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Houses have filled my dreams for as long as I can remember. They are the psychic dwellings that inform me of myself, the obstacles, fears, challenges I'm experiencing in a sort of underground blueprint of rooms. Real or imagined, houses have long served as guiding metaphors central to my life.
And I return to them over and over again, like old friends who turn up expectedly, each claiming a different part of me. These houses point towards some aspect of myself that needs to be nourished, or needs to be more deeply understood.
Perhaps the most mysterious of all is the forest house set in the midst of pine trees, with no roof, ceiling, or floors, only these sort-of-walls made of bookshelves, with daylight and blue sky chipping though. Long tables are laid out, much like those at a flea market, covered with antique relics. I feel happy here, but surprised at how everything is either nearly here, or nearly not here. This is an in-between sort of house where the past keeps breaking into smaller and smaller bits, and fading away. I know if I stay here long enough I will be left with no structure at all, only forest and sky. I am in the land of impermanence and change, the past having lost its grip. What remains is a fragile nostalgia.
I mention my fascination with houses as a prelude to my slow awakening to a new idea. This was Sthapatya Vedic architecture, which has its origins in ancient India, and has given me, as for most people in the West, a brand new notion of "house." While I know more now than when this story begins, I am still no authority on what these houses entail. What I mean to share is only one person's journey towards an understanding that came largely through imagination, thinking, and a meager amount of experience. In the very beginning all I knew was a little gossip growing up around, but this filled me with curiosity, and also with wonder. Each house was designed to accommodate the full scope of nature--the very pathways of the sun, moon, and slow-moving stars. Every room, window, and door was situated to receive the full blast of these offerings. It seemed magical, indeed.
I had no clue as to how it would look, of course. A glass-domed roof, perhaps, with walls made also of glass. Rooms veering off each other at odd angles, or maybe more symmetrically like branches off a spruce tree, each emerging from a single axis. But however it was laid out, I was sure each house would be beautiful. Wasn't this, after all, the pinnacle of architecture? I was enchanted, and wanted only to see more. But to be honest, with each house I visited, for indeed these houses were being built one after another all around us now, there was a slight twinge of disappointment. Not at first, but as I saw the symmetry, the "boxiness" of the layout. There was something all the same in the design that played with my notion of originality, my desire for uniqueness, mystery, the labyrinthine hallways of my dreams.
Like almost anyone with one house to build in a lifetime, this was to be my perfect house, situated on my imagined 40-plus acres of land (okay, I'd settle for 20, even 10), but with the sun rising in our back fields, a stretch of timber with a creek running through, coyotes skirting the yard on a moonlit night. And I wanted my house to ramble, whether old or new. I wanted that labyrinth of rooms and corridors. I wanted mystery and surprise above all things. I did not want a square house with every room already positioned. I did not want "the box." These tidy homes that rose out of their parcels of land seemed too tract-like, too "suburban," too much the same.
Meanwhile, my husband was immersed in another project. He had become the developer of an 80-acre parcel of farmland upon which was to be built a Vedic Observatory. For those baffled by what this might be, let me say, for brevity's sake, that these observatories exist all over the world, having been left to us by ancient cultures. Among the most famous are Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid. It has become more widely accepted that these structures were built not just to take measures of the sky, but to generate certain influences.
The most recent of these was built in India in the early 1700s by the Maharaj Jai Singh. The story goes that the Maharaj built his large stone instruments to settle a dispute over calculations by his fellow astronomers. With these larger than life instruments, astronomical calculations could be taken with the naked eye. Unfortunately, he understood little of the finer values--values that I, after much delay, would come to appreciate.
It seemed apparent that my idealist of a husband was indeed going to build one of these ancient observatories. I was like the Maharaj, only worse. Not only did I not understand the "finer values" of this enterprise, I did not understand its superficial uses either. More precisely, I did not understand why one should bother building some ancient measuring system that Western astronomy had surpassed centuries ago. And because I was just as suspect of its more esoteric characteristics, I was suspect of it all. But I was not immune to some of the romance.
My husband's four a.m. vigils, for example, in the dead of January, with the wind howling and the snow piled high, when he'd venture out to the land to take the first sightings of the pole star. This was in order to place the first of the fleet of ten instruments, the great Samrat Yantra or pole star instrument. Over the course of that month, and well into February, he and his chief engineer braved the elements, making sure each sighting was a match week after week, that the star had not slid from its tiny pulsating orbit. But mostly I remember the months, maybe years, of standing in the muddy circle with a few piles of rocks marking off the various instrument sites, being surrounded by these beautiful Iowa fields and sky, standing there and just asking, "Why?"
As a creature of words, and with a metaphor-making disposition, I was to be saved by the word "instrument." This is the word that kept stirring up my brain. I did want to "get behind" my husband's newest obsession, but unlike him, had no particular fascination or comprehension of the intricacies of measurements and maps. When he spoke of instruments and how they'd record the sun's passage, I'd go brain dead. But I remember one day fixing on the idea of a musical instrument. Here, at last, was a notion I could get my mind around, a far more poetical metaphor. And it fit, I thought, for doesn't air play across the strings of a harp or violin causing sound vibrations? In the same way, wouldn't light play across these "instruments" causing some other kind of vibration, who knows of what kind?
This small notion worked like a pebble in my shoe, or maybe a seed in a window pot, for not only did its effect nudge me beyond all this talk about measurement, eventually, with patient nurturing, its wider implications began to grow in me. What once had been falling on deaf ears, I began to hear. It was with this metaphor of a stringed instrument that I would enter my uneasy alliance with these ancient devices. I carried my insight like a talisman, giving credence to my husband's project, keeping my own inner hearing alive. But meanwhile, I wasn't there yet.
It took years, perhaps five, maybe seven, to finally complete the Vedic Observatory. No longer a circle of mud and stone, but a ring of human-sized stone sculptures, I spent more and more time there. I was not convinced of anything, mind you, but I did begin to recognize that every time I went there, I felt better. Maybe it was just the land, the far-off skyline, the great expanse of green fields stretched all the way to their thin perimeter of sky. Sure, I'd listen to my husband's explanation of how each one worked, but I'd forget their names almost as soon as I heard them, forget how each took its own peculiar measure using the sun's shadow. Yet even forgetting everything, I'd look forward to going there again. A few times at night we went so I could see for myself how the north star aligned itself to the tip of the Samrat Yantra, and this did make me feel closer to some higher sense of things. Wherever I stood, it seemed the constellations rode on my shoulders.
Meanwhile, though my oar was beginning to crack in regard to the instruments, I was bravely clinging to my little life raft concerning those houses going up on the nearby acreage. These were the houses of my husband's latest enterprise, the Mandala One Village. He was at it again with a brand new idea in housing development, a group of homes arranged within a perfect vastu. This meant that not only was each house built according to Sthapatya Veda principles, each was placed in its most propitious relationship to every other house, and all were arranged within one perimeter, or vastu, precisely drawn in order to generate the most harmonic influences. By now I was growing more used to these exotic concepts. It was easy to poke fun at them, but more fun to ride the wave of excitement and mystery they seemed to promise. Besides, by now I knew without a doubt that our house would one day be among them.
I don't remember now when I had the first revelation, or where I was exactly. It might have been while standing in the Observatory when the sun was bright, the sky clear, and each instrument performing well (by which I mean the metal needles able to cast their shadows sharply, crisply at the hour's mark )--standing there and looking back across the field to the small line of houses going up. Or, maybe it was in the Village, circling the empty space inside one of the homes under construction, and happening to look out a window across the field to the Observatory. Suddenly I saw, with that sharp jilt I've come to recognize as my own little insight Geiger counter, how each house was an extension of the instruments. Both Sthapatya Veda house and Vedic Observatory were, indeed, instruments of alignment, with all this implied. The impact left me reeling. How could I have been so obtuse as not to see the connection before?
For the first time, I understood why the light, pouring through a central open area called the Brahmastan, must come clean along each axis demarcating the four cardinal directions: west to east and north to south. I understood why the windows needed to be lined up exactly at these coordinates, why each room and its corresponding function might be served differently by the light at different times of day. And how, as in the Observatory, wherever I stood, no matter in which corner or in which room, by always being in close proximity to these bands of light, I too was being tuned to the same "music of the stars." More than mere sundials? Indeed, yes. More than an interesting collections of rooms, corridors, and windows? Most certainly. As one more creature belonging to this universe, certainly I too would be transformed.
It has been said that at the Vedic Observatory one "eats through the eyes," realigning the physiology and consciousness, that is, body, mind, and spirit. In a similar way, while living in this house I ingest these influences. What a delight to throw away old clothes, to arrive at a new concept of home. All my notions, my residue of romance with what in a house lies hidden, begin to be replaced with this fresh bakery of light. The great poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote "wherever I am folded, there I am a lie." To unfold the mystery of home may never be done, but something in me has changed. The mystery shifts from the actual space my house might occupy to the vast spaces of my own Self. Isn't this the greatest mystery of all, living as we do in the streaming universe?
If you'd like to see the Vedic Observatory in person, please call (641) 472-0010 to arrange a tour.
