Finding the place where your fate is appreciated
usefulness is the combination of fate (time) and place
pardon me while i riff a bit on some things I’ve been thinking about. the cycle of structural violences that keeps so many of us in negative-relationship patterns. the loops of slavery, the wheel of samsara.
i don’t know enough about feng shui to be of most use. before he died, liu ming recorded a series of lectures on feng shui that are hosted at golden gate school of feng shui. in many of his other lectures, such as ones on polestar astrology, lunar almanac/tongshu, and yijing divination, ming would hint that the ability to apply those methods was a function of placement, or feng shui. now, i can’t afford the feng shui lecture series, so i’m still very much in the dark on this. Mostly i’m spending time learning more the above three methodologies as best i can and continuing my almost ten-year process with ming’s other work on dream and nutrition.
but this idea of real feng shui has always fascinated/confused me, mostly because over my lifetime i can see how where i lived, both the greater geographical region and the specific apartment or room/house would affect my sanity greatly, sometimes to a degree that could be categorized as possession, obsession and depression.
i would rearrange my belongings endlessly, things never quite feeling right. i would have to do the best i could and then just endure it, endure the feelings of being in the wrong place, the wrong arrangement, the wrong interiority of place. this constant itch is a combination of lifelong, inherited/ancestral poverty, lack of a loving family unit, lack of a loving culture that could see/appreciate me, and an astrological fate pattern that is hellish to put it mildly. probably also moldy and unfit/unsafe environments.
all this combines into a generalized anxiety of “wrong place”. nevermind the almost total lack of a sane culture or community. a community where everyone isn’t a merchant, selling their brand identity as if it will somehow create the world the way they want it. the past 5+ years in coaching/spirituality education has shown me that to be a community member and an artist is opposed to capitalist socioeconomics. we can’t have a community if everyone is a merchant, if everyone applies mercantilism to their relationships 24/7.
if every individual is an economic unit, then all we do is try and leverage every other person into a customer, consultant or competitor.
it may be that there are no more real places, no more real communities except in ever-dwindling numbers. but feng shui and astro-geomantic sciences seems to hint that everything is an effect of place and time. of the proper spatial relationships (place, placement, position, arrangement) and timing (movement, cycles, seasons, momentum).
the last time i really felt close to “right place” was when i visited the big island of Hawaii for the first time a few years ago. the climate and multi-cultural diversity felt “close to right”. the insane economic oppression, colonialism and overcrowded ness was definitely wrong enough that i couldn’t fathom moving there. too many native Hawaiians being forced out even after working multiple jobs to make ends meet. forced to be a serf/servant class for wealthy foreigners and colonialists.
this is also what i mean by place, the capacity to be able to be in right relationship with the land. the capacity to be in right relationship with a real culture. living in Portland, Oregon for the past 6 years, i can say that “well-meaning white people” is not a whole culture. this is one of the most segregated places i’ve ever lived. this is one of the loneliest places i’ve ever lived on a basic cultural level. but it’s also the only place i’ve been able to find semi-affordable housing with no fucking roommates.
let me tell you, roommates are the worst. if you want to see normalized addiction and despair, live with other people who aren’t related to you. (hell, family ain’t any better in many cases.)
living with other people is how i learned early on that things like demons and ghosts were a real thing, even before i learned about classical asian traditions or other indigenous/animistic worldviews. “mental illness” is just the denial of whiteness about what’s really going on, a way to personalize people’s pain into “things-that-aren’t-our-problems”.
many people need ritual-as-medicine, as well as herbal, nutritional and cognitive interventions. ritual requires place and time. ritual requires a culture that is bonded by and with place and time.
instead, many of us are wandering ghosts, essentially “homeless” even if we pay for a roof over our heads. in the zhouyi, the book that contains the yijing hexagrams, the authors of that text transmit that the worst fate is someone who is “far from home”, someone who is a traveler, visitor, foreigner passing through. The yijing exemplifies this in hexagram 56.
This is because when a person isn’t surrounded by people who know them, care for them, are part of a tribal affiliation, then that person is more likely to suffer afflictive conditions, such as violence, wind diseases, injuries and worse. To die far away from home, without being buried properly, is a fast-track to ghosthood from the perspective of the ancient pre-chinese people.
compare this with the western capitalist colonial paradigm of being able to go wherever, whenever. if one is wealthy enough, then “travel” is the badge of honor. being able to invade everyone else’s domain is a right, an entitlement that the privileged have “earned”. in the west/capitalism, freedom means being free from relationships. it means being able to re-invent yourself constantly, because no one you meet knows you and no one sticks around long enough to meet you again.
this “feels” like freedom only to a deeply wounded and disturbed shen, or heartmind. to a people that have been so abused that superficial relationships feel “good”. to these people, collectivism in any form is an existential threat to their sense of freedom, because freedom-from-stability is equal to safety.
this is the mindfuck of the religion of individualism.
in collectivism, people are free to have individualistic ideas and pursuits, just not at the expense of others. in collectivism you can actually feel how your actions affect others and the land, just as you can feel how other’s actions and the land affect you.
in some cases, it’s true that a person may be born with the wrong fate to exist in the culture or village they are born in. this is where the aforementioned wisdom sciences come into play. we want everyone to be in the right place for their fate, because then everyone benefits, even indirectly.
but this would mean that we would have to have a way for this process of location and relocation to be just.
we don’t have that.
what we have instead is whatever the fuck this is.
part of whatever this is, is a recipe for ghosts.
housekeeping
if anyone wants to fund or trade for Ming’s feng shui recordings, contact me and i’ll connect us in an email. i have many recordings already and i’d like to complete the collection so that it exists after i die, especially as reparations for Asian folks. i already have an Asian-descended female caretaker of my collection who will decide access after i pass. if you are an Asian person (chinese, taiwanese, tibetan especially, but there’s definitely leeway here) and would like access to my library (and the responsibility of the information within it), you can always email me, and we can have a real conversation.
this post is from the archive of unfinished posts. i’m still deeply interested in talking about craft and process, but i’m also recognizing the information-overload nature of the times. like, do ppl even read these? do they read them in useful way? what is the pedagogy of the reader, the learner? are we as a culture actually making meaning or are we just adding symbols to the slush folder of our minds? am i just trying to dump the backlog of repressed expression out via tiny black marks on a digital screen stored in some anonymous server farm that uses up clean water to cool its humid engines? who will tend these server farms when we die? will they become food for some kind of new spirit bacteria that eats digital information? will these new bacterium create their own poetics in a symbolism we cannot even imagine? zeroes and ones converted into chutes and ladders, new holograms with teeth made of affiliate marketing and escher-shaped digestive tracts, a colony of orbital logic so circular that only ghosts can see it? if i chop up all these words and rearrange them alphabetically do i discover the true name of the exiled angel that was erased from time-memory after the secret war?
a about actually adding affiliate after all alphabetically also am and angel anonymous archive are as backlog bacteria bacterium become black but can cannot chop chutes circular clean colony converted cool craft create culture deeply die? digestive digital discover do dump eats engines? erased escher-shaped even exiled expression farm farms folder food for from ghosts holograms humid i if imagine? in information-overload information? interested into is it? its i’m just kind ladders, learner? like, logic made making marketing marks meaning minds? name nature new of on ones only or orbital our out own pedagogy poetics post posts. ppl process, read reader, rearrange recognizing repressed screen secret see server slush so some spirit still stored symbolism symbols talking teeth tend that the their them these these? they this time-memory times. tiny to tracts, true trying unfinished up useful uses via war? was water way? we what when who will with words zeroes
