Feng Shui Ultimate Resource Feng shui facts without the New Age psychobabble - since 1995 http://qi-whiz.com/atom/feed 2008-04-27T15:08:41-05:00 Real Chinese Houses Meet McFengshui http://qi-whiz.com/node/1556 2008-04-16T23:21:12-05:00 2008-04-27T15:09:53-05:00 qiwhizco Ever wonder how traditional housing in China would be analyzed by McFengshui? Let’s take a typical courtyard house and analyze it according to McFengshui rules from Karen Rauch Carter.

traditional house

Drawing adapted from Liu Dunzhun, ed.

Zhongguo gudai jianzhu shi.
(Beijing: Zhongguo gongyue chubanshe, 1984), p. 12.

Traditional Chinese Courtyard House McFengshui Rules Reality Check

Courtyard houses typically face south.

 Direction doesn’t matter. This orientation sites the house for solar gain — thus ecologically efficient in its heating and cooling.

The best rooms in the house typically face south and in the center of the home. These rooms are for the head of the household.

Direction doesn’t matter.

The center is the "heart" and when it is out of balance, it can easily affect the other areas of the house.

The many angles from the buildings in a courtyard can cause poison arrows, and crystals should be hung just in front of the corner causing the problem. Or maybe put up mirrors to deflect the "negative energy." Or maybe do both

You won’t see crystals or mirrors — yet people have lived happily and comfortably in these houses for centuries.

Rooms along the east and west sides are occupied by the children, servants, relatives, etc.

These long hallways with lots of doors need crystals to be hung from the ceiling. You won’t see crystals, yet people have lived well in these houses for centuries.

Rooms for women are in the northernmost part of the compound, behind the best rooms. Rooms for women were supposed to be cut off from the outside world.

 This area encompasses the Prosperity/Abundance, Fame/Reputation, and Relationship/Love sectors. No doubt a McFengshui practitioner would invent some psychobabble about prosperity, fame, and relationships being “cut off” from the outside world. Which would be strange, because China is the longest-running civilization in humankind’s existence.

Rooms facing north are generally used as study, library, or office. They are also places to retreat in the heat of the day.

Direction doesn’t matter. However, if people are upstairs, and there are toxic odors emanating from the floor beneath, they should lay a mirror facing down on the floor. Nobody does this, because they haven’t lost their common sense. It is physically impossible for a mirror to have any effects on odors or aerosolized substances.

The formal entrance is typically in the southeastern area of the compound. The spirit wall requires that you turn sharply left or right to enter the compound.

You enter from the Helpful People/Travel sector. This part of the house puts you in harmony with life so you don’t have to have help with anything. It also symbolizes being treated fairly and honestly. Add a item in this area and use intention to ensure a safe journey or to balance travel times. Doesn’t seem to reflect how people lived in traditional China. Today, elders and small children stay home while the rest of the family migrates to the cities for work. They may stay away for months or years at a time — or never come back.

The latrine is typically in the southwestern area of the compound.

 The latrine is in the Skills and Knowledge/Wealth sector. This area symbolizes "inner wisdom, higher thought, self-cultivation, meditation, and all the other wonderful things associated with knowing and learning." That must be why people take along reading material when they go to the bathroom.
]]> Ever wonder how traditional housing in China would be analyzed by McFengshui? Let’s take a typical courtyard house and analyze it according to McFengshui rules from Karen Rauch Carter.

traditional house

Drawing adapted from Liu Dunzhun, ed.

Zhongguo gudai jianzhu shi.
(Beijing: Zhongguo gongyue chubanshe, 1984), p. 12.

Traditional Chinese Courtyard House McFengshui Rules Reality Check

Courtyard houses typically face south.

 Direction doesn’t matter. This orientation sites the house for solar gain — thus ecologically efficient in its heating and cooling.

The best rooms in the house typically face south and in the center of the home. These rooms are for the head of the household.

Direction doesn’t matter.

The center is the "heart" and when it is out of balance, it can easily affect the other areas of the house.

The many angles from the buildings in a courtyard can cause poison arrows, and crystals should be hung just in front of the corner causing the problem. Or maybe put up mirrors to deflect the "negative energy." Or maybe do both

You won’t see crystals or mirrors — yet people have lived happily and comfortably in these houses for centuries.

Rooms along the east and west sides are occupied by the children, servants, relatives, etc.

These long hallways with lots of doors need crystals to be hung from the ceiling. You won’t see crystals, yet people have lived well in these houses for centuries.

Rooms for women are in the northernmost part of the compound, behind the best rooms. Rooms for women were supposed to be cut off from the outside world.

 This area encompasses the Prosperity/Abundance, Fame/Reputation, and Relationship/Love sectors. No doubt a McFengshui practitioner would invent some psychobabble about prosperity, fame, and relationships being “cut off” from the outside world. Which would be strange, because China is the longest-running civilization in humankind’s existence.

Rooms facing north are generally used as study, library, or office. They are also places to retreat in the heat of the day.

Direction doesn’t matter. However, if people are upstairs, and there are toxic odors emanating from the floor beneath, they should lay a mirror facing down on the floor. Nobody does this, because they haven’t lost their common sense. It is physically impossible for a mirror to have any effects on odors or aerosolized substances.

The formal entrance is typically in the southeastern area of the compound. The spirit wall requires that you turn sharply left or right to enter the compound.

You enter from the Helpful People/Travel sector. This part of the house puts you in harmony with life so you don’t have to have help with anything. It also symbolizes being treated fairly and honestly. Add a item in this area and use intention to ensure a safe journey or to balance travel times. Doesn’t seem to reflect how people lived in traditional China. Today, elders and small children stay home while the rest of the family migrates to the cities for work. They may stay away for months or years at a time — or never come back.

The latrine is typically in the southwestern area of the compound.

 The latrine is in the Skills and Knowledge/Wealth sector. This area symbolizes "inner wisdom, higher thought, self-cultivation, meditation, and all the other wonderful things associated with knowing and learning." That must be why people take along reading material when they go to the bathroom.
]]> The Big Yin explains Feng Shui and Aromatherapy http://qi-whiz.com/node/1537 2008-04-05T22:42:35-05:00 2008-04-13T22:38:33-05:00 qi-whiz Billy Connolly knows the difference between McFengshui and real feng shui!

WARNING: This video features a foul-mouthed, ranting Scotsman. You may want to fortify yourself with Balvenie or Glenlivet.

]]> Billy Connolly knows the difference between McFengshui and real feng shui!

WARNING: This video features a foul-mouthed, ranting Scotsman. You may want to fortify yourself with Balvenie or Glenlivet.

]]> My Favorite Oxymoron: PoMo Feng Shui http://qi-whiz.com/node/996 2007-04-07T19:18:32-05:00 2008-04-13T18:10:38-05:00 qi-whiz

It is the diviner’s job to guide people who are confused and to teach the ignorant. And when one is dealing with confused and ignorant people, how can one make them understand in a word or two?

— attributed to “Master Jizi” (Sima Jizhu)

Somewhere in Suburbia

A woman dressed as a retro-Eighties mix of Stevie Nicks and Cher (or maybe Dame Edna) drives an SUV with personalized auto plates proclaiming “Feng Shui.” She meets the owners of a house and settles down in their living room for four hours of meditation.

When she awakens, she says something about a “money corner” needing “activation.” She sells the owners the world’s most expensive red Avery labels to stick on walls and furniture. This will “harmonize” the house with the environment.

Film at eleven

Live news coverage shows the bloody aftermath of a murder-suicide that engulfed a family. The police announce the case as solved: detectives intuited that the spiritual harmony of the living room was upset by the placement of a couch. It created cutting chi that set off the chain of events.

What is this, the Cartoon Channel? The Onion? No, it’s real life (the feng shui lady) and its logical conclusion (murder-suicide by cutting chi).

False hope springs eternal.

— Ron Rosenbaum: The Secret Parts of Fortune

Predigested feng shui primers like Feng Shui Made Easy, The Western Guide to Feng Shui, and Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life are popular because they market what is essentially a get-rich-quick scheme.

These books (and many others) form part of a capitalist self-help plan that avoids nagging confrontations with reality. The plan speaks to deep fantasies of personal power, plus an all-embracing faith that promises relief from spiritual distress and some kind of connection with the universe — even it if is mostly greenwash.

Most importantly, the books and their writers promote concepts of an “exotic” practice — but one that is not too exotic.

Pundits of PoMo Feng Shui proclaim traditional (Chinese) Feng Shui as restrictive, irrational, and unnecessary — as if channeling Francis Fukuyama:

  • William Spear claims that much of what we received from ancient cultures is “dogmatic and limiting.”
  • Jami Lin says traditional Feng Shui methods strand you in a “culture gap,” but if you discard the cultural gap’s guidelines and rules “you become free to experiment.”
  • David Johnstone chants the New Age mantra about traditional feng shui: “compass school” is “too complicated” and “form school” is “superstitious” and “too simplistic.”

You can’t claim to be an expert in feng shui and denounce the basis of your expertise. It’s like going to a doctor who spends most of your visit telling you that medicine is confusing and stupid.

Yet this is how New Age entrepreneurs appropriated what scientists call traditional ecological knowledge — in this case, from China.

New Agers sound smug about traditional feng shui because their marketing is heavily influenced by the writings of Victorian missionaries in China. One Belgian missionary derided what he called Chinese geomancy as “a chaos of childish absurdities, a cloud of ignorance” that demonstrated how superstitious, backward and decadent Chinese civilization was in comparison to his little corner of the world.

Today we identify this self-congratulatory bombast by its true name: racism. (And after 1957, only the foolish believe a Luopan is backward.)

Paul Devereaux thinks that New Age entrepreneurs rush their products to market without checking their facts.

With feng shui, the entrepreneurs could not be bothered to check the facts. The facts would get in the way of sales.

The marketing is very simple. Here is Carl Sagan’s version:

Don’t think. Buy.

]]>

It is the diviner’s job to guide people who are confused and to teach the ignorant. And when one is dealing with confused and ignorant people, how can one make them understand in a word or two?

— attributed to “Master Jizi” (Sima Jizhu)

Somewhere in Suburbia

A woman dressed as a retro-Eighties mix of Stevie Nicks and Cher (or maybe Dame Edna) drives an SUV with personalized auto plates proclaiming “Feng Shui.” She meets the owners of a house and settles down in their living room for four hours of meditation.

When she awakens, she says something about a “money corner” needing “activation.” She sells the owners the world’s most expensive red Avery labels to stick on walls and furniture. This will “harmonize” the house with the environment.

Film at eleven

Live news coverage shows the bloody aftermath of a murder-suicide that engulfed a family. The police announce the case as solved: detectives intuited that the spiritual harmony of the living room was upset by the placement of a couch. It created cutting chi that set off the chain of events.

What is this, the Cartoon Channel? The Onion? No, it’s real life (the feng shui lady) and its logical conclusion (murder-suicide by cutting chi).

False hope springs eternal.

— Ron Rosenbaum: The Secret Parts of Fortune

Predigested feng shui primers like Feng Shui Made Easy, The Western Guide to Feng Shui, and Move Your Stuff, Change Your Life are popular because they market what is essentially a get-rich-quick scheme.

These books (and many others) form part of a capitalist self-help plan that avoids nagging confrontations with reality. The plan speaks to deep fantasies of personal power, plus an all-embracing faith that promises relief from spiritual distress and some kind of connection with the universe — even it if is mostly greenwash.

Most importantly, the books and their writers promote concepts of an “exotic” practice — but one that is not too exotic.

Pundits of PoMo Feng Shui proclaim traditional (Chinese) Feng Shui as restrictive, irrational, and unnecessary — as if channeling Francis Fukuyama:

  • William Spear claims that much of what we received from ancient cultures is “dogmatic and limiting.”
  • Jami Lin says traditional Feng Shui methods strand you in a “culture gap,” but if you discard the cultural gap’s guidelines and rules “you become free to experiment.”
  • David Johnstone chants the New Age mantra about traditional feng shui: “compass school” is “too complicated” and “form school” is “superstitious” and “too simplistic.”

You can’t claim to be an expert in feng shui and denounce the basis of your expertise. It’s like going to a doctor who spends most of your visit telling you that medicine is confusing and stupid.

Yet this is how New Age entrepreneurs appropriated what scientists call traditional ecological knowledge — in this case, from China.

New Agers sound smug about traditional feng shui because their marketing is heavily influenced by the writings of Victorian missionaries in China. One Belgian missionary derided what he called Chinese geomancy as “a chaos of childish absurdities, a cloud of ignorance” that demonstrated how superstitious, backward and decadent Chinese civilization was in comparison to his little corner of the world.

Today we identify this self-congratulatory bombast by its true name: racism. (And after 1957, only the foolish believe a Luopan is backward.)

Paul Devereaux thinks that New Age entrepreneurs rush their products to market without checking their facts.

With feng shui, the entrepreneurs could not be bothered to check the facts. The facts would get in the way of sales.

The marketing is very simple. Here is Carl Sagan’s version:

Don’t think. Buy.

]]> Want to stop global warming? Stop eating meat. http://qi-whiz.com/node/487 2007-01-06T22:00:06-06:00 2008-04-20T01:39:07-05:00 qi-whiz You’d probably rather give up your SUV than stop eating meat — but you may have to make a choice. And it’s not just because you’re eating too much meat (which all of us probably are); it’s not just because Americans grow and kill more than 10 billion animals a year for food.

Like it or not we have come to the end of the era of cheap meat and cheap oil — and you might as well get used to thinking of them together, because both contribute heavily to global warming.

Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

— Mark Bittman, Rethinking the Meat Guzzler, NY Times

One incandescent light bulb is responsible for 700 pounds of greenhouse gas (CO2) over its lifetime, according to the NRDC.

Our eating habits are funding global warming and many other environmental catastrophes, according to a recent report from the United Nations.

Click here to download a PDF of the report.

“Do you eat meat? Then you are responsible for the destruction of the Amazon, because 95 per cent of deforestation is caused by cattle ranching. I would love it if every one of your readers boycotted Brazilian beef.”

The tearing down of trees to make way for intensive cattle production has helped destroy an area of rainforest nearly three times the size of Great Britain. The Instituto Peabiru has been monitoring the social and environmental impact. In the next decade, another Great Britain could be lost, along with the animals, birds and plants it supports. Though the message has failed to penetrate Europe, this carving out of pasture is far more pernicious than logging (accounting for three per cent of rainforest loss) or large-scale agriculture, including intensive soya production.

“There are five big companies producing soya in the Amazon, but 420,000 cattle ranches. Why is Greenpeace diverting attention to soya?”

— João Meirelles Filho, a Brazilian conservationist living in Belém, quoted in The Observer, Sunday, November 18, 2007

Livestock production is at the heart of almost every environmental catastrophe, and:

  • More climate change gases than all the motor vehicles in the world
  • 64 percent of all the acid rain-producing ammonia. (Why do you think the oceans are dying and sea creatures are starving?)
  • 15 out of the 24 biggest global ecosystems that are dying out are declining because of our desires to eat meat.

Does your spirituality encourage global warming?


Please donate £6 to WSPA

]]> You’d probably rather give up your SUV than stop eating meat — but you may have to make a choice. And it’s not just because you’re eating too much meat (which all of us probably are); it’s not just because Americans grow and kill more than 10 billion animals a year for food.

Like it or not we have come to the end of the era of cheap meat and cheap oil — and you might as well get used to thinking of them together, because both contribute heavily to global warming.

Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

— Mark Bittman, Rethinking the Meat Guzzler, NY Times

One incandescent light bulb is responsible for 700 pounds of greenhouse gas (CO2) over its lifetime, according to the NRDC.

Our eating habits are funding global warming and many other environmental catastrophes, according to a recent report from the United Nations.

Click here to download a PDF of the report.

“Do you eat meat? Then you are responsible for the destruction of the Amazon, because 95 per cent of deforestation is caused by cattle ranching. I would love it if every one of your readers boycotted Brazilian beef.”

The tearing down of trees to make way for intensive cattle production has helped destroy an area of rainforest nearly three times the size of Great Britain. The Instituto Peabiru has been monitoring the social and environmental impact. In the next decade, another Great Britain could be lost, along with the animals, birds and plants it supports. Though the message has failed to penetrate Europe, this carving out of pasture is far more pernicious than logging (accounting for three per cent of rainforest loss) or large-scale agriculture, including intensive soya production.

“There are five big companies producing soya in the Amazon, but 420,000 cattle ranches. Why is Greenpeace diverting attention to soya?”

— João Meirelles Filho, a Brazilian conservationist living in Belém, quoted in The Observer, Sunday, November 18, 2007

Livestock production is at the heart of almost every environmental catastrophe, and:

  • More climate change gases than all the motor vehicles in the world
  • 64 percent of all the acid rain-producing ammonia. (Why do you think the oceans are dying and sea creatures are starving?)
  • 15 out of the 24 biggest global ecosystems that are dying out are declining because of our desires to eat meat.

Does your spirituality encourage global warming?


Please donate £6 to WSPA

]]> Ham and Cheese on a Wry Bagua http://qi-whiz.com/node/5 2006-01-04T01:34:42-06:00 2008-04-27T15:08:41-05:00 qi-whiz Most Western ideas about feng shui are utterly wrong and generally based on a variety of weird concepts pulled from European folklore and New Age marketing — which are in turn marketed as “contemporary and practical” feng shui.

Despite all of the books rushing into print claiming “Feng Shui this” and “Feng Shui that,” the theoretical depth and full potential of the authentic material remain virtually unknown to the public.

Theory

For Black Sect Buddhists and other New Age types, their Bagua (or Ba Gua, Ba Qua, Pa Kua) is a so-called “mystical octagon of symbolic correlations,” This cafeteria-style approach to borrowed ideas was whipped into a lovely froth from Western cultural icons and concepts.

The new bagua supposedly represents “eight fundamental life conditions” that correlate to “a different aspect of ourselves.”

Yet it was created within the last thirty years and marketed entirely to New Agers ignorant of Asian culture.

According to Ho Lynn’s article in the execrable Feng Shui Anthology (published and edited by Jami Lin), this new Bagua was created by self-proclaimed “wandering impostor” Thomas Lin Yun, founder and spiritual leader of an American church called Black Sect Tibetan Buddhism. The new bagua is marketed as a “revolutionary” and “innovative” step in Chinese philosophy. In fact, it is so “revolutionary” that Asians laugh it off.

As one Korean-American practitioner of martial and healing arts said,

This is the sort of thing that Asians would use to make money off non-Asians.

The theories are labeled “Mutationist” for good reason.

According to the Feng Shui Anthology, Lin Yun took the Taiji (the Primordial, Great Unity or “Yin Yang symbol,” as everyone calls it) and set it spinning in its opposite direction. The Taiji and its corresponding systems move clockwise. A left-spinning Taiji — that is, one spinning counterclockwise — correlates with global culture’s views of aberrant behavior, misfortune, and necromancy.

All those occultists … who are brimming with claims about the strange and the marvelous … those occultists cheat people and delude the masses. They hold in their grasp the black arts and in their embrace all manner of false and faked means. … if one listens to what they say, it fills the ears to overflowing. But one should seek to take hold of what might actually be found, in the end one will have gained nothing, for it is an evasive thing, akin to binding the wind or clutching a shadow.

— Gao Yong, an esoteric master (Fang Shi) and advisor to Emperor Zheng (33 to 7 BCE)

Left (lyft: “weak,” “worthless” in Old English) still retains its primordial associations with antisocial behavior and disaster, the concept of sinister (“left hand,” “unlucky side”), in Sanskrit sauvastika (“all is evil,” movement which upsets the whole of nature). The Tibetan Bon religion uses symbols flowing counterclockwise to indicate black magic and opposition to Buddhism. A movement withershins (“against-direction”), nirrita, or cartua-sul traditionally begins and ends in irreverence, heterodoxy, perversity, death, infertility, and black arts.

Another bizarre theory promoted by the church is calling Kan, Gun, Qian, and Li yin guas because they don’t look any different when you flip them on their heads. Yang guas are those trigrams that do look different when they’re flipped. Flipping a trigram like a burger is a unique approach without any historical precedent — certainly one reason to call this stunt “innovative” in BTB marketing materials and articles.

When you compare the Luoshu of Daoism with the Luoshu developed by Lin Yun you see the rich diversity of material in the original. The New Age bagua stipulates that people enter their homes in the sectors for Skills/knowledge, Career, or Travel/Helpful people. Taoism assigns different interpretations to those sectors, and people enter their homes based on the actual location of the door as it relates to compass headings.

The Luoshu according to Daoism The Luoshu according to Lin Yun
Taoist Bagua McBagua

Because the Hetu is not used in the New Age versions of feng shui, it is largely ignored by the New Age crowd because they do not know what it is or does. They think it is not used in feng shui when in fact it is.

McFengshui

Knowing the telltale direction indicators makes it easy to spot BTB ideas even when they have been repurposed to suit the ideologies of each new book by yet another self-proclaimed “Feng Shui master” who attended a Lin Yun seminar and was exhorted by him to rush out and get a book deal. They share one another’s ideas and emphasize various New Age fads, folklore, mythologies, and psychobabble.These “experts” do not agree on a definition of feng shui because with McFengshui they don’t have to, and they are encouraged to invent their own. That is why they are so knowledgeable about marketing New Age ideas, western occult lore, and techniques of the con artist. That’s why this product is called McFengshui. Here are some typical examples.

Ellen Whitehurst

Ellen Whitehurst defines feng shui as some sort of object-relations psychology — ironic, considerng the pathological narcissism at the heart of McFengshui:

whatever you put all around your external environment, whether that means your home or office or even your car, has an impact, an influence, a profound psychological effect on everything that then goes on inside of you.

If you suffer from abulia, associative agnosia or Capgrass Syndrome how does her version of feng shui work?

Whitehurst has limited her vision of feng shui to her feeble range of science knowledge. This limitation affects most McFengshui enthusiasts — they have no effective responses to people with better information, or a science education.

Terah Kathryn Collins

Terah Kathryn Collins trademarked her version of feng shui, which she markets as honoring “the essence of its Eastern Form School Feng Shui heritage, while focusing on the practical applications it has in our Western culture.” Look up the word essence and you wonder: does she mean an immaterial spirit, a derived substance, or the invariable nature of the subject? It does not matter: this is marketing.

Collins seems unaware that what she calls “form school” (San He) uses a compass.

In denial

It is no coincidence that McFengshui does not acknowledge global warming or have a response beyond “buy more stuff” (green cleaning products and “chi enhancers”) while the practitioner learns how to fleece people using building biology (bau-biologie). McFengshui is stuck in the 19th century, talking about life force and auras and reeking of colonialism.

Real feng shui does not exist to arrange the environment for our personal gain — that is what got us into our environmental mess! Feng shui exists to fit us within the environment. By doing that feng shui keeps us safe and healthy. That is why feng shui can be used to combat global warming and environmental disaster.

What Authors & Consultants Promote BTB Church Ideas of Feng Shui?

—and a host of others. Check a book carefully for the “eight fundamental life stations” or whatever cute metaphor the author may use to disguise Lin Yun’s ideology.


Paloma Tankless Water Heaters

]]> Most Western ideas about feng shui are utterly wrong and generally based on a variety of weird concepts pulled from European folklore and New Age marketing — which are in turn marketed as “contemporary and practical” feng shui.

Despite all of the books rushing into print claiming “Feng Shui this” and “Feng Shui that,” the theoretical depth and full potential of the authentic material remain virtually unknown to the public.

Theory

For Black Sect Buddhists and other New Age types, their Bagua (or Ba Gua, Ba Qua, Pa Kua) is a so-called “mystical octagon of symbolic correlations,” This cafeteria-style approach to borrowed ideas was whipped into a lovely froth from Western cultural icons and concepts.

The new bagua supposedly represents “eight fundamental life conditions” that correlate to “a different aspect of ourselves.”

Yet it was created within the last thirty years and marketed entirely to New Agers ignorant of Asian culture.

According to Ho Lynn’s article in the execrable Feng Shui Anthology (published and edited by Jami Lin), this new Bagua was created by self-proclaimed “wandering impostor” Thomas Lin Yun, founder and spiritual leader of an American church called Black Sect Tibetan Buddhism. The new bagua is marketed as a “revolutionary” and “innovative” step in Chinese philosophy. In fact, it is so “revolutionary” that Asians laugh it off.

As one Korean-American practitioner of martial and healing arts said,

This is the sort of thing that Asians would use to make money off non-Asians.

The theories are labeled “Mutationist” for good reason.

According to the Feng Shui Anthology, Lin Yun took the Taiji (the Primordial, Great Unity or “Yin Yang symbol,” as everyone calls it) and set it spinning in its opposite direction. The Taiji and its corresponding systems move clockwise. A left-spinning Taiji — that is, one spinning counterclockwise — correlates with global culture’s views of aberrant behavior, misfortune, and necromancy.

All those occultists … who are brimming with claims about the strange and the marvelous … those occultists cheat people and delude the masses. They hold in their grasp the black arts and in their embrace all manner of false and faked means. … if one listens to what they say, it fills the ears to overflowing. But one should seek to take hold of what might actually be found, in the end one will have gained nothing, for it is an evasive thing, akin to binding the wind or clutching a shadow.

— Gao Yong, an esoteric master (Fang Shi) and advisor to Emperor Zheng (33 to 7 BCE)

Left (lyft: “weak,” “worthless” in Old English) still retains its primordial associations with antisocial behavior and disaster, the concept of sinister (“left hand,” “unlucky side”), in Sanskrit sauvastika (“all is evil,” movement which upsets the whole of nature). The Tibetan Bon religion uses symbols flowing counterclockwise to indicate black magic and opposition to Buddhism. A movement withershins (“against-direction”), nirrita, or cartua-sul traditionally begins and ends in irreverence, heterodoxy, perversity, death, infertility, and black arts.

Another bizarre theory promoted by the church is calling Kan, Gun, Qian, and Li yin guas because they don’t look any different when you flip them on their heads. Yang guas are those trigrams that do look different when they’re flipped. Flipping a trigram like a burger is a unique approach without any historical precedent — certainly one reason to call this stunt “innovative” in BTB marketing materials and articles.

When you compare the Luoshu of Daoism with the Luoshu developed by Lin Yun you see the rich diversity of material in the original. The New Age bagua stipulates that people enter their homes in the sectors for Skills/knowledge, Career, or Travel/Helpful people. Taoism assigns different interpretations to those sectors, and people enter their homes based on the actual location of the door as it relates to compass headings.

The Luoshu according to Daoism The Luoshu according to Lin Yun
Taoist Bagua McBagua

Because the Hetu is not used in the New Age versions of feng shui, it is largely ignored by the New Age crowd because they do not know what it is or does. They think it is not used in feng shui when in fact it is.

McFengshui

Knowing the telltale direction indicators makes it easy to spot BTB ideas even when they have been repurposed to suit the ideologies of each new book by yet another self-proclaimed “Feng Shui master” who attended a Lin Yun seminar and was exhorted by him to rush out and get a book deal. They share one another’s ideas and emphasize various New Age fads, folklore, mythologies, and psychobabble.These “experts” do not agree on a definition of feng shui because with McFengshui they don’t have to, and they are encouraged to invent their own. That is why they are so knowledgeable about marketing New Age ideas, western occult lore, and techniques of the con artist. That’s why this product is called McFengshui. Here are some typical examples.

Ellen Whitehurst

Ellen Whitehurst defines feng shui as some sort of object-relations psychology — ironic, considerng the pathological narcissism at the heart of McFengshui:

whatever you put all around your external environment, whether that means your home or office or even your car, has an impact, an influence, a profound psychological effect on everything that then goes on inside of you.

If you suffer from abulia, associative agnosia or Capgrass Syndrome how does her version of feng shui work?

Whitehurst has limited her vision of feng shui to her feeble range of science knowledge. This limitation affects most McFengshui enthusiasts — they have no effective responses to people with better information, or a science education.

Terah Kathryn Collins

Terah Kathryn Collins trademarked her version of feng shui, which she markets as honoring “the essence of its Eastern Form School Feng Shui heritage, while focusing on the practical applications it has in our Western culture.” Look up the word essence and you wonder: does she mean an immaterial spirit, a derived substance, or the invariable nature of the subject? It does not matter: this is marketing.

Collins seems unaware that what she calls “form school” (San He) uses a compass.

In denial

It is no coincidence that McFengshui does not acknowledge global warming or have a response beyond “buy more stuff” (green cleaning products and “chi enhancers”) while the practitioner learns how to fleece people using building biology (bau-biologie). McFengshui is stuck in the 19th century, talking about life force and auras and reeking of colonialism.

Real feng shui does not exist to arrange the environment for our personal gain — that is what got us into our environmental mess! Feng shui exists to fit us within the environment. By doing that feng shui keeps us safe and healthy. That is why feng shui can be used to combat global warming and environmental disaster.

What Authors & Consultants Promote BTB Church Ideas of Feng Shui?

—and a host of others. Check a book carefully for the “eight fundamental life stations” or whatever cute metaphor the author may use to disguise Lin Yun’s ideology.


Paloma Tankless Water Heaters

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