Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva. (Video was not captured this time due to technical challenges.)

“Have you ever had people come to you and tell you all of their problems? What did they do? As a pure state of awareness, they came to you as a pure state of awareness. You were not identified in the area of the mind that they are living in. So, they came to you, because they want to get out of the area of the mind that they’re living in. They’ve been living in it so long, they think they are that area of the mind, like somebody that has lived in a house so long and is so attached to it that they would rather die than move from the house. So then, they come to you and start telling all the problems. First they start with the little ones, and then they start with the big ones, and all their complaints, heartaches and everything that that area of the mind involves. Now, you can do one of two things. You can gently talk with them and bring them out of that area of the mind into your area of the mind, or they can move your awareness right into that area of the mind, too. And when they go away, you are feeling terrible. You’re feeling just awful.”

Yesterday Rajkumar Manickam sent us this creative expression of Gurudeva's classical upadesha on Parasivam, the Self in all. The original talk was recorded in his San Fransisco Ganesha Temple on October 3, 1959, on vintage audio equipment so the fidelity is not great, but the message makes up for that. Click on the Adobe link to mouse through Rajkumar's artful photos (he is a pro) and Gurudeva's remarkable talk. Then click on the second link to hear the original unscripted and unedited recording.

Rajkumar's Presentation

Gurudeva's 1959 Recording

For those who are subscribed to the Master Course trilogy daily lessons, you'll notice that the first audio narration appeared in yesterday's Merging with Siva lesson. For a while it will be Gurudeva's digital voice clone narrating, then it will switch to his late 1990s personal narrations for some time.

After we finishing creating narration for Merging with Siva, we'll proceed to the other books.

To subscribe to the Master Course daily lessons and other inspiration on email, go here-- https://www.subscribepage.com/hinduism

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva.

"The average person who is not a mystic lives two-thirds in the external area of the mind and one-third within himself. The within of himself can be, and sometimes is, very foreboding. He doesn’t understand it. He is a little afraid of it and prefers to involve himself with external things. Possibly he’s had some inner experiences, some emotional unhappinesses, and he shuns anything that is inner. The mystic lives, and is taught to live, two-thirds within himself and only one-third in the external. In learning how to do this, the mystic is taught to become consciously conscious, or aware that he is aware. He learns to separate awareness from that which he is aware of. The person who is not a mystic, living two-thirds in the external mind, says, “I am happy,” meaning, “I am aware of a state of mind called happiness, and I am in that state, so that is me.” Or, “I am unhappy. Unhappiness is me.” The mystic living two-thirds within says to himself, “I am flowing through the area of the mind that’s always unhappy.” He doesn’t change; he is a pure state of awareness.”

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva.

"Basic principles for a good foundation in our lives can be established through consistency. The consistency in approach to what we are doing—a good habit pattern in living our life, as we approach our inner life, the understanding of our inner life, the study of it and the experience of it—has to be on a day-to-day basis. Developing a contemplative lifestyle that is sensible, that is positively worked out, and programming that into our complete pattern of daily life gives us a foundation strong enough to face decisions and the ensuing experiences and the reaction to those experiences in a way that they enhance our spiritual un­fold­ment. Remember, the lifestyle that we now have was programmed for us by mothers, fathers, religious leaders, teachers, people that we had just met along the way, and good friends. It’s not a particularly good lifestyle in which to hold the perspective that we’re an immortal being. It’s a great lifestyle to hold the perspective that we’re a temporal being, and we’re only here a few years and then we die.”

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva.

"Meditate on man being like a lotus flower. He comes through the mud, his instinctive mind, and he’s aware of the things of the instinctive mind: hate and greed and love and passion, and jealousy and sorrow, and happiness and joy and excitement. He comes into the intellectual mind. He becomes aware of ancient history and predictions about the future, politics, all sorts of systems, all sorts of organizations, institutions and opinions of other people. And this consumes and overshadows the soul, life after life after life, just as the desires and cravings of the instinctive mind overshadow the soul life after life after life after life. But all this time, the body of the soul is growing up. It’s getting stronger. It’s absorbing the reactions of each lifetime, drawing more energies from the central source of energy to build up and absorb these reactions; and this is food for the soul. Then finally awareness comes into its bud state. It says, “Here I am, a bud, and I’m out of the mud, and I’m out of the water.”

We are inching closer to adding Gurudeva's original audio narration of certain Master Course trilogy lessons to the online text version. After that we will use his new digital voice clone to narrate the rest. First we are cleaning up his narrated lessons of Merging with Siva from the late 1990s, which total around 130. We also went back to some old videos taken of Gurudeva narrating some lessons from Dancing with Siva, and are now extracting audio from that to clean up and use. In these videos Gurudeva often spontaneously expanded on the lessons before and after narration. We might add these videos to our YouTube channel in the future after editing them. Below is a short sample from a video where he speaks more after reading a lesson.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva.

"See awareness as a lotus flower. The lotus flower goes through many, many experiences. A few weeks ago in Bangkok, on Innersearch, we drove out into the Thai countryside and we saw many, many lotus flowers growing wild. They’re just beautiful. See awareness as a lotus flower. First awareness is a seed, and it’s breaking out of the instinctive elements, the hard shell of the seed. But it’s living right within the seed. It is dynamic life at that very time, tuned in with the central source of energy. Then it breaks out and it becomes roots, and then awareness becomes a stem, becomes conscious of water all around it. Finally, the stem emerges above the water, and awareness has leaves and a bud. It’s still limited awareness, because it’s not in its fullness. But as that awareness expands, it opens up into a beautiful lotus flower, then creates more seeds for more flowers. This is the path of awareness. Become acquainted with the awareness, that one beautiful, pure element of the soul, your super­con­scious body, which is easily found and easily discovered by simply closing your eyes and opening them and saying “I’m aware,” not necessarily of what you are aware of. Close your eyes. Say, “I am aware.” Awareness is closely identified to the realms of sight—hearing, of course, too, but more predominantly sight. As awareness expands and as awareness contracts, we find that we have power over awareness. It merely becomes a tool. The underlying power of awareness is the blissful state of the spiritual body of man, pure consciousness, the central source of all energies, in its blissful, calm state. Meditate on awareness being like a lotus flower."

It's something we didn't foresee happening this soon, or perhaps not at all. Our founder, the late Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, always intended to record himself speaking the edited and published version of his Master Course book trilogy lessons comprising three 1,008-page books--Dancing with Siva, Living with Siva and Merging with Siva. However, his life of service and sadhana was quite busy, and taking the time to properly audio record already-published material was not a top priority. In the final years of his life, he recorded over a hundred lessons from Merging with Siva. He had the monks set up a high-end recording station and every afternoon he would spend an hour or two reading the lessons. He did this for some months. And then, rather suddenly in 2001, after returning from taking 72 Innersearchers through Northern Europe, he learned that it was time to release the physical body. Siva's Will Be Done. We created an audio CD of a few chapters from those Merging with Siva recordings, and contented ourselves with that and Gurudeva's other spontaneous audio talks for a number of years. Now and then we attempted to replicate his voice, but no one could make it work. So we waited. Just last year, AI capabilities took off. Over a year ago we saw articles popping up about voice cloning AI systems. Feeling that it would be good to research a potential fulfillment of Gurudeva's original intention, we looked into it. After trying out a few AIs, we found the ElevenLabs model to be quite promising. It wasn't excellent at the time, but their model has been evolving rapidly, and the results now are quite impressive. We have been able to replicate Gurudeva's voice to the point that it sounds so accurate those who hear it and who knew him are stunned. This is only possible because, fortunately, we have good quality recordings of Gurudeva speaking over 100 Merging with Siva lessons. We fed a couple hours of those recordings into the AI. We now have a voice clone that can speak any block of text that we feed into it. Though the voice is technically artificial, we feel the shakti is still present because it is created with the exact tones and style of his original voice. We plan to gradually create audio files of all the Master Course trilogy lessons, linking them in the web pages and daily lesson emails. Then we'll continue with Gurudeva's other books. One challenge is the use of Sanskrit words sprinkled amongst English. The AI English-language model we use is not able to recognize diacritical marks or long and short vowels to pronounce all the Sanskrit words correctly. Fortunately, ElevenLabs allows us to upload a lexicon text file of individual word replacements. When the AI is voicing a block of text, it checks this file to see if the spelling of any particular word in the block is changed, and then speaks out the changed version. We change the spelling to make it sound more phonetically correct. For example, when the word "jñānī" appears in a Merging with Siva lesson, we change the spelling to "yaanee," and then the AI pronounces it correctly. This is a slow process, as we have to experiment with various spellings until the AI gets it right. We are gradually building the lexicon now. We are firmly committed to ensuring that this digital voice is used exclusively for reproducing what Gurudeva actually wrote or said. Crossing this line would not only be confusing but also unjust to all parties involved, including Gurudeva himself. Enough theory. Below, we are pleased to share a sample of Gurudeva's digital voice reading from Merging with Siva, lesson one. As the AI model gets more refined, we expect the quality to increase even more.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva.

"The super­con­scious mind and the body of the soul have been around a long time. This immortal body of yours has been around a long time, and it’s seen many lives come and go, many experiences pass by the windows of its eyes. Some need no explanation, because they are the playing out of vibrations. Others do need an explanation, the explanation that would come and impress you intellectually from your super­con­scious, would give you power maybe to face an experience that was yet to come. So, don’t analyze every nuance of a reaction or try to anticipate the next series of experiential patterns, for life is a series of experiences. They are all great experiences."