Auspicious Geopathic Chi Luck Elements Fortune
All righty, now let’s all pull up our chairs to our desks and place our pens and pencils neatly at the top and get ready to pay attention. Remember the other day we had a little disagreement about whether or not Feng Shui is woo-woo or, in the technical language, nonsense? It started because I linked to an article by Nick Cohen who referred to Feng Shui (as I did in the headline) as fashionable nonsense – a phrase that has a certain resonance for the proprietors of B&W. But a reader took exception to that headline, and to Nick’s article, on the grounds that Feng Shui isn’t nonsense at all, but just sensible environmental design. Well, I don’t think so. It does include sensible environmental design, but it also includes real nonsense. I’ve been investigating, and I have yet to find any nonsense-free Feng Shui. Now, granted, it’s possible that like the black swan, nonsense-free Feng Shui just hasn’t turned up on the radar yet…But so far, it seems safe (and fair) to say that Feng Shui is well over in the woo-woo camp.
Here’s something from the first Google hit. It’s about kitchens.
The kitchen represents the manifestation of the family’s well-being and wealth. It is useful for pressing down bad luck caused by bad flying star number or personalized directions of bad fortune. According to the Eight Mansions and Flying Star formulas, certain sectors of the house are deemed to be unlucky. If your kitchen is located in an unlucky sector this is a good thing…The mouth of the stove should face one of the best directions of the father of the family. This energises the stove, making the food cooked in it auspicious for the family…Good feng shui kitchens should take the orientation of the stove, oven and rice cooker into account. When auspiciously oriented, the stove can bring enormous good fortune to a family. The kitchen stove should not be in the northwest sector. This is called “Fire at Heaven’s Gate” and brings bad luck to the breadwinner, causing the head of the household to lose their job and money.
Here is a basic course in the principles of FS from a UK site:
Four evenings of giving a good basic foundation in Feng Shui principles for the absolute beginner and basic knowledge to go on to further training. The course will cover: Form School, Chi Energy, the five elements, ying and yang, I Ching and the trigrams, Geopathic Stress, Electro magnetic fields, Feng Shui cures, artwork and symbolism, Clutter and space clearing.
And finally there is this from yet another site.
In Chinese philosophy, the concept of “Wu Xing” has a prominent standing. In Chinese Medicine, Astrology and Fengshui, the idea of Wu Xing is used extensively. This term has been conveniently translated as “five elements” or “five phases”. The word “Wu” means “five”. To single out the word “Xing” and try to explain what it means is futile effort…Water dominates in winter, wood in spring, fire in summer, metal in autumn. At the intersection between two seasons, the transitional period is dominated by earth…The names “water”, “wood”, “fire”, “metal” and “earth” are only substances whose properties resemble the respective chi in the closest possible way. They do help us understand the properties of the five types of chi but they also mislead us if we take everything in the literal sense.
Right.
So is there any completely nonsense-free Feng Shui anywhere? If so, it’s pretty hard to find!
From ‘Bad Science’;
Anthea Turner, former darling of morning TV, paid through the nose to have her home Feng-Shuied last month. The very next weekend she was burgled and lost £40,000 of valuables. Proof, if proof were needed: I guess she should have left that wastebasket in the “wealth” corner of the room after all.
Not to be a pedant… but who among us can always resist that urge? The black swan example for the difficulty of proving a universal negative is rather badly out of date… since a black swan species was discovered in Australia a few centuries back.
http://tinyurl.com/9nvdq
;-)
G
I know (I ought to know, we had black swans at the zoo, I saw them every day), but that’s the point. There was a time when the people who didn’t know that, didn’t know that. That was Popper’s point, wasn’t it?
It’s arrogant, racist, and scientistic to scoff at Fung Shway.
Feng Shui is like so many other pseudosciences (and religions.) There are some perfectly reasonable ideas (remove clutter, put a little waterfall somewhere, etc.) mixed in with a bunch of gibberish, falsehoods, and non sequiturs — and people vaguely assume that the success of the first must somehow entail that there is “something to” the rest of it.
Penn and Teller did a great Showtime episode on Feng Shui, by the way. The same woman hired different “experts” to work on her living room. None of them knew about the others, and all were secretly taped. They contradicted each other left and right, of course, as well as babbling obvious nonsense for big bucks an hour. So much for the empirical “science” of Feng Shui.
(Come to think of it, Feng Shui might be a bit like chiropractry. If you look at the actual theory and those who try to follow it properly, it’s pseudoscientific rot. But over time much of it has turned into fairly practical physical therapy for the back. Perhaps some of the Feng Shui-ists are really doing the same: normal decorating with just a bit of mysterious oriental hand-waving thrown in for effect …)
I know, OB. Just being silly. The underlying point of the silliness (if there is one) being that while there *are* in fact black swans, it’s awfully darned unlikely that there are any non-nonsensical versions of Feng Shui.
But maybe I just say that because I have too much yang energy flowing into my fingers through my keyboard because my computer faces south…
Hmm… art deco? =)
Oh, duh. Sorry for being so literal, G. It’s, let’s see, because my stove is too near the refrigerator, and fire is hostile to ice and vice versa.
“Perhaps some of the Feng Shui-ists are really doing the same: normal decorating with just a bit of mysterious oriental hand-waving thrown in for effect …”
That seems to be exactly it.
A friend of mine never stops telling me about this spiritual healer he goes to for ailments that would normally suggest he saw a physiotherapist. Turns out that this woman is actually pretty good at her job, but I found out later that she is also a qualified physiotherapist! I haven’t managed to convince my friend that it might be the medical training that allows her to help him and not the spiritual energies that she apparently babbles on about.
The pragmatic fallacy is one of the toughest to argue with gullible friends. ‘But I felt better after seeing Marvo, so Marvo’s mojo works.’
Apart from the glaringly obvious post hoc reasoning here, you can point out that;
a) you almost certainly went to Marvo when feeling at or near your worst, so there was always a good chance that you would feel better in the coming days anyway.
b) if Marvo is any good at his scam, his rooms will be soothing, pleasant and relaxing and he will have spent 50 minutes focussing on you, your feelings and your needs. (Much like an expensive prostitute, or so I would imagine.)So, yes, you will feel better, especially if your problem is emotional, stress-related or connected with low self-esteem.
c) Placebo.
d) Marvo will have primed you to expect certain indicators of success (‘You may feel a slight tingling …”Why, yes, there it is now!’) and the fact that you went to him in the first place implies a certain suggestibility and lack of critical thinking.
Of course, this just pisses your friends off, so I tend to limit myself to, ‘(cough) Quack (cough)’
I got in a discussion with a GP doctor who keeps her fees a touch lower than her rooms-mates. A customer wisely asked why, was she not as good a doctor?
The signal was clear, but what she thought of as professional care for the less well-off, came across as ‘doubtful quality, can’t you afford better?’
My advice: put in a grand piano and raise fees by 120%. Wealth will be energised – and why should quacks benefit from manipulation and scientific medicine not?
Ah, well. If one dimbulb patient equates quality care with exorbitant fees, then that cinches it. Jack it up and stick it to ’em. That’ll teach the less well-off to appreciate you more.
Basic façade or front shop theory. Wear a very expensive suit and people will think you’re competent. Drive a very expensive car ditto. But…what about people who are highly competent but have better things to spend their money on? Well, the hell with them, they’re not playing the game properly. What about people who are highly competent but nevertheless do not particularly remunerative things? Same goes for them, with bells on.
“But…what about people who are highly competent but have better things to spend their money on? …What about people who are highly competent but nevertheless do not do particularly remunerative things?”
They’re called losers, OB. Get with the program.
Hey, check out my new Porsche, baby. Impressed?