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By Brenda Koehler

          In Taoist thought everything is made of qi or energy. The Chinese say qi is the energy that gives us life, that makes rivers flow and plants grow. Qi is our spirit, our emotions, our subconscious, our creative intellect. Although these principles have driven Eastern culture for thousands of years, there is no equivalent term in English for qi, or recognition in the West even of its existence (Liu). However, lately this elusive concept has established a stronghold in the bottom-line-driven capitalist world largely due to its charismatic ambassador, feng shui.
          What is feng shui? To many people it has simply been a rattling collision with the discovery that a whole world exists beyond the reach of intellect, a place where conventional logic dissolves. Based on the Tao Te Ching's doctrine that the world is a swirling network of energies and that success may be attained by correctly aligning ourselves with it, feng shui is about harnessing the energies of one's environment to attain prosperity. Many feng shui consultants maintain they can accomplish this by re-positioning the objects within a home or office and changing color, lighting and textures.
          Mitch Lansdell is an example of someone whose experience has led him to acknowledge the powerful enigmatic workings of feng shui. Lansdell was in desperate straits in 1998 as the acting manager of the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena. The city of 59,000 residents faced a $4.7 million budget deficit, and Lansdell was at the end of his perseverance and ingenuity. In sheer desperation he agreed to try a feng shui practitioner. The consultant, Angi Ma Wong, came to Lansdell's office, permanently sealed off one of his doors, put all his books in the southeastern corner and arranged his desk so he could face northeast when talking on the phone during important calls.
Within three weeks, Lansdell was promoted to full-time manager of Gardena, whose economy then got a boost when Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt bought a bankrupt casino there. This month Lansdell expects Gardena's deficit to decrease to 2.9 million. If this was a coincidence, Ma Wong's other clients don't think so. They include 65 real estate developers as well as Universal Studios and Coty Beauty, the fragrance concern. If feng shui's effectiveness is an illusion, it's occurring on a massive scale throughout the country. Real estate tycoon Donald Trump uses feng shui, as does the brokerage house Merrill Lynch (Singh 97-98).
          Feng shui has burrowed deep into American culture, opening up a new way of perceiving reality, and making people question accepted traditions. The Tao states spirit and matter are two aspects of the same thing and feng shui incorporates this into its everyday practice. While architecture and interior design concern themselves with structure, function, and visual impact, feng shui takes into consideration the conscious and unconscious associations a person may have with a space and the objects within it, as well as their placement. According to its philosophy, a person's home can be the overlap between the inner and outer universe, the crossing point between inner and outer reality, an empowering sanctuary (Linn 21).
          The knowledge that spirit is inherent in matter was scientifically discovered by Einstein and forms the basis of his field theory. In fact, with the advent of the relativity and the quantum theories, modern physicists' concepts of reality were shattered and forced in line with a Taoist point of view. The universe is no longer officially seen by the scientific community as a machine made up of a multitude of separate parts but as a harmonious indivisible whole, a network of dynamic relationships that include the human observer and his consciousness in an essential way. But it is feng shui with its more accessible concepts and more easily realized benefits that is bringing the individual's ability to manipulate the immaterial world into sharp and perceptible focus.
          Carl Sanders called a feng shui practitioner as a last resort. He had always been a skeptic, but since moving into a new house less than a year ago, he had been plagued by misfortune. He lost his job and his wife, and was chronically sick, and in debt. Somewhat sheepishly he asked if the new house was affecting his life. His consultant told him the street that ran directly toward his house was weakening its energy and inducing financial loss. The large tree outside his window was lowering his immune system and causing depression. Having the kitchen on the right hand side where one enters the house was also a source of poor relationships and money loss. Carl moved out of his house and into an environment that reinforced his energy and sharpened his intuitions. Because his problems did not develop overnight, they took time to begin to resolve into a healthier state, but eventually they did. This is one reason why feng shui is better used in the beginning to prevent the fire rather than to try to put it out when it is too late (Liu).
          The Japanese used feng shui as a weapon during their occupation of Korea. In order to ensure that the occupation would be successful, Japanese geomancers dug deep shafts into the earth, inserted, then buried upright, long iron poles to act as collectors and redistributors of the land's qi. This was intended as a sort of destructive geomantic acupuncture. To this day, Koreans are trying to find and remove these poles in order to restore their country's original qi flow. 
          When the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei designed the new Bank of China building, he neglected to consult a geomancer. When the building was completed, havoc erupted as merchants, individuals and business tycoons scrambled to build surrounding walls and protective structures around their homes and offices to correct the imbalanced feng shui from the seventy-story tower. One of the problems was that it was taller than anything else in Hong Kong. Another problem was that the pointy angles of the building created arrows of qi that pierced buildings all over Hong Kong (Wolfe).
          Feng shui anecdotes are easily dismissed by critics, but no matter how irrational they may seem, the effect of the feng shui experience in America has been a cumulative one of fascination and acceptance. It is this positive encounter with a foreign concept in pursuit of the short-term gain that is opening the gate to a more receptive and open-minded attitude to the invisible world around us. This collective heightened awareness could not come any time too soon. According to some people: 
           We have lost a natural human ability to be close to nature by becoming civilized and 
            industrialized. Before the days of victorious industrialism, civilized men were able to
            conceive of a systematic mystical relation between themselves and their environment and, by
            working on the assumption that the future was orderly, were determined to shape it. We
           dominate our environment with increasing ferocity and have lost the power to make it speak
           about our future. (Freedman 168)
           By using feng shui to step back and recognize that we are equal participants in our environment and not the masters of it, we may be taking the first enlightened steps to a healthier and more responsible role as citizens of the planet.

Works Cited

Freedman, Maurice. Chinese Lineage and Society. London: Athlone Press, 1966. 
Kiat, Tee Wee. The Feng Shui of Physics. 5 June 1995.
<http://www.synaptic.bc.ca/ejournal/fengshui.html>

Linn, Dinise. Sacred Space. San Francisco: Lighthouse Books, 1997.

Liu, Jenny. Spirit Web: Feng shui Giving Us Direction. 7 October 1996.
<http://www.2.ev.spiritweb.org/feng-shui-liu-01.html>
------. Spirit Web: Feng shui in Times of Trouble. 1 October 1996.
<http://www.spiritweb.org/spirit/feng-shui-liu-06.html>

Singh, Ajay. "Luck be a Stone Lion." Time Magazine 3 July 2000: 97-98.
Wolfe, Jeremiah. Feng Shui. 2 November 1996. <http://www.wolfenet.com/
~jerimiah/fengshui.html>

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