Last summer I was consulting at a beautiful straw bale house in the Marin countryside. While we were discussing some of the feng shui problems of the house, their teenage son came into the kitchen, grabbed a bag of blue corn chips and sat at the table. When he tried to open the bag of chips, the bag exploded and the chips came flying out at me. I thanked him for offering me a snack, of course. Because I was in a meditative feng shui consulting mode of mind, I felt that the flying blue chips had meaning, were symbolic, the universe trying to tell us something about the issues brought up in the consultation.

Using a very dynamic on the spot method called Plum Blossom I Ching, I was able to translate the incident into symbols from the I Ching and give them information about the future of their business. They were having cash flow problems because of difficulty in their international operations.

I told them that that their reputation was suffering and they needed to change distributors. If they did so cash flow would be good in four months. Now, if you knew the situation you would have recommended changing distributors without an I Ching reading. I did not know all the details at that time. So I can't say the I Ching reading is why they did so. It was just prudent business practice. The reading did help them make that decision quickly.

Later that evening another incident occurred that they felt had that omen quality. They emailed me the details, but I did not respond for a few days. When I called I told the husband that they would have a big fight and probably already did. He confirmed that I called too late.

Feng Shui and I Ching are inseparable. Let's look at each and see how they can work together to improve your life. Feng Shui practitioners use I Ching symbols and the flow of those symbols through time to read the chi of any environment. They also use I Ching to read the chi of the clients. All Chinese astrology is based on I Ching, not on stars or planets. Feng Shui practitioners also read the shapes, forms, colors and other elements of an environment symbolically. From the Chinese perspective ambience is the quality of the chi of the place.

Feng Shui is the original environmental impact report. All creatures want to feel safe and easily sustain themselves and future generations. It is no surprise then that Feng Shui is an innate function present in all sentient beings. Birds do, it bees do it, even monkeys in the trees do it. We all do feng shui. Feng Shui is just a name for the study of how we are affected by and react to our environment physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Does the environment actually have control over our lives? Yes and No. Western belief systems are generally based on an either/or, yes/no outlook. Chinese philosophy, based on the Tao, is a both/and outlook. The environment controls us to the extent that we remain unconscious of its effect. Once we understand the effect we can change the environment or ourselves for more comfort, ease and to further our purpose in life.

Because it is an innate function, we are not usually aware that we are Feng Shuing our way through life. This is only one manifestation of a large problem for humans. Innate and deep cultural conditioning is invisible to us. What ever we are used to experiencing and believing over time becomes the norm. So most cultures have never given the feng shui process a name. It is just the seemingly natural way we arrange our life. The Chinese gave it a name and turned it into an art/science.

Feng Shui and I Ching are products of Shamanic culture. Around 2870 BCE, Fu Shi, the first emperor, met a turtle arising out of a lake upon which he found the eight trigrams or Ba Gua, a symbolic representation of physical, emotional and spiritual space. Fu Shi took a Shamanic journey diving into the lake of the unconscious to discover a power animal who gave him knowledge. This knowledge was expressed as a medicine wheel. This event is considered the birth of the I Ching and the Ba Gua is the medicine wheel of feng shui.

I believe feng shui became a conscious process in China because the chinese developed the first mathematical model to understand the interplay of natural forces - the I Ching. The I Ching is a binary mathematical system just like the series of 1's and 0's that are the base language of computers. The Chinese named these numbers yin and yang. They gave them meanings based on common complimentary dualities in life: Being/ non being, matter/space, hot/cold, male/ female, up/down, in/out etc.

Giving the numbers meaning produces a system of numerology, rather than a system for counting. Numerology treats numbers as metaphors, symbols for large categories of energetic relationship. Natural forces and objects are assigned to particular numbers based on a perceived relationship. Numbers are assigned meanings from nature such as wind, mountain, water, thunder as well as more abstract meanings such as wealth, relationship, knowledge, career, benefactors.

Amazingly, the structure of the I Ching is almost identical to the structure of DNA. Johnson Yan, a Chinese american physicist in his book I Ching and DNA claims that DNA is the code for the physical life and I Ching is the psycho-spiritual code. Many scientist and mathematicians have been fascinated by I Ching. One Hawaiian scientist credits his saving of the Hawaiian papaya crop to his study of the I Ching with my teacher, Grand Master Lin Yun.

Feng shui also became a conscious process in China because of the desire to maximize burial location for the benefit of family future. You might naturally choose a great place to live but how to choose a place for the chi still attached to a dead body.

Chinese Feng Shui and I Ching are inextricably interwoven. Feng Shui practice is dependent upon two medicine wheels derived from the binary number system, one for the dead and one for the living. These medicine wheels, called Ba Gua, are used to read the connection of environment to the inhabitants' fate. The binary numbers 7 through 15 are arranged in geometric patterns and imagined superimposed upon any and all environments. Sometimes the placement is based upon the earths magnetic field, sometimes on the door of the environment. This is why you hear feng shui practitioners talk about the wealth corner or the relationship corner of an environment.

The Ba Gua you see in Feng Shui books is either the Wen Wong or Confucian Ba Gua, the Ba Gua of the living world. It is superimposed on homes offices buildings rooms plots, tables beds faces. It is ubiquitous. It is placed either according to compass directions or the portal through which the chi enters the space. The eight trigrams are placed on the space the practitioner can give meaning to nine areas (the center is the ninth) that look like a tic tac toe diagram filling the space. Upon consideration of various shapes forms and qualities of each space, a feng shui practitioner can describe situations in your life and possible future outcomes.

I don't know about you, but it seems like a great leap of faith to imagine symbols from a book, the I Ching, on someone's floor and tell them they are going to have relationship problems. It always amazes me how easily this is accepted when I teach feng shui. It does not fit any linear logic I know. It does fit the logic of synchronicity. I believe it is supported by cutting edge physics and mathematics. If we throw together a little fractal science, quantum physics, and relativity we may be able to make this symbolic and imaginative process reasonable.

In his book, Physics As Metaphor, physicist Roger S. Jones describes incidences of information traveling faster than the speed of light. Packets of information traveling faster than the speed of light are called tachyons. For example have you ever picked up the phone before it rang and some one was on the line calling you? They could be calling from far away. It takes about 1/60 of a second for the information to travel from New York to San Francisco at the speed of light. It travels even slower in the wire. This means that it is possible for events to take place outside our experience of time. Synchronicity.

Synchronicity is just one of many natural principles expressed graphically in the Tai Chi symbol. The symbol that contains all of the wisdom of the I Ching. The I Ching already contains all the discoveries of modern physics.

Quanta are units of action. One action is one quanta. Any action is always discrete and complete. Try to do an incomplete action. No matter what you do it has a beginning and an end, even though that end may not complete the intention for the action. Photons are the units of action and photons are the unit of light. In the seventeenth century, the great German philosopher scientist Liebniz showed that light intentionally travels its path. Therefore light is the carrier of intention or purpose. E = MC2 describes everything in the universe as light differing only in density. C.P. Snow once wrote that Scientists are strange creatures in that their main purpose is to prove there is no purpose. Quantum physics, to the horror of scientists, proves the universe is intentional, purposeful.

Twentieth century scientists were depressed because the third law of thermodynamics describes a universe continually deteriorating into lower energy states, that is, increasing chaos. Furthermore when scientist tried to discover the laws of nature operating on large systems it appeared that chaos reined. Then a weather researcher, Edward Lorenz, discovered that large systems could be represented by equations that produce reiterating patterns, called fractal equations. You can't predict the weather in San Francisco at any particular time with much accuracy as is obvious to any one watching weather reports. However, you can become aware of and predict the weather pattern.

Cut a broccoli in half and it is obvious that there is a broccoli pattern. Each layer is different but conforms to a pattern that is reiterating. The broccoli is expressing through the broccoli fractal. In the book Complexity, Mitchell Waldrop describes an experiment by Craig Reynolds, an aeronautic engineer, to mimic the flight of flocks of birds on a computer. Large numbers of birds and fish move in unison, an intricate dance with incredible responsiveness yet with no observable communication. Mr. Reynolds called his computer simulated birds boids. He could get his boids to mimic bird flocks flying by imposing three simple rules

1. Each boid would always try to maintain a specific distance from other boids.
2. Each boid would always move toward the center of boid density of the flock.
3. Each boid would maintain ten velocity of the other boids.

This is a fractal equation, an equation that produces complex reiterating patterns of boids flying in a flock. The flock flying on the computer screen behaved exactly like a flock of birds or a school of fish. Mr. Reynolds then created a software barrier, a virtual pole, on the screen. When one of the boids hit it, it fell back stunned but then sped up and regained its place in the flock.

Let's take a quick review and see if science can make sense out of what seems like an irrational illogical shamanic process. Here is my theory.

1. According to Relativity Theory the universe contains an area of experience that is based on the dimensions of space and linearity of time as well as a contiguous area that is free of time constraints and generates synchronous experience.
2. Energy is proportionally equal to mass and also proportionally equal to frequency. Matter then is just dense energy. Frequency is light, the whole spectrum of light, of which visible light is just a very small portion. The unit of light is the photon which is a unit of action and therefore intentional.
3. Since photons are an expression of intentional action they must be created and moved by will.
4. Will aggregates photons into ever more complex systems ultimately generating the experience we call our life story.
5. At the level of story, our life and nature are governed by fractal equations that produce reiterating patterns of experience from which we can predict probable outcomes but not specific events.

Thus I Ching, Feng Shui, all types of astrology, Tarot cards and other methods of divination can explain underlying causes and predict outcomes. I did make some assumptions and take a big leap there, but for me this is a viable explanation for the validity and amazing accuracy of all the above modalities.

I propose that life is that simple. That our lives are created by a few simple rules. That we are living out and are hypnotized by complex patterns of living experience generated by a simple fractal equation. Into that equation we place emotional beliefs that generate our perceived experience. The I Ching's Tai Chi symbol, a symbol that contains all the wisdom of the I Ching, is graphic depiction of a fractal equation that is a very accurate modeling of our lives and that of nature around us.

All one has to do is drop a few negative beliefs and feelings on one side and a few positive ones on the other side of the Tai Chi and, voila, we have a complex life story to identify with. The negative ones make us feel like the boid bouncing off the pole. The positive ones make us feel like we are soaring in a dance of beauty and grace. Understanding life is available to us through the Tai Chi symbol which generates all the other symbols of the I Ching. Utilizing this simple graphic representation of life's underlying process rules, we can step out of our story into the bigger picture, the Tao.

On the one hand the I Ching can show us that nature generates the complex pattern of our life with a few simple rules and some basic emotional belief input. Our life is a series of interlocking patterns and just like the boids no one has to be home to create it. It can run on automatic. On the other hand the I Ching provides the rules by which we generate our ego, the filters through which we perceive the world, and the probable outcomes of those rules and filters, we can use it to wake up, flip the switch from automatic to manual when appropriate, and create different outcomes from the ones we have been resisting.

Luckily, Edward Lorenz made another significant discovery. It is called the butterfly effect. "When a butterfly in Brazil flaps its wings the weather changes in Japan." A very small change in the data inputed into a fractal equation results in a large change in the output. you could use a lever to move one thousand pounds with just one pound. A change of one degree in the average temperature of the oceans makes a large and potentially dangerous change in our weather.

Remember that pole our automatic patterns of response to life keep bumping us against. Let's say relationship is one of the areas of life that is not working for you. Haven't you noticed that there is something hauntingly familiar about the succession of people you have chosen as partners? The traits that attract you and that later repel you are similar in each partner. All the descriptive elements of your relationship story are different each time but the structural elements are eerily similar. Let's call it the fractal science of relationship.

The butterfly effect flaps to the rescue. If we could just make small changes to the inputs to our relationship fractal, we would get a big very welcome change in our relationships. The inputs are emotional beliefs, Gordian knots of belief and feeling. Ultimately they all come down to how we feel about ourselves. These beliefs have momentum which means they have mass. Mass has the property of gravity. In this case it is attention gravity. So it may take some discipline to keep replacing the old beliefs with new ones to achieve a lasting change.

There are uncountable ways to effect these changes. Sometimes just waking up to the knot is enough. Then there are so many forms of body and breath-work, Energy Psychology, other psychological modalities, homeopathy, chinese medicine, Ayurveda, countless magical techniques, NLP, Feng Shui, blessing rituals, the list goes on and on. Perhaps there are as many methods as people deciding to change.

Feng Shui and I Ching are two powerful tools for this change process. they are integrated combinations of many of the above methods. Feng Shui in particular lets us make changes in the seemingly outside world instead of the possibly squeamish process of going inward. It works because it is very hard to find that boundary called inside outside.

From a western point of view, Feng Shui is one form of Chinese therapy. There are numerous schools of feng shui, perhaps one per master. Some aspects of each are complimentary and some are contradictory. It may not matter which one you use. as Just as in psychotherapy, the most important aspect is the relationship of the therapist and client.

Of all the myriad feng shui schools, BTB Feng Shui has the largest Shaman's Bag of effective solutions to adjust the environment to correct problematic situations and to support and enhance our lives, even if no problems are apparent. BTB Feng Shui also provides solutions to adjust our reactions to the environment, especially important when the environment is difficult to control or change. Of course I may be prejudiced as that is the school I belong too.

The I Ching is perhaps the oldest book in the world. It puts the Whole Story into a nutshell. Check it out.