In my last article, I wrote about mother spirit. Today, I’m going to write about official spirit. Official spirit is the spirit that gives rise to your mother spirit because the histories from which you are formed are what educates you. It is also the spirit that controls you.

There’s two versions of official spirit—direct and indirect. Indirect Officer is sometimes called Seven Killings. Official spirit disciplines you. The Chinese character for officer is called guan and represents your social status. So, your official spirit is the role that you play in your community. That’s why mother spirit grows out of official spirit, because your sense of belonging is nourished by your willingness to accept the roles that are offered to you by your community. That’s discipline.

Your official spirit is the season that controls you. If you are a wood day master and you were born during the fall, then you might have a lot of official spirit because the fall is the season of metal and harvest when wood is cut. Same goes if you are fire day master and you were born during the winter, if you are earth day master and born during the spring, if you are metal day master and during the summer, or water day master and you were born in the periods that come between seasons.

What is official spirit?

Official spirit is the rules that you use to function. We all have rules. Sometimes we’re aware of our rules. A lot of the time, we’re not.

Back when I was in daycare in China during the 90s, one of the biggest taboos around was the taboo of wasting food. We had to sing this song praising the peasants who grew our food every day before meals. To throw away even a single grain of rice would be to waste one drop of a peasant’s sweat. My teacher would actually beat kids who couldn’t finish our food. But after I moved to the United States, I learned that wasting food was okay. I was told to throw out an entire tray of food for the simple reason of not liking it very much the first day I spent at Kindergarten. You can throw something away just because you don’t like it.

One of the hardest and most confusing things about moving geographically is having to learn new customs. A place isn’t just a place. It’s a society and a society has certain rules around conduct.

I still run into this issue whenever something has rotted in my fridge. Should I throw it away or cut away the rot and eat what’s still good? You see, this question around food waste isn’t just about etiquette. It’s a question about how we understand class. In China and in the United States, my class was pretty much the same. I was a child living in an urban area who wasn’t a peasant—a consumer of grain, not a producer. However, the way that positionality was taught to me was different.

The question of food waste comes down to: do I know my own class? Am I aware of my social position and how I am positioned in relation to other classes? If I am aware, then what do I do to recognize that? Singing songs about peasant labor, fetishizing peasants by performing symbolic praise isn’t a very radical ritual. Neither is throwing out food obviously. But these were the rituals that I was taught by my society. These are official spirit rituals.

Official spirit is about status. Are you a citizen, a legal resident, or documented? If so, then you have status in the society that you live in. Are your contributions to your society recognized or valued?

Official spirit is a very serious spirit. People who have strong official spirit want to impact the society they participate in and they want recognition for their contributions. They study history. They are interested in their lineage. They are subject to the social pressures of being a person who is shaped and informed by a larger community.

“Make something of yourself,” official spirit tells you. Get out there. Make history.

As you can probably see, official spirit is interested in power. Official spirit is authority. People who have strong official spirit and have charts that can use official spirit know how to use their power. They make a sizable impact and they mean something to the people around them. People know who they are. They have authority because they do things or know things that are important to the movements they participate in, oftentimes leading.

But what if you have weak official spirit or if your chart can’t use official spirit? Then there is power that you are subjected to facing. You have to be careful about being self critical—self punishing. Remember that official spirit represents the social pressure of society. Official spirit wields the power to discipline and power becomes punishing when it becomes insecure.

Direct Officer

When you look around at the people who have strong Direct Officer spirit, you do get some kings and emperors. You get people who inherited the throne from their lineage or presided over a big territory like the first czar of Russia. You also get a lot of athletes who play team sports. Stephen Curry also has Direct Officer month command and he’s a strong role model for little kids because he is a humble hero who teaches self respect and playing by the rules. Direct Officer likes to play by the rules and basketball is literally a game. To succeed in it, you have to follow the rules. Successful athletes having strong Direct Officer checks out because athletes succeed when they follow the rules of the game that they play.

Guess what? Greta Thunberg is a Bing Zi or Fire Rat day master born during the winter. That means that she also has very strong Direct Officer energy.

What I find interesting about Greta Thunberg is that she has been subjected to an extraordinary amount of criticism all before she turned 18. The reason why the climate justice movements initially asked her to make herself visible was because she was a white child. As a white child, Thunberg represented the future of a society that our neocolonial economy is supposed to promote and elevate. She was aware of her own position from the beginning and the groups she was in used that position as leverage.

Greta Thunberg is a complex figure. Capitalism always tries to make everyone a hero so that they can be evaluated aesthetically rather than structurally. Grown men criticize her appearance on a level that would be abusive if they did that to their own children. Politicians, from Putin to the UN to the US, have tried to use her as decoration. She’s fairly no nonsense. It’s not that easy to use a Direct Officer person because Direct Officer people have their own standards. Carbon emissions have not lowered and that’s the standard by which Thunberg seems to measure much of her work. She thinks about the long game. She learns from history and she tries her best to combat the aesthetic critics by citing the groups that she is involved in.

That’s Direct Officer. Direct Officer is not in it for themselves. They’re part of something larger and they will always let you know that. They’re not appeased by theatrics because they measure the weight of the future using the reality of history.

Obviously, Direct Officer people are very dedicated. But they’re not dedicated because they’re so excited by something or so passionate or whatever. They’re dedicated because they are dealing with inevitables. Do you want to have a future? Then you must change something.

If you have strong Direct Officer in your chart, then you think long term. You’re humble because you understand your own position based on where you came from and what you’re part of. Powerful people might try to use you but it will be hard for them to do so unless they follow your rules. You have authority. You receive authority because you rise up to challenges and earn your experience.

And your standards? Super black and white. Not just for other people but yourself too.

People have been hard on you. You are hard on yourself. You critique yourself from every angle, cutting yourself open to build yourself back up. You evaluate yourself the way a king evaluates a prince—ruthlessly. Sometimes, that makes you a superstar. You never set out to be one.

Seven Killings or Indirect Officer

Indirect Officer, also called Seven Killings, is the indirect expression of official spirit. Seven Killings is thought of as territorial, ruthless, and morally gray. This spirit is compared with gangsters and mobsters and warriors. We call Indirect Officer Seven Killings because this spirit is militaristic, someone who stages revolutions and rebellions, who conquers territory. Most descriptions of Seven Killings calls to mind people like Napoleon or Tony Soprano.

But do you know who actually has strong Seven Killings spirit in his chart? Mister Rogers.

Mister Rogers felt called to start a children’s television program because he saw a generation obliterated by the Vietnam War and felt that war was child abuse. His show was not about education or learning your letters but about ethical dilemmas, about how to make mistakes or trust people or deal with your social fears. Mister Rogers’s Neighborhood is about being a neighbor and a neighborhood is a territory. Being a neighbor is not about following a rule book. Being a neighbor is about sharpening your own moral code.

Direct Officer can be a bit black and white about what it right and what is wrong. Remember, this helps them from being manipulated or used by powerful people. They have a standard and they adhere to that standard. There’s no moral grayness with Direct Officer. Seven Killings? Seven Killings is not black or white. Seven Killings cares about loyalty. Are you with me or are you against me?

Mister Rogers always calls his viewers his neighborhood friends. By doing that, he creates a sense of cohesion. You feel like you’re a part of something.

Notice this: Mister Rogers nevers asks you to be a “good” neighbor. He asks you to be a neighbor. Neighbor implies closeness. Seven Killings is not Direct Officer. Direct Officer believes in good and bad. Seven Killings believes in yours and mine.

Seven Killings can be very seductive. When you look around at people who have strong Seven Killings, you find a lot of military generals and presidents and people who have organized to kill. Mister Rogers is not an outlier. He created this program for kids trying to understand their society at war. He taught kids how to be a neighbor and how to trust, how to join something but Seven Killings isn’t really about being good with kids. Seven Killings is about the authority that you claim when you rebel. Gangsters also make you feel like you are part of something greater.

Why does Seven Killings care so much about loyalty? For that, we have to take a look at another kids show creator who happens to have a very strong Seven Killings structure chart: John R. Dilworth, the creator of Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Courage is a Seven Killings person. Courage fights for his family but he’s terrified because he’s facing all of these external threats all the time. Monsters are always trying to attack him and Eustace is jealous of Murial’s love for him so he’s always trying to kick Courage away. Courage is hyper defensive as a result. That hyper defensiveness comes in handy because he’s just instinctively fighting. Courage is vigilant. He keeps Murial close by. He tries everything when facing danger and, even though the monsters aren’t evil. Courage is still scared.

Dilworth said that Courage the Cowardly Dog is about trauma. He made Courage to help kids who were experiencing domestic violence find a narrative. Sound familiar? There’s some similarities between John Dilworth and Mister Rogers.

Meng of Tiger Eye Astrology describes Seven Killings spirit as “an ancestor who didn’t receive justice within their lifetime.” I think that sounds just about right. Seven Killings is someone who suffered, someone who had to become vigilant and courageous and fight. Seven Killings wants to protect. It’s not that interested in right or wrong. It’s interested in the things that are precious to you and in the dangers that might threaten those things that are so precious that they must be defended.

Seven Killings wants to make people into your people. Why? Because it’s scared of monsters.

What if you don’t have any official spirit?

You might think that official spirit sounds like a hard chart structure and that people who have weak officer in their charts must be really chill. Not so. Remember that official spirit tells you where you belong. It gives you a place in this world and a role to play. Official spirit gives you history and history gives you your struggle.

You know that scene in Mean Girls when Cady is new to the school and she doesn’t know where to even sit down to eat lunch in the cafeteria? Cady doesn’t know where to sit because she can’t read the room. She doesn’t know about jocks or preps or cool asians or asexual band geeks. She can’t read the society that she has just moved into because she’s new. As a result, Cady also doesn’t know where she fits or how to act.

That’s what it feels like when your official spirit is weak or when your day master is too weak to properly use official spirit. Maybe you have strong Hurting Officer and that harms your official spirit.

You don’t know where you belong. People might see you as rude and outlandish and crass. Meanwhile, you’re feeling fearful and shy. That’s the internal experience for many immigrants who happen to be people who are confused about context. You’re embarrassed about who you are. You’re just trying to figure things out.

Not all people need that much official spirit. If your chart structure doesn’t need a lot of it, then maybe you don’t mind feeling like a fish out of water. You don’t mind behaving in ways that are totally socially inappropriate because you kind of have your own thing going on and you don’t really care about all the extra stuff. Yang day masters tend to be more like this, especially Bing and Wu. But, for most of us, we do care about where we fit in and about what is socially acceptable. Some people don’t like official spirit or social discipline but need it. They don’t think they care about where they fit in but they also need to find their role in their community or else they become purposeless.

If you have weak official spirit, then you might be skeptical about your own authority. You don’t know where you fit so you don’t know what you represent. You might be more on guard about teachers or more seduced by them because you are unsure about your inner authority.

The best way to build up official spirit is to build your wealth spirit. Your wealth spirit is your sense of responsibility. You can’t give someone a sense of social accountability by yelling rules at them. What you do instead is you give them something to be responsible for, something that they can take care of. Wealth spirit births official spirit because responsibility births social importance. You have to take care of your responsibilities to mean something to your community.

That means that, if you don’t know where you belong, then try to figure out what you are responsible for. Take on a task. Care. That will naturally give you a sense of belonging.