The Annapoorna Hindu Sangam sponsored a gala all-day event at the Sacramento Lakshmi Narayan Temple. The trustees invited Kulapati Easan Katir to speak about 'Growing Up Hindu'. He presented the new eponymous Himalayan Academy book to a group of 400+ enthusiastic souls who are in the midst of raising their children.

At our Himalayan Academy table many were intrigued with the new children's books, with DevaTrek cards, and the perennial favorite compendium from Hinduism Today, What is Hinduism.

Brahmachari Dinanatha is the owner of Shivalingam LTD company in Moscow, Russia. He runs a large health spa there and conducts travel tours to India. Click here for his web site. He is very devoted to Gurudeva and Bodhinatha and is breathing new life into our Russian publications. During his visit last year to Kauai Aadheenam he lamented that the first editon of Dancing with Siva in Russian has long been out of print and that there would be a high demand for Gurudeva's teachings in Russia. He was prepared to get the job done.

So Himalayan Academy recently signed a new contract with Dinanatha, granting him rights to proceed with a new edition. He in turn has just signed a contract with Andriy Kostenko in Ukraine who was instrumental in getting some portions of the first edition translated. Andriy is also a Hindu at heart and his translation of Gurudeva's work is considered very good.

Today Dinanatha sent the good news of his agreement with Andriy, to purchase the rights to the translation and pay for the work on the balance. Andriy will now proceed with an upgrade to the original translation. (Some portions has been done by someone else to a lower standard). Here Dinanatha presents the contract to Gurudeva, who he has enshrined on his wall in Moscow.

Congratulations to Dinanatha and Andriy. Pranams to you both for moving forward with this project!

A special book review today from an anonymous reader of our spiritual biography, "The Guru Chronicles."

She begins: First and foremost, I truly enjoy every page of it! Such a gift to the world. It is the next best book after Merging with Siva. At times it reads like the Autobiography of a Yogi, at times like a history book on the Parampara, and most of the time as a loving tribute to Gurudeva. Readers who already know and others who want to learn about your mission and philosophies will find a gem on each page.

For example, we all know at an intellectual level about Gurudeva's mission to provide unity within the diverse Hindu world. We all had the privilege to hear Bodhinatha talking about Vedanta and Siddhanta, immanence and transcendence, and so on. We all know about the Church and see pictures of the Spiritual Park on the beautiful island of Mauritius. But why? Why devote so much energy to these efforts, both at the intellectual and material levels? Reading the detailed history of how each concept evolved in Gurudeva's realizations made me understand that I always had this nagging little question in the back on my mind. The issue was that I only saw scattered 2D pieces of the puzzle that the Guru Chronicles put together into an astonishing 3D artwork.

The evolving materialization of Gurudeva's extraordinary visions, all leading to the realization of a dream that nobody in their everyday mind would have dared to undertake: truly uniting Hindus around the world and revive this profound religion. An originally Western person who is succeeding at uniting people from such diverse countries and cultures...The book made me experience this vision, truly participate in its creation through Gurudeva's and the swami's words. In this context, I understand even more the monks' amazement and joy at seeing Hinduism Today being translated into Tamil and published in India!

Another "Aha!" moment came when looking through the early Innersearch pictures, when traditional Hindu attire was not yet required or strongly encouraged. The group looked new age. The current appearance of our Innersearch group is defined by its attire, a definition that obviously derives from its firm roots in orthodox philosophy. My unspoken "why do we wear Hindu attire?" was answered: otherwise we look, think, and feel new age. New age is ok, but it is not what Gurudeva's vision is about.

My favorite part so far? In the Mission Goes Global chapter, an insert from Gurudeva on seeing God everywhere. I don't remember reading this section in the Trilogy. It felt spontaneous, an urging advice on how to see God when His presence is not as obvious as it could be. I read it many times, gratefully.

Now that I'm looking at my notes, I found this other gem: "Association with orthodox Saivites of India and Sri Lanka allows Westerners to absorb the subtleties and depth of this refined culture, and Gurudeva encouraged it at every opportunity". This is It, the essence of what we visually see at the monastery and keep coming back for! The innate refinement of this amazing culture, mixed with true spiritual connection with the inner worlds via Kadavul Temple, explained by Gurudeva's and the monks' originally Western minds that probe and explore - what a treat for the soul.

I have many other highlights, most on the printed copy left at home. Recently I bought the Kindle version of the book, to read anywhere and anytime. The pre-Gurudeva era was full of spiritual gems, especially the section on Yogaswami. One of my plans is to bring over the highlights from the printed copy to the Kindle version, to be accessed anytime."

Order your print copy today here. or get the Kindle version from Amazon

A new feature of the Global Dharma pages is coverage of a famous vegetarian or vegan in each issue. The July issue briefly shares the life and times of Jane Goodall, famous for her early research on chimpanzees. Late in her career she discovered the horrors of factory farming and became a vegetarian. At the age of 78, she is going strong as the leader in a movement to teach and engage youth in fixing earth's environmental problems. She shows it's never too late to keep on working for dharma.

Some years back biologists discoverd stem cells in muscle tissue. These cells have the capacity to live virtually forever and and be teased to produce different kinds of tissue. With the ethical issue of using stem cells from human embryos out of the way, scientists are steaming ahead with research on culturing meat from single muscle cells taken from animals. Read about it on page eight of the July Issue of Hinduism Today.

It is likely that this thirty-something bachelor had little to hold him beyond his work in the courts and that the murder trial provoked deep refl ections about life and death, reflections that intensifi ed his naturally spiritual turn of mind. Finally, he made the pivotal decision to seek a satguru and devote the remainder of his life to realization of God and service to his Hindu faith.

Speaking to others about his inclinations toward sannyasa, he came to know of the rishi in the tea shop. He was regaled with stories of this remarkable sage, stories that moved him deeply and led him to seek to meet that awakened being in person. The erstwhile High Court judge became a wandering sadhu, following the Indian roads on foot, in search of the rishi, walking from village to village, here and there, looking on the inside, looking on the outside for the man he increasingly knew beyond any doubt was his guru. This was no intellectual certainty, for they had never met. Rather it was a truth, a subsuperconscious knowing, that welled up from deep within him.

Chapter Five

"I Will Not Sentence Him to Death"

One day, in High Court in Bangalore, Karnataka, a magistrate presided over a murder case. The verdict was never in doubt, and the jury was unanimous. When the time came to pronounce the mandatory death sentence, the judge stood up to address the court. His tall, imposing stature brought silence to the courtroom. Before he spoke, he removed his shastri's shawl, his robes and ornaments. Looking around the courtroom for the last time, he announced, "God created this man. Who am I to decree his death?" Refusing to deliver the death sentence, he solemnly walked away from the bench and was never seen in that region again. Years later, he would be found in Northern Ceylon, a swami and spiritual force who deeply changed not only individual lives there, including the future satgurus of the Nandinatha Sampradaya, but the course of that nation's history as well. What happened between these known events is vague, and stories don't all agree. Here an attempt is made to intuit the most likely course of events, based on those oral histories and the cultural patterns of the time.

Meeting the Rishi

They finally met at Palani Hills Temple, the famed hilltop sanctuary where Lord Murugan presides as the loincloth-clad yogi. This had been the sacred site of the rishi's initial vision of Murugan, the experience that took him north to the Himalayas and into a lifetime of sa dhana and divine realizations. He had returned to this place of his spiritual beginnings. Like the two men, their meeting was not ordinary. The sadhu was engaged in worship when the rishi came up from behind and motioned him to follow. It is said they were together for most of a year, wandering through the Tamil lands from temple to temple, shrine to shrine--at Chidambaram for several days, later at Tiruvannamalai, and as far north as Madras and Nellore. People long remembered seeing them, for they were an unusual sight, the rishi and his disciple. Wherever they went, people looked twice or stopped to stare. The rishi walked with long strides and kept his eyes on the way ahead. If people looked at him, he looked away, showing nothing of himself. His towering disciple, though, walked with a long, lumbering gait, one stride for the rishi's two, his gaze fi xed between the clouds and treetops. They walked side by side, like old friends, staying each night wherever they happened to be at day's end--in a village, at someone's home, a temple or under a tree by the road. A typical day would find them meditating together in the pre-dawn darkness, having sat up most of the night. Before the sun came up, they would bathe at a well or river and stretch a bit, then the rishi would sit down facing the east, his shishya nearby. The rishi talked to his disciple for several hours each morning, then sent him to beg the day's meal. They would sleep through the hot hours, and in the afternoon move on, covering a few kilometers each day at a leisurely pace.

Order the book here.