giving a workshop at my school, "you don't serve taiji, taiji serves you."

Yes, it will be feng shui then.

Here's both -- xiantian in black, houtian in red. Notice that apart from those silly "sectors" or "life stations" invented by the black sect, another problem is eliminated from this one that the one you posted had -- namely, the unwarranted positioning of "earth" in the center AND in the SW simultaneously. The author of the diagram you posted confused two systems -- the diagram is of the bagua and the nine palaces, but the central earth is from one semi-traditional arrangement of wuxing (the more traditional one places wuxing phases in a circle, generating each other). In reality the center, both in xiantian and houtian bagua, is the 5th Palace, and this is a Flying Star and not "earth" from an entirely different ball of wax.

Oh bother. "Without my realization." Nope, I pretty much know what I'm doing here. January of 1957 is still a lunar month of 1956 by the lunar calendar. Someone born in January of this year would have to convert his or her year of birth to 1956 first (using the solar to lunar calendar converter based on Chinese New Year that falls on a different date of the Gregorian calendar every time) and THEN use the year obtained in order to calculate his or her ming gua. If you are using 1957 in the calculations you showed, it means you are already assuming 1957 is the lunar year of birth. But a January 1957 baby would have to use 1956. Ming gua of your example is, in the case of the female, Gen8West. Please understand that you can only calculate the ming gua using the lunar calendar; that any and all conversions have to have been done prior to doing this; and that Gen8West means many exciting and profound things but "solar to lunar calendar conversion" is not one of them.

This is not western calendar to lunar year conversion. This is ming gua calculation.

This is Lin Yun's black sect nonsense.

Well, however it is written, the important thing to understand is that taiji stores, not uses up, your jing, qi, and shen. (Issuing force -- fajin -- also does not mean you are using anything up, the circular moves return the expenditures of qi back to you, every "up" is followed by a "down," every "out" by an "in" and every "release" by "gather." Besides, you don't issue your muscular force in fajin, you issue a redirecting vector that interferes with the opponent's force rather than exerting your own. This, of course, is a later skill, beginners can be fully expected to fajin with li, muscular force, but a good teacher does not ask beginners to fajin until they know how.) So, unlike with all sports and hard style MA, you grow stronger with taiji as you grow older, instead of weaker. This is the beauty of this art, one of many -- you don't expect to reach a certain level and then go downhill from there, the way you would with skating or boxing or running or wrestling or gymnastics or anything else. You expect, and rightfully so, that for as long as you practice, your skill will keep growing, and there's no payback later, no enlarged heart and Parkinson's as in boxing, no arthritis and kidney and reproductive disease as in ballet and gymnasitcs, no busted knees as in running and football and what-not (with a caveat -- taiji has to be practiced under a knowledgeable master who will teach you how to keep your knees in good repair, they are the potential trouble spot in this endeavor if it's done incorrectly, but not at all if done with proper alignments), and so on. Of course someone very young does not always think ahead when choosing an activity, so this may or may not be a consideration. If you are not wowed beyond repair by the logic and beauty of taiji movements, you may be disappointed... but if you are, if something in you resonates with its inherent perfection, you will want that for yourself. My first encounter with my teacher of a few years was like that -- every cell of my body proclaimed, "this is who I want to be!" (not in the sense I want to be a Chinese male, of course, but in the sense of someone who owns space-time instead of renting it the way we all do...)

See my post #33 in this thread (with the link to another post answering the same question), you could start there. Moving the sofa is not likely to increase wealth (and everything else black sect has to offer is not likely to work any other way than, maybe, as a placebo in some cases -- anything can be a placebo). But if your ming gua and your sleeping position don't follow the rules of real good classical form-compass FS, chances are your sleep is not as peaceful and healthy as it could be if you moved it in one of your auspicious directions. (These are individual and fall into 2 major groups, East gua and West gua, with 4 good and 4 bad directions for each, and one "perfect" sleeping position for each. If your room allows for this kind of rotation of your bed, and you place it so the top of your head points to your perfect sleeping gua, you will notice the difference the very first night. Of course someone who is intrinsically lucky already has his or her bed in this position. Already lives in a home that is perfectly compatible with him or her feng shui-wise. And the opposite is also true. Someone who is unlucky already dwells in the house that will make it worse -- unless he or she wakes up to real feng shui possibilities, which, in a maddening vicious/benevolent circle, is more likely to happen to someone who already has some luck for this to happen. I've seen it many times. Bad luck sprouts more bad luck, good luck invites more good luck. All the more reason to discourage bad luck wherever possible and encourage the good kind.)

You jump to unwarranted conclusions. I did what??.. I did no such thing as a "divination for his job finding." I took compass measurements and a sketch of the position of the house we lived in and both places of work under consideration, superimposed the nine palaces, did xuan kong calculations, determined the position of the monthly and yearly stars. I determined the position of the beneficial and adverse qi phases in relation to my husband's wuxing type and ming gua. I found the location of the Grand Duke in relation to the two job places. I determined that there's a 5 Yellow in a deadly overlap with the 2 in the Southeast from where we lived, and a Fire-Metal clash (my husband's phase is Metal) in the same location in the same period. I detected a Poison Arrow straight between our home in NJ and the location of the purported new work place that was the WTC. All in all, I saw a feng shui disaster in the making, nothing positive in the layout of qi of the moment. I remedied with a Strong Water and Strong Wood installations in the 2-5 intersection in the house, and moved his sleeping position away from the Poison Arrow. Is what I did. (Perhaps more, I don't remember by now, it's been over a decade). You call it "divination?" Whatever. Just don't call me late for dinner.

Thanks for the great feedback, Clarity. Yes, the problem of "bad luck" for some folks is very real... bad luck which in other modalities might be called karma, but karma is judgmental and presupposes wrongdoings in the past and thus makes it sort of unnecessary to feel compassion or help the individual -- while "bad luck" is just a non-judgmental statement of a fact, no one presumes to know "why" someone is born under the unlucky stars/adverse qi (unless he or she is spiritually equipped to truly investigate and uproot the causes), but the understanding is that it may be wrongdoings in the past as one possible scenario, psychic attacks by malevolent entities as another, a curse on the individual, family, clan, or nation, spiritual battles lost to a powerful adversary, non-content and therefore non-helping ancestors (e.g. ones who died a violent death and didn't get a proper and restful burial), and on and on. In other words, "bad luck" may have causes but taoist understanding precludes one from pointing a self-righteous finger at the affected individual, withholding compassion, gloating, and so on. BIG difference from what I've seen some folks do who are enamored with the idea of "karma equals your fault." And, of course, this taoist position sanctions a proactive approach, not a fatalistic one. Bad luck should be corrected when possible, to the extent possible, and there's nothing wrong with working in that direction and nothing right with just "accepting" it. You don't passively accept punishment for crimes you may or may not have committed in other incarnations. You try to do and be good in this one. Good feng shui helps with that.

Karma is a borrowing from buddhism and not an original taoist concept. The original taoist concept is luck. Luck, in the classics, is threefold -- celestial, terrestrial, and human. Celestial luck is written in the stars and can't be changed. An example of that is your being born a boy or a girl, a younger or an an older brother or sister to another kid in the family, Chinese or Irish, and so on. Terrestrial luck can be changed partially -- you are born to a certain terrestrial position that may be subject to your conscious efforts to either maintain it or to change it, and these efforts may be ignorant in which case your luck might worsen, or educated or even wise in which case it can improve. And, of course the bulk of your influence on your luck lies in the realm of human luck. Here you have a say in your destiny. Feng shui gives you more say in your destiny. Or in those of others if you work for others, the way traditional feng shui masters always did. So, the knowledge of feng shui is the knowledge of luck as a force of nature. People are no strangers to adjusting their actions to forces of nature -- we wear clothes and shoes against cold, build shelters from the storm, etc., don't we? Feng shui can be viewed as part of this process of adjustments, but on a more profound, not immediately obvious (like cold on your skin or rain on your head) deeper level of nature's functioning in our lives. But then there's taoist sages. Cultivators of the different order of comprehension and participation. These can change even celestial luck. It can't possibly be every FS practitioner's goal, much like winning the Nobel prize can't be a realistic goal for ALL scientists...

Thanks for asking... Before I answer, I'd like to tell a FS story that contains part of the answer in its most dramatic form. In the year 2001, I was studying and trying to apply feng shui full throttle, with little sympathy from the family and friends, because nobody in my immediate environment "believed" in this "BS." So, one day my husband's company dissolved and he found himself out of work for the first time in his life, and it scared him briefly, to the point that he agreed I do some job-success FS rearrangements in the house. Next, head hunters descended on him like a swarm of flies, everybody wanted him (he's a top notch software developer and the market was strong at the time, so, no miracles there yet). He went to a few interviews, got three serious offers, narrowed down to two, and the two were hard to choose from, both had big advantages and big disadvantages. One was an easy commute, a good position, more money. The other one was a tough commute, a great position, a bit less money but a promise of the kind of bonuses that would dwarf the first one if materialized but were a gamble, not a certainty. He was leaning toward the first one. I did FS readings for both. The second one looked fine. The first, for reasons I didn't understand at the time, looked absolutely disastrous. I told him so, and convinced him that whatever he decides, whatever was wrong with that position should be counteracted with a FS remedy (a time-sensitive strategically placed one), and installed one. He was surprised that as soon as I did the people who wanted him for that position and used to call several times a day urging him to make his decision fast, like right this second, suddenly stopped calling, stopped returning his calls, and all but disappeared. Well, that settles it then, he shrugged and took the second position. His first day on the job was in the first week of September, 2001, just as it would have been with the other job. The other job, the one I averted with my FS, was on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center. There were no survivors on that floor on September 11.

It just came up yesterday or thereabouts: http://www.thetaobum...ms/page__st__64 As for online sources, there used to be a very good yahoo group (from way back when, before the advent of forums) -- Advanced Feng Shui -- I was a member for years, but I don't know what condition it's in today. It had mountains of references to all manner of resources. If you find it, you'll have enough stuff to dig through for years. The leaders of the pack were rather brutal to the ignorami though, most of the people who haven't done their homework were either ignored or told off rather unceremoniously, not like here. As for my live exposures, I've been lucky to have learned a bit and plan to study more. My understanding of feng shui is that everything you do with dwellings (whether for the living or for the dead) is "applied feng shui," huge in and of itself, but there's also "theoretical" feng shui that is the very heart of taoist sciences -- all of them -- of which applied feng shui is one... I've done a bit of that... I can fly the stars on my fingers with my eyes closed, and I do have (and use) a luopan with 21 rings, of which I understand about half to date...... also know a bit of space-clearing FS which you cited from your experience -- good stuff! -- and use an array of tools for that and even make them.

These are all schools I said earlier to steer clear of. All spun from "professor" Lin Yung, who invented this approach some 30 years ago and called it "Black Hat" or "Black Sect Buddhist Feng Shui" (which buddhists of the corresponding sect vehemently deny has anything to do with them). His students (and, notably, Sarah Rossbach with her lively writing style that won followers by radiating the charm and confidence all con art of the higher order must possess) wrote some of the first "Western FS" books and their students took it further -- the dilution of the dilution of the bogus -- interestingly, many of them are Chinese who don't know any better because the easy and bogus got the widest exposure (as often is the case) and the real, which involves a lot of study and work, digging for what isn't readily available, etc., does not become obvious to anyone just because he or she is a member of any given ethnic group. So, as things stand today, 95% of feng shui out there is this bogus stuff, what "everybody" has heard of as feng shui is those "sectors" -- Wealth, Relationships, all that jazz. Of course the bogus school incorporates some stuff from the real one, but it is useless because it is misused -- e.g. they're big on "remedies" (a whole industry has come into being selling those -- crystals to hang, flutes, wind chimes, images of animals, water fountains, etc.). Remedies are indeed used in real FS, but not the way they are used in the bogus version. They are time-sensitive and connected to the motion of the Flying Stars through the real (rather than imaginary) compass directions of the place, and are different for different years, months, sometimes even days. The bogus school ignores all the real energies of the world (celestial, terrestrial, and man-made) and substitutes man-made ones only, which of course is ridiculous if you think of it -- how can man "appoint" South and North, what's the North Pole Star, chopped liver? What's Jupiter, a non-consideration? with a mass greater than all other planets of the Solar System combined and a field of qi that's been making and breaking civilizations on this one for aeons? And so on. So, of course all those fixed-arrangement schools are bogus. Also all those "intuitive FS" deals. You do develop much intuitive understanding of these things AFTER you've worked for years with the form-compass approach, not before. You can't intuit everything all cosmic energies focused on a place are up to. Not even all terrestrial ones. Not even all man-made ones. There's a lot to perceive there... the best intuitives perceive some of it, but they may well miss the bulk of it, which is what real FS does not miss.

Nice. I have his book on the Water Dragon method somewhere. Well, top notch cultivation will "reveal" things that feng shui and astrology will take you through step by step, at some point advanced cultivation meets advanced feng shui, key word "advanced." But feng shui IS cultivation by other means -- it develops your ling, "supernatural intelligence," gradually but surely. I was rather blown away when a taoist TCM doctor in China looked at me for a minute and muttered "Wood with Fire" -- which I know from my astrological chart. I doublechecked -- does he mean a "diagnosis" of sorts? No, "the type," inner feng shui, inner climate. What you were born to be. That's astrology on sight. Don't tell me "anyone" who's dabbled in cultivation can do that, 'cause I know for a fact no dabbler can, and no beginner. So feng shui and astrology are a bit of a shortcut to knowledge that you would perhaps get by other means by investing much more time and effort. (The doctor used to practice MA for 8 hours daily and study and qigong and meditate and work assisting his teachers most of the rest of the time.) Yeah, because taoism I know and love ain't no climber's ambition toward any mountain top. But that's the nice thing about feng shui -- it functions to your benefit regardless of what you believe in. 'cause, you know, it's not a belief system. At all. (I mean the real thing of course, pop feng shui is, obviously).

Thank you, Snowmonki. I haven't read it, not really familiar with his work except in passing, but from the little I've seen he's got some interesting stuff.

There's no feng shui experts who could give you an accurate assessment without doing a lot of serious work with your and your house's natal charts. If such work hasn't been done, they either weren't experts or didn't have all the necessary information to utilize their expertise properly. Then again, 2 years is not long in the life of a house or a person. Feng shui is long term. My parents lived in a place that had mixed-blessing but mostly bad feng shui for 20 years. The first years there were happy, then everything started going the way the place's feng shui predicted it would ("luck will come but won't stay."). Alas.

All right, I'll oblige. Feng shui is the original world view/science/practice of the ancient Chinese civilization which later became known as taoism. To put it concisely, shamanism > feng shui > original taoism. Taoism, in its turn, got influenced (whether enriched or impoverished is in the eye of the beholder -- I behold impoverishment, but many will disagree) by the imported Indo-European religions (primarily Buddhism but also the rest of the major ones) as well as the emergent new paradigm developed and honed to serve the ruling class for the purpose of solidifying its disproportionately usurped power -- Confucianism. As a result, some of the new taoist schools and sects eventually lost their emphasis on the original, Chinese proper and taoist proper, approaches to reality, substituting the imported and/or forcibly superimposed goodies instead. So today you can find an array of schools and sects that think of themselves as "taoist" that retain varying amounts of taoism proper, sometimes only the flavor, sometimes no more than a name. If you remove these from consideration and approach taoism as what it is minus all the foreign interventions, you are left with feng shui. So, a discussion of feng shui is a discussion of taoism proper, and vice versa. In the past few decades "fung shuay" has been "introduced" to the West just as it was largely removed from circulation in mainland China (the Red Guards used to "reform" practitioners of this "bourgeois/feudal superstition" by imprisoning them, sending to forced labor, starvation, or execution), so a modern person, whether a Westerner or a Chinese, is likely to be treated as a mushroom in this regard (kept in the dark and fed shit, that is) unless he or she understands the whole historic perspective in which "fung shuay" is currently occupying a wrongfully and purposely marginalized place instead of the magnificent all-encompassing ancient holistic wisdom it really is. Without such understanding, forays into taoism are futile and yield nothing but fragmented snippets of useless trivia, practices that may or may not have anything to do with what a given person would really benefit from practicing, and sow seeds of disappointment to reap in one's later years. Also sprach Taomeow.

I've been recommending Elizabeth Moran/Val Biktashev's "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Feng Shui" to all beginners for years, despite the idiotic title that is likely to spook off people who take themselves and their studies seriously. It was the first book that spelled out the basics for me many, many moons ago, and I still find that its forte is that it is systematic and goes over all the fundamental notions of taoism (albeit in passing on occasion) without skipping any of the essentials before proceeding to practicalities. Elizabeth is a student of Joseph Yu, who is a serious xuan kong feng shui master (very expensive), and her guide's second edition was revised by him and got rid of a whole bunch of bugs and inaccuracies that were present in the first edition. Val comes from a direct lineage going way back, to pre-taoist Siberian masters if he's telling the truth, which I have no reason to doubt, considering the quality of his work. So, I wouldn't hesitate recommending this one to anyone who wants to get a systematic approach to taoist cosmology, ideology and physiology (which is what feng shui really is, contrary to what you may have heard from pop sources referenced by QiDragon) going in the right direction. There's a few other nice beginner's guides out there (if you steer clear of the Lin Yun/Sarah Rossbach/Black Hat/Black Sect Buddhist etc. "western" FS) but they all have their drawbacks -- a bit too dry (Eva Wong's), a bit too advanced for a beginner (David Twicken's), a bit too popsy (Lilian Too's), quite a bit inaccurate (most of the rest). Of course I might be missing something.

(drops her cup of coffee on her keyboard, etc.)

Thank you, very nice! If you're starting a new series (look forward to it!), not to impose on your artistic will or anything but just a thought... your diagram suggests a yang-qi flow on the outside (clockwise spirals) -- asking for a mirroring diagram of yin-qi flow (counterclockwise spirals) -- a sister painting? There's an approach to xiantian-houtian interactions that suggests xiantian is not really static (a view a bit shocking even for me, but classical) despite its perfect balance, that it is upheld in this state by a backward flow of qi in the counterclockwise direction folding it all inward, accumulating tremendous potential power inside. In the realm of humans, this corresponds to the prenatal development, with its inward flow and silent, invisible growth -- silent and invisible but not static. The flow of qi to a fetus in the womb (mirroring and rotation) streams counterclockwise from particular trigrams of the Earlier Heaven as it passes through stages of its development, absorbing and embodying the properties of each as it goes, as well as going through all the Nine Palaces of the Magic Square (one per month) and internalizing their numbers (or flying/floating stars, as they are otherwise known, cosmic energies forming the "number" that is an actual pattern of qi rather than merely an abstract symbol). Fun stuff!

Yeah, me too... I always have mixed feelings about these threads. You know, the bread and butter (or, rather, the rice and soy sauce) of all things taoist. The basics. What I come back to again and again trying to ganying with "it all" and then am surprised that I can't ti "it all" in houtian, and then, duh, yeah right. But then I see that hardly anyone bothers with studying the basics, and it shows and shows and shows. And you know how fruitful it is to "go there," the things you find! The art, the inspiration, the it-all-makes-senseness of it all! Speaking of making sense... I'm also usually surprised to see hundreds of diagrams out there and very few of them "quite right." E.g., if they are going to split it into time periods, how about a Chinese day-night unit has 12 hours, each comprised of 2 "our" hours, the first part yang, the second yin, and they give you a diagram that adds up to 10 -- so I start thinking, should I say something? -- then I see the discussion in full swing going god only knows where more often than not (ChiDragon, you are an inspiration for my silence more often than not, thank you, you're gonna make a sage out of me one of these days, a silent non-doing one, because as soon as you touch a thread having anything to do with the basics I drop my cup of coffee on my keyboard and my keyboard on my lap and my lap into a kneeling position of prayer -- Merciful Quan Yin, send him a teacher!) Anyway...