First of all, your child spirit can be very literal because it can represent your actual children. I’m not just talking about your biological children but any kind of youth that you have relationships with and shape. Why? Because child spirit is very simple. In bazi, child spirit is simply the love that you give.

Let’s not make it more complicated than it needs to be. Child spirit is your creativity, all of your inventiveness, and the ideas that you come up with. I feel like there’s kind of a cult around creativity. We’re always worried that we don’t have enough of it. Why? Creativity isn’t something that you have. Creativity is about what you give away. It’s simply the love that you give.

Creativity is simply what you share. If you have a bunch of ideas inside of you but you don’t act on them or share them, then you’re not going to feel that creative. Think about it this way—if you’re sitting around and feeling hungry then you’re just fantasizing about what you could eat. That’s not creativity. If you look around for ingredients and actually invent a dish, then you’re creating something. If you feed that dish to other people, then you feel celebrated in your creativity.

To be creative, you have to give. Creativity isn’t something that you do for yourself. It’s your ability to nurture the future. That’s why it represents children.

Different day masters are productive during different times. Wood is most creative during the summer because that’s when plants flower and bear fruit. Fire is most productive in between seasons because that’s when the sunlight changes or when we burn the fields. Earth expresses itself best during the fall because earth cultivates metal for long periods of time and the fall is when we use metal to harvest. Metal expresses itself through water and during winter. Metal is also the day master that likes child spirit the least. Water likes to feed wood and it gives the most during the spring when plants are growing.

What is child spirit?

Yes, again, child spirit can represent your actual children. I’m remembering something that a friend of mine told me once. They told me that, “If you want a kid, then you’re actually just going to have to have one. You can’t wait until you feel prepared. No one ever feels prepared. You just have to do it and then figure it out. That’s how everyone does it.”

Child spirit is about risk. Creating things takes a lot of risk.

Child spirit is about invention. You make something. You’re giving love out, for god’s sake. That’s risky. You’re showing your feelings. Child spirit is the poetry that you have to psych yourself up to read out loud. It’s the confession that you make to your crush. It’s your kid. It’s the creative project that you start. All of these things involve some element of risk.

And child spirit is playful. That’s why it’s called child spirit, because we invent new ideas when we play. This spirit comes alive when you have fun.

The other thing to remember about child spirit? It’s something that you give to other people. Your creativity doesn’t make you stronger. It weakens you. Your child spirit in bazi drains your day master. It also gives birth to your wealth spirit which is the thing that controls your mother spirit. Child spirit drains you energetically and it blocks you from resting. If you are pregnant and have a baby, that baby literally drains your skeleton and organs.

I think that this concept doesn’t make that much sense at first for people who live in a consumerist culture that tries to tell us that play is rest. Play is not rest. Making art is not a form of rest. Having fun is not resting. Rest is rest. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. No amount of having fun or creativity will solve your need to sleep for eight hours every night. Play is how you learn as a primate (or feline or canine). Play is a form of productivity.

If you don’t believe me, ask any parent. Playing with your kids will never ever replace your need for rest. Play is not rest.

You have to keep in mind that inventing things, creating, nurturing young people, cooking food, coming up with ideas, and playing actually uses up a lot of energy. Making things uses up a lot of your brain power and ideas. Cooking food uses up the ingredients in your fridge. Making food, foraging or hunting or farming, is something that depletes your environment in some way.

Child spirit is extractive. It’s creative and fun, yes. It brings about change. It uses up resources and depending on what you are drawing your resources from, your chart might like child spirit or you might not. You know whose day master is completely surrounded by child spirit both in the form of Hurting Officer and Eating God? Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer extracted a huge amount of energy from an atom. His Bing fire day master is completely surrounded by earth.

Bing fire can do this. Bing fire is the sun and the sun doesn’t really need anything to simply give and give just like an atom. Compare that with earth. Earth can give the appearance of constantly nurturing and giving but earth is not self renewing. Earth actually needs to be nurtured back to keep providing and sharing but it doesn’t like to ask.

Child spirit is about making yourself useful, about productivity. Your child spirit will drain you. You can think of this physically. Being productive uses energy. Making food drain energy and calories from your ecosystem. Having children, giving birth, drains your body of calcium and bone density and nutrients. Your children literally feed from your body if you are chestfeeding and that drains you.

Hurting Officer

Why are kids so scary? Because we know that they will take over the world someday. That’s why we’re so worried about whether the kids are alright all the time. We know that they will someday rule the world. Kids are the future.

Hurting Officer is called Hurting Officer because it hurts your official spirit. Hurting Officer is the kid who knows that they will someday rule the world. They will someday succeed all of the adults around them. They make their own rules. They remove old rules.

You can think of Hurting Officer very literally by thinking of Hurting Officer as your child and of official spirit as your grandparents. What happens when you reach the age when you have children of your own (if you have children of your own)? Usually, that’s around the time you see your grandparents get ill or pass away. That’s just the passage of time and something like this happens every generation. Someone who knows what has become history passes and someone who will create new ideas comes along.

Hurting Officer is rebellious. It doesn’t follow the rules. It’s not interested in following tradition. It’s interested in reinventing it or reinterpreting history. It’s a punk. It’s a little punk who is constantly trying to get up to no good. If you have strong Hurting Officer in your chart, then that’s you. You’re a punk who is constantly getting up to some kind of mischief.

We’re talking about child spirit here. Hurting Officer is the direct expression of child spirit. Children are, first and foremost, mischievous. They’re always trying things. They’re always trying to pick little holes in big bags of rice, bite people on the leg, or give themselves a haircut for no reason. Kids are experimental. They don’t know what they’re not supposed to do.

And they get away with it too. Hurting Officer is charming. Kids are funny. If you have strong Hurting Officer in your chart, then you’re a funny person and funny people can get away with a lot.

This spirit makes people really shiny and expressive. That’s why there’s actually a huge amount of famous people with strong Hurting Officer. I’m talking about movie stars, comedians, both Will and Jaden Smith, and Salvador Dali. I’m talking about Issac Newton and Vivaldi. These are inventors who are known for their innovations. Rihanna has Hurting Officer in her day pillar. They’re these really shiny people who do kinds of crazy creative things.

There’s also a lot of revolutionaries or reformers who have strong Hurting Officer—Robespierre, Mao, Khrushchev. You have to remember that Hurting Officer has this overturning energy. It purges the old to make room for the new.

Robespierre was a Jacobin who is known for spearheading what’s called the reign of terror, a moment in the French revolution when ten of thousands of public executions took place. The nobility was executed but then factions of the Jacobins were too and, finally, Robespierre himself. Mao carried out the maoist land reforms and also the cultural revolution which was about using youth to remove elements of old cultural traditions. Khrushchev denounced Stalinism and oversaw a lot of technological innovations like Sputnik.

The name Hurting Officer refers to Hurting Officer’s ability to hurt official spirit. Your official spirit is your relationship to tradition and history. Hurting Officer removes a part of the past to make room for innovation or the future. That’s just the kind of change Hurting Officer represents.

Remember—Hurting Officer is a child spirit. That means that is doesn’t sustain you.

I think that we tend to think of Hurting Officer energy when we think of change but it’s actually just a specific type of change. It’s the young overtaking the old. But what you’ll notice about this kind of change is that it actually isn’t built to be sustained over a long period of time. Hurting Officer uses a lot of resources. It purges tradition and makes innovations very fast. The technological innovations that it likes to create require a lot of resources. Traveling to outer space drains a lot of resources.

Child spirit ultimately drains you. It takes energy and it also removes your friendship spirit. Mao got rid of a lot of his own comrades during the cultural revolution. Robespierre too and he lost his own life. Khrushchev was ultimately deposed too.

Hurting Officer is really just about sharing your opinion. It’s about your crazy ideas and it makes you look very shiny. You can think of Hurting Officer as an ancestral spirit who wants you to be outspoken. Hurting Officer can cost you some friends because, when you share your opinions, you inevitably piss someone off. It represents a really specific type of change, of the new overtaking the old. It’s not sustainable over long periods of time. It moves very fast and costs you a lot of resources.

Eating God

Food is the basis of all creativity. I’ll live and die on this hill. The reason why we are creative people, why we make things, is because we need to eat. Because we need to eat, we have to figure out how to invent dishes each and every day.

How do you like your eggs? What kinds of spices do you mix into sauces? Do you braise your meats or tofu and how do you think about flavors blending together? What do you invent to get yourself aliveness?

Food actually represents so much of child spirit because we make food to feed to children (adults can cook for themselves). We make our food using our creativity but it’s also extractive. If you try to make too much food from your environment, from your mother spirit, then you extract too much and you destroy your mother. That’s what happened when settlers over produced wheat in the dust bowl. Child spirit is draining. We still need to eat. Everything in moderation.

Eating God, sometimes called God of Food, is basically just that. It’s your daily creativity that you use to make your meals. It’s creativity that you do everyday that becomes so common you see it as a simple habit. Eating God is the indirect version of child spirit. What is the indirect consequence of being around kids or young people? Having fun! Pleasure! While Hurting Officer is literally about the young overtaking the old, Eating God is about about pleasure. Just like Hurting Officer, Eating God is also someone who has a bunch of crazy ideas but the reason why Eating God has crazy ideas is because it is interested in pleasure.

You know who has really strong Eating God spirit? Nikola Tesla and Martha Stewart.

Nikola Tesla is known for his weird inventions and for wanting to make electricity free to all. He didn’t make a lot of money during his lifetime. He didn’t believe in centralized energy and thought of the coal industry as exploitative. He wanted to make energy just available to ordinary people. That’s Eating God. But you know what Tesla is also known for?

That’s right! His highly specific eating preferences. Tesla believed in eating in accordance with the earth’s rotation. That’s why he only ate twice, once at sunrise and once at sunset. He was vegetarian because he thought that meat was too extractive. Martha Stewart, of course, is also known for food—especially for her tarts. She actually also believes in eating in accordance with the earth’s seasons.

Eating God is just as inventive as Hurting Officer but it’s a bit different. Hurting Officer is motivated by fast change, by generational shifts. Eating God? It’s motivated by pleasure. Why do we eat? Because we want to feel full, because food tastes good.

The other thing that Martha Stewart is known for is actually tax fraud. Viktor Orban and Boris Yeltsin are both also strong Eating God people. Yeltsin is known for dismantling the Soviet Union, for opening up Russia’s natural gas resources to global trade, and for his alcoholism. He started his life big and strong and became sickly and weak at the end of his career. Orban is known for his populist authoritarianism. That’s why Trump likes him so much, because Orban has formulated a way to be an authoritarian while remaining well liked.

Eating God is for everyone. These people like to be well liked. They’re often popular. They are motivated by pleasure. Remember—child spirit drains you. Pleasure corrupts because pleasure takes a lot of work. Anything that takes a lot of work is extractive for your environment. If you are in a position of leadership, then pleasure can cause corruption or unbalanced extraction. Tesla wanted to give energy to everyone. Yeltsin, who turned Russia into a natural gas producing economy, wanted to give money to his friends.

Enough with these celebrities and politicians! I only talk about them because it’s easier to find accurate birth info for famous people. Let’s talk about regular people for a moment. What do you think Eating God looks like for regular people? What do you think someone who loves to give energy and pleasure is like?

Eating God people are often lovesick people. They just want to give pleasure. These people are worried about a crush all the time and that lovesick energy wears them down. They make little zines and playlists for all of their lovers. They share their emotions all the time and this makes them worried about getting a positive reaction back. Eating God people want to be liked and they want to give you something that you will like. Just like Hurting Officer, they are capable of creating some really unique art projects. However, Hurting Officer is motivated by newness. Eating God is motivated by what feels good. They are providers.

And guess what? Eating God people are doing all of that giving from a source. They are draining themselves.

Just like Hurting Officer people, Eating God people are often very tired. They are producing a lot. They are cooking a lot of stuff for other people. They’re giving a lot of love out.

The basis of Eating God is really just about giving energy to other people. That’s what it means to feed people. You give caloric energy out. That’s really the basis of pleasure. Pleasure is about giving energy. People like you if you give them energy and pleasure but it ultimately drains something. It might be draining you.

What if you don’t have any child spirit?

Not everyone needs to share or express or provide. It depends on your chart structure.

Yes, child spirit is creative and fun but it’s also mostly about productivity. What child spirit is really good at is weakening you. Having a child weakens you physically. Sharing your opinion will always lead to you being humbled in some way (take it from someone who has strong Eating God and writes everyday). Giving love and pleasure is draining. What happens when you don’t engage in the risk of self expression as much? Your idea of yourself becomes stronger. Your idea of yourself can become more stubborn and more rigid.

This is absolutely fine if you actually need your day master to be stronger. Maybe you are unsure of yourself because you have strong official spirit and weak self. Maybe you need to make your concept of self more stubborn so that you believe yourself about who you are because too many people are trying to shape you.

But mostly, what happens when people don’t have strong child spirit is that they don’t really like to text back. They like their privacy. You might call them uncommunicative. They might call themselves undramatic. These are people who mind their own business and don’t really like to get involved with other people’s issues.

Someone who needs child spirit might feel frustrated because they limit their own self expression because they are unwilling to take on any risk. Not having child spirit and needing it can keep you overly rigid and scared of self expression.

Child spirit is dramatic. Children are dramatic. If you have a relationship with children, if you care enough about something to give your energy away, then your life will have some drama. If you don’t have strong child spirit, then your life is relatively peaceful. That can be fine. But if you need more child spirit? Then you might feel that something about your habits tends to make your life a little too boring.

You keep to yourself too much. You don’t feel like you need to care. You have too much ambivalence. You don’t want to take on any risk because you can’t justify it due to your ambivalence.

Child spirit is really good at protecting you against official spirit. Official spirit, both in the form of Direct Officer and Seven Killings, gives you a lot of rules to follow. Official spirit gives you a lot of tradition and customs and rituals. If you have weak self and strong official spirit, then you have too many rules to follow. Child spirit would give you more options because creativity tends to give you more choices.

Not everyone likes child spirit. Drama drains you and some people really do need more peace. But if you need child spirit because your habits make your life too peaceful and keep you bored? Then allow yourself to give a shit. Giving a shit is exhausting but will help you find your creativity.