After reaching the Kauai docks several days ago, the containers from India have finally been unloaded and are being trucked up to the temple. So far we've received two truck loads and are expecting more. When the containers arrived on Kauai Yoginathaswami and Nirvani Adinatha went to inspect their contents. Included are Stones for the Nandi Mandapam, the statues of the Satgurus, Hanuman, the three elephants which will adorn the stairs leading up to the temple, and lots more.

Et maintenant, la troisième episode de l'expériment: We are roughly half-way through the trip today, driving through the Swiss Alps from Geneva to Bern after a highly successful time in Italy (which you will read about soon, we promise)... But "hey," you ask, "what about that Hinduism Today article this modern itinerant pilgrim needs to edit?" True, there isn't an iOS version of Adobe InDesign—yet—so that will have to wait until the intrepid sannyasin returns home. Besides, between the events, interviews, temple visits, the travels from one to the other, and the rare, momentary bouts of rest and relaxation, there is hardly the time to focus on such an elephantine task. Some things are better left at home. What about downloading photos from the camera, processing them and writing captions for the monastery blog? Okay, so maybe some will call this cheating, but we won't: the monk who had the crazy idea is joined by a monk who did bring a MacBook Pro. For a task like downloading, sorting, processing and mass uploading of large numbers of photos and captions for the slideshow posts you see on this blog, one computer is enough for our traveling troupe. But we are thinking of the ways even this job could be done on an iPad. We brought a cable to connect the digital SLR camera to the iPad to download the occasional tweetable photo, but with a larger capacity iPad (this is only the 16GB model), all the photos could be held. iOS apps are available for organizing photos, too, and Apple's upcoming iOS 7 update will make such tasks even easier.

The Natesan family from Austin, Texas, was back today with their 2nd set of parents, attending the 6am Siva homa and then darshan with Satguru Bodhinatha and seeing more of the grounds.

Click the play button to hear to Bodhinatha's talk.

Yesterday the monastery observed a homa in Kaduval temple, burned notes to the devas, and enjoyed a talk givin by Bodhinatha. He describes how energy flows through different chakras like water flows through different spigots on a pipe. He discuses the use of willpower to lift energy into higher chakras and controlling speech to keep open access to the superconscious. Click above to play Bodhinatha's talk.

We left Portugal and flew next to Madrid in Spain arriving in what has to be the most creative airport we have ever seen, vast waves of natural wood to the horizon, like a gargantuan sculpture. In our small B&B apartment we met with Alvaro Enterria and Oscar Montero, two Spanish men who have adopted Hinduism and have deep knowledge of Hinduism. Alvaro brought his wife Arati (they live most of the year in Varanasi). A long discussion ensued about the state of Hinduism in Spain of which more in our Hinduism Today article.

Next, off to Barcelona where we were met by Elena Saura, a devotee of Mata Amritanandamayi, and Agustin Navarro, members of an unusual and delightful group called Advaityavidya, which has several hundred people from different parts of Spain who come sporadically to the teachings and seminars on Hindu Dharma, with a core group of about thirty to forty people, very dedicated to their seva and sadhana. They follow the teachings of Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa and Swami Satyananda Saraswati.

We shared the day with them, exploring things yogic and dharmic here in Europe. Then, after washing our robes and feeding us the most marvelous Spanish ayurvedic cuisine, they insisted we become tourists among the rather amazing architecture of this city. Our major revelation of the day came when we were taken to the ancient Cathedral of Barcelona, an architectural wonder that took 150 years to build. Cavernous, elaborate, baroque, stunning would be words to describe it.

The amazing part is that this once powerful church, which must have once had thousands in the pews for daily mass, today had not a single worshipper, not one (unless you count us, there to worship one of the forms of Siva). Instead, hundreds of tourists paid to enter, to photograph, to marvel, all wandering these once holy halls as though they were walking through history, which they were! It was a shocking moment to realize how thorough has been the retreat of the faith here. Were this sacred building in India, it would have 100,000 inside worshipping, making offerings, meditating.

That evening we went to the apartment of Jayatma, one of the Barcelona group, to meet for an hour with about eight of the leading lights of Hinduism in Barcelona, plying them with our questions and recording their insights for the article. They were from Sai Baba's group, Divine Life Society and such and helped us to glimpse into the evolution of Hinduism here in Spain, where decades ago Gurudeva thought the youth had the most light he had seen anywhere, the most potential for spiritual growth.

The following morning we were joined for breakfast (what an ayurvedic feast) by Martine Thom, the filmaker who captured the daily life of the aadheenam back in 2000. Martine, who came five hours from her Mediterranean seaside home in France, had many stories to share with the others, giving them insights into life at the monastery. Of course, we took out our iPad and showed her the many things that have happened since her days on Kauai (though that was hard, since she visits TAKA daily).

On our way to the airport, we were taken to the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família, commonly known as the Sagrada Família (Temple of the Sacred Family), a large Roman Catholic church in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, designed by genius Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí. How to describe the artistry of this temple to holiness? Search for it online to see one of the world's architectural wonders, half sculpture, half fantasy, completely awesome. Outside we met a swami who had recently been to Kauai. Small world.

After a final moment together at the Starbucks across the street, off we went to the airport for our flight to Venice, Italy.

Thushyanthan and Renuka Amirthalingam pilgrimage darshan with Satguru Bodhinatha, sharing their experiences of trying out the various pilgrimage sadhanas on monastery grounds. They said it's like a wonderful buffet of options each day. It was Renuka's birthday today (28th). Happy birthday Renuka!

Chinna, Sivagami and son Arunachala along with grandparents are visiting Kauai for the first time. They are from Chettiar community and live in Austin, Texas. When Satguru Bodhinatha was in Austin recently to teach at the Hindu Students' Association weekend retreat, this family hosted the weekend retreat in their home.

We had a recent visit from Richard Gaskin. Richard is a senior software developer in the LiveCode community, (see www.fourthworld.com. He is ever a gentleman, very generous with his help to others and full of intelligent insightful vision on strategies for moving forward.

We know we have plenty of IT people in our audience so here is a little story for you. It was Richard Gaskin in the late 1990's who encouraged Brahmanathswami to switch from Supercard (a later offspring of Apple's HyperCard) to Livecode. Since 1998 we have been using our own in-house developed LiveCode software to bring you TAKA every day. Even after we switched to Word Press, we still use our "Caption Writer" application to create the daily html/javascript slideshow posts. It would be impossible otherwise to do this on a daily basis in a timely way.

Since then we have used LiveCode (see /www.runrev.com) for various in-house media production applications. Our new Himalayan Academy web site is also built on the Linux server version of LiveCode. Sevaks do transcriptions using a LiveCode desktop application, and also help with our new web site with a desktop app that allows easy remote access to our media database on the web server. The Ganapati Kulam uses an in-house app built by Brahmanathswami for their InDesign publications document revision control. And we look forward to soon releasing our first mobile app, also built with LiveCode. Shanmuganathaswami is working on that one (stay tuned.) LiveCode just just raised over 1/2 Million dollars in Kickstarter campaign and is now open source, for those who may be interested.

Richard has been very supportive via our technical lists and forums. He just got married and was happy to come to Kauai for his honeymoon and finally meet Brahmanathswami in person and include a tour of the Iraivan with wife Tiffany who is behind the camera.