The bronze work that will immortalize Iraivan Temple's founder, architect and carvers is progressing, both in Hawaii and Colorado. On Kauai, the monks are working to prepare the final space that will hold the seven sculptures. The first step is to put in place a giant raw piece of granite in the charming space that has palm trees on the South and a large garden pond on the North. This stone is fresh from the quarry in India. Uncut and unfinished, it gives you a weighty example of the temple's origins, showing what a stone looks and feels like before the master craftsmen approach with their hammers and chisels. Speaking of weight, the stone weighs in at 18,500 pounds! As you can imagine, moving such a gargantuan piece of granite requires some special equipment. We hired a local crane operator, Larry Conklin, to help us. Paramacharya Sadasivanathaswami, Acharya Kumarnathaswami, Yogi Rajanatha and our hired worker Doug all spent several hours yesterday working together to move the stone a short distance into place. The two bronzes of Gurudeva and Ganapathi Sthapathi will stand atop this central stone with the smaller pieces on all sides.

Colorado -based master metalworkers Bobby and Kathy Page sent us these photos today depicting the final major addition to the bronze Iraivan Temple Builders' Memorial. This piece shows Selvanathan Stapathi marking designs on one of the temple's Tara pillars as another part of the pillar is worked on by Chinnaiya, a marvelous sculptor with unique gifts who spent several years on Kauai. As you may remember, sculptress Holly Young, who lives on the Big Island, made a casting of the actual pillar in Iraivan Temple to aid her in her work. This means the bronze pillar you are seeing here is an exact duplicate of the stone pillar in the temple, perfect in every detail.These photos show some of the assembly process of the bronze pieces. Bobby noted there is some duct tape on the architect's arm, there to steady tack welds while the final welds take place. After this, the piece will go to the gifted patineur, Debbie Bakel, for the chemical coloring of the metal surfaces which will make the realism come to life. After that, it will be shipped to Kauai. One of Bobby's observations when the monks visited Loveland last September is that one seldom sees a massive architectural work executed in bronze. People, yes. Dogs and cats, yes. But not architecture. That is one reason this masterwork, as we call it, evokes such awe! As a final note, there is still a major bronze piece to be done, which is the 2-feet-wide by 6-feet-tall by 9-feet-long Chola-style panels which record the names of some 15,000 donors around the world. It's a major piece, but this one above is the last one that shows the silpis at their tasks. Aum Namah Sivaya

Today is Ashram Sadhana Day for the monks. It's the one day a month when they forgo their other duties and give all their time to cleaning. Today's initial focus was on Iraivan Temple. Lately the temple has been receiving a steady amount of red-dirt dust blowing in from the surrounding landscaping work, so the monks brought in a lot of water to scrub and wash away much of the build-up. When the land is fully planted and the temple is in active use, this won't be as much of an issue. Also today the monks cleaned their offices, the kitchen, workshop areas and more.

Here is a good quote from Gurudeva's Living With Siva that describes the importance of a clean environment:

Lesson 30: Cleaning the house is an act of purifying one’s immediate environment. Each piece of furniture, as well as the doorways and the walls, catches and holds the emanations of the human aura of each individual in the home, as well as each of its visitors. This residue must be wiped away through dusting and cleaning. This regular attentiveness keeps each room sparkling clean and actinic. Unless this is done, the rooms of the home become overpowering to the consciousness of the individuals who live within them as their auras pick up the old accumulated feelings of days gone by. Small wonder that a dirty room can depress you, and one freshly cleaned can invigorate. In these years, when both mother and father work in the outside world, the house is often simply where they sleep and eat. But if a home receives all of the daily attentions of cleaning it sparkly bright, both astrally and physically, it becomes a welcoming place and not an empty shell.

Today we are blessed to receive the Iraivan Sivalingam's silver naga. Hundreds of emails back and forth from the contributors to the monks about details, shipping, design and whether it could be shipped under a religious object status all had to be worked out over the past several months.

It's here finally and its future will unfold in the coming days.

Here at Kauai Aadheenam the Deities never sleep. This is one of the few places where all eight daily pujas are conducted as prescribed in the Agamas. They happen every three hours at midnight 3am 6am 9am noon 3pm 6pm and 9pm. Each day at 3am Kadavul Temple's Lord Ganesha receives an abhishekam and is dressed for the new day. His decorative colors are calculated by the panchangam and this month He was mostly blues yellows whites and reds. Here he is at about 4:40am each of the past 25 days just following the puja's final arati.

If you worship the elephant-faced Vinayaka your life will expand bountifully. If you worship the white-tusked Vinayaka your desires and doubts will flee. Therefore worship Him with love-offerings of jack hoppers plantain and mango fruits and thus mitigate the burden of deeds. Saint Auvaiyar. 127

Tune in next month for a series of Lord Murugan.

Last November, Amsterdam-based artist Pieter Weltevrede began work on painting a Lord Nataraja in his fantastically creative style. Recently Pieter sent us the finished work which is the result of countless hours of creative genius.

"O God of mercy who performs the dance of illimitable happiness in the hall of inconceivable intelligence! The Rig and other Vedas are thundering forth in words announcing to us that all are thy slaves all things belong to thee all actions are thine that thou pervades everywhere that this is thy nature. Such is the teaching of those who though they never speak yet broke silence for our sake."
Karunakara Kadavul 6.3

We recently received this copy of a photo from Rajkumar Manickam which he took while at the Aadheenam during our 2016 Mahasamadhi celebrations. He skillfully caught a long exposure of our galaxy behind Iraivan Temple. The next photo is a look at the Temple's recent landscaping.

Our Sun 1 homa was a delight indeed. The monks gathered together and chanted Sri Rudram in unison, meditated on the inner skys, offered what we have to Rudra and listened to our satguru speak profoundly on fulfilling dharma, resolving karma and realizing the Self.

But recently we had to remember what was learned and forgotten, and that is the story of our svayambhu sphatika Sivalingam sitting in Kadavul Temple.

One day, in an early-morning vision in his private quarters, Guru deva saw
the future, as he would later say. In fact, he often said, if you want to know
what you should do, do this: In your mind, travel into the future, and from
there look back and witness what happened. The present-day decision
will be obvious.

In this vision of the yet-to-be, Guru deva saw a massive crystal Sivalingam
shining brightly in the sanctum of Iraivan Temple, radiating out to
the world. It was a titan among crystals. In fact, it seemed in this first seeing
impossibly large, fantastical and beyond reality. Perhaps, he thought,
it is merely the spiritual form of the Sivalingam and not the physical one.

Downstairs a few hours later, he shared this vision with the monks,
letting them know he had his answer as to which form of Siva that Iraivan
Temple would embody. It would be a crystal Lingam, known in Sanskrit
as sphatika Sivalingam. In the ancient texts it is said that a Lingam, which
is the aniconic form of the Creator-Preserver-Destroyer of the universe,
is the highest of worshipful icons. It represents That which is beyond
representation, beyond form and even imagination. It is the All in all, the
Self beyond time, form, space and cause.

The Agamas say one can worship this Great God Siva in the form of a
Lingam made of mud or sand, of cow dung or wood, of bronze or black
granite stone. But the purest and most sought-after form is the quartz
crystal, a natural stone not carved by man but made by nature, gathered
molecule by molecule over hundreds, thousands or millions of years, grown as a living body grows, but infinitely more slowly. Such a creation of nature is itself a miracle worthy of worship.

The monks were delighted to hear of their guru's revelation and imagined
the meanings behind it. Kadavul Temple already housed God Siva as
Nataraja, the divine dancer who creates and inhabits every atom of the
cosmos, and Iraivan Temple would host Siva as the transcendent Beyond,
immanent and transcendent, form and formless. It was perfect. But the
monks were not at all prepared for what would happen next.

Gurudeva paid a visit the next day to the Crystal Journey shop at Kilohana
on Kauai. He was there looking at the wares, asking the proprietor
about crystals, looking for a large one he had visualized. She did not have
such a crystal, but eagerly shared her own similar vision of a giant crystal.
Some weeks later, she called requesting to meet with Guru deva, arriving
at the monastery mid morning. She was a kind of mythical character, a
child of the 70s, a cherubic, intelligent lady about 40 years old. In her long
dress, looking a bit Roma, her round cheeks pink with the pleasure of her
visit, she shared that she had an important message for him. She was taken
to Guru deva's offi ce, where he listened to her tale. "Guru deva, I had a
dream last night. In my dream I saw, even more clearly than before, a giant
crystal. Very tall and perfectly formed, just like the one you described. Not
only that, I saw where it is. If you will allow me, I want to go there. I want
to find the crystal and bring it to you. Will you buy me a ticket?"

Never in his life had Guru deva bought a ticket for a near stranger on a
dream-induced mission. But this was different. Guru deva then told the
visitor of his own dream that same morning, of how he had seen the giant
crystal, too, but never imagined someone else might have the same dream
at nearly the same time. He took it as a sign, and did the unthinkable--
bought her a round-trip ticket to Arkansas, the Natural State.

Soon she was on a crystal quest. Having never visited Arkansas, she
took the logical course and began visiting the various mines in the area.
Along with Brazil, Arkansas is the world's most productive crystal source,
and there were dozens of mines to be tracked down at the end of long,
unpaved roads.

Ultimately she found the crystal at the mines of one James Coleman, a
hard-scrabble man dressed in denim with a scrappy beard and callused
hands, whose father and grandfather had mined crystals and who knew
the business like none other.

Ambling to his Jeep, the taciturn miner motioned to her to get in. Off
the two drove, about a mile on a pitted coral path some called a road that
ended at an old wooden warehouse. Getting down, Coleman walked through the double doors and headed to the back of the open space, stopping at a pallet in a dark corner. On it was a musty mattress, worn and
worthless, rolled in a circle and tied with a hemp rope...

Just a few days ago, the old, faded carpet in Kadavul Temple was replaced. In only a few hours a local team removed the old carpet and its layer of under-padding. They laid down a new thick layer of padding, along with the top layer of bright red carpet which they carefully cut and fit along the lavarock walls and around the shrine tiles. The new flooring is soft and quite comfortable to walk or sit on. Aum Namah Sivaya.

Saravananathaswami leads the monks in today's homa in Kadavul temple. Sadasivanathaswami gives the talk of the week while Satguru is in transit back to the monastery.