Today is Sun Four… Our Siddhidata Kulam reported on their many activities this phase. They really do a lot! Here is just a short list:

• Many hours working on the rigging of a high beam under the banyan tree to hoist up the statue of Lord Murugan
• Lots of work on top of the temple installing safety railings and scaffolding, to make sure our silpis are safe at all times. This requires constant attention as every time they have to move to a new area, everything must be reconfigured.
• The stream of fresh fruit and vegetables is no accident! The team is working daily to pick bananas, start new seedlings, harvest greens, transplant seedlings into the beds of the main garden, harvest oranges, grapefruit, starfruit, papayas. It’s a never ending work they do. It reminds one of some of the words of Saint Tiruvalluvar “Farming is the most honorable profession…The whole world lives off the labor of the farmer.”
• Vehicle maintenance… this week the 100-hour servicing of our valuable Bobcat.
• And research into replacing some of our aged fleet of utility and people mover vehicles… stay tuned.

Its a special day for the publications team… we call it Archive day… Paramacharya Palaniswami tells the story of this important work…

“Today our Malaysian youth, 16-year-old Nutanaya, served in the Ganapati Kulam. Here he is entering the publications building to begin his day.”

He was here for six months back in the year 2000, so there have been lots of changes for him to get acquainted with.

It happens that today was Archive Day, the one day each month that the entire publications team works together to sort through, log, protect and organize Gurudeva’s lifetime legacy of audio recordings, videos and photos. This 40-foot container was installed a few years back just for the purpose of housing Gurudeva’s gifts to the world as we go through the enormous task of digitizing everything for future generations to have access to. Here Nutanaya is leaving the container with a box of photos to be organized.

Natarajnathaswami was his mentor today, and together they sorted through hundreds of old photos, from 1949 and before, and placed them carefully into protective sleeves. One day all those tens of thousands of photos will be digitized, but not today!

Inside the Archive Container there are shelves and shelves of reels, tapes, cassettes and more. At the back are stored all of Gurudeva’s office and personal items.

These blue and white binders, hundreds of them, contain the photos we took from the 1960s onward, up to the digital age, that is. After the late 1990s it was all digital. Each binder has several hundred photos, all sorted according to Gurudeva’s travels and according to the year.

A typical set of binder labels showing the year and general contents.

One of the amazing discoveries of the day was a few seconds (about four) of Gurudeva which were part of a documentary by the History Channel. Here Arumugaswami has captured the short image for our archives. A rare video glimpse of Gurudeva from the year 1958, when he was just 31 years old.

Meanwhile, Sivakatirswami was compiling the audio CDs, logging in the hundreds of files and reconciling various lists. For the first time, we have all of the digitized audio files on our server, and we are getting ready to develop a small piece of software that will give us facile access to this wealth.

Here we have a look at the shelves in the Cedar Room. These are the VHS tapes which over the past three years we have digitized onto DVDs.

Just in time, since in our tropical climate many were covered with mold and the tapes were quickly deteriorating. Fortunately, they are all in digital form now.

There are approximately 600 hours of video in this format alone, hundreds more in Mini-DVs and such.

All of these tapes were boxed and stored in the Archive Container, making room on the shelves for our next phase of video work.

Arumugaswami works on organizing the tapes while Nutanaya carefully works through photographs. Lucky him, being able to look into the monastery’s past…

Yogi Japendranatha is working on capturing the special talks, called “the Mathavasi Shastras,” a series of talks Gurudeva gave for the monks during the last few years of his life.

Each morning after our meditation he would speak to the monks about monks’ things, about the ideals of our lives, about the disciplines and expectations, about our vows and our responsibility to seek the Self throughout life.

Palaniswami gathered the next 128 reels tapes and wrote instructions to our team in Chennai which is digitizing them, guided by Sivathondar Sheela Venkatakrishnan. Here is his note to her, with contents of each of the reels.

These ancient audio reels are so archaic that it is even hard to find machines that can play them. They are on 7-inch and 5-inch reels, using magnetic tape.

This is the kind of humongous device we used back in the 50s and 60s, to record all of Gurudeva’s upadeshas.

Not finding anyone in the US who would do this for a reasonable price, we turned to Sheela who found a company equipped for the task. For about a year now we have been sending boxes of reels to them in Chennai.

They painstakingly record them on CDs, which Sheela then sorts through before shipping revised CDs to Hawaii.

Here are her last three CDs, containing all the audio files from over 100 reels sent last year.

Today these were loaded onto our server. So now we have some redundancy: the original reels, the CD files and a copy in a secure part of our server. Despite the old technology, the audio quality from the reels is excellent.

As you can see, this CD contains 12 of Gurudeva’s talks. Thank you, Gurudeva, for these gifts of knowledge and insight, unequalled in all the world.

Another treasure from the past from Sri Lanka. While in Australia, a man came forward at Bodhinatha’s seminar to hand us a letter and envelope written to his father by Yogaswami. Dated August 20, 1938. It may be the first time we are seeing his writing in English. Such a mature style. Palaniswami took out his small digital camera and captured this onsite in Melbourne. We thought you would all enjoy seeing Yogaswami’s beautiful English script. The letter is in Tamil and we have captured that as well.

Yogaswami’s message, written during one of his few journeys to India, is roughly translated as: “Things are going on in the world that are not all good, but they are all Siva’s will and it will always be so.”