Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to Hey, it's no sillier than Feng Shui, if you think about it.

Ever hugged a tree?
Robert — (archived)

No, of course not, Tom, and I understand that the concept's ideologically abhorrent. But I have, and as a Liberal I'm not ashamed to admit it. It's a pleasant experience because I get a hard-to-verbalize sense of the tree as a living thing. A tree is a living thing that's a member of a different kingdom of life, but still we're related by a common ancestor hundreds of millions of years ago. I know kin when I meet it.

People like to couch the experience in mystical or supernatural terms, but I don't think that's necessary. It really isn't hard to consider that all life here has coevolved and exists in a web of homeostatic relationships with all other living things; of course we're sensitive to other life, because our own lives depend upon it. It's not a hitherto-unknown separate sense, it's just the ability to interpret the ordinary senses to perceive that they're reporting life.

So feng shui's like that, I think. Leave aside any mystical trappings, and you're left with the straightforward craft of arranging a space with living things like plants and environmental cues like lighting, to maximize the sense of contentment experienced in that space by a person who's conscious of living things. No big thing, just another technology, really.

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