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| Clearing The Air On Feng Shui
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Lately, I've been busy butting heads with all sorts of people, and it's all due to my job here as Feng Shui Times.
For example?
Two nights ago during an outing with friends for drinks, we came across a very distant acquaintance. He was very effusive with his greetings, though, and pretty soon he was comfortably seated with us. We babbled on about life and the reality TV show du jour, and predictably the conversation steered towards our jobs.
"So what do you do, Delia?" our new friend wondered. I replied that I worked with a Feng Shui E-magazine. To our shock, his expansive manner took a turn downwards.
"Feng Shui?" He literally barked. Specks of peanuts he was chomping on flew in my direction. "Whenever I see anything about Feng Shui come up on the television, you know what I do? I turn it off! " He then proceeded to unnecessarily and loudly list down all the points to why he thought Feng Shui so badly (notable quote: "A rooster for a pet to ward of illnesses? Come on!").
I did try to explain to him about his apparent Feng Shui confusion, which, to his credit, is not entirely his fault. But once a person is slightly under the influence and has a strong opinion, you know there's no stopping him or her. In the end, we all left him sputtering alone and agreed that his field of work (Public Relations) didn't quite fit him.
This is just one very good example of the mass confusion on Feng Shui out there. I've seen it all during these past few months: A distraught girl tearfully calling us to ask if her broken crystal mandarin duck was the cause of her break-up, a Feng Shui Times reader Emailing me wondering if buying a Flower Horn fish (with a price tag that was equal to my monthly wage) would spruce up business… the list goes on.
Why are so many people caught up in this confusion? Feelings run high or low when it comes to the perception of Feng Shui. They either take it in face level and put their whole lives on it, or use 'Feng Shui' as a cussword.
Feng Shui is not about putting a walnut into your pocket for clearer thinking, suffocating your home with peony flowers for love luck or buying a fish more expensive than a college education fee to up your lagging business.
These examples are Feng Shui, by the way. But it is more specifically Symbolism Feng Shui, a very simple, borderline form of Feng Shui. Some might even disdainfully term it old wives' tales. And, since it can be simplified and thus be more accessible to the clueless, many authors have manipulated Symbolic Feng Shui, re-packaged it into fancy hardcover books and successfully passed it off as authentic Feng Shui.
This is the main reason to why so many of us are misinformed: Symbolism Feng Shui is just more marketable than its serious Classical sibling. Let me just quote Joey Yap's excellent take on this:
"While the authors propagating this sort of information may (or may not) know that Feng Shui cannot be so generically applied, you can bet that unsuspecting readers will be lining up to follow their advice."
The one positive thing about the mushrooming of 'instant' Feng Shui books, though? In many ways, it has effectively spread the word of Feng Shui across the globe to allow a wonderful wedge of space for Classical Feng Shui to come out. But we must be mindful that the propagation of Symbolism Feng Shui does no favors to the integrity of Classical Feng Shui.
Many Classical Feng Shui practitioners and consultants are working hard to shed light to the true science of Feng Shui. Best of all, more and more people are abandoning their New Age Feng Shui encyclopedias to delve into the beautiful intricacies of Xuan Kong, BaZi and other more substantial forms of Feng Shui.
Within a short frame of time, if these few good men (and women) continue onwards and upwards, and if everyone does their part in recognizing the truth from the manufactured, Classical Feng Shui will take precedence and be professionally recognized by its other scientific peers. Think about it: there might even be University courses providing Feng Shui classes next to Physics and Bio Chemistry!
Now this kind of progress would truly make our past Feng Shui forebearers proud.
What do you think?
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This article is brought to you by |
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Delia Zamir
Associate Editor for Feng Shui Times.
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