Around the midpoint of my life, I found myself wondering whether I was on the right path. I considered whether I should change careers and set out on a new course. Around this time, I received a call from an old friend of mine in China who was a Taoist qigong healer. This friend told me that he had returned to the island where he was born, and he invited me to visit whenever I happened to be in China.
Fengshui talk with Dr. Hsu, Jenny, Taras & Justin via Zoom on May 12, 2020. All Zoom talks and Q&A sessions with Master Hsu you can watch here.
Many Blue Mountain feng shui students in different parts of the world are asking me “how do we see and handle the coronavirus pandemic from a feng shui perspective?” I was surprised at the question, as feng shui is about living environment design. It is about life design and has no obvious connection to this pandemic.
However, since the fundamental feng shui principle is based on natural principles — natural laws, the highest guidance for human living, then maybe we can try to see the pandemic from a natural law perspective.
Master Hsu is practicing Tai Chi in the snowy morning in China, Guangping, Hebei province, on Dec. 15, 2019. It is the brithplace of Yang Luchan (1799–1872), influential teacher of the internal style martial art Tai Chi Chuan (Taiji Quan), the founder of Yang-style Tai Chi Chuan:
In our previous note, we mentioned that water quality can be assessed through the form or image of the water.
In the 1960s, the German scientist, Theodor Schwenk, the author of Sensitive Chaos, developed a “drop picture method” for studying water.
In 1990, I participated in the first Water Symposium held in Washington State (in the US). About sixty scientists and inventors participated in a discussion of the question, “What is good water?”
Most people approached this from the point of view of physics: they talked about the pH, oxygen content, molecular size, purity, conductivity, surface tension, and so on. These are all things that can be measured and put into numbers.
What is beauty? What is the experience of beauty?
Philosophers, both in the East and West, have tried to address this subject: in the West, Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hegel; in the East, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Chuang Tzu, and more recently Cai Yanpei, Wang Guowei, and Zhu Guangqian.
We used to discuss what is beauty? – the subjective and objective sides of beauty, and the combination of both.
Regardless of the philosophy of the issue, we have to admit that pure art and architectural art are very different from each other. For one thing, architecture is a very complicated art form, because it has elements of many arts combined in it. But more important is how architecture relates to the public.
In earlier postings we mentioned the Four Features of Feng Shui, and that they apply at any scale, from the largest to the smallest.
Some readers have pointed out that many Feng Shui books talk about Five Features – and that the fifth is orientation.
In fact, that fifth feature came along much later, when people tried to apply astrological ideas to Feng Shui. This was the beginning of what we now call the Cosmological School.
To be in harmony with nature is a popular ideal, especially in light of the increasingly popular environmental movement.
In fact, when Blue Mountain Institute was founded, we used “In harmony with nature, in tune with the heart” as the motto of the Institute. But what is in harmony with nature? And how can this harmony be achieved?
