You well know that there are five forms of Siva, also known as Sadasiva, that will one day be installed in niches on the Iraivan Vimanam. They are deeply mystical aspects of Iraivan temple that were cast in bronze many years ago. They are 36 inches tall. Finally, they are being prepared to be gilded with 23-karat gold leaf. The work is going to be done in Honolulu, by Hawaii's finest gilders, so our team made some sturdy crates for the 104-mile sea voyage ahead. When they return, you will be amazed by the transformation (in a January or February TAKA post). Meantime, enjoy the crate building.

From the October/November/December issue of Hinduism Today Magazine:
"The entire world entered a challenging new era in December, 2019, when the first human cases of Covid-19 were identified in Wuhan, China. In the two and a half years since then, the lives of virtually every human being were touched by lockdowns, economic hardships, health issues and loss of loved ones. With the pandemic still with us, global citizens now face another avalanche of difficulties provoked by Russia’s war on Ukraine. The greatest military conflict in Europe since WWII, it has further disrupted the world’s supply chains and contributed to soaring prices, as well as severe shortages of food and fuel in many countries. These hardships have become so dire that people in poor nations are demonstrating in the streets, hoping a new government will be voted in and improve conditions for the populace. Financial markets are in turmoil, recovery of the global economy is in doubt and Europe is experiencing the most severe humanitarian crisis it has seen in decades."

Visitors come daily, some from far lands, many who have been planning their trip for ten or more years. Such was a group of seven from Calgary, Canada, today. One was celebrating her 70th birthday, and all the others were, amazingly, all having an unbirthday. What are the chances. The elders told of going every Saturday to Yogaswami's hut, and of meeting Gurudeva at a Ganesha temple in Sri Lanka in 1974.

  Still want to drink from the fountainheads of wisdom that are Gurudeva's books? Look no further because right now for the low low price of free you can use your God given ear holes listen to 4 new audiobooks from Himalayan Publications. These are not just your standard audio books as these were generated with...........drumroll please........... AI! Yes, all of these audiobooks were within a few hours narrated by an AI system build by Google. They are not as good as a human yet but it's a free service they offer and a good placeholder until a human narrates them. Give them a try, we think you'll be surprised how nice the voice is! Here are the links- 

Lemurian Scrolls: Angelic Prophecies Revealing Human Origins

Loving Ganesha: Hinduism's Endearing Elephant-faced God

Weaver's Wisdom: Ancient Precepts for a Perfect Life

Yoga's Forgotten Foundation: Twenty Timeless Keys to Your Divine Destiny

  If you want to listen to the audio books offline without wifi please download the Google Play mobile app AUM!

Years back we had ponds, large ponds 100 feet across, packed with lotuses. You could not even see the water they were so dense. Then along came a voracious fish, the talapia, who loved their taste and devoured every one.

We have been without lotuses all those intervening years, til now. With the help of Piragash and Kauai members, we are getting them again, and this one bloomed today with multiple blossoms. A joyous thing to see. We will now work to keep the fish away from them so they will flourish again. A little tutorial on lotus for the uninitiated:

Hinduism equates the lotus with beauty, fertility, prosperity, spirituality, and eternity. The most common lotus seen in Hinduism is the white lotus flower. However, the pink lotus flower is considered to be the most divine and only awarded to those of the highest standing. Hindu deities are often seated on a lotus. And it is said that each chakra has lotus-like petals.

The lotus flower is the foremost symbol of beauty, prosperity and fertility. According to Hinduism, within each human is the spirit of the sacred lotus. It represents eternity, purity, divinity, and is widely used as a symbol of life, fertility, ever-renewing youth.
One of the most common metaphysical analogies compares the lotus' perennial rise out of the mud into faultless beauty to the evolution of consciousness, from instinctive impulses to spiritual liberation.
In Hindu sacred texts each human is urged to be like the lotus; they should work without attachment, dedicating their actions to God, untouched by worldliness, like water on a lotus leaf, like a beautiful flower standing high above the mud and water.

We have mentioned briefly that the team in Moscow is continuing its remarkable work with Gurudeva's publishing legacy despite the extreme challenges being faced in that part of the world. They have, for instance, translated and typeset the entire new edition of "Loving Ganesha, Hinduism's Benevolent Elephant-Faced Deity" into Russian. We thought you would like to see some of the graphically-rich pages. Remember, this is a big book, over 400 pages in all. Our congratulations to those who are working for upliftment in difficult times.

Employee John is nearly finished placing the two rows of paver stones next to the seashore paspalum grass sprigs popping up. Underneath the grass is the geotile, and this will constitute the ground pradakshina path around Iraivan. Below the front of Iraivan Temple, employees Doug and Jim are nearly finished creating this lava rock pony wall around the steps up the hill.

Following the model of another free resource, Wikipedia, today we begin our eighth annual November-December appeal for support of our publications development. The success of this drive defines the scale of our digital work in the months and years ahead.

Right from the days he printed his first yoga lessons by hand in the 1950s on a Mimeograph machine at the San Francisco Temple, Gurudeva readily embraced technological changes. One afternoon in 1984, having never seen or even heard of a Macintosh, he encountered this revolutionary computer in a small Apple store in the sleepy town of Kapaa. After playing with MacPaint and MacWrite for fifteen minutes, he walked out with a Macintosh 128K under his arm. Later, he bought each monk a Mac and gradually made the shift to digital typography. Takes one back to the LaserWriter, right? When the Internet swept up on Kauai's shores in 1997, he urged the monks to publish a daily blog of monastery events, and "Today at Kauai Aadheenam" was born. TAKA, among the earliest of blogs, has been issued almost daily since that time.

Gurudeva would celebrate where we have come today. He would love the ease with which his books are available, at no cost, to everyone who owns a mobile device anywhere in the world. The Capricorn in him would love the lack of massive investment costs that are required for major books to be put on printing presses, tens of thousands of dollars for each title. Then come the inventory costs, the shipping, the returns. All of that has been largely 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. Our Hinduism Today app, available to anyone with a mobile phone, anywhere in the world, is an example of the best of the Web.

Gurudeva would love that we don't have to charge struggling Hindu students and seekers 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. Not to mention relevant in fast-moving times. That's what compels our annual fundraising campaign. It's a chance for you to help us to help explain and share Hinduism globally. 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.

Yes, we could (perhaps) 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. We have come to expect it. But free to the world is not free to those of us who create it. Running our websites entails significant costs, especially when we have to reach out for expert help and skills. A good example of current use is our support of a dedicated team in Moscow which, despite great difficulty, continues to translate, print and distribute Hinduism Today magazine in Russia. The goal for 2022 is the same as last year: $75,000. Our Digital Dharma Drive will end at midnight on December 31, 2022. We hope you will join in helping us meet our goal. 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. Please make a generous donation today.

With much aloha from the far islands and warm greetings during the holiday season,
The Editors
Kauai's Hindu Monastery
Himalayan Academy Publications

Another Skanda Shashti festival has come and gone. Dancing with Siva defines the festival as "A six-day festival in October-November celebrating Lord Karttikeya's, or Skanda's, victory over the forces of darkness." After two years of no visitors, we once again have a contingent of pilgrims from off-island. Because the six days of this festival immediately follow our late Gurudeva's annual Mahasamadhi puja, most pilgrims who come for that puja tend to stay on for this festival. Every day they were attending the 6am Muruga puja performed by Muruganathaswami, offering soulful singing while the curtain was closed, building the vibration towards the final afternoon puja shown in these photos.