Time, Space and Person: The One Principle Behind Changing a Fate

Translator's note. The theoretical spine of the whole remedial layer, and the most abstract piece in the collection. Its argument is that every method of changing a fate — astrological, medical, psychological — works only when time, space and the person are aligned, and that the traditional systems have all been reading the group rather than the individual. The strongest passages are the appointment analogy at the start and the “eldest branch” paradox in the middle, which is a genuine logical objection to the standard feng shui claim. (The original illustrates the peace-versus-war point with two named countries; I have generalised it, since the argument does not depend on which countries they are.)

Chinese predictive method has many schools and many theories. Some read accurately, some badly; some are strong on one subject, some on another. Prediction, however, is not the end. The end is to move toward the auspicious, avoid the inauspicious, alter a fate and cancel a disaster.

Because that is the end, a thousand years of schools have produced an enormous number of methods for achieving it. Look past the surface differences and they fall into three families:

1. Methods derived from a predictive system — if the useful element is wood, travel east and wear blue-green; if the east of the house is open, treat it as water; change the facing of a door; add or remove sand and water. And so on through every school.
2. Methods drawn from science — medicine being the largest and best of them.
3. Methods that work through the mind.

All three can fail. To get the largest and most reliable effect, at a date you can name in advance, every one of them must satisfy a single condition: space, time and person must be unified.

1. An appointment

What does that mean?

You arrange to meet a friend. Whether you meet depends on three things:

1. When — which year, month, day, hour?
2. Where — which point in space?
3. Do you both actually go?

For the result “we met” to exist, none of the three can be missing. Agree a time but no place, and even if you both set out, the chance of meeting is very small — unless by coincidence. Agree a place but no time, and again the chance is very small. Agree both, and one of you does not go, and the chance is essentially zero.

Only when all three hold does the result appear.

You will object: what if someone dies the day before, what if the traffic is blocked for three days or a year, what if the meeting place is demolished? But a death the day before makes meeting easier, not harder. A traffic jam that lasts so long means the two of you were incompetent at planning. And if you agreed a latitude and longitude, demolishing the building does not move the point.

In substance: two intelligent people cannot be prevented from meeting by an accident, because they will have thought the arrangements through, and will have agreed fallbacks — if not here, then there, at such an hour. Only fools arrange a meeting that cannot happen.

Every result in this world, once it has occurred, has occurred inside space and time. For a person, every auspicious or inauspicious fact likewise sits inside space and time. So to produce the result “fate altered, disaster cancelled,” you must take the person as the centre and move that person's position within the four-dimensional grid of space and time.

2. Space is a grid of points

A person lives in a three-dimensional environment of length, height and breadth. Within it there are millions of coordinate points available to live at. Around each point, the composition of matter — its properties, its energy — is not the same as around the next. So no two points are auspicious or inauspicious in the same way, and the same person living at different points has a different fate.

Nor is any point stable. With the passage of time the matter around a point changes, more or less, and so its quality changes, more or less, and so the fate of whoever lives there changes.

Consider one person at the foot of Everest, on its flank, and at the summit. Three different fates, in the ordinary sense of good and bad. Consider different people at the same point at the foot of Everest: their fates are still essentially different, because their innate quality differs — and their innate quality differs because the “factory” that produced them differed, that is, because the environment their mother occupied during pregnancy differed.

A fate is decided by two things: innate quality, and the coordinate point of the environment afterwards. Innate quality cannot be changed once a person is born. But by changing the coordinate point he lives at, and by changing the matter around that point, his fate can be substantially changed. That is the whole basis of the remedial art.

3. Time

A person also lives inside a process of change.

As time passes, his innate quality changes — not in its basic character, but in its strength. Meanwhile the matter around his coordinate point also changes. Buried river mud becomes stone over ages; buried plants and animals become fossils.

So both terms are moving at once. And the rule is this: if at the right moment a person moves to a new coordinate point that suits the direction in which his innate quality is already shifting, his quality will tend toward the good. If he moves to one that opposes it, it will tend toward the bad. The same holds for changing the matter around his existing point.

4. Graves and houses

From this, two familiar operations become intelligible.

Moving an ancestral grave, or moving house or office, changes the coordinate point. Adjusting the surroundings of a grave, or the interior and exterior of a dwelling, changes the matter around the point.

Do either correctly and the innate quality shifts, over time, toward the favourable. Do it wrongly and it shifts toward the harmful.

We cannot change a fate absolutely — a pig cannot be turned into an elephant. But we can give the pig an environment in which it lives happier, healthier and safer. To a very large extent a fate can be remade and a disaster cancelled.

5. Two layers of environment

Now: what about the person decides which environment to choose?

Space has two layers.

The first layer is the environment as it is for everyone. A plain versus a summit. Fertile, well-watered land versus poor land with irregular rain. A battlefield versus a quiet bedroom. A country at peace versus a country at war. This is what people ordinarily mean by good feng shui and bad feng shui: good for anyone, bad for anyone.

Note the logic carefully. Being president of a peaceful country is better than being president of a country at war — but being president of a country at war is better than begging in a peaceful one. And begging in a peaceful country is better than begging in a country at war. The judgement of a site's quality is made for people in general, not for a particular person.

The second layer is the environment as it is for this one person. Even in a battlefield — unambiguously bad feng shui for everyone — there is good and bad for individuals. One man dies there; for him it was bad. Another comes through untouched, is decorated, is promoted; for him it was good. Though even for him, the battlefield is not good in the way a peaceful posting would be.

So: whatever the general quality of the environment, if it is favourable to this individual, his fate will be favourable.

Choose both — the point and the matter around it — and the leverage is greatest.

6. The eldest-branch problem

Traditional feng shui studies the first layer almost exclusively: the environment as it is for everyone. Very few have studied the second.

The consequence is a limit on precision that the whole field has lived with. Ask a traditional practitioner about a family and the best he can do is “the eldest branch, the second branch, the third branch” — a group, not a person.

Stop and look at that answer.

In one family, the eldest branch himself has sons who are eldest, second and third branch. So does the second branch. So does the third. Which branch's branch are you reading?

Further: your great-grandfather was the eldest branch. Your grandfather was the eldest branch. Your father was. You are. Your son is. Your grandson is. Which eldest branch are you reading?

Any system that stops at “which branch” is still reading the fate of a group. However you adjust the environment, you adjust it for a branch, not for a man.

This is not to say the group-level adjustment is worthless — it visibly helps everyone in that branch. But to get a precise result for one person you must adjust the group environment and then adjust again, on top of it, for that individual.

And even where the group environment cannot be touched at all, the individual adjustment can still be made. We cannot move a president from a country at war to a peaceful one; but we can change the circumstances around that president so that he governs his own country very well indeed.

7. Birth order, then birth hour

So what about the person decides what to change?

First, his birth order among his parents' children — this sets the whole group environment for everyone born in that position.

Second, his hour of birth — this sets the individual environment that suits him.

The reason the second works is a distinction worth holding on to: the birth time reflects the type of a fate; it does not decide the quality of one. Quality comes from the environment during pregnancy and from the ancestral grave. The dwelling and the grave afterwards merely move the quality up and down within its band.

Because birth time gives the type, a chart can be read accurately for everyone born at that time of that sex: same type of fate, similar features of fate.

Take an analogy from manufacturing. Products of the same function come off different production lines, with different machines and different workers. So two products with the same function differ enormously in appearance and in build quality. But whatever the differences, they remain functionally similar — which is why we do not mistake a tree for a television, a pig for a plant, a person for an insect.

For people: two men born in the same year, month, day and hour, of the same sex, differ in body and in the quality of their fate, because their mothers occupied different points during pregnancy and their ancestral graves differ. But their fates remain similar in type. That is exactly why a chart can be read at all.

And so: adjust the group environment, then adjust the individual environment according to the hour of birth, and the fate moves. All phones make calls; not all can stream video. Modify one model and it acquires a capacity the others lack — without ceasing to be a phone.

Which means: any adjustment made on the basis of a given chart will produce a similar shift in everyone born under that chart who lives in that environment.

8. The two preconditions — and the warning

At this point the chart-masters will pounce. So the chart does decide the fate after all, and you can adjust feng shui by the chart. If a master says that, know him for a fraud.

The claim that a chart-guided adjustment can change a fate holds only under two conditions. Strip them away and adjusting feng shui this way is not treatment — it is killing.

Recall the geometry. Each person comes into being at one point in time and one coordinate point in space. At a single moment there are millions of such points, and millions of people born at them — and the matter around those points is not identical. Which is to say: people with the same chart did not have the same feng shui before birth.

So:

1. A chart theory must be able to distinguish, among people born in the same year, month, day and hour of the same sex — and even among those sharing the same parents — the sand-and-water quality across the twenty-four mountains of the eight palaces of their prenatal environment.
2. It must equally be able to distinguish, for each such person, the sand-and-water quality of their postnatal environment, year by year, month by month, even day by day.

Only a chart theory that does both can be used to adjust feng shui, because only such a theory satisfies the unity of time, space and person.

The “useful element is wood, so open the east and put water there” school satisfies neither. It is not merely useless. On the argument above it is dangerous.

9. When to adjust

And when?

Take a medical analogy. A man goes to hospital for treatment. Is it auspicious to have his kidney replaced before he is ill? Is it auspicious to replace it after he has died of kidney disease? Neither. The right time to replace a kidney is when the disease exists and there is no prospect of self-repair.

Feng shui is the same. Adjust too early and it does little; adjust too late and it does little. Two people arranging to meet: arrive too early and you wear yourself out; arrive too late and you may not meet at all. The right time is inside the agreed window.

For a particular person, then, you must select the moment — year, month, day, hour — and the position — among the twenty-four mountains — and the object, all from his chart: his four pillars, his luck cycle, the year, the month, the day, the hour. Only then can a specific area of his life be adjusted — wealth, office, career, study, affection, marriage, litigation, illness — with an effect whose date of arrival can be named in advance.

10. What this buys

Any method that ignores the unity of time, space and person may produce an effect, but only by accident. It cannot be relied on, cannot be repeated, and cannot produce its best effect at a predictable date.

Any method that satisfies it can.

And because it can, it can be tested: run the experiment a hundred times, a thousand, ten thousand, on someone who does not believe any of this, and let him establish for himself that the effect arrives when predicted and is plainly visible. Practice is the only test of truth. On this question, only repeated, dated, visible results can establish that the art is real.