Breaking a Gaming Addiction: A Worked Method

Translator's note. The clearest worked example in the collection of how a remedy is actually designed: take a behaviour, find its structural description in the chart, and adjust the environment so the behaviour loses its footing. The reasoning here is worth following even if you accept none of it — the move is from “he sits still” to “make the day master move,” and from there to the two directions that govern it. Note also the honesty about side effects: the author tells the client the remedy will cost money, and lets him choose. The last section sets out a criterion for a real theory — proposition and converse must both hold — which is a better piece of epistemology than most of what appears in this field.

A behaviour has a structural description, and once you have the description the remedy follows from it. What follows is the author's method worked end to end: from the chart, to the two directions that govern it, to the side effects the client is asked to accept, to the food on the table and the friends in the room.

1. The ordinary method

A gaming addiction has one defining feature: the day master is still. To break the addiction you must make it move. A person who is running around, never in one place, does not have a gaming addiction — because games require sitting down. Get him running, playing sport, moving, and he cannot sit. Making the day master move is the root of the method.

People will tell you to adjust the resource star, or the output star, or the officer star. None of it works.

Adjust the resource and you raise his skill at the game — not his reading. Strengthen the output star and he plays better still: a mediocre player becomes a good one, and with the resource fixed on top of that, a good one becomes top-tier. Adjusting resource and output has nothing whatever to do with breaking the addiction.

We insist on one thing: to solve a problem you must return to the observable facts. Reasoning that stays inside a theory is wrong, always. Theory and fact must agree before anything is solved.

So the method is simple — make the day master move — and there is exactly one way to make it move: clash.

By feng shui, adjust two things: the direction of the stem that clashes with the day master (primary), and the day master's own stem (secondary). The second is adjusted because only when the day master's position carries strong, auspicious energy does the child think normally at all.

Every child knows gaming is bad for him and cannot stop. That is close to universal: in a person with a gaming addiction, the feng shui at the day stem's position is invariably bad sand and bad water. He cannot control himself because the position he stands on does not support control.

So the two positions must both be brought to strong, auspicious sand and water.

Breaking the addiction is good for the family and good for the country. The internet is good for a nation; the gaming industry is not. In its effects it is indistinguishable from the gambling industry.

How to do this in a given year depends on identifying what is holding the child still, and removing it. That is the general method. There is also a method specific to one child.

2. The non-standard part

Beyond the two directions above, different children need different additions.

Direction of exercise. The best direction to exercise in is the direction that clashes with the day master's stem. Note that this direction is auspicious for this purpose and not necessarily for anything else.

Go in that direction and break the addiction, and you may fall ill, or lose money. Solving the principal contradiction means ignoring the secondary one. The choice is yours.

Which is true of everything we do: every act carries some cost. What matters is which problem you have decided to solve. The best direction for breaking a gaming addiction is the one that clashes with the day master; the best direction for getting a divorce is the one that clashes with the day branch.

If you want a partner to leave you, there is no need to quarrel. Move to the direction that clashes with your day branch and the partner will leave of his own accord. The best way to shed someone is not negotiation — certainly not what men in power do, killing a mistress rather than ending it. Go to that direction and your body fills with an energy the other person finds uncomfortable; being near you becomes exhausting, and he or she leaves. One of my students was pursued by a woman who threatened suicide if he would not marry her, and could not shake her. He went to the direction that clashed with his day branch; a month later she stopped contacting him.

Once you understand the principle, helping and harming are both easy — but so is solving a problem. If you do not want to be entangled with an enemy, there is no need to fight him. Choose a direction to move in and the enemy loses interest, because in that direction he suddenly finds the hostility pointless.

A single direction of movement can settle a matter. The same applies to diet, to clothing, to the people around him, and there is real help in the twelve-animal pendants.

One of my students distributes household appliances. His son had stopped studying for online games and played to the point of forgetting food. I explained the adjustment over QQ. Three months later the boy told his parents he wanted to go back to school. He has not gamed since and is studying well. The father sent a large consignment of appliances to a mountain temple. Breaking the addiction is not difficult — the difficulty is seeing the cause.

3. Why counselling and shocks fail

The counselling programmes run in many places do very little good.

A person with an addiction cannot leave the environment that produces it, and his body is not receiving the energy that would make him move. Every method that does not change this is temporary.

Take gratitude education: the addict weeps, swears never to play again, goes home, holds out two or three days, and starts again — because his body has refilled with the energy of playing. Take the electrical-aversion method: every time he plays he is shocked, he stops, and a month or two later he starts again.

It is the same with gamblers who cut off a finger and swear off. They gamble again, because their bodies are full of the energy of gambling. If you cannot remove that energy, or block the channel by which the environment feeds it to him, he will gamble. You need not cut off his finger.

4. Worked case

The question came up: how do you adjust this when the day stem is wu or ji?

Answer. If the day stem is wu, bring the two opposite palaces chen and xu to auspicious sand and water. If it is ji, do the same for wei and chou.

Case, male: renwu / gengxu / wuchen / wuwu. Luck cycle renzi; year gengzi.

The feng shui adjustment. The two opposite palaces representing the day stem wu — chen and xu — must be made auspicious, and the energy of the adjustment must be large. Adjust weakly and he will be back at the game within days.

Direction of movement.

1. The gui direction breaks the addiction. Gui combines with wu; going there pulls the day stem wu out of the chart and away from the environment in which he wants to play. (If the day stem were ji, the direction would be jia.)
2. The zi direction also works. In the coming gengzi year the year branch zi clashes the hour branch wu, which activates the hour stem wu. Day master and hour stem are both wu; the hour branch wu sits beneath the day master. In the zi direction that branch is kept in constant agitation by zi, the seat beneath the day master will not stay still, and a person who cannot sit still cannot play.
3. But going to gui or zi costs money. Gui water and zi water are unfavourable here. Move to zi and the wealth star, unfavourable, is thrown into motion: he breaks the addiction and spends a great deal. If you are willing to lose money to break the addiction, go; if not, the child keeps the addiction.

Sometimes an unfavourable direction is the one you must take to reach an objective — as you must enter the enemy's camp to get his intelligence.

And note what kind of unfavourable star it is. If the water is the wealth star, the side effect is financial loss. If the water were the officer star, the child would be injured, fall ill or self-harm in the course of breaking the addiction — and children do jump from buildings when they cannot stop. This is why I call gaming a scourge. If the water were the sibling star, the child would turn delinquent. Then you choose: break the addiction first, deal with the delinquency after.

This is medicine, and medicine has side effects. No drug treats every disease at once; no drug is free of effects. Our methods are drugs. When we advise a family, we tell them what the side effects will be, and let them decide.

5. Questions

If the day stem is unfavourable, can you still travel in the direction that clashes with the day master?

Yes. The method has nothing to do with useful and unfavourable gods. If you treat a hunchback, the question is whether the hunchback is straightened; the rest is not my concern. Wealth, office, romance — all of it is gain with loss attached. If you ask me to straighten the hunchback, I will choose the method that does not kill the patient. That is a good practitioner. The poor one straightens the hunchback and the patient dies.

Does drug addiction fall under this method? No. Drugs are not a gaming addiction, and the method differs.

Does gambling? No. Gambling does not require sitting still — some gamblers travel the world to do it.

Once the feng shui at zi is auspicious, does zi stop clashing with the hour branch wu? In the context of breaking this addiction, it does not clash.

Then if geng clashes jia and the day master is jia, making geng's direction auspicious would stop the clash and the addiction could not be broken — would it not?

No. The rule is whether the thing being clashed is the day master. If the jia being clashed is the day master, then making geng's direction auspicious does not stop the clash. If it is not the day master, the clash stops. Day master, clash; year stem, month stem, day branch, year branch, hour stem, hour branch, no clash. But note: this belongs to the remedial art, not to prediction. It is not the “clash” of predictive theory; “clash” is only a manner of speaking.

Do novel-reading and autism fall under this? Reading novels is close — a boy motionless in a wuxia novel is in the same category. Anything that consists of sitting still and being absorbed can be treated this way. Autism is not an addiction; it is an illness. Gaming is not an illness. Autism has its own method.

6. Why qimen cannot treat anything

A hexagram reading does not change with repeated casting, but the remedy designed from it changes completely with each cast. Which tells you that the six-line method is an instrument for prediction and not an instrument for treatment. The same is true of qimen dunjia.

No one understood qimen more deeply than Zhuge Liang and Liu Bowen. Neither of them achieved a real remedial result with it. So qimen, properly speaking, is a predictive instrument without therapeutic function.

Yet people in this field, to make money, adjust feng shui with the six-ren methods, with qimen, with palm and face reading. They are all applying their own system to other people's problems, and after all these years the results are mostly worse, not better — because none of these theories can be checked backwards. Qimen cannot be run in reverse.

A theory is true only if its proposition and its converse both hold. A proposition that can be run forwards but not backwards is one-directional, and a one-directional theory is a defective theory. Any theory worth the name must work in both directions. That is my view of this field.