Feng Shui Ultimate Resource

Myth: "Household drains deplete finances, health, aspirations, travel, clog sinuses, wreak havoc in general."

The Egyptians had copper plumbing around 3000 BCE; many homes had indoor plumbing without the expense of copper. Flushing toilets were available at Knossos Palace on Crete around 1500 BCE. The Indus Valley civilization (2600-1900 BCE), ancient Greece and Rome also had indoor plumbing. Even the Bible makes mention of indoor plumbing at the palace of King Eglon of Moab, in what is now west-central Jordan.

Technical knowledge about indoor plumbing faded in Europe with the fall of the Roman Empire.

If drains were capable of the deleterious effects that people claim, then indoor plumbing would have been abandoned several thousand years ago.

Because archaeologists have also found Chinese toilets dated to the Han dynasty, it seems quite unlikely that the alleged problems with drains are anything more than a favorite superstition of McFengshui sales people.

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Lunatic Fringe Myths

Myth: "Feng shui agrees with modern physics"

True.

However, the fact that feng shui does agree with modern physics is going to upset a lot of people. It means the death of their pet beliefs.

Energy

Feng shui people don’t seem to play golf or billiards. Those skills would help them gain an understanding of why feng shui does not defy basic laws of physics. Perhaps they would stop using “energy” as an explanation for everything.

They will try to convince you with a lot of babble about “vibrations,” and incomprehensible paraphrasing of Deepak Chopra. Yet there is no “vibrational energy” in some universal, mystical cosmic soup. Any energy can be measured if it is actually there.

Anyone can distinguish between a real phenomenon and one that is not, simply by having an independent party demonstrate that the phenomenon exists.

If a feng shui person claims to be exploiting some kind of “energy” with feng shui but can’t explain how their energy is measured, you are dealing with a con artist. (Or someone who is delusional. Or possibly both.)

“It is quantum physics,” they often insist, as if this answer is enough to stop your prying. “That cannot be measured.”

Just because they don’t understand the science doesn’t mean the science cannot be explained.

Quantum mechanics theory works at the atomic level and smaller, at a size most people simply cannot imagine: 0.000000000000000000000000000000000016 meters. This is a scale where quantum fluctuations in the fabric of spacetime theoretically become enormous. This is so small humans cannot see obvious signs of the effects of quantum gravity (non-Newtonian gravity).

Why do feng shui people claim to work with quantum physics or quantum mechanics?

Marketing! They are exploiting some people’s taste for nonsense. And some people are silly enough to believe it.

Magic in the Lagoon

Many years ago I saw an aerial photograph of Mexcaltitán in a book by John Michell.¹ It wasn’t so much what Michell claimed for the place (because his books are academic fiction) — it was the way the photograph made you feel.

The photograph is of a lagoon with a cosmic anchor point.

One of the magical villages of Mexico, Mexcaltitán is a wonderful destination if you are a birder or nature-lover, or simply like to visit interesting places.

Some say it is the birthplace of the Méxica ("Aztecs"). Jesús Jáuregui² of INAH notes that no one has undertaken serious fieldwork in the village, so the truth still awaits discovery.

That doesn’t stop anyone from looking at aerial photographs and wondering about the place.

Mexcaltitán is sometimes known as the Venice of Mexico because during the rainy season the streets become canals, and people punt around town. It is a lovely way to commute — except for the mosquitoes!

One of the straight 'avenues'

Actually a better candidate for Venice was ancient Tenochtitlán because the streets were permanent canals, according Bernal Diaz de Castillo:

we saw that from every house of that great city and of all the other cities that were built in the water it was impossible to pass from house to house, except by drawbridges which were made of wood or in canoes … ³

Tenochtitlán was divided into four sectors, just like Mexcaltitán today. A central plaza, like the Great Teocalli, contains the church and museum. Mexcaltitán could be an old city. The state of Nayarit (which contains Mexcaltitán) was a nice place to live during the Neolithic.

The world is a flower with four petals, in the cosmology of ancient Mexico. Tenochtitlán before the coming of the Europeans

had a huge temple at the ritual cenre of quadrants: beneath the temple was the underworld filled with the sacrificial bodies of celestial and terrestrial animals.⁴

Nobody knows whether there was an intersection in ancient Mexcaltitán that had to be fed regularly, as there was in Tenochtitlán. But foursquare is classic Neolithic thinking.⁵ The Maya bacab (jaguars) anchor the sky at each cardinal point:

East is a red jaguar
North is a white jaguar
West is a black jaguar
South is a yellow jaguar
The center is green.

Ancient Chinese used the foursquare philosophy very early in their cosmology. Because precession shifts the cardinal points westward 30 degrees over roughly 2000 years, humans developed mythologies of worlds "dying," "drowning," and the like, and being reborn.

Astronomer Nu Gua established a new calendar and cardinal directions using the sawed-off feet of a huge turtle — she reset the heaven-round, Earth-square "mandala" (tianyuan difang) for the stars of her time. Yao would do the same around 2300 BCE.⁶This would be repeated throughout Chinese history.

It is Nu Gua’s turtle that made me look again at Mexcaltitán.

The Cosmic Turtle	The Cosmic Turtle in Numeric Form
This turtle recorded a lunar eclipse of 27 March 1373 BCE for King Wuding of the Shang. (You get a sense of the beginnings of Five Element Theory in Shang China: sacrifice to the cardinal directions while crack-making.) The cover of Sarah Allan’s book shows one way that the cosmic turtle was interpreted, and it included a directional scheme. Long before King Wuding, Chinese were creating the Cosmic Turtle as a schematic, like the famous jade below, that Li Xueqin links with feng shui.

The Cosmic Turtle

The Cosmic Turtle in Numeric Form

This turtle recorded a lunar eclipse of 27 March 1373 BCE for King Wuding of the Shang. (You get a sense of the beginnings of Five Element Theory in Shang China: sacrifice to the cardinal directions while crack-making.)

The cover of Sarah Allan’s book shows one way that the cosmic turtle was interpreted, and it included a directional scheme.

Long before King Wuding, Chinese were creating the Cosmic Turtle as a schematic, like the famous jade below, that Li Xueqin links with feng shui.

jade astrolabe

Neolithic diagram

Ao, the Great Turtle, had the head of a dragon, the back of a tortoise, and the tail of a qilin (which, depending on the times, might be interpreted as the tail of a giraffe, a lion, a horse, or other animal). Ao was allegedly defeated after 72 battles (72 is an astronomical number), and transformed into a dragon.

The tale of Ao explains why there is a "snake" wrapped around the body of the Mysterious Turtle (the circumpolar region or "Central Palace," the most sacred part of the Chinese sky). Ao indicates a time between the autumnal equinox and the spring equinox — the yin part of a year — for the qilin signifies the west, the turtle signifies the north, and the dragon identifies the east.

Now that we have his position in the sky we know that Ao moves clockwise. That is, he moves with the apparent path of the sun, and he is facing south.

In astronomy at the time of the Han, only two lunar mansions or xiu — Xu and Wei — were associated with the turtle. When the other xiu came to be added to the system, Ji (which is the seventh xiu of the Green Dragon) contained the ancient Bie (River Turtle) constellation (Corona Australis). Thus Bie was tangled in the Dragon’s tail.⁷

For a later age, the River Turtle was "born" as an intertwined dragon tail (a snake, which is a "little dragon") and a turtle. After all, Tengshe (alpha Lac), the "snake of heaven," mated with river turtles (Bie) and tortoises (Gui).

You may recall the old story that Fuxi discovered the Luoshu on the back of Bie, the River Turtle, who crawled out of a tributary of the Yellow River (in this case, the Celestial River or Milky Way). Ao and Bie are the same turtle, but explained for the skies of their times.

You can’t tell time by the clocks (or the streets)

Without archaeological analysis, it is difficult to know whether those who originally oriented the Mexcaltitán streets did so with any precision. Google Earth is no help because the resolution is poor. You have to look at the shape of the village, look at photographs, and try to compose the city in your head.

In the lagoon

Everywhere the ancients used sightlines: people observed where the sun or stars met a feature of the landscape (the sacbeob in some instances). Consider the precision of measurements elsewhere in Mexico. With the flatness of the lagoon, where would the sightlines originate on the neighboring hills? You couldn’t see the hills for the vegetation, unless the landscape was very different then.

In the lagoon

Maybe accurate solar alignment was not a concern. As some researchers have observed,⁸ once the cosmology is in place, you need only approximate conditions for people to see the world in terms of sacred geography.

Which leaves us right back where we started: a cosmic anchor point in a lagoon.

References

John Michell. The Earth Spirit: Its Ways, Shrines, and Mysteries. New York: Avon Books, 1975.
Jesús Jáuregui. Mexcaltitán-Aztlán: Un nuevo mito. Arqueologia 67.
Miguel Leon-Portilla (trans.). The Broken Spears. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce: Inside the Neolithic Mind. London: Thames & Hudson, 2005.
Ibid.
Sun Xiaochun and Jacob Kistemaker. The Chinese Sky During the Han. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Ibid.
James J. Aimers and Prudence M. Rice. Astronomy, Ritual, and the Interpretation of Maya "E-Group" Architectural Assemblages. Ancient Mesoamerica (2006), 17: 79-96.

law of attraction

A feel-good philosophy manufactured for today’s enlightened narcissist, this is the “law” popularized in both versions of the movie “The Secret.”

We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very [ticked] off.

— Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club

It’s just the next coming of the same old New Age cavalry.

— Douglas Cowen, a professor of religion (quoted in The Christian Science Monitor)

The law of attraction is the latest in a line of American religious traditions that believe, in some sense, people create their own realities by their thoughts:

The New Thought movement
The New Age movement
The Positive Confession (Mind-Science) movement
“Prosperity Gospel” ideas
The Word of Faith movement, which includes pastors T.D. Jakes and Joel Osteen

Christians acknowledge that the idea is built upon 19th-century occultism.

It works so well that the principals involved in the movie, the book, and the website are all suing the pants off each other.

It is magical thinking: the idea you can control the world by what you think. You don’t think hard work is necessary. All you need to do is to believe. If your belief is strong enough, the law says, you will get what you want.
It is infantile and narcissistic: it is all about you and what you want and are thinking.
It is materialistic: it is all about riches for you. No one uses the law of attraction to pursue justice, promote literacy, banish poverty, cure disease, stop global warming, or to save endangered species and habitats. The people behind the movie prove it.
Many of its claims are based on pseudoscience, which is a faith-based system.

Above all, it is ecologically unsound.

Seventy-five percent of the world’s population — more than 4.5 billion people — live on just 15% of the world’s resources, while we in the West gorge on the remaining 85%.

The world simply does not have the resources, renewable or otherwise, to sustain Western lifestyles across the globe.

— Eamon O’Hara, a Brussels-based policy adviser for the Irish Regions Office, which represents Irish interests in the European Union

Quantum Quackery

New Age thinking always tosses in physics but relies on Deepak Chopra’s visions, unless it can find a fringe member of the physics community.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a physicist or cosmologist who would agree that quantum mechanics or quantum cosmology would confirm that the universe emerges from thought. That’s something science has not addressed … and scientists wouldn’t consider provable at this point.

—Bruce Schumm of the University of California—Santa Cruz (quoted in The Christian Science Monitor)

Believing in Absurdities Leads to Atrocities

The law of attraction blames innocent victims by claiming that when bad things happen it was because the victims had bad thoughts.

As a site promoting one feng shui practitioner, Marie Diamond, says,

The law of attraction puts whatever you think about into your life, so you have to be careful what you put in your mind and how you feel about it.

So if language is so powerful, why can’t it be used for good instead of narcissism? Jane Goodall wonders.

It’s a triumph of marketing and magic. The Secret has earned my antipathy for its outrageous, unproven assertions that I believe go beyond the ordinary overpromises of most self-help books into a danger realm. … Cancer victims. Sexual assault victims. Holocaust victims. They’re responsible? The book is riddled with these destructive falsehoods.

— John Norcross, a psychologist and professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania who conducts research on self-help books (CNN: The Secret: Big Sales, Loud Criticism)

The law of attraction would have you

blame babies for physical and sexual abuse — it was what the babies were thinking.
blame rape on the victim — she wanted it.
blame the daily killing of thousands of unwanted cats and dogs on the animals, because they were thinking about being euthanized.
blame AIDS orphans, because they evidently wanted their parents to die of the disease.
blame the Holocaust on the Jews, gays, Czechs, etc.
blame Darfur on the victims.
blame Abu Ghraib on the prisoners.

Not so, you claim? And yet, the day after I published this article, Tim Watkin flayed the philosophy in The Washington Post:

I watched Bob Proctor, author of “You Were Born Rich” and one of the “gurus” Byrne quotes most often, being asked on “Nightline” whether the starving children of Darfur had “manifested” — that is, visualized — their own misery. In utter seriousness, he replied, “I think the country probably has.”

The book is not nearly so equivocal. “Imperfect thoughts are the cause of humanity’s ills,” Byrne asserts, in a stunning sentence that had me pondering how to perfect my thoughts, pronto.

Poverty? “The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.”

Illness? “You cannot ‘catch’ anything unless you think you can. … You are also inviting illness if you are listening to people talking about their illness.” So … got any sick friends who need a shoulder to cry on? Tell ‘em to bug off! As for Elizabeth Edwards — how selfish is she? By making people think about her cancer, she’s basically giving them the disease.

What at first glance looks like the world according to Disney — wish on a star, and it will all come true — turns out to be a pretty ugly little secret indeed.