Our First Hindu Game — DevaTrek Card Deck Released!
Himalayan Academy Publications is inspired to officially announce the release of our first Hindu game.The DevaTrek card deck has fun in store for both young and old -- the perfect gift for the holiday season. [A reminder about the slideshow controls: click the small icons on the bottom to see images in a light box, thumbnail gallery or full screen.]
The DevaTrek playing card deck contains twenty cards for yamas (guidelines for self-discipline) and twenty cards for niyamas (guidelines for spiritual observances) and two matching title cards with a web address. The card deck comes with instructions for playing four games that help children and adults alike learn and explore the yamas and niyamas.
Match Up is the common visual memory came that even little children can play. The cards are placed face down, players turn them over to reveal matches.
Catch and Match is another easy fun game for children, based on the luck of the draw, that is played like "Go Fish."
Getting to Know You uses the deck of cards to trigger stories from the real lives of the players.
Let's Make a Story is the classic centuries old game where players are challenged to create a story together. Even adults can have a creative, intriguing experience and at the same time have hilarious fun with "Let's Make a Story."
DevaTrek cards will be fun for the whole family while at the same time helping to instill positive values and virtues into the minds of the young. These character-building principles of Hinduism’s code of conduct hail from the 10,000-year-old ancient Hindu text called the Vedas. The yamas and niyamas are also well-known as the first two stages or limbs of ashtanga yoga (“eight-limbed yoga”).
[Order here.]Hinduism Today Jan 2012 Issue Preview
The January 2012 issue is off to press. Watch for it's release on December 1st.
Our Agama page talks about where the various Deities should be placed in a village and what each one means.
Digital Dharma Drive 2011 Begins Today
A Message from Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami
November 1, 2011
To good souls using our websites, described as "where Hinduism meets the future:"
To keep our free web resources online, during the final quarter of 2010 we reached out for assistance from all of you around the world who value the spiritual and educational content on our sites. We followed the Wikipedia model, a world-class, free-resources site that raises funds once a year to keep their good work going. The response was overwhelming, truly a wind under our wings, with contributions exceeding our goal by 20 percent. In our How the Funds Are Used page we detail what we did with last year's generous gifts and what we hope to accomplish next year. There was so much progress during the year, we're back this November-December to ask again for your support to keep this momentum going.
Not long ago, before the now ubiquitous Internet, information was hard to come by. Sources were few but mostly authoritative, such as encyclopedias and books which had been carefully tooled by trained editors and fact checkers.
We quickly crossed the bridge to the other side, and now we find ourselves in the opposite situation. There is a monsoon of information from all kinds of sources. Every second, hundreds of millions of us around the globe are looking to the Internet for information on topics that interest us, including Hinduism. What we need now is organized knowledge that we can count on being authentic.
Our sites provide that--and they do it for free and without ads. Nowhere else will you find such a wealth of resources about our faith, carefully researched and compiled from across the globe. How important is it to you to have good resources on Hinduism online? How important is it that your friends and business associates, your children and their teachers, when doing a search about Hinduism, find a place that explains it from the inside, without academic biases or gross misconceptions?
There are two more reasons you might consider donating. One is that your donation will go straight to the enhancement of the sites and the content, not staff salaries or administrative overhead, since these sites are created and maintained by selfless monks who work for free and live simply in a verdant monastery on the island of Kauai.
The final reason to give is that a portion of your tax-deductible contribution goes into the Digital Dharma Drive Endowment that was begun last year. We put 10 percent, almost $6,000, of the 2010 contributions into this permanent fund. Each year we plan to add to that endowment, which will generate a steady income for decades to come, protecting the digital future of Hinduism, your religious heritage.
We are here, on the Internet, for you today. With your help, we will be here for you for years to come, in the lives of your grandchildren--and perhaps in your next life.
Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami
Guru Mahasannidhanam of Kauai Aadheenam
Publisher of Hinduism Today
Himalayan Academy Email News
Dandayuthapani Poster
At the Aadheenam we have many beautiful pieces of art, including some exquisite images of the Gods. This is one of our favorites, an image of Dandayuthapani, the Deity of Palani Hills, dear to renunciates and all who are inspired to do yoga, tapas and self-purification.
Click here to download a large size image
Monastery News Video: October 2011
14 Questions People Ask About Hinduism
Hello Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami, I met you during the last few hours of HMEC 2011 in Columbus, Ohio in September. I was/am one of the youths from Toronto. I really enjoyed your talk on the 14 common questions that Hindus may be asked about our religion. I really liked how you broke down the responses into three sizes: " the tweet, the elevator pitch and the rotary club response." I was wondering if you have and if possible, a copy of that presentation you could send me? Aloha, Girish! Yes, I remember you and than you for the kind words about our presentations. I put the 15-minute highly graphic Keynote presentation I gave here for you and others to download and use in your local communities: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/923572/14%20questions/HMEC%2014%20Questionsg2.zip(128MB Download Apple Keynote file) Sadasivanathaswami
I have also put a printable PDF of the 14 Questions booklet in the same Dropbox, and you can retrieve it here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/923572/14%20questions/14%20Questions%20Booklet%20%202.pdf
Guru Chronicles Has Arrived!
Our first copies of the new book Guru Chronicles arrived today. Bodhinatha is the first to receive them.
The book is beautifully printed and even those who have been working on it for years are impressed to have it in their hands. With color artwork throughout, it is a master piece to be sure!
Get your copy today! Order now at minimela.com
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END OF PHASE
Today is the last day of our phase.
This edition of TAKA will remain posted
over our coming three-day retreat,
until Dvitiya Tithi, Sun One, Thursday, October 13th.
1
Hindu History Book To Be Released in Los Angeles!
The five popular Hindu History lessons that have been presented in Hinduism Today over the last 3 years have all been compiled into a book that came off the press a few days ago.
Acharya Arumuganathaswami worked closely with Professor Siva Bajpai on this series over a five-year period.
The book will be released at the Uberoi Foundation Conference being held in Los Angeles this weekend.
To find out more about this conference Check out the Uberoi Foundation Experts Meeting web site
Meeting an Old Friend of Yogaswami in Toronto
Sadasivanathaswami and Senthilnathaswami visited Toronto for the past two days with the primary purpose of spending some time with Dr. James George, who spent many moments with and was profoundly influenced by Yogaswami in the early 1960s when he was the Canadian High Commissioner to Ceylon. (A lifetime scholar and diplomat, he was at other times the High Commissioner to India and Iran as well.)
We embarked in the morning and ended up in his apartment in a tightly-secured and upper-crust building in the city, an apartment filled with ten thousand artifacts, most of them of a spiritual nature: thankas (old ones) covering the walls, at least the walls not covered with his vast library of religious and spiritual books. We set up to interview him about his time with Yogaswami near a window in his dense office, amongst computers and printers and papers and files.
We thought the morning would be a journey into history, capturing his times with Yogaswami. It was that, but far more. At 93, Dr. George is a bright light, capable of imitating Yogaswami's raucous laugh and powerful voice, inclined to take each question we asked and make it a reflection on life and truth and life's search for truth. Our queries would stop him and for a full minute he would look off, not so much into the distance as into the inner sky, then finally he would return with a gem, some insight into consciousness, some delightful comparison of George Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic who stressed the now and the Great I Am.
We don't yet have a transcript of our conversation, but we would like to share with you here a story directly from our latest book, The Guru Chronicles (now available for pre-order!). Dr. James George wrote the following account about his meetings with Yogaswami in Jaffna 50 years ago.
The Tamils of Sri Lanka called him the Sage of Jaffna. His thousands of devotees, including many Sinhalese Buddhists and Christians, called him a saint. Some of those closest to him referred to him as the Old Lion, or Bodhidharma reborn, for he could be very fierce and unpredictable, chasing away unwelcome supplicants with a stick. I just called him Swami. He was my introduction to Hinduism in its pure Vedanta form, and my teacher for the nearly four years I served as the Canadian High Commissioner in what was still called Ceylon in the early sixties when I was there.
For the previous ten years I had been apprenticed in the Gurdjieff Work, and it was through a former student of P. D. Ouspensky, James Ramsbotham (Lord Soulbury), and his brother Peter, that, one hot afternoon, not long after our arrival in Ceylon, I found myself outside a modest thatched hut in Jaffna, on the northern shore of Ceylon, to keep my first appointment with Yogaswami.
I knocked quietly on the door, and a voice from within roared, "Is that the Canadian High Commissioner?" I opened the door to find him seated cross-legged on the floor--an erect, commanding presence, clad in a white robe, with a generous topping of white hair and long white beard. "Well, Swami," I began, "that is just what I do, not what I am." "Then come and sit with me," he laughed uproariously.
I felt bonded with him from that moment. He helped me to go deeper towards the discovery of who I am, and to identify less with the role I played. Indeed, like his great Tamil contemporary, Ramana Maharishi of Arunachalam, in South India, Yogaswami used "Who am I?" as a mantra, as well as an existential question. He often chided me for running around the country, attending one official function after another, and neglecting the practice of sitting in meditation. When I got back to Ceylon from home leave in Canada, after visiting, on the way around the planet, France, Canada, Japan, Indonesia and Cambodia, he sat me down firmly beside him and told me that I was spending my life-energy uselessly, looking always outward for what could only be found within.
"You are all the time running about, doing something, instead of sitting still and just being. Why don't you sit at home and confront yourself as you are, asking yourself, not me, 'Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?'" His voice rose in pitch, volume and intensity with each repetition of the question until he was screaming at me with all his force.
Then suddenly he was silent, very powerfully silent, filling the room with his unspoken teaching that went far beyond words, banishing my turning thoughts with his simple presence. In that moment I knew without any question that I AM; and that that is enough; no "who" needed. I just am. It is a lesson I keep having to relearn, re-experience, for the "doing" and the "thinking" takes me over again and again as soon as I forget.
His story continues:
Another time, my wife and I brought our three children to see Yogaswami. Turning to the children, he asked each of them, "How old are you?" Our daughter said, "Nine," and the boys, "Eleven" and "Thirteen." To each in turn Yogaswami replied solemnly, "I am the same age as you." When the children protested that he couldn't be three different ages at once, and that he must be much older than their grandfather, Yogaswami just laughed, and winked at us, to see if we understood.
At the time, we took it as his joke with the children, but slowly we came to see that he meant something profound, which it was for us to decipher. Now I think this was his way of saying indirectly that although the body may be of very different ages on its way from birth to death, something just as real as the body, and for which the body is only a vehicle, always was and always will be. In that sense, we are in essence all "the same age."
After I had met Yogaswami many times, I learned to prepare my questions carefully. One day, when I had done so, I approached his hut, took off my shoes, went in and sat down on a straw mat on the earth floor, while he watched me with the attention that never seemed to fail him. "Swami," I began, "I think..." "Already wrong!" he thundered. And my mind again went into the nonconceptual state that he was such a master at invoking, clearing the way for being.
Though the state desired was thoughtless and wordless, he taught through a few favorite aphorisms in pithy expressions, to be plumbed later in silence. Three of these aphorisms I shall report here: "Just be!" or "Summa iru" when he said it in Tamil. "There is not even one thing wrong." "It is all perfect from the beginning." He applied these statements to the individual and to the cosmos. Order was a truth deeper than disorder. We don't have to develop or do anything, because, essentially, in our being, we are perfectly in order here and now--when we are here and now.
Looking at the world as it is now, thirty years after his death, I wonder if he would utter the same aphorisms with the same conviction today. I expect he would, challenging us to go still deeper to understand what he meant. Reality cannot be imperfect or wrong; only we can be both wrong and imperfect, when we are not real, when we are not now!
On and on it went, question after question, all captured on our camera for you to enjoy later. Mostly he was thoughtful and faithful to the task of describing his times with the Lion of Lanka (who did roar, he said), but now and again he exploded: his voice rising, his eyes gleaming, his body leaning forward to convey a moment when Yogaswami said something potent to him. It was so evident that those moments are still alive in this wonderful soul, that, as he told it, they changed his life and his family's too.
Here is a man who can field the most sophisticated question on consciousness, who can set two spiritual traditions side by side and compare them, who can speak of presence with perfect presence, a kind of soft intensity you rarely encounter, who knows what not knowing is, who believes the universe is ultimately perfect and yet bemoans the "rise of negativity in all spheres." Fun, gracious, "What would you like in your tea?" humble, "I hope your journey here from Hawaii has been worth these small remembrances," generous "Taxi? No, let me take you back to your hotel."
Our interview with Jim, as he insisted we call him, turned out really to be a satsang of kindred souls, of those who explore consciousness and who strive as often as possible, as much as possible, to heed Yogaswami's stern yet utterly simple instructions: "Summa iru. Just be."
From Our Gurus' Teachings
Archives are now available through 2001. Light colored days have no posts. 1998-2001 coming later.
