Free Will Or Fate? The Answer Is Yes- with Richard Ashworth | EP 471

You know you need something, you're just not sure what. You've been listening, you're doing the work, but there's still this feeling that you're circling the same place, like you're waiting for the thing that finally moves you. Now maybe you've thought about working with me one-on-one. Maybe something's held you back, the timing, the money, or you're just not sure you're ready yet. I get that. And I want you to know there's still a place for you. I built a resource for exactly this moment, guided meditations for when the waves hit and you just need to breathe. Workbooks to help you get out of your head and onto the page, ebooks on what near-death experiences tell us about the people we've lost, and whether they're really gone, a full course for widows and widowers who are ready to find their way back to living, and a full course for the evidence of the afterlife. And all of it is available for pay what you want. Nobody gets turned away because of money. I think these resources are valuable, but I don't want to hold them back because you don't have the money to pay for them. You don't have to wait until you're ready for coaching. The next step might be a lot smaller than you think. To find out, go to grief2growth.com/store. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/store. And check out the resources I've made for you. Close your eyes and imagine. What are the things in life that cause us the greatest pain? The things that bring us grief are challenges, challenges designed to help us grow, to ultimately become what we were always meant to be. We feel like we've been buried. But what if, like a seed, we've been planted? And having been planted, we grow to become a mighty tree. Now, open your eyes. Open your eyes to this way of viewing life. Come with me as we explore your true, infinite, eternal nature. This is Grief to Growth. And I am your host, Brian D Smith. Hi there, and I'm Brian D Smith, and I want to welcome you to Grief to Growth. And whether this is your first time joining us, you've been walking this path with me for a while. I'm so glad you're here. On this podcast, we explore life's most difficult moments, and life's deepest questions: who we are, where we came from, why we're here, and where we're going. And today's conversation is one that blends ancient wisdom with modern healing. My guest is Richard Ashworth, a leading authority on classical feng shui, in the Chinese metaphysical system known as Ba Zi, or the Four Pillars of Destiny. You may recognize Richard from Channel 5's Housebusters if you're in the UK, where he introduced classical feng shui to a wide audience in the UK. But his work goes much deeper than home arrangement. He's helped thousands of people around the globe interpret the energetic blueprint that they were born with. In our conversation today, we'll explore how your birth moment holds the keys to your life patterns, and how understanding your unique elemental makeup water, wood, fire, earth, and metal can help dissolve heartbreak, reveal opportunities for healing, and even answer questions like, is there such a thing as fate? Or is it ever too late to have a happy childhood? Now, Richard describes Ba Zi as the most powerful instrument of self-help he's ever encountered. And he's just released a new book titled I Talk to the Animals: A Definitive Guide to Constructing and Interpreting the Ba Zi Chart. So whether you're curious about destiny, wondering if you can change your story, or if you're just looking for tools to better understand yourself and others, this conversation is a must-listen. And when the episode ends, make sure that you don't end the conversation there. Head over to grieftogrowth.substack.com, where I've written an article about this episode. I'd love to hear your thoughts. You can leave a comment, ask a question, and you can connect with our growing community. So now let's dive into this conversation with Richard Ashworth.

That's beautifully expressed. Thank you very much.

Thank you for being here, Richard. It's really fascinating to meet you. We, we had a little talk before we got started recording, and I know this is going to be a great, a great conversation as we talk about some of these big questions about fate. But before we get started, let's define a couple things because some of these terms are not going to be familiar to my audience. So could you let people know— now, we— I mentioned, I think it's pronounced feng shui, but feng shui, Bazi, what are those things?

And pronunciation's fine. Everyone gets it wrong. I say feng shui, which is close to the Cantonese, but I mean, I'm no speaker of Chinese. I do not speak Chinese, so don't worry about that. Bazi, if you like, Bazi is probably the better way to pronounce it, but I use buzzy, is if you like the feng shui of time as opposed to space.

Okay.

So I mean, what happened was I was talking to you earlier that my sister died in 1990, and I had been pursuing a spiritual path for some time prior to that. And I had studied with, you know, guys who were talking about the 4 rules of that and the 5 guides to this and the 6 principles of the other, who were all to a greater or lesser extent, I mean, some very good people, but reinventing the wheel. And I was working with a guy called Chuck Spezzano, who you may have come across, who has a thing called the Psychology of Vision. He's Philadelphia Italian based in Maui. And we were doing work on biblical archetypes. Now I'm guessing you know your Bible.

Pretty well, yeah.

Yeah, I do too for odd reasons. I was never indoctrinated, but I did a lot of Sunday school. Anyway, what we were doing was working with biblical archetypes with the intention of preventing World War III at the time of Desert Storm. So you have me to thank. But in the process, I was noticing that there were parallels between the 1930s and the 1990s. And someone pointed out to me that the Chinese model of time, which is called the Ganzi cycle, is 60 years long. And therefore you would find echoes between the 1990s and 1930s, things happening in the Balkans, rise of dictators, a number of things that struck me very powerfully. And it kind of blew my mind. So having studied with all these people who had various different perfectly worthwhile takes on healing, and by which I mean everything from physical change, which is unusual and hard to do and we shouldn't make promises we can't keep, to performance enhancement, I no longer needed a new model 'cause there was this thing that had been being used by the Chinese for 2,000 years. And what it consisted of, as I say, was this thing called the Gan Zi cycle. Which is the order in which the animals that you will have heard of, you'll be familiar with at least, I expect, that there is a dragon, there's a rat, and there's a sheep and so on. You probably know that. You may know that this year, for instance, is what's called a wood snake, and the next year is going to be a fire horse. And that's in a cycle of 60 because there are 5 elements and 12 animals, so a cycle of 60. Hmm. And a Ba Zi is a snapshot of the prevailing elements of your moment of birth. In other words, it's a point in the cycle of 60 years, cycle of 60 months, the cycle of 60 days, and the cycle of 60 hours that is precisely the moment at which you were born.

Hmm, interesting.

Okay. And Chinese have been using this to decide on how to educate and how to look after their kids, you know, for 2,000 years or so, because it gives them indications of what their capabilities are, what their likely fate, destiny, or whatever is, which is sometimes called the Four Pillars of Destiny. So we're talking the same language. And so it can be incredibly helpful in suggesting possible futures, suggesting possible pasts, and in relation to what we're talking about, what I am most interested in is mending broken hearts and making dreams come true. Mm-hmm. It doesn't seem much point doing this unless you can do something of that sort. And so I found that the Barsi gave me insight into people that I've never seen any other way. And so, you know, I've drafted thousands of these over the years and the book I Talk to the Animals, is basically my method, is basically my textbook. And if you were to read it very carefully, at the end of it, you would know how to draft a BaZi chart, how to find the date in relation to those Chinese cycles, and also what it means. That is not to say you'd be an expert. It means you'd be just starting a very long journey. But I Talk to the Animals is a how-to book on the BaZi. Okay.

And—

Yeah.

Now, is this the same or different from what we call a horoscope?

Well, it's sometimes called a Chinese horoscope, but I don't think that does it any justice because the heart of it is that the Chinese elements— water, wood, fire, metal, and earth— appear cyclically. So what that means is that you can, when you've got a Bazi chart that shows you the where you are in the cycle of 60 in your year and in your month and your day and your hour, you can run it backwards and forwards. Mm-hmm. Or you can say in 10 years' time it looks like this, in 20 years' time it looks like this. And I sometimes call it a map of your most likely mistakes. 'Cause as we were discussing, there is this paradox, if you like, this kind of tension between destiny and choice and fate. Which, as we were discussing earlier, in my brightest moments, I do not see as a contradiction. But what you can do is just to see what's likely to happen and what you might do about it. And because it's expressed in elements, if it's saying you've got too much fire, well, you put in a bit of water and you maybe cut down the temperature and reduce the temperature of it, take it from a particular kind of nature, fire being about haste and celebrity and attention and stuff like that. And make it more balanced, easier to work with.

Yeah. As we're talking, I'm thinking these ancient wisdom things, they seem to be coming up again. Modern people are kind of rediscovering them. And I've heard a lot of people talk about some Indian, or I think it's Ayurvedic, but some Indian things that sound very similar to what the Chinese discovered hundreds of years ago.

Yeah, Vastu Shastra. Is an absolute analogue, which I'm sure you've come across. If you've looked at Ayurvedic astrology, Mm-hmm. Brahmasvastu Shastra, it is— I'm no expert in it, but it appears to be broadly classical feng shui. It's a particular aspect of classical feng shui for the southern hemisphere, because most of China is in the northern hemisphere. Ah. Those and Western astrology clearly come from the same grandparents, if you're interested in history, probably from Sumerians or Babylonians or something going back, you know, whatever it is, 6,000, 7,000 years. I mean, this cycle of 60, you notice we work in hours of 60 minutes, minutes of 60 seconds. You know, these things are not coincidental. There's something about those numbers.

Yeah, and that's an interesting number. You know, why 60? Why not 10 or 100? You know, that is an interesting thing.

Yeah, yeah. So, so, yeah, 60 fits all sorts of patterns. Um, and Chinese astrology is so developed, it's quite easy to forget that it's even about stars. But basically what it's saying is, as above, so below. But the use of buzzing, for me at least, is as a healing tool, because I have found that it is the best way of talking to someone's soul, if you like. Knowing who they really are and then being of use. And in relation to your remarkable and brave work, I mean, I think it's extraordinary. I think I get what you do. There is an aspect of the Barzeh, which is called the big fate, sometimes called luck pillars, which doesn't really do it justice. And the big fate is a moment when a child arrives. So it may be when they learn about death, Some people would say that's what it is. I'm not sure. But it is always when there is a psychological moment of real psychological importance, very often traumatic. And typically, it can happen anytime between birth. If it happens at birth, this is a calculation. If it happens at birth, it will mean things like separation from mother, traumatic birth, those kinds of things. If it happens a lot later, it may make for a sheltered child or a very imaginative one, so on and so forth. But my point is this: when the big fate kicks in, it is about a decision. And typically, people make limiting decisions. The big fate can point to when a child maybe says, my gosh, this is awful, and it's all my fault, which is a very common decision to make early on. And the big fate renews every 10 years with a different different elements. And the second decision, very often, this is not invariable, but very often the second decision is something like, there's nothing I can do about it. And the third decision is something like, the whole world is screwed. And it's my observation that when people get to yours and my age, I mean, you're a bit younger than me, very often they've pretty much given up. They think they know how the world works and it isn't much fun. Yeah.

Yeah.

With the Bars, we can go back to the point where those decisions are made. Sometimes you can change the decisions and you can almost always reframe them.

Yeah. And I love what you talked about because I'm a very practical person. So whenever I'm talking, I'm like, okay, so what? What difference does it make for my life? Right. And the thing about this is, you said you talk about healing, but we're not necessarily talking about physical healing. We're talking about emotional or spiritual healing, because we do have these wounds that we experience along the way as we're going through this. So that's what I'm interested in, in this. And then I'll have what you said. You're like, why would I do this unless I'm going to help people heal?

Exactly. That's got to be the point. So having identified a point where someone makes that kind of decision, it is possible to go back there. I was a master practitioner of neurolinguistic programming before I discovered the Chinese stuff.

Oh, okay.

What I use is, is various methods to go back to the, the last point of clarity, if you like. Mm-hmm. And then, um, to gently take them back to factory settings.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so, but mending heartbreaks, if you will.

Yeah.

And if not actually changing the heartbreak, changing what it means. Um, and the buzzy is incredibly helpful in finding those moments. And obviously one has to be very, very delicate and very careful in talking with people because what you're going to go back to is places of great grief, very often of great distress.

Sure.

And on the back of my first book, The Feng Shui Diaries, which is more fun, there's more laughs in it, but on the COVID there's an endorsement by Gillian Anderson, you know, the X-Files lady who I think wants feng shui for, who says, Warning, this man may make you cry because almost invariably that process leads to tears. And as I imagine you of all people would've recognized that tears very often are a sign of healing.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. For sure. So let's talk a little bit about— forgot where I was going to go with this, but with this idea of the buzzy and the cycles. And you mentioned I forgot the word you use, a wound, I guess, or kind of a fate that we go through. So what did you learn from— you, right before we got on, I gave you my birth date and stuff. So what did you learn about me? Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

You know, one of the hardest things about grief, most of the people in your life just don't get it. They want you to be further along than you are. They get uncomfortable when you bring it up. So you stop bringing it up. And that's why I started writing. My Substack is where I go deeper. Thoughts I don't always get to on the podcast. Essays on consciousness, on continuing bonds, on what it actually means to carry a loss and still build a life. The stuff that used to keep me up at night, written out in a way that I hope meets you in the morning. But here's what I didn't expect when I started it. The community that showed up. People who are doing exactly what you're doing. Listening, learning, learning, trying to find their footing. Readers who comment, who share their own stories, who remind each other that none of us are as alone in this as we feel. And that's what the Substack has become— a place to go deeper with me and to find your people. It's free to subscribe. Find me at grief2growth.com/substack. That's grief, the numeral 2, growth.com/substack. Or just go to Substack and search for Grief to Growth. I hope to see you there.

What's called your life house, which is like a place of observation. You have 5 what are called pillars, that is with one character on top of another. 4 of them relate to one to the year, one to the month, one to the day, and one to the hour. The life house is a kind of point of observation. Yours is a metal dragon, which is very interesting. The dragon is powerful and magical and telluric, and the dragon is the one who can wiggle his nose and change things, which speaks of your consciously using that power. The yang metal often relates to bitterness. It speaks of a need to deal with— bitterness is the best word. Often it relates to missing fathers. If I come to a house that is oriented like that, or if this is very prominent, I examine whether that is what has happened. And sometimes it's literal and sometimes I'm wrong. But in your case, it relates to a certain kind of bitterness, a certain kind of magic, a certain kind of observation of the process. Putting it another way, it speaks to someone who takes other people's pain and feels it.

Hmm, okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

I would guess your principal gift is the ability to do that.

Yeah, yeah, I've always been that, like, like that.

Yeah, I'll bet you cry a lot.

Um, I don't cry a lot. I have, uh, more as I get older because, you know, the thing is, I think it's interesting you say that. I think that would be my nature, but that's not the way that I was raised.

Well, the bitterness is often about your relationship with your father. So whatever that would mean— missing father is what's often in town. Your year is a wood ox, the same as Barack Obama, which speaks of assertiveness. It speaks of spiritual gifts, spiritual progress, spiritual journey. And you also have two sheep, which is the other most sensitive. You'll be good at going into alpha rhythms. You'll be good at prayer. You know, you will, you will know the difference between mouthing and talking to God.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you know, whatever we mean by those words, you know.

Yeah, that makes sense.

All of, all of those words.

Yeah.

Um, very, very sensitive. Liable to be fertile. So liable for fertility to be an issue. Someone, someone who, who's an ox in the year is either very fertile or not very fertile. So the odds are you have quite a few kids. Uh, is that right?

I have actually two.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Um, your month is a water snake. The snake is dedicated to truth.

Okay. Yeah.

Which yin and yang being one of, one of the kind of themes of Chinese philosophy, that it can be someone who is very, very truthful or someone who's very, very not. So for instance, if you were to take Tony Blair, he's a triple snake, for instance, just to take, to pluck a name from nowhere. Mm-hmm. But conversely, I recently did a Barsi for a lady who was a Zen nun.

Wow. Okay.

And she had 3 snakes. That's 3 out of a possible 5 characters were snakes, which is very, very unusual. Absolutely dedicated to the truth in a way that the conversation was really perhaps she needed to let herself off the hook just a tiny bit.

Yeah. My problem is I don't know how to not say things. So yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

My wife's always like, yeah, you shouldn't have said that. Or, you know, or even, even now with the work I do, you know, I— people are like, you shouldn't put that out on Facebook. And I, I'm like, I can't, I can't stop.

Yes, my, my— I've been married twice. My first mother-in-law used to say, mouth open, story jump out.

Yeah, yeah, that's— I can definitely relate.

Um, but you have these two sheep as well. I call sheep rather than goats. Um, and the sheep is an idealist.

Yes, very much. Yeah.

And the sheep needs to belong. And you, you will be someone, probably as you get older, because these are in the day and the hour, and a bazi proceeds from the year, which will be deep history, via the month, which is more shallow history, into the day, which is very often present, into the hour, which is future. Your sheep are both on the hour and the day, which, as I say, implies you're getting gentler, more spiritual as you get older. It speaks of also a frustration. The sheep— and all of these animals, they're neither good nor bad, they're just what they are. I mean, I'm sure you will understand that. The sheep is generally very affable, very gentle, very idealistic, but a twisted sheep you will find sheep in the bazi of the most of many of the populists currently making loud political noises around the world, such as your current Supreme Leader, Jair Bolsonaro, also Adolf Hitler, Napoleon. I mean, very interesting. And Barack Obama. I mean, you share both of those with Barack Obama. So there's something about the sheep that is so desperate to be involved, included, part of the family, that kind of thing. And an unbalanced sheep can kind of fall over themselves because of it. Probably the most famous sheep in the world are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. And you get an idea of how they need to belong. They need to belong and to be up to the minute and part of the conversation so badly, they're still touring at the age of 83.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

The sheep has that, but deeply spiritual. As I say, having two sheep and an ox means you're very, very sensitive, possibly even psychic, certainly someone who'd be very gentle, a very safe pair of hands. Because you have a dragon in the life house, it means you have magical powers, by which I'm not talking about mumbo jumbo, but I'm saying that you know how— well, I mean, you know how to turn grief into growth. That's really, that's really what it says.

Yeah, well, I think we all do, but yeah, that's, that's what I try to help people do. So that makes sense. And, you know, and it's interesting because you talked about the, the missing father. My father still is actually still alive and, you know, lives with me, and I've lived— I've lived the whole— my, my whole time. But I am a very sensitive person born into a family where that doesn't express emotions. So for me, it was— that's what I always felt like was kind of missing. And I remember I was in my 30s, I discovered this book called Wild at Heart, was by a guy named John Eldredge. And it was about the father wound, because we all get a wound from our father. And so we talked about this. And I remember I gave the book to my father. I'm like, I want you to read this. And my father goes, why? I don't read books. My father is a very, very literate person, but he reads the Bible and he reads magazines and stuff. So he didn't read it. So I said, okay, well, here, I got it on I got it on tape for you. So I gave him the cassettes and he never listened to it. So that was, that was the feeling I always felt like I wanted to have that kind of relationship with my family, my parents, etc., but never really did. So that, that's probably what, how that expresses in my life.

Yeah. You remember John Cleese wrote a book about families? I think he wrote more than one. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, a couple of times been asked whether I have read John Cleese's book on families, and I've replied both times, no, my father gave me a copy.

That makes sense. Yeah, I can understand that. So yeah, I think that, I think that's where that would express in, in my life. And we talked earlier, and I know the question now I wanted to ask is, we started before we, we got into the conversation about fate versus free will or randomness or whatever, and the tension between the two. So what are your thoughts on that? Because people might look at the BaZi and say, well, this means that this is going to happen and it's written in the stars.

Well, I would say people talk about nature versus nurture. I would say it is choice. I'd say everything is choice, and that is a very hard thing to get hold of if you're not too happy with your choices.

Hmm, yeah.

But when we get, I suggest to you, you don't have to agree, when we get that our lives are made up of choices, that we are totally responsible for those choices, two things tend to happen. The one is we go, how could I be so damn stupid? Because we can see choices that we made. We go, you know what, I went right, I should have gone left. How, you know, I mean, I don't know whether you are tortured by those things in the small hours of the night, but I still go, oh my God. You know, I don't know whether you, one will do that forever. The second thing you get is power to change.

Yes.

Yeah. One of the things that I will do, which is a Chinese technique with a thing called Qi Men Dun Jia, and I say technique, I don't really like that word very much, but there is method to harnessing time and place. There is power in time and place when we can choose to become who we wish to be. And it's a process of channeling the person that we want to be at some point in the future and house training the person we were and thus changing the way we are now.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I like the way you put that.

Yeah. And it is, the Chimen Dunjia allows us to harness powers which we could talk about the degree to which they're abstract and the degree to which they're physical, but these are extraordinarily powerful procedures where you can literally go, I wanna be like that, I was like this, I'm gonna be like that now and I will be the way I wanna be. And it can be extraordinarily powerful.

Yeah.

Same kind of thing applies looking at the big fate, where we can find a point where someone kind of arrived, as we were talking about.

Right.

And we look at what the heartbreak was.

Yeah.

And rather than dealing with the heartbreak, we deal with prior to the heartbreak. Because I try not to have beliefs at all, but as far as I have a belief in this, I think we arrive perfect.

Hmm. Yeah.

So you say something?

Yeah, well, on the idea of beliefs, I totally agree with you. It's interesting, because I'm on a platform where I am a grief guide. And I, when I'm— people ask me about the afterlife and stuff like that, all the questions we talked about earlier, and they're like, and they're like, and I say to them, like, I don't consider this a belief, it's more of a conclusion. And the difference is a belief is just based on whatever you— a preference, you know, or it may be just like, I like ice cream, ice cream is good. You know, that— but it's more like I have, I have studied things. These are conclusions I've come to, and they're subject to change. And I do believe, or I've come to the conclusion, that we do arrive perfect, that we arrive— and, and we, because we come from a place of perfection. And then we come into this world, and, and then we get— we start getting the wounds, we get the— we get the big fate, we get the family dynamics that doesn't line up with with who we are in our hearts, right? Or we lose a child or something like this happens.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, there's this thing, the wounded healer. I'm sure you will have come across. I'm not sure there's any other suit, right?

Exactly. Yeah. And, and we talked, you know, you asked me— I was expressing you earlier, my, my daughter passed away and this is the reason why I do this work. And you talked about your sister passing and how that opened up, you know, something in you. And then you talked about choice. And this is the thing, my, my business is whatever is called Grief to Growth. Growth is a choice. And you know, we can choose, we can say, this is where I am, this is what's happened, what am I going to do? And we can choose to grow, or we can go to the default mode, which is to let it destroy us. And that is a choice.

Yeah. I think dealing with death as growth is one of the hardest challenges.

It is the hardest challenge.

The reason number one is that the preparedness to talk about toilets, if it's maybe a foot away from me, and the preparedness to talk about sex is maybe 10 feet, preparedness to talk about death is in the next state.

Yeah, yeah.

So we're kind of terrified of doing that. And to be prepared to find the growth in trauma, I mean, that is, it is one of the keys. I mean, I think it was Tolstoy, I think it was Tolstoy, I haven't read Tolstoy, I have read quotations of Tolstoy, please don't confuse me, you know, I'm not very well educated. He said, he was asked what he wrote about and he said, love and death, what else is there?

Yeah.

Dealing with death as a, you know, that dealing with grief as a healing process. I think where I go with that is that it is not painful to fear. It is painful to try not to fear. Yeah. It is not painful to feel, to be angry. It's painful to deal with it. I mean, anger is a really good example because what we tend to do is confuse anger with blame. Yeah. When you say to someone, again, I'm sure you're a very evolved man, that you've always done a lot of work on yourself. And when we tend to think of blame, when people say to us, express your fear, express your anger, we tend to think that means, well, you're an idiot and I hate you. That's not expressing anger. I am angry is expressing anger and feeling it. So the thing where I have got to with this stuff is that there are greater and lesser tragedies in life, and the appropriate response to all of them is a smile. It's just harder and harder to do it. Yeah. And the way through is to be prepared to feel what it is. So the way through fear is to feel fear, I think. The way through grief is to feel grief. But it takes some bottle, it takes some nerve to do that. It is one of the most— grief particularly, that deep personal, right-in-your-face grief, someone who is integral to your life, dealing with that grief and moving on to whatever comes up next, I think is one of the hardest things human people human beings do, isn't it?

Yeah. And you, you asked me earlier before we started recording, you said you see your daughter's passing as, as a gift in a way, and I, I'd said yes. But back to you, your sister's passing made, uh, uh, kind of prompted a transformation in yourself.

Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, it did, it did. I, I was aware that I had become kind of ossified I thought I knew stuff and I opened up to the possibility that I didn't and I probably wouldn't have done that. I mean, I was kind of lost in a kind of money power kind of trap and she reminded me that probably wasn't the most important thing.

Yeah. So with the Bazi, getting back to your work, how does this help people to to come to these realizations, to start to embrace this idea of that, you said things in life we should meet with a smile. I would say we should meet with curiosity. It's like, what is this here to teach me? That type of feeling.

Well, curiosity keeps us alive, doesn't it? Yeah. When we stop being curious, we kind of disappear. When I am dealing with the big faith, for instance, I'm suggesting that everything that has happened is still here to some extent. It's certainly everything that has happened dictates what is so. I mean, that goes back to what's inevitable and what isn't. And the future in some sense is here already because the future is kind of made inevitable by what is so today in some sense, which means that if you were traumatized at the age of 7, by the way, that's when you all start, so you might find it interesting to look at what that was.

Oh wow, I can't believe you just said that. Yeah, that was my grandfather passed away. My grandfather was living with us, and because you talked to that, I was like, that my mind went back there. I didn't realize how traumatic it was for me at the time. Um, he was— he and my grandmother moved in with us, and he was a coal miner in West Virginia, and he went back to West Virginia to visit. He was in church, and he was giving— stood up to give his they call it testimony, and he had a heart attack and he passed away. So from my perspective, like, he was here and then he was gone. I never saw him again. And that happened when, I believe it was in '68, when I was 7 years old.

Yeah, well, and that, that's interesting as well, uh, I mean, the, the timing of that, because 1968 is a year of revolutions. It's a Earth monkey, very, very powerful powerful right now. Um, in, in relation, in relation to my sister, I don't think it was as, as dramatic as that. I mean, it was a just such a strange event. I mean, when someone dies, it's like time stops, stands still for a while, I think. You know, the time, the time between death and a funeral is a strange kind of, kind of time of misrule. You know what I mean? Like, it's, you know, has something changed or hasn't it? Um, but how, how a Barsi, how a Barsi will help is to go back to moments, and there won't always be deaths. They may be, you know, somebody disappearing, or, or, you know, your parent, part of parents separating is, is a, is a typical one.

Yeah.

And, um, what I will tend to do is to go back before that and to observe the degree to which all the, all the players in whatever the story is were off their center. Where their heart was beginning to break. You know, I mean, a child's heart very often kind of breaks kind of slowly, you know. And one of my teachers would say, you know, look at the child, she's still looking at heaven. And we look at our children's eyes and we can see how they come into a world that requires being present in a way that is not looking at heaven. But what we can do is to return people to that point where they can see, which many people can see intellectually, that whatever has happened to them was everybody else doing the best that they could. But it's not something they necessarily feel in their bodies. But they can, we can go back to how we were when we were, say, 7. You can look down the vista of years from— I won't embarrass you by telling you how very old you are, which is about 10 years younger than me. You can look, you can hear, you can look at yourself, age 7, and you can see that at age 7, you are making decisions about the world, and those decisions probably dictate the way you behave, dictate your attitude, and they probably weren't helpful decisions.

Yeah.

And what you can do is to say, look, I'm here, I'm pretty good in most of the ways that matter. I seem to have made it through. Do you know what? You don't have to do that. And on some level, everything changes. Yeah. Where both the child at 7 goes, you know what? I can relax now. And you don't have that decision within you anymore.

Yeah.

Um, and, you know, miraculous things can follow that.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And, you know, again, we talked about earlier— and I can't remember now what was before we started, we're pressed record— what was quite— what was after, we were talking about this idea of fate versus, versus, uh, free will. And I always referred to the person I think got it the best that I've seen is a writer named Philip K. Dick. And he put a movie out, The Adjustment Bureau. Um, yeah, I, I, I love that movie, um, because to me it has— it's got that balance. And so when people start to discover things like the Bazi, the way that I see it as being helpful is it does, it does put some order in the universe. Because a lot of people think we're just, you know, there was this Big Bang, there's no order there. We just got lucky, we became these talking apes, and there's no, there's no meaning, there's no rhyme, there's no reason. And I believe the exact opposite. I think it is, I think it is extremely ordered, and I think that everything that happens happens for a reason. We don't know the reasons right now, but I love the way he shows the tension between we still have free will, but there is an overarching plan or probability, I guess I would say.

I think there's nothing random.

Yeah.

No such thing as random, I think. But Philip K. Dick was a fascinating writer. I mean, he was developing in his last few years. He was moving from something that was kind of political into something that was spiritual. He was noticing— do you know the penultimate truth?

No, I do not, no.

His penultimate truth is kind of what we're living through now. Which is where everybody is underground in nice comfortable places with television and the equivalent of the internet and plenty of food and so on and so forth, while apparently World War III wages above their heads. And eventually, after several decades of this, someone bravely goes out to see what's going on and they find that the elite have been living on the rest of the Earth while most people are still underground and there's no war at all.

Oh wow, wow.

Philip K. Dick, but a real visionary. Anyway, we, we digress, but I share your admiration for his work.

Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, it's that for me, the, the part of me that wants to know how things work and stuff, you know. And it's— and I, and I see how we as a society, when we start, we, we got scientific, as we call it, and we became very materialistic, and we looked at things like this we said, oh, well, that's just old, you know, nonsense. That's wishful thinking. That's, that's woo-woo. And now physicists are starting to come back around and going, yeah, maybe these things do influence what's happening on Earth. And as you said, as above, so below. And I'm just fascinated by the wisdom and this that, that was revealed to these people, you know, so many years ago, and how it can help us with our lives today.

What's astonishing to me is that the Ba Zi, which is what I'm writing about in I Talk to the Animals, has been in use in China for 2,000 years. And it's mostly used to choose jobs, to decide whether people are going to be fantastically wealthy, that kind of thing. But I think its greatest use is in finding moments of decision. Allowing choice. And I think underlying this conversation is whether choice is a possible thing. And the Bazi consists of two bits. If you look at this, this is the front of your Bazi. That's the main thing. And it is pretty much written in stone. I say pretty much written in stone. I'm not sure anything is, but as far as things are, it is. Whereas this guy here, which is the big thing, is not written in stone. It is a possible choices. And what this will just do is, well, this is, if you like, as I said, a map of your most likely mistakes. But with the Big Fate, you can see where it's likely going and you can correct. That's the idea. And there is something that is kind of mechanical about it and something that isn't. But in order for it to work, what's required is what the Chinese will call Qing, which is somebody has to give it out. —No. —And so, if you like, the spiritual aspect of it is more valuable than the mechanical aspect of it. And what we have with— human beings want to know, they want to feel they can control, and science is all about that. Science is that if we do something in the same conditions, under the same conditions, the same thing, we'll get the same result. And the 20th century quantum mechanics has made this kind of a joke at the expense of people who think like that.

—I love it, yeah. So long.

I mean, in quantum mechanics, there are so many more events on a subatomic level that if you throw something up in the air, it doesn't necessarily come down. There's so much we don't know.

Sorry. Yeah. Well, what I love about it though, and I'm a chemical engineer, so I'm all about science. I love technology. I love all that stuff. But the observer effect, because scientists are like, as you said, If we do the same thing the same way, it, it always has to happen the same way if we— if everything's the same. And then they're like, oh, wait a minute, just me observing it actually makes a difference. If I observe it, it happens this way. If I don't observe it, it happens that way. And that just, to me, that just blows everything away. And it does show we don't live in a mechanical universe. Well, exactly.

And the Chinese have been working along those lines for a very long time, and it does seem to have worked it worked for them at this point in history. I mean, conventional Western science says, I have a theory, can I prove it? Or we get confirmation bias. Yes, yes. For instance, is why a psychic will never work, will never be able to do their best work under laboratory conditions because they're surrounded by people who want to make sure he doesn't. Yeah. It's like asking a horse to race in a swimming pool. And so, but with the Chinese method is to observe what happens and draw rules from it. Yeah. Which I say is more scientific. Yeah.

Yeah. I completely agree with that. And so, yeah, it's interesting as our science is kind of developing and coming back around, we're starting to say there's something about this ancient wisdom. I was just discussing with a friend the other day, if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? And Western Western science would say, of course it does. Why is this even a question? Why would someone even think about that? And now we're going, oh, wait a minute, if there's no observer, does something exist? And some serious people are starting to say, if there's no observer, then there's no material. Yeah, yeah.

And actually, that question comes from, I'm sure you know, comes from a late 18th century philosopher called Bishop Berkeley. Because I studied philosophy for about 20 minutes in the 1970s.

Okay, no, I did not know that.

Yeah. Until I discovered that everything that mattered to me, they had defined as meaningless. If it couldn't be counted or expressed in mathematical terms, it was meaningless. But interestingly, of the rationalist philosophers that you were taught in English universities a very long time ago, Slightly prior to him, there's a thinker called Leibniz, Gottfried Leibniz. Do you know, have you heard of him?

No, I'm not familiar with him.

You would find him fascinating. There's a recent biography come out, which is 7 days of his life, which is wonderful. I can't remember what it's called. Oh, I think it's called The Best of All Possible Worlds. But he's the guy who's being quoted by Rousseau when he says everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, which a lot of people think is really kind of fey, unrealistic stuff. But Leibniz, who is one of the godfathers of computing because he was the first Western thinker to master binary counting. And as you know, there are 10 different sorts of people, those who know binary, those who don't. And he was in conversation with Jesuit missionaries in the Chinese court from whom he got that idea. Binary counting is taken to a remarkably sophisticated degree in the Book of Changes, the I Ching, which is one of the kind of textbooks in this whole way of thinking. But he also, he wrote a book called the Monadology, which basically says that the universe is made up of tiny little minds, and you get enough of them together, you get sentience. And that reality, I think, comes from his understanding of the Chinese which is the life force, which is energy. And everything we're talking about here is about how Qi moves and how Qi expresses itself. And all of it is based in this idea of the Tao, by which, you know, the Tao that can be named is not the Tao, is what Lao Tzu says. The Tao is the appropriate, if you will. The Tao is when we know when to speak, when the Tao will make it clear to us. You know, we get taken over by our feelings, and when we can have our feelings and be quiet and conscious within that, the Tao will be making it clear when is the time to act and when is not the time to act. What is the thing to do in this circumstance and what not to do in this circumstance? And all those things have gone into the construction of the BaZi, which, as I say, has been used in China for 2,000 years. When I started to understand it, I found it breathtaking. And I hope that I have made using it that a lot of people smile who weren't smiling before.

Yeah, exactly. So you said you have clients and now you have clients all over the world. So When your, when your clients come to you, what is that? What is they're seeking? Are they looking like, are they looking for help making decisions? Are they looking for like, figuring out what their big fate is? Or what they're, you know, what are they seeking from you?

I think they're all looking for the same thing, don't you? I think they give it different names. Yeah. They're looking, they're looking, looking for meaning, if you like, they're looking for um, peace. I think everybody is broadly looking for the same stuff, and we tend to get confused along the line. You know, we started off, as we both agree, we started off perfect, and then kind of life gets very confusing. We're kind of blinded by the light, you know, we go on strange paths. But at some point, if we're very lucky, we get time to reassess. It happened to me as I'd say, shortly after my sister died in, in 1990. And I, I think what you've been saying is it happened around the time that your daughter died for you.

Yeah, well, for me, I'd say there were multiple points in my life, but that was, that was the big one. That was, that was the, you know, the biggest one. Um, so, you know, and I love what you said, you know, people are looking for meaning because I, you know, as I'm a life coach also, and I hear people talk about like, what's What's my purpose, people, you know, and people really struggle, like, because they think there's like this, this one thing. I'm here to write a book, or I'm here to be a CEO, or I'm here to whatever. And they get lost in like, the one big thing you're here to do is experience life. You know, that's, that's, that's really what you're— that's really what your purpose is. That's really what it comes down to. So I agree with you, people, they come to you and they I ask you from different points of view, but they're looking for, again, that big thing. Why am I here?

They're looking to love and to learn, I think, those kinds of things. They're a lot to it. But yes, as I say, I think people are broadly looking for the same thing. And mostly what I find is that people have a point where they've not been prepared to feel something. And they feel it all the way through and it kind of clears the path. And I think that probably bereavement is the hardest one. Yeah, I—

well, you know, there's, there's many types of, of grief. There's many types of loss. So there, there's losing a person, you know, death, as we talked about. That's the big one. But there are also separation of parents, um, getting divorced, losing a job, uh, losing your health. You know, all these things are kind of like resets that make us turn inward and kind of figure out, again, all these questions. Why am I here? Where am I going? Et cetera.

Yeah. And that last question, I don't think anybody knows the answer to that one. Where we're going? Yeah, lots of people think they do. I don't think the Dalai Lama knows, or Archbishop Tutu, or even Pope Leo. I don't think they know.

I, I, I would disagree. Well, I don't know. No, as a, as a, as a, as the operative word there. I think we have a pretty good indication, and I think, you know, it's interesting you talk— we, we both agree we come in perfect. I think we return to where we came from. This, this is where we— this life is a— we talk about cycles, right? You know, the Indians, the talk about it a lot, the Chinese talk about it. I think our life is a circle, so we We come in, we go through all this crap that we go through, and then our big thing is like, we're trying to figure it all out, and then I think we go back to where we came from.

I hear what you say. These are stimulating ideas, but I don't think we're constructed to answer those questions.

Yeah. No, we're not definitively. No. And some of this stuff goes beyond my level of way beyond my level of understanding, like quantum physics. I forget who it was that said anybody that says they understand quantum mechanics does not understand quantum mechanics because I think it's beyond what we can comprehend.

Yeah. And I think we're talking about some kind of spiritual analog for that. And I think I have lots of ideas, but I think the only thing I really know is that I am. I don't think I know. I mean, it's what, what God says to Moses from the burning bush, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. And then that's absolutely true. You know, it's interesting because I do a little thought experiment. What if I was a brain in a jar in a laboratory and I was hooked up to inputs that, that could stimulate my neural system? How would I know any difference between that and me sitting in this chair? I would not. All I truly know is my experience. All I know is that I'm experiencing this moment. When it comes down to it, that's all we can know.

I think that's exactly right. Yeah, exactly. I've got some ideas, but that's all I know. Yeah. Well, also, it's a game. It's fun. I mean, the various theories and mysteries and methods of interpretation, they're just kind of interesting.

Yeah, and that's— and I think that's what we come to once we start to comprehend some of the things that you're talking about, some of the things that I'm talking about, where instead of us being overwhelmed by life and, and the quote bad things that happen, etc., we become more curious about it and we become more— you know, it's funny, the more I know— and I have a t-shirt that says, the more I, more I see, the less I know. Um, and, and it's, it's absolutely true. I don't I don't know things, but I don't need to know them anymore because it's more of like I trust more, I guess, is what it comes down to.

Yeah, I think that's important. But I mean, if your readers wanted to know why they should buy I Talk to the Animals, it is that it gives them a kind of guide to where they come from, a guide to where they might be going to, some ways of dealing with things they might get stuck with. Yeah, exactly.

Helping us to make sense of this. And, and it's, it is a, it's a methodology to, you know, to understand that, you know, some of the— it's not just random that you, you know, that, and the things. And, and just, you know, I gave you my birth date and stuff, you know, like half an hour before we got on, on here. And it's interesting that the things that you were able to come up with. And, you know, if you'd asked me 20 years ago if I believed in something like this, I would have said, yeah, no. Probably not. But the older I get, the more I see and the more I'm able to draw these parallels. I'm like, yeah, it makes sense. It does make some sense to me. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. So the Barsi appears to be my small contribution to those studies and it seems to have made a few people happy over the years. And then my book, I Talk to the Animals, I will, to the assiduous reader, tell them how to do it.

So with the book, people will be able to create their own charts. Is that correct?

Yes. And for a limited time, I'm prepared to coach by email anyone who gets stuck, who can't make it work. And they'll need to get a Chinese calendar, but I give them a link to getting a Chinese calendar. So it's all there. They won't be expert at the end, but they will have all the tools that are required to do Yeah.

So I would imagine, I'm sure in the past they were doing all this by papers. Is it computerized now? Has anybody been able to program it so you can just put in the date and it comes out with that? Or how does it work?

Well, yes, my book is available as an ebook and yes, there are apps, but I teach people to do it by hand for a variety of reasons. One is you don't want to get too dependent on apps because they get more and more expensive. I mean, feng shui apps can cost you thousands of pounds a year. But secondly, the process matters. Yeah, yeah. Saying it, ching, that is giving a damn is important. Yes. My process in drawing up a buzzi is a really important part of what I'm doing. How I feel when I'm doing it, what appears to be coming up for me in terms of what I can hear, like maybe a song or a little bit of conversation or the weather or just an emotional feeling. Will give me a different view of the characters that I'm writing. I mean, I will derive meaning from making mistakes. I will notice what I have written wrong and go back and look and see, well, maybe, you know, what's that telling me? I mean, people sometimes ask me whether I know when people are going to die, which is not a claim I'm gonna make or something I'm doing research in. But the one client I had was a very unfortunate lady who ultimately killed herself. I went back to it to see if I could see in her BaZi something that indicated that she was going to die. And what I did find was that I had written her big fate up to a point that was exactly where she killed herself. So you couldn't have got that from a computer.

Yeah. Well, and that also comes back to when someone says, do you know when I'm going to die? I mean, it might say there's a likelihood that this would happen at this point, but I don't think it would say definitively that it's going to happen at this point. Is that— would you agree with that?

Asked that question explicitly several times. I've only answered it once, and that, that was— that's not the case I'm talking about, where lady was ask— asking me whether her elderly husband was going to die soon for quite material reasons, and I said not yet, and I've been right so far. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and it also gets back to me, I think there, there are some things that we can know, some things that are beyond us. And I think there are probably some things that we're not supposed to know. I get people that say to me, because we talked about this concept of the veil between us and the spirit world. And I have some people say, well, I just wish I could just go beyond the veil and just see, you know, what's over there. And I'm like, I don't think that's really intended for us. And I've talked to many, many people who've had near-death experiences, And it can, it can really mess you up for a long time. It takes most people an average of 7 to 14 years to integrate that experience once they have it. So we're, we're here where we're going through the things we're going through, I believe, for a reason. So, and I have, I have, I know someone who tells me that she can tell when people are going to die. And, and so I've had the opportunity to ask her, and I realized I'm not going to ask that question.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure how useful it would be. Yeah, but I actually had a conversation like that with Gillian Anderson. Oh really? Yeah, because I was a big admirer of the X-Files. Yeah, I was quite excited to work with her. I did a couple of houses for her, and she had a picture up on the wall in her house in Westbourne Grove which looked very like one of the episodes. From The X-Files, which is the one that Peter Boyle was in. Do you remember Peter Boyle, who was Frankenstein?

Yeah, Young Frankenstein.

I love him. Great American character actor. Yeah. And he was someone who knew when people were going to die. Hmm. And, um, um, um, what was she called? Scully. Scully. Yeah, yeah. Well, she asked him, she says, well, well, what about you? And he says, you know, I'm going to be in bed with you. And she's— she says, well, there are mistakes and there are mistakes. Turns out exactly, I mean, they're not having sex or anything. She happens to be there at the same time as him in his bed, and, um, she's asked him, how did you, how did you get this ability? And he said, I was, I was a fan of the Big Bopper. You know who the Big Bopper was?

I, I've heard the name, yes. The guy who did Chantilly Lace?

Yes, yes. Um, he was one of the, the three other guys who went down on the plane with Buddy Holly in '58.

Okay, yeah.

And the story was that, you know, they were doing those interminable American music tours when your cities are so far apart there's no need to book a hotel. It's going to take you 6 hours to drive from, you know, Chicago to Columbus. That's probably about right, isn't it? Yeah. Um, and so mostly these, these guys were in the bus in the same clothes, didn't get to wash, you know, that kind of thing. Wasn't— it was not glamorous. And Buddy Holly was the only one who's making any money at that point. He said, you know what, I'm gonna going to charter an airplane. So I will take your laundry, get it all washed up for you. You can all have a nice shower. You can have a decent sleep, you know, because we'll be ahead of you, we'll sort it all out. And of course the plane crashes. And what Peter Boyle says, says, do you know how, how they decided? And she says, no. He says, well, they drew cards. Now in a world where you, whether you live or die in 24 hours' time is decided by whether you pick the right card or not, you might as well give up on control. Yeah, yeah. You might as well, you know, be present, which, I mean, there are no rules ultimately, and I certainly wouldn't— I certainly don't know them. But dealing with the world as it is, trying to be appropriate for the moment, trying to take the right action at the right time is, um, I think the only sensible approach.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. Richard, this has been a fascinating conversation. I really— I've enjoyed meeting you today. So remind people of the name of your book. I assume they can get on Amazon. But if people want to reach out to you, how do they reach you?

I'm available online very easily. You look for Richard Ashworth and feng shui, you will find me on Substack, on LinkedIn, on Facebook. On Blue Sky. And my book, I Talk to the Animals, should be in a decent bookshop now. If you can buy it from a bookshop, it's better because it builds up connections and habits and stuff. I much prefer that. Okay, yeah. You can buy it online, but you can get it online very easily. So you can get hold of me that way. I'm Richard Ashworth. I'm actually, my email is richardashworthfengshui@gmail.com. It's pretty easy to remember. Richard Ashworth Feng Shui, all one word, at gmail.com. And if you read the book, I would be very interested to hear how you get on with it. And if you get stuck, as I say, email me and I'll see if I can help you through.

Yeah. Well, again, thank you so much for being here.

It's fascinating talking to you. And you're doing amazing work. And I am humbled to have had a conversation with you. Thank you so much.

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