Reporting on July 17, 2010:
It was a long day today, full of knowledge, experience and practice, new life and resolved karmas. It began very early with a 5:20am bus ride to the Aadheenam for a 6am Murugan abhishekam. I was reading tonight in the new book Gurudeva’s Spiritual Visions about the special relationship that Gurudeva had and the monks continue to have with Murugan. The Murugan pujas are always so moving.
After another delicious breakfast, Acharya Arumugaswami held a class on sadhana, especially on writing prayers to be burned in the sacred fires in Kadavul Temple in Kauai and at the Mauritius Spiritual Park. Innersearchers shared testimony about receiving answers to prayers almost immediately (about 72 hours after the prayer is burned). For example, a woman became pregnant after trying for 15 years, after her brother wrote a prayer for her and it was burned in the temple. Arumugaswami reminded us that the prayers must be written in large handwriting and that they must be very specific, including names and addresses, copies of plans and/or contracts, copies of travel itineraries, etc. And the prayers can also be for more mundane matters, for example for help to find objects that have been misplaced.
Arumugaswami also spoke about vasana daha tantra, and the power it has to release us from our emotional attachments to incidents both current and past. These can be written anywhere and burned in a fireplace or other receptacle but not in the temple or sacred fire. Major benefits can be derived from maha vasana daha tantra–writing out by hand ten pages for each year of your life and burning each page as it is completed. Innersearchers provided many testimonies of how this and related practices have released them from emotional bonds to past events in their lives.
For the next 40 minutes, each of us found a place in the Aadheenam grounds to write prayers or vasana daha tantra. It was a quiet, inner time as we worked through personal memories or wrote our prayers. In the afternoon we walked to the river and performed ganga sadhana–50 of us lining the river, all in contemplation and meditation, letting our remaining thoughts go with the river as it flowed by.
During the remainder of the day, the monks so graciously looked after us with tours of various parts of the Aadheenam grounds and activities (the vegetable garden, the cows, the carpentry shop, the media studio), and fed us a magnificent South Indian meal at lunch time. As we sat in rows on the floor with our cashew ghee rice, multiple curries, fresh yoghurt, homemade chutneys and pickles, we could have been anywhere in South India.
Some highlights from the tours: A calf had been born this very morning and we were able to visit him; enormous cabbages grown in the vegetable gardens; publications projects that are pushing the boundaries of modern technologies; and demonstrations from the silpis on how they move large blocks of granite, how they level and cut them so accurately with mere pieces of string, small pieces of bamboo and their handmade chisels.
For dinner we headed to Lydgate Park for another outstanding meal provided by Gaylord’s, and magnificent Hawaiian and Tahitian hula dancing by local girls and boys. Their talent amazed us and warmed our hearts.
Aum Namah Sivaya.