httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXFQk4AGnKw

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami reads his editorial from the April/May/June 2016 edition of Hinduism Today magazine. “Conflict and violence have their roots in hatred learned during youth. By teaching children tolerance, we create a more peaceful future.”

We've recently enjoyed a visit from Pundit Vamadeva Shastri and his wife Shambhavi Chopra, both of whom are renowned authors and teachers.
Staunch Hindus, these two have long been collaborators with our Hinduism Today team, supporting the magazine with advertisements and being ever ready to help on a consulting basis. Our publish team has in turn tried to help with Vamadeva's publishing by supplying illustrations and art work. He reaches a large audience through teaching the disciplines of yoga, ayurveda and jyotisha.

After several months of hard work we are happy to finally release this year's Gurudeva Mahasamadhi gift. For 2015 we decided to make a digital offering to keep alive the presence of our beloved Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami in our daily lives. Through the years, the top of TAKA with changing images of and quotes from Gurudeva has continuously received Five Star ratings for inspiration. Though the selection is based on a random algorithm, many have given testimony on how the quote seemed to speak directly to them and issues they were facing.

Gurudeva.app takes this paradigm to new level with over 270 images of Gurudeva and more than 2,500 quotes. You may view quotes and images chosen at random, share the quotes and app link by email ( and later, on Twitter and Facebook) and read the quotes in different categories. In addition, eight audio files have been included in the app and can be listened to even if you are not connected to the internet. If you do have an internet connection, a "Surprise Me" link will stream a randomly selected audio file from our web server.

Go to this page to download the app for your Android or iOS device:

http://www.himalayanacademy.com/apps/gurudeva

The monks designed and built this app from the ground up and when a fully functional prototype was completed we hired an expert to help bring the final touches to the code, especially for the Android version. If you have any issues with the app, please use the feedback you will find on the help screen inside the app itself. We want to thank our Digital Dharma donors whose donations helped make this possible. And, please, share the app with your friends, spread the word. When you are looking at a picture and quote, click the share icon and email will be invoked with the quote and a link to the app. (Twitter coming next and then Facebook later). Spread the word! Perhaps it will go viral and 1000's will get to have the blessings too!

Drum roll. Cue the town crier. Ring the temple bells.

Today we begin our fifth annual Digital Dharma Drive. For the next 60 days, ending at midnight on December 31, we will humbly hold our begging bowl in hand seeking everyone's help with our digital resources and outreach.

As is well known, the publishing world has been transformed by the Internet, and we have been among those working (to good effect) to make the transition from paper and press to a publishing future that is 100% digital. The big difference is that our books and magazine (which we still do print) were sold, in bookstores all over the world, and the income provided funds to print the next book and the next.

Like Wikipedia, we have chosen a free model for the digital publishing, and we follow Wikipedia in reaching out at the end of each year to those who use and love our resources. This has worked well these past five years, and we think it will continue to be a way forward as more and more around the globe access our work and our spiritual teachings on their computers and mobile devices. 

Gurudeva would love where we have come today. He would love the ease with which the books are available, at no cost, to everyone who owns a mobile device anywhere in the world. He would love the lack of massive investment costs that were traditionally required for major books to be put on the presses, tens of thousands of dollars. Then the inventory costs, the shipping, the returns. All of that has been rendered unnecessary in the age of digital publishing. In our case, we are doing both, printed editions of the magazine, for instance, and then digital editions based on the elegantly designed PDF pages. The best of both worlds. 

Gurudeva would be proud of what the monastery produced in this past year: a major Hinduism Today app for all mobile platforms; Bodhinatha's offering, "A Character Building Workbook," two more 22-minute films on Hindu history for American schools; a book for Hindu teens teaching life's tough lessons; the beginning work on an educational game for youth and adults; dozens of ePubs of our magazine Insight sections; a map that will provide the central navigation for a future digital tour of the monastery; aerial footage from our QuadCopter; more foreign-language translations of Gurudeva's books, and much more. 

He would love that we don't have to charge struggling Hindu students for the spiritual teachings, but can make them available for free. In the last decade our resource-building efforts have shifted massively toward the web, following the fast-evolving world of communications and publishing. It takes a deft team to gather and sculpt the needed tools and stories for Hinduism Today and our Web resources. Creating and sharing an articulate and graphically elegant repository of Hinduism is neither easy nor without costs. Hindu youth are learning their spiritual ABCs online, and millions of seekers are discovering Hinduism digitally. What they encounter should be thoughtful, lucid, elegant and authentic. That's what compels our annual fundraising campaign. It's a chance for you to help us to help explain and share Hinduism globally.

Yes, we could meet our costs by charging for the online books and magazine, but we are determined not to do that. We ourselves are seldom motivated to pay for online information. We like it when needed information is available without cost. But free to the world is not free to us. We have significant costs in running our websites. The needs are modest, but they are real.

Among those needs has been a work space conducive to creative thinking and collaboration. For four decades the publishing team worked in a dim space, not exactly a hovel, but not much to inspire, either. The marvelous renovation of the Media Studio has changed the team's environment dramatically, and this year's contributions will help pay for this costly transformation into a "temple of the mind" worthy to be the headquarters of Hinduism Today and Himalayan Academy Publications. 

In order to provide information without charging for downloads, without showing advertisements on our sites, without commercializing our mission, we turn to you for help.

The goal for this year is the same as last: $70,000. Between now and December 31, we hope you will be inspired to help us meet our goal (you can click the banner above to give). In the right hands, and leveraged by the unsalaried work of the monks, these funds will have a profound impact on the future of Hinduism around the world. 

With much aloha and warm greetings during the holiday season ahead,

The Editors
Kauai's Hindu Monastery
Himalayan Academy Publications

Bodhinatha's Latest Upadeshas:"Detach Awareness From the Conscious Mind" (October 6, 2015)

Avoid creating ripples in life, being permanently emotionally disturbed. The English language is a conscious mind language structured to teach us that we are our emotions. Be observant of thought patterns and detach yourself. The "I" is not the body nor emotions. The "I" is the spiritual being.

Master Course, Merging with Siva, Lesson 172.

The Power of Meditation to Change Your Mind (October 21, 2015)

Superconsciousness is always there within us. A simple key to contacting it is relaxation. Step back, become internalized. Meditation requires retraining the way we think. The mind is used to doing external things. Subjugate externalizing samskaras (external impressions) by employing restraint, nirodha. This produces a new impression in the mind, the impression of restraint. In time, through years of practice, eventually we achieve vichara, the power of one-pointedness and cognition. Then something else begins to occur, deep in meditation, intuitions come, and they modify the impressions and we begin to change the total content of our minds. The gradual building of the impressions of restraint and intuitions make it easier and easier to meditate.

Master Course, Merging with Siva, Lesson 193

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Click here to go to an index of all of Bodhinatha's and Gurudeva's online audio.

The Hinduism Today app for mobile devices now has a second edition. If you are a registered user you would have received an email notification that the October issue is ready for you to download. Read all about London's Saivite Hindu temples, the ongoing challenges for Hindu culture in earth-quake smitten Nepal and more (see below).

Android Users
Android users who may have downloaded the app after our first announcement should delete that app and re-download and install the "new" one. This was necessary for technical reasons, but should not be needed in the future.

Click to install Hinduism Today from Google Play

Apple iOS users
iPhone and iPad users go here:https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hinduism-today/id1023295974?mt=8

Hinduism Today's October/November/December 2015 issue has gone to press and is now available on your mobile phone, free of charge.

It's a story that, while known in London, has never been told. Our intrepid team conducted myriad interviews, scoured the history of Hinduism in the UK and came up with a fascinating story of how 23 Saivite temples were built in London, almost exclusively by the immigrant Sri Lankan community. See how an ethnic war resulted in new life in England, and how easily you can reach the temples following our London Tube map!

When our Nepal photographer, Thomas Kelly, woke up the morning of April 25 in his Kathmandu home, little did he know what the day had in store. At 11:56 A.M. a powerful earthquake shook the earth for 50 long seconds, bringing devastation to dozens of surrounding Himalayan communities. It turned out to be history's most impoverishing loss of world heritage sites. Thomas and his family took refuge outside, and he was able in the ensuing minutes and hours to venture through the rubble to capture an extraordinary tale on film (OK, no film was involved). See his powerful photos and Sally Acharya's personal narrative, which captures the voices of those who survived this historic 7.8 magnitude quake.

Not often in one's life do the spiritual heads of major monasteries change, and so this story by Choodie Sivaram provides a rare look into the traditional process by which a new successor is chosen, prepared and initiated. Join us for the ceremonies at Sringiri Math, one of India's great monastic institutions.

It's now official: International Yoga Day. Find out how it happened and what it may mean for the future of humanity now that the United Nations has officially designated June 21st of each year to be celebrated as a day of yoga, peace and nonviolence. This first year was observed by millions in 177 nations! The photo of yogis under the Eiffel Tower in Paris tells the tale.

Our publisher, Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami, tackles the ultimate goal in life, Moksha. His take is different from what you might expect, focusing on how such a seemingly remote attainment can remain relevant in our day-to-day life.

This issue's 16-page Insight Section is all about astrology. World renowned expert Vamadeva Shastri takes us on a wide-ranging adventure into this ancient science of time, touching on all of the basics, along the way exploring some of the controversies that arise when astrologers abuse their clients' trust.

Rajiv Malhotra has authored some of the most trenchant and historically relevant books on Hinduism. In this issue of HT we explore Indra's Net, his epic dismantling of the last hundred years of encounters between Western academia and Hinduism. It has not been a happy relationship, and Mr. Malhotra is never shy about explaining just how fatally flawed the Western intellectual view is.

There is more, much more. A young man discovers appreciation for his ancestors and what they accomplished, our Digital Dharma page reveals just how rich the topic of vegetarianism is on YouTube (more than 780,000 instances). Our reviewers give you an inside track for exploring the subject. You'll always find a cartoon surrounded by inspiring and witty remarks in our "Quotes and Quips," reader responses in our "Letters" section and an array of diaspora stories from around the world in "Global Dharma."

For technical reasons, the details of which we will spare you, we have been required to put up a new version of the Hinduism Today app on Google Play. Instead of updating the existing app, a new one was issued. This should be the last time this happens. Future updates will be automatic via your phone or tablet. If anyone has downloaded and installed the Hinduism Today App from Google Play, please delete the app on your Android device and then open this web page on your device and re-install using this link.

Click to install Hinduism Today from Google Play
Then stay tuned for the release of the October issue