Pimp My Ride and Feng Shui My Crib
yesterday i found myself at probably one of the most interesting lectures i have been to since i have been here at harvard. ok, so i have been to like four, but still. what caught my eye was basically that the lecture was on feng shui and subtitled something like how to make your dorm room ready for success. very interesting no? i had some high hopes for this lecture, since i figured it was at harvard so that means it must be a somewhat intellectual exercise discussing not only the practice of feng shui but also interesting de bate on the place of feng shui in western society, being a relatively new import although ancient in eastern cultures. unfortuantely i was mostly disappointed. the first sign that this wasn't going to be that cerebral of an evening was when the main speaker was introduced as "his holiness, the supreme leader of " blah blah. ok, i mean, no disrespect for whatever your the "supreme leader" of but still, one has to realize how hokey a statement like that must sound in these hallowed halls of harvard. but, let's not judge just on the surface of things. so this guy was like the messiah or whatever of a certain "black sect" of tantric buddhism, had his own temples and network, blah blah blah. now, automatically i was thinking, my god, i wish my parents were here because they would either be covering my ears, ushering me out of the lecture room or would be in rapture, telling me this man knows his shit. haha. maybe neither, i dunno, but i am looking forward to calling them and telling them about my little adventure.
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ok, so like i fell asleep for part of the time. it was just that he was going into sort of superficial feng shui "tips" that i had heard over and over again from my dad over the years so it was like, ok, been there, done that. and honestly, even when the "lecture" moved on to something interesting as the "ba gua" trigram theories, it was like, ok...let's move the pace up a little bit, you don't have to explain every single little nuance. but of course, maybe not everyone in the crowd had this much pre-exposure to feng shui as i have had. the "ba gua" portion was somewhat interesting though i have to say and his position that the "black sect" feng shui school's position on relative direction (based on the mouth of chi...i.e. the door) was interesting, as opposed to directionality based on actual magnetic north.
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what i felt really degraded the lecture into a common mismash of decorating show tips though was when the speaker started speaking about "personal chi". now granted, i understood and valued his position that feng shui is in part effected by your own personal "energies", but i have to really criticize the presentation of archetypes or personalities of people as seemingly solely defined by certain types of "chi". i mean from healthy chi, showing and energetic, young businessman, supposedly ready for the world, contrasting to unhealthy chi and that of an overweight, slouchy, older individual...i found sort of crass. in essence, its this generalization of people and then this supposed "scientific" rationalization that smacks of some kind of eugenic mentality to me. maybe i am just overacting, but it was just viscerally uncomfortable for me to be presented information like this. what was really great was when they described, by their own words verbatim, "pre-suicidal" and "pre-nervous breakdown" individuals. i was thinking, oh my god, how insensitive is this? so, hopefully you expect that everyone in the audience is completely 100% sane and emotionally healthy, and if them crazies are out there, why don't you suggest to them to change their feng shui?
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i was just put off by it but i don't know how the crowd really was taking it. eventually i think people walk away with it with what they want to. i had a new interseting insight on "ba gua" theory and maybe some others now had a rationalized reason to pin someone who really was suicidal as needing to put some pink flowers in the northwest corner of their room...and voila...suicidal tendecy gone! i dunno, it's just that quick ratinalization of people i think is dangerous and its even more dangerous when you spread it at places like harvard. it is like turn of the century eugenics when they rationalized "intelligence" and "civilization" based on things liek skull shape, distance between eyes, etc. now it can be transformed into even more manipulative post rationalized stuff as reasoning kind of "chi" in people supposedly pre-disposed to whatever illness, physical or mental.
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again i was just put off by it, but hey, everyone is allowed his opinion, and even if spoken at harvard, one would hope the inidviduals in the crowd are smart enough to discern what's useful and what's not.
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didn't really make a believer out of me, but i do have a mind to go and buy some pink flowers to place in my love sector ... doesn't hurt to have a little help in that department at the moment. haha.
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ok, so like i fell asleep for part of the time. it was just that he was going into sort of superficial feng shui "tips" that i had heard over and over again from my dad over the years so it was like, ok, been there, done that. and honestly, even when the "lecture" moved on to something interesting as the "ba gua" trigram theories, it was like, ok...let's move the pace up a little bit, you don't have to explain every single little nuance. but of course, maybe not everyone in the crowd had this much pre-exposure to feng shui as i have had. the "ba gua" portion was somewhat interesting though i have to say and his position that the "black sect" feng shui school's position on relative direction (based on the mouth of chi...i.e. the door) was interesting, as opposed to directionality based on actual magnetic north.
.
what i felt really degraded the lecture into a common mismash of decorating show tips though was when the speaker started speaking about "personal chi". now granted, i understood and valued his position that feng shui is in part effected by your own personal "energies", but i have to really criticize the presentation of archetypes or personalities of people as seemingly solely defined by certain types of "chi". i mean from healthy chi, showing and energetic, young businessman, supposedly ready for the world, contrasting to unhealthy chi and that of an overweight, slouchy, older individual...i found sort of crass. in essence, its this generalization of people and then this supposed "scientific" rationalization that smacks of some kind of eugenic mentality to me. maybe i am just overacting, but it was just viscerally uncomfortable for me to be presented information like this. what was really great was when they described, by their own words verbatim, "pre-suicidal" and "pre-nervous breakdown" individuals. i was thinking, oh my god, how insensitive is this? so, hopefully you expect that everyone in the audience is completely 100% sane and emotionally healthy, and if them crazies are out there, why don't you suggest to them to change their feng shui?
.
i was just put off by it but i don't know how the crowd really was taking it. eventually i think people walk away with it with what they want to. i had a new interseting insight on "ba gua" theory and maybe some others now had a rationalized reason to pin someone who really was suicidal as needing to put some pink flowers in the northwest corner of their room...and voila...suicidal tendecy gone! i dunno, it's just that quick ratinalization of people i think is dangerous and its even more dangerous when you spread it at places like harvard. it is like turn of the century eugenics when they rationalized "intelligence" and "civilization" based on things liek skull shape, distance between eyes, etc. now it can be transformed into even more manipulative post rationalized stuff as reasoning kind of "chi" in people supposedly pre-disposed to whatever illness, physical or mental.
.
again i was just put off by it, but hey, everyone is allowed his opinion, and even if spoken at harvard, one would hope the inidviduals in the crowd are smart enough to discern what's useful and what's not.
.
didn't really make a believer out of me, but i do have a mind to go and buy some pink flowers to place in my love sector ... doesn't hurt to have a little help in that department at the moment. haha.
.
posted by faux chink @ 11:42 AM
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