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What is Feng Shui?
What is a Remedy?
Schools of Feng Shui
Feng Shui as Chinese Geomancy
History of Feng Shui
What is Feng Shui?
The premise of Feng Shui is that your home or place of business shapes you
by having a profound effect on your health, vitality, attitudes, and
fortunes. Feng Shui is Chinese geomancy, an ancient system used to determine
the beneficial or harmful nature of land and buildings on the people
residing there. A building and its decor form a system that creates and
radiates an energy field. The energies affecting you in your place are
determined by the land, neighborhood, town, and region around you, the
building (earth), time cycles (heaven), direction (connecting man to land
and building), and placement. The goal is to connect heaven, earth, and man
in perfect harmony.
Feng (wind) refers to the flow of health-giving chi, and Shui (water)
represents wealth. Good Feng Shui means a place is good for people and
health, and also good for wealth. Accurate Feng Shui adjustments will open
up the energy to opportunities for prosperity.
Chi, the life-force energy necessary for health and vitality, flows easily,
or not, through the place you reside. This life-force energy is affected by
the location of water (or streets) and the shape of land (or buildings)
around you, polarities of Yin and Yang (balance), placement, symbology,
shapes, colors, light, the fortunes of who lived or worked there before,
along with many other things in your decor and landscaping. Every building
has areas of auspicious energies which can be activated and negative
energies which can be remedied or suppressed. The FengShui practitioner,
together with your intent and participation, changes energies to bring your
home or office to balance, harmony, and the highest life-force chi possible
to support your highest goals.
What is a Remedy?
A remedy is the placement of an element or other, used to balance energies
in a space to suppress and neutralize negative energies, and to activate and
enhance the positive chi that already exists. Other branches of Feng Shui
emphasize symbolic representations of the elements and transcendental
remedies. These also are effective, but the classical school believes that
using the called for element itself is the most effective energetic remedy.
The goal of a remedy is to achieve perfect balance in an environment,
bringing harmony, enabling health, empowering vitality, creativity,
productivity, and prosperity for the person there.
Schools of Feng Shui
The original school in the development of Feng Shui was the Form School.
This school considered the forms in the landscape, the location of water and
weather patterns as the chief determiners of where and how to orient
buildings.
From that derived the Compass School, which added in the analysis element of
time and direction derived from compass readings, mathematical calculations
and observations made over millennia (astrology).
Form and Compass schools make up what is known today as the “classical” or
“traditional” schools of Feng Shui. These schools are considered both art
and science, and are not connected in any way to religion.
In the last half of the 20th century Grandmaster Prof. Lin Yun brought a
branch of Feng Shui called BTB (Black Sect Tantric Buddhism) to the West.
This branch can be described as symbolic or intuitive Feng Shui, and uses
more symbolic and transcendental remedies than the Compass School, which
relies more on elemental remedies. Master Lin Yun altered and simplified BTB
Feng Shui for the consumption of the West, placing the ba gua (Chinese
map/compass that is the foundation of all Chinese divination arts) at the
front door so that the front door always represents North. Placement follows
as relative to the front door, rather than relative to compass directions,
and so factors in neither direction nor time. There is some basis for this,
since the geography of North America is so different from that of China, as
to the sources and direction of wind and water. BTB Feng Shui is effective.
There is more than one road to the well.
The latest western trend in Feng Shui is to integrate BTB Feng Shui with the
Form and Compass Schools, a positive and welcome development. Although I
practice primarily Form and Compass Schools because I consider these schools
to be the deeper analysis, I integrate elements of BTB Feng Shui as well.
Feng Shui as Chinese Geomancy
Geomancy is the larger field of which Feng Shui is a part. Geomancy is the
art of adjusting and balancing the energies of the earth by the use of
divination. The verb, ‘to divine’ means to make known through divination, an
intuitive art art/science/practice of discovering hidden knowledge and
foretelling the future through intuition or with tools: the divining rod
(willow branch to find water, metal L-rods or other), pendulum, tarot or
other cards, patterns of thrown sticks, stones, or coins.
Geomancy has been practiced in many ancient civilizations besides China. It
was a strong basis of Druid culture and other ancient Celtic civilizations,
evidenced by the standing stones in Great Britain with their precise
astronomical alignments. It was practiced in ancient Egypt and other
Mediterranean cultures from pre-history. Cave paintings in Lascaux, South
France up to 15,000 years old depict a dowser with a divining rod being
followed by a group of people. Divination was practiced in India by the
Brahmins, in Africa, and elsewhere. The pendulum was brought to Europe from
Arabia in the middle ages. Divining today is called “dowsing,” and people
who do this work are called “dowsers.”
Much of this knowledge has been lost in the chasms of pre-history. What
scant evidence remains is relegated to the trivia of history as the
scientific methods of the age of reason have thrown out the baby with the
bath water, gradually replacing the importance of other esoteric means of
gaining knowledge. Yet evidence exists that trying to retrieve these lost
methods of knowledge would greatly benefit mankind. For example, there are
enormous stones in the interior of the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt for
which no engineering technology exists today to explain their installation.
I have seen the many-ton Temple of the Sun at Machu Picchu in Peru, carved
out of a single piece of granite, which was brought to its high and steep
site by some technology unknown today. It is believed that some ancient
peoples may have known how to work with gravity. Many ancient wonders
exhibit the existence of technologically advanced knowledge of ancient
civilizations.
This brings me to Feng Shui, or Chinese geomancy, as it is sometimes called.
The reason we practice Feng Shui today in adjusting environments and not the
arts of divination from other ancient civilizations is that, unlike other
ancient civilizations where there are great gaps in our knowledge of their
history, the geomantic knowledge that is called Feng Shui has continued in
an unbroken stream from as far back as 5000 B.C. The Feng Shui of China is
the most complete and comprehensive body of an unbroken stream of geomantic
knowledge that exists today.
Evidence points to continued research and keeping an open mind. Meanwhile
the practice of Feng Shui, specializing in the branch of geomancy linking
built environments to land, humans, and heaven (influences of the cosmos),
can detect, adjust, and balance the energies of the earth to bring about
harmony, strength, balance, and auspicious energies to the human
environment.
History of Feng Shui
Feng Shui originated in China thousands of years ago. The ancient Chinese
text, the I Ching (Book of Changes, circa around 1100 A.D.), based on
observations made over millennia, was one of the first major codifications
of Feng Shui. It postulates that the physical world and the solar system
move in ever-changing cycles which affect nature and people and which can be
predicted and prepared for to best support and enhance the quality of human
life.
The Yin/Yang principle of strength through the balance of polarities was
conceived by shaman Taoist masters more than 5000 years ago. This knowledge
was the precursor of Feng Shui. It is believed that the practice of Feng
Shui began to develop around 500 B.C. Literature and manuals on the teaching
of Feng Shui have been found as early as 25 A.D.
Feng Shui knowledge was always a closely guarded secret among China’s rulers
and families of Feng Shui masters until during the Yellow Bandit’s Rebellion
in 907 A.D. when a man named Yang, an astronomer and the emperor’s
meteorologist, fled the imperial palace taking with him valuable information
on Feng Shui. He hid in the mountains and helped the poor using Feng Shui,
making known to them its long-kept secrets. Even so, Feng Shui continued to
be sanctioned for only the elite, and people were punished or killed for
using Feng Shui outside of accepted channels. But sanctions were useless;
Feng Shui had taken root in the people’s understanding of the nature of
their world. Mao’s Cultural Revolution tried to stamp it out, and only since
his death has Feng Shui begun to emerge again from behind closed doors.
In Hong Kong, the entire city is awash in billion dollar evidence of Feng
Shui in its lavish buildings. In mainland China today, the practice of Feng
Shui is not far behind as seen in Feng Shui features incorporated into the
great new buildings of Shanghai and Beijing, especially in the last ten
years.
Only in the last half of the 20th century has knowledge of Feng Shui come to
the West due to the immigration of many Chinese and a few extremely
knowledgeable Chinese Feng Shui masters, along with their recognition that
the West needs the help that Feng Shui can provide, and their openness and
willingness to educate a new western generation of Feng Shui experts.
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