What
is Facing?
Facing
is one of those murky concepts that is actually a little
hard to pin down, but I'll give it a shot anyway.
The Feng Shui newsgroups and mailing lists are always
full of people asking about facing, and I doubt I'll be
able to give the ultimate, argument-ending, definition
here. But you have to know what it is in
order to proceed with the tutorial, so we'll just have
to muddle through.
The
facing direction of your house is whichever direction
the most "yangness" comes into your house from.
Whichever direction is brighter, noisier, more active,
hotter, etc., is the facing direction. When people
(or things) come to or into your house, from which direction
do they come? That's the facing direction.
More or less.
Generally,
the facing direction is the direction you are looking
when you are standing in your front door, looking out.
But... not necessarily. If the back of your home
has lots of windows that look to the south (which is typically
brighter than the north) and there's a freeway there (with
lots of whizzing cars), and on the other side of the freeway
there's a big ol' ocean with lots of crashing waves and
jetskiers, then that's the more active (more yang) direction,
so that's the facing.
You
can see why this can be a confusing concept. There
just aren't any hard and fast rules that will apply in
every single situation where anyone can just look around
and say "Ah HAH - that's the facing!" Sometimes
more than one direction is pretty active, and it just
comes down to deciding which one is more active
than the others.
Look,
this is an art, OK? Not a science.
Sometimes it just boils down to a judgement call.
No doubt the confusion and controversy will continue until
the sun goes nova, and the whole thing will become moot.
Sometimes, especially after some long drawn out argument
on a newsgroup or mailing list, I think that might
be a nice turn of affairs.
Anyhow,
once you've figured out the facing direction, you need
to measure it, and really nail it down pretty exactly,
because it is a very important part of determining the
next few steps.
How
do I measure Facing?
In
the olden days - and even today - traditional Feng Shui
practitioners wandered about the countryside with a tool
called a Luo Pan, that they used to figure out directions
with. Luo Pans, which can run about $500 nowadays,
are pretty impressive to look at: large discs full of
concentric circles and literally covered with Chinese
characters, trigrams, pictures of some real-star constellations
(except that the Big Dipper is mirror imaged), and assorted
other things. Very complicated looking items.
And
completely unnecessary for what we want to do here.
What
we need is a compass (which is all a Luo Pan really
is, anyway). Just a regular compass, like the kind
that pretty much every sporting goods store carries.
But
get a good one, with a rotating dial. You want to
be able to read the exact degree - or at least be able
to figure out the exact degree - of the facing direction
with it.
I'm
not going to teach you how to read a compass. The
good ones usually come with instructions. Just bear
in mind that magnetic North is at 0 (or 360 - which is
the same number on a compass) degrees, and magnetic South
is 180. So if the sun is in your eyes while you
figure out your facing is 351 degrees, you are probably
doing it wrong.
Take
a couple of readings from different places outside
of your house. It's weird, but lots of houses seem
to have quite a substantial quantity of metal in them,
and metal tends to do odd things to compass readings (since
the needle in a compass is a magnet, after all).
Also, take off your jewelry and other compass-affecting
sorts of things while you do your readings, etc.
It's amazing how many people forget little stuff like
that.
Anyhow,
like I said, take a couple of readings from different
places outside your house, and compare them. They
might be slightly different. Think of them more
as voting for a particular direction rather than giving
you the last word - settle on the one that seems most
right, even if they all seem sort of off.
Who knows what affected them enough to cause slightly
different results each time? Lots of things could
have that effect.
Now,
check out the following chart, and figure out which direction
that number you came up with points to - a sort of fuzzy
"kind of east by northeast" won't do. We need to
pin it down a little firmer than that:
|
Compass
Range
|
Direction
|
|
337.5
to 22.5
|
North
(N)
|
|
22.5
to 67.5
|
Northeast
(NE)
|
|
67.5
to 112.5
|
East
(E)
|
|
112.5
to 157.5
|
Southeast
(SE)
|
|
157.5
to 202.5
|
South
(S)
|
|
202.5
to 247.5
|
Southwest
(SW)
|
|
247.5
to 292.5
|
West
(W)
|
|
292.5
to 337.5
|
Northwest
(NW)
|
Now,
here's where Step Two of our series of lessons pays
off. Remember when I was repeating over and over
about which direction was always at the top of a Flying
Star map? I'll give you a hint - it's SOUTH.
And remember that you have a Flying Star map with the
Time Stars filled in? And remember how you just
figured out what your Facing direction is?
Good.
This is where it all comes together.
Look
in the palace that matches your facing direction, and
note which Time Star is there. That star
is the Facing Star that you will write into the
center palace, replacing the first "F" that you didn't
actually copy there.
That
palace also, by the way, will forevermore be called
your Facing Palace. Makes sense, right?
The
palace directly on the opposite side of the map from
the Facing Palace is your Mountain Palace (also called
the Sitting Palace - but we'll continue to call it the
Mountain Palace just to be consistent). Look there,
and see which Time Star is occupying it. Congratulations!
You've just found the Mountain Star that you
will put in the center palace, replacing the first "M"
that you didn't actually copy there.
In
the example chart we are filling in (which just so happens
to match my own apartments chart) the procedure would
be as follows:
My
facing degree is 166. That is South.
I
look on the map that I have filled in with the Time
Stars, and I see that in the South palace the Time Star
is a 2. I copy the 2 into the center palace in
the "F" position.
I
look at the exact opposite palace from the Facing Palace
(which is the North palace, of course, since North is
the opposite direction from South), and see that the
Time Star there is a 3. I copy the 3 into the
center palace in the "M" position.
Thus:
Facing
to "F", Mountain to "M"
Now,
if my facing direction had been SE, rather than S, I
would have looked in the SE palace, where I would have
found a 6 instead of a 2, and the Mountain Star would
be an 8. If my facing direction had been W, my
Facing Star would have been a 9 and my Mountain Star
would have been a 5. See how this works?
Once you get the hang of it, this is a piece of cake!
But,
my facing direction is S, so I fill in the center palace
with a Facing 2 and a Mountain 3 like this:
Believe
it or not, there is only one more step!
So,
if you are ever confronted with a Flying Star map, you
can always tell which palaces are the Facing Palace
and Mountain Palace just by looking at which stars are
in the center palace. It's pretty obvious, once
you think about it, but I've never actually seen that
written down in any of my Feng Shui books.
Another
little bit of trivia that should be apparent if you
think about it for a moment is that the Facing Star
and Mountain Star in the center of the chart will never
match the Period Time Star in the center palace.
That's because the Facing and Mountain Stars are chosen
from the palaces around the outside of the chart, and
the Period Time Star isn't in any of those - it's in
the center. I've never seen that bit of info written
down anywhere, either. So, for example, it is
impossible for the Mountain or Facing Stars we just
figured out in the above chart to be a 7 - no matter
what the facing direction is.
Other
periods, of course, change which stars are impossible.
In Period 3, for example, it would be impossible for
the central Facing or Mountain Stars to be a 3 (because
the 3 would be in the center of the chart instead of
around the edges). And so on.
Like
I said in the label under the last grid, we're almost
done. All that's left to do is fill in the rest
of the Mountain and Facing stars. But don't get
ahead of yourself! It isn't quite a straightforward
as the Time Series was.
But
it isn't rocket-science, either.
Back
| Next
