Color theory and feng shui furnishings
The Chinese theory of colors is a difficult chapter for Westerners. I have entered these colors and their assignment to the various cardinal points in my graphic. At the same time, certain human abilities, areas of life and organs are assigned to the colors. In the diagram on my homepage, the traditional colors are shown in the rectangular fields, together with the associated terms.
Let’s take an example: If you want to promote fame and prestige according to feng shui, then you should arrange a reception room or living room in a house facing south and design it predominantly in strong red colors. This would be good for the eyes and would allow the power of fire to take effect. I don’t think a European needs much imagination to realize that these instructions have very little to do with our cultural sensibilities and would therefore not be at all beneficial.
Would you like to sit in a bright red living room or welcome your business guests in a red reception room? Surely that is diametrically opposed to Western needs!
Depending on the mindset of the individual and their profession or company, a choice will be made. It is up to you whether you prefer a modern style of living and perhaps furnish the reception rooms in light leather and birch wood furniture, or whether you prefer a conservative style of living with heavy oak wood furniture.
Both are perceived as appropriate in Europe. A computer company might design everything in subtle gray because its customers are intellectual thinkers who don’t want to be distracted by bold colors. A Bavarian farmer will probably find oak furniture dignified and positive, and his modern-minded daughter works in a Munich gallery. Pop art is the order of the day in her apartment.
No matter what you choose, we can enhance any interior style with a few beautiful green plants and an aquarium or indoor fountain. Plants and fish signal life and vitality. We know from psychoanalysis that people in all countries also equate fish with wealth. On this point, the statements of Feng Shui coincide exactly with Western research.
The connection between fishing, Feng Shui and wealth goes much deeper. When I studied Feng Shui and Tai Chi intensively for some time, it became clear from the exercises that the source of this special knowledge goes back to people in ancient China who lived as fishermen on large rivers. They used Tai Chi to be able to stand safely in swaying boats, to be able to cast their nets successfully and to be able to haul in the filled nets. They had to master Feng Shui in order to read from experience, from the currents, where the fish would gather, at what time of day and in what light.
The true secret of these powers was only ever passed on within the respective family clan and never revealed to strangers like us. And this is still the case today. We will only ever receive a limited and incomplete partial knowledge from Asian masters.
The different interior design styles are completely okay. It would be inappropriate for our well-being if we were to change our personal choice of interior design based on ancient Chinese color theory. I wouldn’t recommend that a family with a residential and commercial building and a store should have the store facing south-east and decorated in red, purple and blue, while the children’s room is white, the master bedroom is bright pink or orange and the master’s office is black. The kitchen and dining room will then be on the east side and painted green. They serve health purposes and are where the family meets. These are all unhelpful instructions. The more we delve into the details of Feng Shui, the more difficult it becomes to recognize the practical advantage for our way of life. You can see for yourself that these instructions make little sense.
If we want to derive practical benefit from Feng Shui, we must therefore critically examine all the instructions we find in books or from today’s masters. Some of them are useful, but unfortunately many are not. There is now a whole Feng Shui industry that produces many useless articles on a large scale, with which we can supposedly correct the misdirected energy in our home. The new Feng Shui industry is a thriving export sector for Asian companies, costs our good money and only rarely brings about really positive changes.
Of course, we can do a lot to make our property, house, apartment and every single room more positive! But personal needs can only be regulated in the interests of the individual if that person develops the right feeling for their environment themselves!
The easiest way is really to dispense with all these complicated instructions and simply set up an energy pyramid in your home, where you like it best! You will soon notice a feeling of harmony throughout your home, so that many complicated measures are superfluous once such an energy pyramid has been set up. Soon after you have set up an energy pyramid, you yourself will gain a new, finer sense of which parts of your house are already well furnished and have a good aura and in which other rooms it makes sense to make changes.
If you then practise some pranayama (breathing and concentration exercises) with your energy pyramid, you will feel the energy of the pyramid more and more clearly. Your sense of harmony will become more and more precise, and soon you will be able to see every little object in your house whether it is in the right place, needs to be changed or perhaps needs to be disposed of! In this way, the power for change comes from within you! You will no longer need a Feng Shui consultant, but will be able to redesign your living space from your own intuition, inspired by the power of the energy pyramids.
We can develop this sensitivity for ambience, for design and colors, for a certain style of living ourselves! You can get hold of Western books and catalogs on home decor and furnishings. Modern designers would be stupid if they didn’t pay attention to the major trends in people’s needs and feelings!
This is another crucial point: Chinese culture stagnated at almost the same level for around 1000 years under strict leadership. In such a firmly cemented culture, in which no one was allowed to break the rules, it was completely normal to use feng shui to give cultural instructions that allowed everything to run along predetermined lines.
Feng Shui was therefore an instruction on how to behave in a conformist manner and only through certain subtleties and finesses to make one’s own property stand out from the others and look better. This cultural stagnation does not fit in at all with our Western need for frequent variety and change.
Modern China proves us right: those who can afford it now live in China in Western style without regard for Feng Shui! This alone should give food for thought to anyone who is fascinated by Feng Shui ! If the Chinese themselves no longer pay attention to it, then for Europe and the USA it will just be a fashion trend, something new that we want to try out, but not a must that will significantly improve our lives.
So the question should not be: How can I use Feng Shui to add a Chinese touch to my Western home décor, but rather: How can I redesign my home so that I feel really comfortable in it?
Every person has a certain energy level. Their home is adapted to this. As soon as his personal energy changes, his interest in changing his living space also grows. To improve personal perception, a yoga course, pranayama (breathing and concentration exercises) and energy training(Kundalini Yoga) are much better suited than a stack of books on Feng Shui or a seminar on the complicated astrology of the Chinese, the flying stars, dragons, turtles etc. The knowledge of Western astrology, which has developed over 1000 years and is based on Arabic astrology, is much closer to us than the Chinese calculations on the same subject.
The study of elaborate ideological systems such as the genuine teachings of Feng Shui from a particular school and a particular master hardly lead to an improvement in one’s own intuition.
If you want to learn these teachings, you have to memorize a wealth of individual symbols, practically the basics of the Chinese language, combined with an almost endless list of conditions, cross-references and exceptions. This is even more time-consuming than European astrology and numerology.
Of course you can do that. Anyone who enjoys this kind of thing should go ahead and do it! But please bear in mind that any kind of intellectual study tends to distance us from our own intuition and never brings us closer to it!
The more so-called facts you have to study in order to understand and apply the complicated Feng Shui charts, the more you are guaranteed to get away from your own way of thinking. In the end, you may even believe it, because anyone who has to go to great lengths to learn such a system is ultimately impressed with themselves and their academic achievements!
It’s great what an effort it takes to understand how a Chinese Feng Shui master puts on a big show, only to give a simple instruction at the end, e.g. to put up a trellis wall so that you no longer have to look at your neighbor’s compost heap from your own terrace, or at an annoying neon sign 50 m away on a house.
Of course, it is right to take measures to conceal unpleasant things, but this can be done much more quickly and effectively if we encourage our intuition and simply pay attention to our personal feelings!
In my opinion, the aim should be for the individual to be well informed and versatile, to develop and train his or her sensitive perceptions so that he or she is able to shape his or her own premises or home according to his or her inner needs.
Of course, anything you personally like is allowed! Everyone has free will and should make good use of it!
If you would like to design your home according to Chinese patterns, you are welcome to do so. Perhaps you are the reincarnation of a Chinese person and will get a feeling of home with such furnishings. But I suspect that most Western Europeans prefer a different style. I have often been impressed by Chinese items. The Chinese are excellent craftsmen and artists, but when I bought a lamp, for example, and wanted to hang it up, it was such a foreign body in my European-style apartment that I removed it again. These Chinese cultural objects really do have a remarkable aura, and you should be very careful with them!
© DHA Kyborg Institute
