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One of the ways Gurudeva kept the force field of the monastery strong with a clear and high vibration was to have the monks and monastery grounds on retreat from visitors three times a year. This two week period is called “Sadhu Paksha”.
Announcement: This is a short, 4-day phase and will be followed by three day retreat. Beginning on Sun Two, Sunday, March 31st, of the following phase… the monastery will be observing it’s spring “Sadhu Paksha” retreat, during which time the monastery grounds will be closed to tours and guests. The temple will still be open as usual from 9am to noon.
Sadhu Paksha lasts until April 12th and the monks will receive guests again on Tamil New Year’s day, Saturday, April 13th. So if you plan to come to Kauai, we suggest you schedule your trip after that time.
Our Beloved and Revered Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
Attained Maha Samadhi on November 12th, 2001
Click to read for Details.
Click here to read
Gurudeva’s statement on September 11th
Today we had our Sun One homa after a two day retreat. Bodhinatha holds the tray of offerings that are made at the end of the fire worship.
Cybertalk: How do we deal with discouragement? Gurudeva gave us a tool, the
vasana daha tantra, to deal with events that hit us emotionally. The
subconscious mind dutifully throws up memories that bother us so we can
resolve them. Still not inspired? How do we uplift ourselves again? Worship.
How do we prevent negative things from happening to us in the first place?
Sangam, fellowship, or spiritual companionship, with those on the spiritual
path. Another way to keep negative things from happening is to ask ourselves
the question, “How is my daily sadhana going?” Keep it going with diligence.
The power of diksha, initiation, is sustained and increased by doing the
sadhanas required of the initiate, such as chanting your mantra if you were
given mantra diksha. This sustains spiritual unfoldment. Otherwise, we
automatically regress.
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
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The offering is made of flowers, banana and grains all into the fire.
The arati light is then passed. “Waving of the LIghts” is perhaps the most important of all the gestures of Hindu worship. The lamp is seen in the inner worlds as bells are rung.
The light represents the offering of our finite consciousness to the Divine Consciousness. At this high moment of the puja, a “window” between the worlds is open and the shakti comes forth from the inner worlds.
Bodhinatha gave a wonderful talk today on “Antar Mandir Jai!” in which he responds to the issues surrounding the rebuilding of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. He made the point that first and foremost we must build the inner temple, live in the higher nature. He related the delightful story about the time in Sri Lanka when the island was all excited about an international conference on Tamil Language which was named “Utsavam Tamil” (Tamil Festival) Yogaswami went about saying with gusto that there was going to be a great event soon: the “Utsavam Tammul” meaning “Festival of the Within.”
After the puja and discourse the monks come forward. Bodhinatha gives holy ash to each one. Here is Guhanathaswami receiving the blessing.
Shankar Nathan and his wife Vidya, and daughter Anjali and son Arjun have returned from a several month stay in India. They now live on Kauai. They have brought their mother and father to live with them for a while. Paramacharya Palaniswami and Yogi Japendranatha talk with them about the various experiences they had in India. The family went to visit some of our artists there as well as to the temple carving site.
Over the retreat our silpis went on an outing… Here is Chinnu the cook. Chinnu is also an excellent gardener as farming is his hereditary family occupation. At our “silpis house” he grows his own eggplant, green chilis and coriander.
Sadhaka Thondunatha is behind the camera taking pictures of Skandanathaswami and the silpis at the Waimea Canyon look out. They were blessed with a sunny day.
Here is Chinnu with Adaikalam. They follow the same work schedule each week as the monks, so we all have the same free day. Please give generously to the Iraivan Temple building fund. Your donations support these and 100 other carvers and their families.
When you participate in building the Iraivan Temple you also support the great tradition of temple building that has been handed down through the ages. Go to the Iraivan Fund Raising page to see how you can help.
Gurudeva’s spiritual center in the island country of Mauritius
in the Indian Ocean near South Africa
It has been pouring heavily on the island this week and the spiritual beings in the trees at the Spiritual Park are the most happy ones! The lush green vegetation is back again. Visitors would be delighted to enjoy family walks among the various varieties of ficus trees on the property. Fresh air is in abundance. The small pools in the Japanese gardens have collected rain water and look beautiful too. Here is one of them.
Today the Master course seminar has been on the holy Temple. A video of the sacred concrete pouring for the Iraivan foundation in Kauai was very appropriate for the children. They saw Gurudeva and the whole ceremony. The young boys were enthusiastically commenting on the works of the silpis, the stone craftmen. In future lessons of the Master Course, they too would be initiated to carvings.
Visitors to the Spiritual Park come as far as from Venezuela in Latin America. Christina Falcon and her husband J�rg Pless discovered the Park sign post while driving in their contract car on the main road. ” We are happy to have discovered such a lovely place here. It’s so quiet and so uplifting”, said Christina.
Nirmala, Gayenee and Sujeewa are from Shri Lanka. They occupy important managerial posts in a Textile plant in Mauritius. They have heard about the Spiritual Park from friends and were curious to visit it. At last they made it. ” We are so happy to see Lord Ganesha here. This place reminds us a lot about Shri Lanka,” says Nirmala Peiris. The three young ladies spent half day at the Park enjoying veggie snacks on large lava rocks overlooking the turquoise waters of the ocean.
The man in the photo is a top international Indian film singer, a honeyed voice second to none actually in Mauritius where he is working on a contract basis. In fact, M V Srinivas teaches Vocal Karnatic at the Indira Gandhi Cultural Centre in Phoenix, a prestigious school of music in the island. One Saturday he came with all his friends to sing devotional songs at the Ganesha Mandapam. Our talented singer is really impressed with the Spiritual Park. Here we see him with his wife and child.
Here is Devajothi Jeetunshiv at the Dharmasala holding the Trishul and majestically playing the role of Lord Siva in a Master Course seminar game in which all the young students of the Mushika group participated. Every child had to come to Lord Siva and honestly confess something they have done wrong during the week. Then Lord Siva would listen and forgive with love. This game teaches children that Supreme God Siva is compassionate and loving. God should not be feared. Gurudeva teaches that God Siva is Immanent love and Transcendant Reality. Children come to learn these profound teachings in simple ways.
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Date: March_17_2002
Title: Do I Now Have Two Gurus?
Category: The Guru
Duration: 10 min., 53 seconds
Date Given: February 25, 2002
Given by: Bodhinatha
An interesting question was raised in an e-mail to me and I am still working on the answer. I thought I would share it with you. One of the sishya wrote in and said, “Oh, thank you so much for what you are putting on TAKA. It is really helpful and I have been working with that for a long time. Do I have two Gurus now? Are you my Guru and Gurudeva also my Guru?”
I have been pondering that question for about a week and a half, how to answer. It raises a very interesting perspective. I answered him partially, saying, “Well, I am thinking about it. Here is a partial answer for you.”
Yogaswami worked closely with Gurudeva ever since he initiated Gurudeva. Or said the other way around, when Gurudeva received initiation from Yogaswami, Yogaswami started working very closely with him inwardly. A number of the monks have had inner experiences of Yogaswami in one degree or another. So, to them the idea of having two Gurus is not new because they experienced Yogaswami and they experienced Gurudeva. It is not a new situation. Some of us have already encountered that idea of, “Are there two Gurus? Is Yogaswami my Guru and Gurudeva my Guru?”
Then you go back further to someone who knew Yogaswami. Looking at Gurudeva, he again faced that question, “I guess there are two Gurus. First I knew Yogaswami and now I know Gurudeva.”
It is an interesting question in that, how far back does it go? You go to Yogaswami, you go to Chellapaswami, you go to Kadaitswami. How many Gurus really are there? It is not answerable to me at the moment. I am just pondering it. Does it go back to Siva? We have a drawing like that in one of our books that has Siva as Dakshinamurthi, sitting there and then the line of Gurus coming out from Him.
It is a very interesting question.
The sutra of the day is very insightful. It is about monastics. “Their past is small, their future is large.” That is the title of the sutra and right there you can see where it is going. You don’t even need to read the sutra really. But we will read it anyway.
“Siva’s monastics walk bravely into the future, letting go of the past and letting what is be. Through yoga their kundalini rises, expanding consciousness, changing values and creating magical happenings around them.”
Walking bravely into the future, letting go of the past is a way of manifesting your full spiritual potential. In other words, when a monk clings to his past, who he was, what he could have been, to some degree or another he is perpetuating the karmas of that past rather than stepping into a new karmic cycle. There is no reason, no value in being a monk and clinging to the past. It is like a contradiction because a monk is someone who has no past. He has let go of the past. He has given up the plans he may have had for some kind of worldly life, some kind of profession, accomplishing something in the world. Totally let that go to become a monk. Becoming a monk and letting go of that, a new pattern manifests which cause more spiritual progress than the old pattern.
Always keeping the past small is an important monastic discipline. Of course that means not talking about it, not thinking about it and so forth. We even have the tradition in our monastery that when parents come, they are our parents. They are parents to all the monks, not to one monk. In that way, we kind of let the past go, keep it small as much as possible in that situation.
‘Creating magical happenings around them’. That is an interesting statement and it shows the spiritual magnetism, the spiritual force that reaches a certain intensity that is magnetic to wonderful things. If it is of a lesser intensity, it is not. When it reaches or goes beyond a certain point, it influences the lives of people and attracts to it wonderful kinds of situations. I think we are getting a sense of that in the monastery, wonderful things have been happening. This is a nice explanation for why. As long as the monastics keep the kundalini force high, then this occurs. It is that simple.
Those are the thoughts for the day. No, there is one more. One more thought here, excuse me.
Duties of the disciple, this one struck me. “Being with the Satguru is an intensification on the path of enlightenment. Always challenging, for growth is a challenge to the instinctive mind. If the Guru does not provide this intensification, we could consider him to be more a philosophical teacher.”
That is a nice point to remember, the idea of being challenged spiritually. The idea is we don’t want to settle down to a comfortable routine in our spiritual life, just doing the same thing over and over again because it is comfortable. As Gurudeva says about certain religious groups, “All they do is come together and sing and eat and that is it.” There is no real sadhana going on, maybe gossip afterwards. That is not a challenging, spiritually challenging situation.
Challenging is always trying to improve. That is the essence of challenging. Always trying to improve oneself spiritually to one degree or another. Never being content, never having the feeling, “Gee, I have arrived. I have matured enough spiritually for this life. I will just coast from now on. Every thing is comfortable, peaceful, just the way I like it.”
That is not the spirit of having a Satguru. The Satguru is there to keep you inspired to keep improving spiritually, keep moving forward. No matter how far you have gone, you can still go further. The same idea of highest potential, just said another way, to keep everyone moving forward.
That is an important attitude to always hold and never feel that, “Gee, I have arrived, this is all I need to attain in this life.” Rather feel, “Gee, this is great but let us move even further forward.”
transcription ends
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Innersearch 2002 in Hawaii!
Our next Innersearch Travel-Study program will be held right here on the island of Kauai in the summer of 2002. It’s the first such program on the Garden Island since 1974! From July 17 to July 22 we will enjoy daily classes with the swamis, join in the annual Guru Purnima festival, be inspired by local culture, explore the lush tropical island in exciting and non-touristy ways, and more. Be prepared for a wonderful spiritual experience in paradise with meditations, seminars and sacred ceremonies at the Siva temple of Kauai’s Hindu Monastery. Many have applied already, and there is a limit of 50 participants, so we recommend everyone apply as soon as possible. Interested? Please request an application from pilgrim@searchbeyond.com |
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From Our Gurus' Teachings
Archives are now available through 2001. Light colored days have no posts. 1998-2001 coming later.
