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Our Beloved and Revered Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
Attained Maha Samadhi on November 12th, 2001
Click to read for Details.
Gurudeva’s Statement on Sept. 11th
Here is a beautiful tribute from someone on Kauai that show how deeply Gurudeva touched even those who were not his direct students or devotees:
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“Beloved Gurudeva,
I know you will never read these words, but I believe that our heart’s messages are written in the etheric and known at a soul level where our oneness is unlimited.
You have been such an uplifting and inspiring presence in my life and, of course, in the lives of so many around the world. I just want you to know that I cherish the things I have learned from you and I would like to list them here:
1) You taught me that oneness with God is the supreme human endeavor and that it is an endeavor that the simplest ordinary human can embrace.
2) You taught me the a path to God can honor all paths to God, that we are one in God even if we are many in the flesh.
3) You taught me that being devoted to a life of religious service includes being joyful and vibrant and humorous and delighted with life and people.
4) You taught me that peace is always in my heart, that my heart is a place of worship and that worship can be constant, with each breath.
5) You taught me what it is to be good neighbors, to share celebration and bounty and kinship with our circle of neighbors.
6) You taught me to honor public officials, whether I agreed with their policies or not, for the office they were holding was sacred and deserved my respect.
7) You taught me that holding a grand vision is not foolish when it is held on behalf of the community interest, that temples to last a thousand years and endowments of $5 billion are possible when a pure heart and a clear intent is focussed on these goals.
I am sitting here savoring some of the moments I have been privileged to be in your presence. I am so touched by you, Gurudeva.
Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for teaching us. Thank you for helping our island form a spirit of community. We have some way to go yet. I know you will continue to assist from the nonphysical.
Thank you for your touching humanity combined with your embodied divinity.
I will continue giving to the temple fund in honor of your life and teachings.
I am grateful to you always and hold you always in my heart like treasure.
Go in peace,”
Bodhinathaswami has been giving some really wonderful talks recently and we are happy to have our transcription team all back on line so you can read them if you don’t have the bandwidth to listen to the talks. See below the transcript of his wonderful, very practical talk about the “high EE.”
Announcement! New Search Engine
For those of you who are interested in research, or looking up a past visit of a friend to the Aadheenam or who would like to listen to or read transcripts of talks on specific subjects — we are happy to unveil, after several months of work and beta testing, our new search engine, which was researched and implemented remotely on the San Diego server from the UK by our sevak there, Darmaguhan Satgunasingam.
Simply put: the search engine accepts “phrasing.” For example if you enter (using quotes)
“Daily Chronicle” Patel California
You would get a list of “hits” of TAKA pages where visitors whose names were Patel were in those pages along with the word “California” (you might get a few hits with Patels from other states as well, if some other visitors on that same day were from California.)
Or, if you are doing “serious” research, you could search for:
“Supreme Court” “child abuse” and you would get all the pages from all of our sites, including Hinduism Today, that had those phrases.
Cybertalk “positive discipline”
would get you to transcripts of audio or audio whose descriptions contained “positive discipline.”
Happy searching!
Cybertalk: Parents need to teach tolerance. There are many practical ways to
systematically do this from the pamphlet from the Southern Poverty Law
Center http://www.splcenter.org/ such as avoiding stereotypes and valuing
diversity. Quote for Living with Siva on tolerance.
Cybertalk Ends”
For more information about listening to Gurudeva’s talks online and to hear them in other formats, click here.
And click here for an Index to All Past CyberTalks.
Study Gurudeva’s teachings
every day. Visit the Master Course site!
Bodhinatha will be happy to hold “Prasnottara Satsang” — “Questions and Answers” over the telephone with any Hindu religious societies, Hindu youth groups, Radio talk show hosts etc. All you need is a phone with a speaker and an enthusiastic audience. Arrangements may be made in advance by sending email to Sadhaka Mahadevan
If you are experiencing any problems listening to the audio, please to go our Audio FAQ page for sound geeks and follow the directions there.
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Here is Mr. Karthikeya Devireddy and his lovely family from Los Banos, California, originally from Andra Pradesh.
Also attending the morning Siva puja, Mr and Mrs Singh from Nashville, originally from New Delhi.
Next to the monastery we have a small “Chola Gardens” area, through which one branch of our stream flows on its way to join the Wailua River below us. Lovely bamboo, bromeliads, ti plants make for an enchanting little world.
More color art for Dancing with Siva for the chapter on:
What Are Hinduism’s Rites of Passage?
Sloka 91
Hindus celebrate life’s crucial junctures by holy sacraments, or rites of passage, called samskaras, which impress the subconscious mind, inspire family and community sharing and invoke the Gods’ blessings. Aum.
People are often amazed at how much our monastic Order is able to accomplish. Well the fact is we don’t do it all alone. Gurudeva and the monks over the years have established a vast network of collaboration. And, from our secret and beautiful Shangrila of Shiva in the Pacific, via the internet, we coordinate efforts by 100’s of people. We are going to occasionally feature some of theses dedicated souls. Here is Sivaneswaran Sockanathan in Kuala Lumpur. He and his two sisters are doing a lot for Gurudeva’s mission. Sivaneswaran is the webmaster for www.hheonline.org whose content is present on servers in Honolulu, but which he manages remotely from Kuala Lumpur.
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Study Gurudeva’s teachings.
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transcription begins
Date: January_03_2002
Title: The Magic of the High “eee”
Category: Self Improvement
Duration: 13 min., 17 seconds
Date Given: January 1, 2002
Given by: Bodhinatha
Looking through the Master Course lesson of the day and the part from ‘Merging With Siva’, I thought I would read from that and comment on it. It is about the high ‘eee’ sound.
“Within the quantum level of consciousness, there originates a vibration, a steady vibration that can be heard with the inner ear as a high pitched ‘eeee’, as if a thousand vinas were playing, as if all the nerve currents in the astral body, physical body and the body of the soul were singing in harmony. It is a divine combination of the ida and pingala tones blended together in the sushumna. Each lineage of Gurus has embedded in the psyche of tradition a certain combinations of sounds, that listening to this mystic sound holds all devotees close to their Satguru and all those that proceeded Him. It is also said that when one is in another birth the sound is the same. This will eventually lead the aspirant back to his spiritual lineage. Listening to the ‘nada’, as it is called in Sanskrit or ‘nada-nadi sakti’ brings a threshold of bliss and shows that the balance of all karmas have been attained. Listening to the nada, tracing it into its source carries the seeker’s awareness to the brink of the Absolute. There are today, mystical orders that do nothing but listen to the nada while looking at and enjoying the darshan of their Guru’s picture. Many sincere seekers wonder why they cannot hear ‘eee’, the nada, during their meditation, while others not only hear it during meditation but during the day when talking, shopping or just meandering through the garden. This is to say, it is there when awareness enters that area of the mind. The mind has to be made empty. That means resolving all unresolved conflicts within the subconscious. The striving to hear the nada will bring up unresolved issues. They may plague the conscious mind until resolved. At first you might disregard them and feel they will go away as abruptly as they came. But later, when they persist, and the major one is deception, yes, we can even deceive ourselves, we are inwardly forced to face up to, admit our secrets and make amends. When deception goes, the nada comes. When the subconscious is heavy, the nada and the brilliant colors it radiates fade.”
That is a very interesting point and not necessarily cognized. So said another way, when we seek in deep meditation to go into pure awareness and then the nada, which in the Shum language is called ‘kaef’, ‘ekaef’. ‘ekaef’ is the nada. Sometimes we don’t experience it, it is not there. Why do we think it is not there? We think our concentration is poor, we are just not having a good day. Why isn’t it there?
Gurudeva gives a beautiful answer. “It is only there when the subconscious is free of conflicts and unresolved problems.” What is preventing us from hearing it, is what is in the subconscious. We may not realize that at the time. We may think, “Well, I didn’t get enough sleep last night …”, whatever reason we attribute to it. But no, it is not that. It is that the subconscious can’t have conflict, unresolved issues in it.
How do we know if something is a conflict or an unresolved issue? By the frequency we think about it. If we think about something once a month, there is not a conflict or unresolved issue. Once every ten years, definitely not a conflict or unresolved issue. Once every ten minutes, it probably is. So, we can tell by the frequency with which we think of something problematic, if it is an unresolved conflict. We think about it often. The subconscious keeps throwing it up.
Why does the subconscious keep throwing it up? So we can solve it. The subconscious is very smart. It is not doing this for some unproductive reason. No, the subconscious and superconscious work together. So the subconscious is throwing it up to remind us it is there and that we should sort it out.
Isn’t that a wonderful perspective, very useful perspective on why when we sit down to meditate, we don’t go more deeply within. It is because we have unresolved conflicts in the subconscious. When the subconscious doesn’t have conflicts, we are within. The depth we are within varies but we are within. We will be within if there are no subconscious conflicts. We cannot not be within.
It is like in, subconscious and out. If there is nothing in the subconscious, we are in. It is when the subconscious has these unresolved problems that we are stuck in the outer. But, if there is nothing in the subconscious then we are within. In one state of consciousness or another. Not necessarily in the highest inner state of consciousness. But, if the subconscious doesn’t have conflicts we are in an inner state of consciousness, on one level or another. It is automatic. It is only the conflicts in the subconscious that keep us without.
The challenge, of course, is to recognize that. Admit when we have a conflict, when there is some unresolved problem and get rid of it. Writing it down in Maha Vasana Daha Tantra is one of the most effective ways of getting rid of conflict, because usually they are just in our mind. Being able to admit we have made mistakes and that we are not perfect, but we are trying to do better can get rid of conflict.
Sometimes a conflict is perpetuated because we feel so bad about ourselves having done something wrong and we can’t get beyond that. “Oh … I did that. Fortunately not too many people know I did it. Oh … but if they did, this would be terrible. I did this thing.” It is stuck in our mind, it is a conflict.
So, how do we get beyond that? Well, writing it down may not do it, if we don’t have the right perspective. Gurudeva, of course, gives us the wonderful principle – Life, the great experience. The idea that whatever we have done wrong, we can take comfort in the fact that everybody else in the world has done that same thing wrong at some point in this life, past life or a future life. Because there is only one path, there is only one path of experience. We all make the same horrendous mistakes. Realizing that and realizing that we are not different from anyone else. There is only one spiritual path and everyone is on the same path. It is just we are not in the same place. But there is only a one path. We all go through the same experiences, we all make the same mistakes, we all express the instinctive nature at one point or another.
So if we have that perspective that, “Gee … I am not different than anyone else. I am not worse”, which is the tendency to think, “Gee … Everyone else is so much better than I am, because I did this.” But when we realize that we are the same as everyone else, then we can go beyond that problem. Because we realize, “Gee … Everyone else is just like I am, I am like everyone else. Let us write this thing down and move on.”
We have come across a way of looking at our self. A perspective of our self which allows us to forgive our self, allows us to feel good about our self by realizing that everyone else did the same thing, or will do the same thing. We all make the same mistakes and the important thing is to learn from our mistakes. Right? It is not to blame ourselves for them. It is not to ignore them. It is to learn something from them. If we learn enough from a mistake, we won’t repeat that mistake again. Right? We will move on.
Some of you may recall an example I give on this because it is one that worked for me. The idea of trying to make a mistake only once. It is like driving down a road, like our back driveway and there are certain holes in the road. So if you are driving along at a certain speed and you drive into the hole, you bump. Everyone in the car bumps, it feels a little unpleasant for a moment. How many times are you going to allow the car to hit that hole in the road and bump? One time, five times, ten times, are you going to keep doing it forever? It is a mistake, right? It is unpleasant to you. It is unpleasant to the other people in the car. Why not just do it once? Why not watch your actions carefully enough so that you are going along, you hit the hole, you bounce and you say, “Gee … there is a hole in the road there. Next time I come through, in fact every time I come through I am going to remember that there is a hole in the road. I am not going to hit the hole in the road because there is no advantage to hitting the hole in the road. It is much more pleasant to miss the hole in the road.”
Simple example, right? But the same principle can apply to more sophisticated behavior. If we do something and it does not work out right, we can think about it and say, “Gee … What did I do wrong? If I think about this correctly, I can avoid doing it wrong more than once. It will only happen once.”
That is the idea set in the iccha, kriya and jnana sakti. The iccha, kriya and jnana sakti idea, that we act until we learn. Kriya is action and eventually it is supposed to result in jnana, new knowledge. We keep doing the same things until we learn something about them and then we change our behavior.
To try to make a mistake only once by being observant and being reflective, obviously it is advantageous. Right? Then we can move on to the next mistake and only make that one once. Then we can move on to the next mistake and only make that one once. If we only make a mistake once, instead of ten, twenty, thirty times, obviously … what are we doing? We are progressing on the spiritual path more quickly. Right? We are progressing more quickly by just being observant and reflective and committed to the idea that there is no need to make any mistake more than once.
Aum Namah Sivaya.
transcription ends
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MORE UPLIFTING THINGS |
Innersearch 2002 in Hawaii!
Plans are in the works for a wonderful innersearch program located right here on the island of Kauai in the summer (July/August) of 2002. Be prepared for a wonderful spiritual experience in paradise with classes, meditations, seminars and wonderful ceremonies at the Siva temple of Kauai’s Hindu Monastery. Details are being worked on and we will be informing prospective participants in the new future of the exact dates. If you would like to be on the mailing list to be informed, please send your full contact information, name, address, phone and email to |
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1. SIGN OUR GUESTBOOK and receive a FREE GIFT |
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3. Visiting KAUAI’S HINDU MONASTERY |
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From Our Gurus' Teachings
Archives are now available through 2001. Light colored days have no posts. 1998-2001 coming later.
