A World Home

About the Book

This exciting and insightful guide for home making can help you establish a vital relationship with the world and the cosmos. A World Home adapts the ancient wisdom of Vastu Shastra to the demands and opportunities of modern life in an easy step by step process. Vastu Shastra asserts the unity of all things and it embodies a conviction that an intuitive recognition of oneness with the world has an ultimate value. In adapting Vastu Shastra to modern life, A World Home helps you organize your home so that every activity can reinforce your unity with the world.

This guide can be adapted to any home making situation. It is relevant to apartment dwelling, or to living in a rental house, for remodeling a dwelling, or for building a new house. If you are thinking of nothing more than moving a chair in your apartment, this guide can open a door to considerations you should take into account in even minor adjustment living in your home. A World Home is a guide toward determining what you need to know about the physical aspects of your requirements, to assist you in examining your needs, wants, and dreams in creating a home, and to help you develop a living pattern that will support and encourage a profound realization of oneness with the world. The issue in A World Home is home making: the purpose is life fulfillment.

If you are going to build a new house, or substantially change an existing one, or have any other dwelling project that might require a design professional, this guide can give you knowledge and insight that can help you locate the best architect or designer for your particular project. In using this guide, you will have progressed a long way toward knowing the kinds of questions you need to ask, and a long way toward knowing with whom you will want to work. You will understand much that you will need to know in order to be an active participant in creating a home that will be effective in your life.

A World Home is organized around introducing relevant issues, one at a time. You will be prompted to respond in ways that will record, needs, wants, dreams, projections, ambitions, beliefs and feelings related to creating a home that will satisfy your needs, nurture your life, and promote your fulfillment.

The first part of this guide focuses on helping you identify and examine your physical needs, wants and dreams. In the case of a new house, an addition, or even an interior rearrangement, it can also help you record information about the piece of earth you will occupy that will be needed so that your new environment can be intelligently and sensitively created. Satisfying one's physical needs wants and dreams is an important part of living in harmony with the earth. The second and most important part of A World Home focuses on gaining a realization of the world and living in harmony with the spiritual reality of the earth.

About the Author

J. William Curtis is professor emeritus in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, and a sculptor with several shows to his credit. An intense interest in Hinduism and Indian architecture led to a Fulbright scholarship to India in 1963, a master of Art degree in South Asian Languages (Sanskrit) in 1968, and an American Institute of Indian Studies fellowship in 1971. Return trips to India since have augmented formal studies. He has published a book on the relationships between South Indian temples and ritual, and several articles. The author is presently an associate editor in the subject areas of arts and architecture for a worldwide Encyclopedia of Hinduism project (information available at www.eh.sc.edu). He is also a partner in the architectural firm of Curtis and Emmons Architects, in Seattle, Washington, where he and his wife, Patricia K. Emmons, specialize in residential architecture (www.curtisandemmons.com).