Even as the Year of the Sheep – 2015 – comes closer (it is on 19th Feb 2015) – my thoughts go to the year gone. It is great to feel that Feng Shui has in many ways transformed the fortunes of many.
It matter a lot to me if people who consulted me figure in a 100 crore club or even 200 crore club, or become a part of the governments formed the last year. I am also elated if my Feng Shui transforms the lives, enriches people with Love and Harmony, Success, Money, Fame and Health.
Though I think noticing that a certain seat is your class is lucky and another would always get you bashed up by your teacher and even treating a Parker pen as lucky is a Feng Shui of sorts, one of my fantasies during school days was to have the ability to tell a hotelier to shift his counter and he gratefully telling me, on my next visit, that his business has boomed. I didn’t even know whether this would be possible. I did read a book on this in one of the many libraries I used to haunt. But soon forgot about it as a skeptical and cynical journalist.
And decades later I am a Feng Shui Master!
Feng Shui is the blessing of our ancestors. They were the ones who worked, discovered the secrets of Feng Shui. I was lucky to stumble upon some interesting facts which arouse my interest in the ancient science of geomancy. Who can believe that I first read the references to Oriental culture and even Fuk Luk Sau in crime fiction written in 1937 by Erle Stanley Gardner (writing as A. A. Fair)? I read it during eighties when no one had heard of Feng Shui.
The lead character, Terry Clane who has spent a few years in China, suspects that cops had searched his apartment in his absence because they hadn’t put back the Trinity of Chinese Gods Fuk Luk Sau to their correct position! Sou, was in the left!
The correct position was Fuk that stands for the Wealth in the left, Luk that represents Fame and Stature in the middle and Sou that symbolizes Health in the right.
Of course, what brought me closer to the Oriental philosophy was the painting of Chow Kok Koh. He is one of the Eight Immortals. I wrote about him in 1994-95 in Suvidha Express, a weekly newspaper of which I was the editor.
The old Chinese man in the painting is Chow Kok Koh. He is one of the eight Chinese immortals. The old bearded man is supposed to have supernatural powers. He carries a sunshade and on his back, hung by a is Yuku, a primitive musical instrument made of bamboo tube. It is like our sitar.
This figure and its fatalism fascinated me.
The lines on his face show that he has lived a full, rich life. He is happy. He is filled with a zest for life and for life’s adventure. And he rides his mule backwards.
Chow Kok Koh believes that the various vicissitudes of life are but the tools with which the divine architect shapes one’s character. He believes mortals are placed here on earth for character development.
Whether a man has good fortune or whether he has bad fortune is relatively unimportant. It is only his reaction to the good and bad that counts.
“A man who suffers adversity and reacts in the proper way in that adversity, has so developed spiritually that he has achieved a net asset, so that in the long run, he has been fully benefited as though he has had good fortune.
And because Chow Kok Koh recognizes these things he rides his mule backwards, because, he says, it makes no difference where he is going. A destination in life is unimportant. It is only what one does along the way that counts.”
So I rode my mule backwards!
I started reading everything I could lay my hands on and experimenting. On myself and on friends. I was amazed to see it working. This was much before Feng Shui became a fad.
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