sabrinamari | If you want to know more, and you made it through the websites in the previous post...

...then the link below is for you. This page explains the Annual Flying Stars for 2005 and what they might mean for you and your home. It also explains what you can do to protect yourself, from the perspective of the Flying Star School of Feng Shui (part of the Compass School approach):

http://www.feng-shui.eu.com/advice/flyingstars2005.htm

Enjoy!

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

onyxtwilight.livejournal.com

Now, see, here's where my bullshit meter starts to go off.

I think Feng Shui principles, the underlying base principles, are very valuable and can teach us a lot, but I get twitchy at western interpretations that move too far into "pop magic" with assertations and pronouncements that don't make any sense from a cultural perspective. I think it's fine to say "this particular sort of energy is out of balance in my home," but quite another to take a book at face value that says "but it will all be okay if I just hang this bamboo flute here, even though I have no cultural association with bamboo flutes whatsoever." I think we can use the symbols of another culture if we take the time to understand them (like, Mandarin ducks aren't going to do a damned thing for you, relationshipwise, until you understand that the reason they're used as a symbol for healthy, stable relationships is that they mate for life -- and, understanding that, you could get just as much benefit, if not more, from other mate-for life animals [wolves, swans, whooping cranes, some foxes, eagles, etc.], especially if you have more cultural associations with them). If I need to put some coins somewhere prominent to fix a money problem, I'm not going to choose Chinese coins, am I? I want money I can spend. :-) (There are other, cross-cultural valuable uses for Chinese coins in my hands, but for me, I don't think money magic is one of them.)

I become even more twitchy when presented with this attitude (not just from pop feng shui, you see this with wikky-wicca and santeria and such all the time) that "all this bad stuff could happen, you have to have all this stuff to fix it, it could be really really bad, oh but don't panic as long as you have this stuff -- which, conveniently, we sell -- but don't worry about why it works, just get it. Oh, and replace it occasionally, because it has soaked up all sorts of bad juju and you need a new one."

The entire approach stomps all over my understanding of the world's energetic interplay. I absolutely laugh at the notion that windchimes are soaking up negativity; the world isn't full of spiritual poison we have to be rescued from by cosmic Tinkerbells. Energy imbalances are corrected by harmonizing, transmuting, healing. Sure, sometimes it's best to suck it up in some salt and let the salt take care of things and just get rid of it, and yeah, you don't want to be using that salt for anything else. But the things that spread beneficience through my home do so because I (and Those who assist me in answer to my request) invest in them the beneficient, harmonious energy to do so, neutralizing the negative energy in my home by transforming it, not because everything in the world that is exactly those shapes automatically sucks up evil all the time.

I'm sure there is value in the flying-star theory, when approached with a full understanding by a serious practitioner, but this website just sets off alarms in my head screaming "bullshit!" :-)

From:

sabrinamari.livejournal.com

I do understand! I think the key is immersion in the appropriate cultural context. The more I learn about Chinese and Tibetan perspectives, and the more I integrate aspects of their worldview, the more this material seems relevant to me. I no longer see it as "outside" of me or my experience---I'm starting to integrate it into the way I think about the world. So for me, as I go, I learn more and more about the underlying symbolic language that is being spoken through each item and the placement of each item---and just as I speak "Blue Star litergy" and "Western Generalized Tarot", I'm starting to speak feng shui and some aspects of Eastern esotericism.

So for me, the 6-rod windchimes aren't just windchimes anymore, just as the key hanging on its red thread on the inside of my doorknob isn't just a key anymore. Both are potent manifestations of a symbolic language embedded with my will, my prayers and my magical intent, which are harnessing that language in order to achieve a specific change in the world and in my consciousness---in other words, magic.

I think there are also personal reasons for this affinity. Right now, I am very interested in creating a safe and nurturing space that is as charged with protection and positive power as I can make it. Feng shui is a beautifully useful tool---a wonderful, rich symbolic language---that will allow me to achieve this goal in a graceful and elegant way. It doesn't hurt that I already believe in the power of intention focused through action and the placement of energized objects, either ;).

So while I understand the bullshit meter that you are experiencing and I do respect it, I don't find that it is a critical element in my own experience.

Part of it is this: in many ways, I stopped asking whether magical tools or approaches were "real" many years ago. Instead, when I encounter a system, or a tool or set of tools, I now ask, "is it useful?". If it is useful to me, then I try to learn as much as I can about it, inhabit the worldview that created it, and draw on those elements that make the most sense to me in order to achieve the ends that I am reaching for.

But that's just me. : ) I say, explore, examine, review and maybe even reinvent. Take what speaks to your soul, offer your thanks, and respectfully decline the rest.

From:

onyxtwilight.livejournal.com

All of which is why it will work for YOU, whereas it probably won't work for most of the people who visit that page and think it's a matter of following the "instructions" and expecting their end result to plop out of nowhere -- which is what I was bitching about, that particular site and the way they present information... not the theory itself, about which I know next to nothing, because that crappy site did a piss-poor job of attempting to educate me. :-)

From:

sabrinamari.livejournal.com

I went back and looked at the site and I think there are a number of problems that may be contributing to your discomfort here:

1. In several sections, the site assumes that readers will have some background knowledge, including cultural context, of what they are discussing, leaving substantial gaps in logic and gaping holes in their explanations.

2. The concepts they are dealing with are pretty complex and quite difficult to boil down succinctly and usefully in a short website.

3. It also looks to me like there are problems that have to do with translation---both the translation of cultural concepts and the translation of language---in this case, the use of English to convey complex ideas when English is not the writer's native tongue.

All of these problems are fairly common on English-language feng shui websites, and they make researching feng shui via the web quite challenging. Right now I'm eyeing a couple of texts that look pretty comprehensive (and pretty expensive) with which to resolve thsi problem, but I don't have them to refer to yet.

I also think that for a fair number of people---include some Asians---feng shui *is* viewed as a simplistic practice of following formulas without understanding the concepts that underlie them. I suspect it's this aspect of things that's bothering you; I agree that it's a troublesome issue. Am I hitting on the problem accurately here?

From:

onyxtwilight.livejournal.com

All of those things are true, and it's especially the last thing that bugs me, yes. The people of that culture may very well get rudimentary results following formulae without any understanding, because they're still steeped in the symbolism on one level or another, but I'll bet most western-culture people don't get any more out of it than they would out of a lucky charm bought from a street vendor -- i.e., the amount of personal power their belief manages to drum up for it.

The thing about this website that bothered me the most was the "don't worry, you don't need to understand, just buy this kit and it'll fix everything." Which is a bit of an exaggeration, I suppose, but that's how it struck me. :-)