Thank you so much!

i really loved what you wrote,
we are moving into a house that was created by a family practicing vastu, and i feel sheepish about the understanding, this has helped me come to know more about my altar space and the divine essence of sunrise greeting the deities... ahh....
namaste

hi, Pritam,

there are two different points here, as well.

one is location of a prayer or meditation room, and the second point is, inside such a room, where to place the deities.

there are many many many different ideas and books and teachings about vaastu. a lot of them are inaccurate, that is, the points they make are more based in folklore and traditions that have been passed down, rather than from an understanding of the energy, the directions and sub-directions, and the five elements of creation, all of which are intimately connected to and experienced in vaastu.

so, someone 300 years ago said, 'you should do such-and-such' -- whether it's true or not, or WAS true then -- and someone wrote it down (hope they got it right!) and then passed it down for generations as a truism. a lot of vaastu 'knowledge' gets passed along that way, and isn't necessarily functionally true or accurate.

I lived for many years in an ashram built on experimental vaastu principles -- ie, a wall would get built, then my master would stand back and observe the effects of that wall on the spiritual lives of his students, the energy of the ground and ashram, the over-all effects (both materially and subtly) and then, more often than not, tear the wall down after a couple months, and rebuild it maybe a few feet in a different direction.

brick by brick, wall by wall, building by building, the ashram has evolved as a study in perfect vaastu. supernatural vaastu. not by blindly following this or that teaching, but based in trial-and-error and really exploring, experientially, the vaastu principles and affects.

it's taken more than 10 years and the place still isn't finished, but enough is in place that when you walk into the compound walls and spend any amount of time there, it's clear that something extraordinary is happening. and a lot of that feeling is a result of the amazing vaastu implementation.

okay, back to the question of the NE for a deity.

it's a general vaastu principle that Lakshmi (goddess of abundance) is living in the NE -- that's Her quadrant, in the directions. it's also the direction of the Water element.

you always want the NE completely empty -- no furniture in the extreme NE of a room, a home, a property, etc.

this is partly why it makes an ideal meditation room -- because you want to go in and out of the NE a lot -- to create the flow of abundance -- BUT you don't want to keep anything heavy in the NE at all.

in terms of the deity being in which direction IN the room itself -- depends what you're doing. if you're SW and the deity is NE, you're commanding the divine. I imagine that in ordinary Brahminical life, people's desires are mostly mundane so having the deity in the NE seems to make sense in terms of creating prosperity -- the supplicant is commanding on the divine to deliver the results of their prayers.

but in the ashram where I lived, built on impeccable vaastu and with energy you can taste, it's so divinely palpable there, there is not a single deity in ANY NE anywhere. no way.

the impact is that the divine is commanding on anyone who comes there. in any temple, bedroom, meditation halls, whatever -- the divine is always SW, or South or West.

when I walk into people's homes and feel, first, the vaastu -- I can tell what their relationship is with the divine, and how effective it is, based on where they've put their deities. seriously -- it's noticeable in a half-second. it's disturbing, to me, to see a major altar or deity statue or photo in the NE -- you can really feel the difference if you've been doing it that way for a long time, and switch it to the SW.

also, it's consistent with ideal vaastu to do it this way -- because ideally you want the NE entirely bare. not so much as an electrical cord or a cushion or ANYTHING in the extreme NE corner of a home or room.

putting a heavy altar, or a big statue, in the NE means automatically you're suppressing the prosperity there. you're putting height and weight on top of the NE, the very direction you don't want to impede in ANY way.

the SW is the Earth element, considered in vaastu a negative direction. purely negative. the earth is where we hold everything, including blame, resentment, egoism, fear, desires, etc., it's considered a 'demon energy' in vaastu.

the idea of putting something big, tall, and heavy in the SW (like a huge altar, statue, etc.) means that the big heavy things are suppressing the negative tendencies of the SW direction.

this is why it's a GREAT idea to put the deities there -- esp the male ones -- because the Shiva energy, residing in the SW, is what keeps the demon energy moderated and suppressed. big heavy altars and murthis and cabinets and entertainment centers and beds and stuff like that keeps the SW negativity balanced.

so -- this is what I know -- take what you like and leave the rest. but vaastu is a HUGE experiment, a huge research project. don't just take someone's word for it -- research it practically yourself, by trying different things, and see what happens.

(I've done vaastu consultations for the last 8 years, in conjunction with my husband, and we've seen literally hundreds of cases, homes, apartments, properties, offices, holy sites, etc. I have never once yet seen a situation where the vaastu principles I learned don't apply, so I really trust, implicitly, what I've learned because I've also learned through trial and error, and researching practically, not just getting the information from a book and following it.

www.kaleshwaravaastu.com is a taste of what I trained in.)

it's a great, amazing subject, vaastu, and one that really needs to be accurately understood in the world at this time.

Alx