DeAnna Radaj: In Feng Shui I can go in to a place and tweak the house if there is something that is bad, say the front door is facing an inauspicious direction for the person or absence of light or tweaking where windows go. Is there a Vastu aspirin? They say in Feng Shui it’s crystals and mirrors, which I fight with people about, but can you tweak in Vastu?

Jon Lipman: That’s a great question and like you always get asked ‘what is Feng Shui in two minutes?’, I always get asked that question. And it is something that we did for about 10 years within this revival by Maharishi and he examined the results and he concluded that the benefits that you could bring into someone’s life by rectifying, which is the term that we use for what I think you are describing, they were ok. Maybe in the best instances maybe 50% of the value of natural law could be enlivened in the house, but in most cases it was quite a bit less than that. And I have to tell you he was an outrageous man, he always saw the greatest possible possibilities for humanity. He wanted to enlighten the entire world and I think that that’s going to happen. And he wanted everyone in the world, all six billion people, to have all of the negative influences in their lives from their homes eliminated from their lives and therefore he felt that rectifying a house was a compromise and so we stopped doing it. So that’s my short answer to your question that it can be done, but we like to give people only the maximum influence and so we are not doing it any more.

If you had a listener who wanted to know what to do on an existing house, there are a couple of things that many people can do. And so I should just mention them quickly, one is because we understand the beneficial effects of an eastern or northern orientation to a house, many people have found that if they just close up the other doors to a house and use solely or create eastern or northern doors in the house that that alone has quite a big impact. There have been so many cases where people’s lives have been dramatically changed by that. Chronic diseases abated, or disharmony between family members dissolved, prosperity increases. Another thing that people can do is, we talked about the effect of our own orientation how it is connected to the influences from the sun and that an eastern orientation is very nourishing, and we spend about a third of our lives in a single orientation and that is when we are asleep in bed. Maybe for some of us it is only a quarter of our life, but somewhere in that range. What Vastu tells us is that an eastern or a southern orientation of our bed is best, that means pillow on the east end or alternatively but not quite as good on the south end. And so anyone, as long as their house does face the cardinal directions, can rotate their bed and sleep with their head at the east end of their bed and see what happens. Many people find they sleep better and many people find they feel more refreshed in the morning. So that’s something many people can do without building a new house.