Do You Believe in Feng Shui?

I had a nightmare last night. I dreamed about running over my former colleague with a car viciously again and again. While she was badly injured, miraculously she didn’t die. Afterwards, I somehow got away with this crime and avoided being arrested for more than 20 years. 

However, for some reason my sister found out about my crime and recommended that I surrender to the police immediately. A sense of guilt was weighing on me heavily, and I considered turning myself in, while also contemplating committing suicide. I tried telling my dad about all the bad deeds I’d done, but couldn’t bring myself to do so for fear of shocking him too much. I woke up from the dream right then, without knowing what happened in the end.

Some people might attach great significance to their dreams, thinking it has a certain bearing on reality, like a harbinger of the things to come. I, for one, don’t believe that my dreams have anything to do with my real life or my future. I think of such practice as pure superstition and nonsense.  

Speaking of superstition, here in Singapore, many local Chinese people believe in Feng Shui, an ancient practice originated from China that attaches great importance to the spatial positioning of the objects surrounding us, including furniture, buildings, roads, mountains, rivers and the ocean.

The way I understand it, Feng Shui believes that if your surrounding objects are positioned in a way that allows the chi (energy) to flow through, you’ll become rich and prosperous, and if the chi is blocked, you are doomed to failure and bad luck.

Not to disrespect millions of practitioners of Feng Shui, I don’t believe in this practice either. If Feng Shui is really as good as it’s cracked up to be, why aren’t the so-called Feng Shui masters who inspect the buildings and apartments of their clientele for a living some of the richest people in the world? Why is China, where the practice originated from and has undoubtedly the most number of its practitioners, not the most prosperous nation on earth? These are valid questions to be asked in challenging the supposed science behind Feng Shui.

That being said, I do believe that the right spatial positioning of our surrounding objects is important for us to maintain our physical and mental health. A room that’s full of clutter, for example, can’t make for a conducive space for studying or working in. If your apartment is facing west in the tropical Singapore, you’ll be fully exposed to the unrelenting afternoon sun all year round that can seriously damage your skin and expedite your aging.

I guess there are some elements of truth to the teachings of Feng Shui. It’s important for us to engage in critical thinking to determine whether they are based on science, instead of embracing them wholesale uncritically.