Blog Archives
October 15, 2002 
Happy Satguru Jayanti! For Gurudeva's successor, Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami has turned 60 years of age today. He requested that no special pujas or ceremonies be performed, but all the monks had to still give him a party tonight! (pictures tomorrow) and felicitations are coming in from members around the world by email.
Our Beloved and Revered Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
Attained Maha Samadhi on November 12th, 2001
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Mystic Mouse Coloring Book Now available
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Bodhinatha with Sannyasin Shanmuganathaswami going over the daily communications with members the world over. This involves coordinating mission activites and working to see to the details of the spiritual unfoldment of all the sishyas of Saiva Siddhanta Church in a very systematic way. All the infrastructure for this process was the great gift of Saiva Siddhanta Church that Gurudeva created to carry forward Saiva Siddhanta into the world today and for tomorrow.
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Title: Choose Realistic Goals in Meditation |
Cybertalk: Bodhinatha talks about the problematic attitude of getting sad when our spiritual experiences aren't as deep as we want them to be or think they should be. He reminds us of Gurudeva's mahavakyam, "Life is meant to be lived joyously." In meditation it is useful to have more than one goal--a really easy one, a hard one and a really hard one. This ensures success at something, so we feel our meditation has been worthwhile even if we didn't realize the Self that time.
Cybertalk Ends"
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Shailesh Trivedi has been doing very well at the Aadheenam and is now in his first "trimester" of three months on task force. He has classes twice a day and meets with Paramacharya Palaniswami on retreats. We see many fine qualities in him and he can sit still for an hour... no problem!
Shaliesh sends his love to his mother Radha and father Arvind Trivedi in Fallbrook, California near San Diego. I asked him to drop in for a first person annoucement to the world via cyberspace and he said:
"Cheerful greetings to my family and the great family of Saivites all over the world."
Sadhaka Jivanandanatha, our intrepid adventurer into the realms of the unknown (at least to us) in photographic technology, has been testing the "long exposure" option on the digital camera and it has really worked! This is early in the morning before dawn and gives a perfect feeling of what it is like as all the monks approach the temple for morning arati at 5:30 am.
Winter is coming and Hawaii is high enough in the northern latitudes to experience a major shift in sunlight hours. as fall and winter approaches. Looking south... the team is still at work in the publications building while on the right the sun is seting over Mount Waialeale.
Pink coral, one of Gurudeva's favorite colors is a frequent sunset hue with numerous nuances of shades. Another long exposure shot here... gives you a good sense for what we see at the end of our day at the monastery.
Gurudeva's spiritual center in the island country of Mauritius
in the Indian Ocean near South Africa
More retrospective pictures from Bodhinatha's mission to Mauritius arrived today.
Here His Holiness is having a walk round the Spiritual Park. It is a wonderful place way from the mundane activities of life.
Bodhinatha has chosen one of the most shady and cool places, under the mango groves to give an interview for MBC TV News. We can see Shanmuganathaswami too.
This is Adisankara singing at the Park. Adisankara is a gold medalist in Karnatic singing from South India and is presently teaching at the MGI. He is also studying the teachings of Gurudeva.
Saminaden Veerapen and his wife are very close financial supporters of the Spiritual Park. Both of them are studying with the Church thru one of the Kulapatis. Saminaden has graduated in Transport Management and his wife is a teacher. They regularly attend the Ganesha Homa every month.
Here is Rajiv Malik, Hinduism Today reporter from Delhi. Rajiv has been in Mauritius for a major article on Hinduism on the island. He wrote a very nice article on schooling in India. See the Oct/Nov/Dec. issue of Hinduism Today
This is Yudananda Munian and his wife, both Church members. Yudananda is helping with the accounting of the Park. He works in one of the major banks in Mauritius.
Sivaneswaran, Church member from Klang, Malaysia is in Mauritius for a short visit. Here we see Sivaneswaran and his fiancee, Venilla Mardemootoo. Their wedding is scheduled for December.
He had a meeting with Kulapati Rajen Manick to go over a new project of having an international Youth Retreat in Malaysia in 2003. Sivaneswaran and Aravindraj Chandrasekaran and others are doing a wonderful work motivating the youth in Malaysia.
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transcription begins
Date: September_15_2002
Title: Talk for Mauritius on God Siva Part 2
Category: God and Lords of Dharma
Duration: 7 min., 14 seconds
Date Given: August 24, 2002
Given by: Bodhinatha
Quite often, we are asked, "How should we conceive of God Siva? What is the best way to think about God Siva? What is God Siva's nature?"
The easiest way to understand God Siva's nature is to think of Him as the parent and yourself as the child. As parent, singular, He is both mother and father. Mother and father are not separate, they are both in God Siva. Why is God Siva like the parent? Because He created your soul. We call Him the Primal or Original Soul because all other souls were created by Him. So He is the parent of everyone, having created their soul.
Not only is God Siva the parent, He is the perfect parent. Because no matter what we do, Siva always sends His blessings and love to us. When we make mistakes, God Siva is never upset, angry or displeased with us. He is always the same, always loving and blessing us no matter what we do. He certainly does not punish us. He is just there, the perfect parent, never gets disturbed. No matter how ridiculous we act, God Siva is there, the perfect parent loving and blessing us at all times.
We can describe God Siva's love as perfect love because it exists at all times and extends to all beings. Nobody gets left out. It exists at all times and for all beings, the perfect love.
The goal, of course, is to find God, for God to reveal Himself to us. But if we keep searching diligently, we will eventually find Him. Even though He is hidden from our sight right now, we can perform certain actions that will cause us to eventually find God.
In finding God, we also experience Siva's perfect love. We experience the consciousness that Siva is in, which includes perfect love, love for everyone at all times.
How do we find God? How do we experience God as perfect love? Well, we need to become closer to Him and Hinduism gives us certain actions, certain disciplines, sadhanas we can perform that bring us closer to God. A number of those have to do with worshipping at a Siva temple.
We will look at those first. Worshipping at a temple is called bhakti yoga and Gurudeva gives us a beautiful definition of bhakti yoga. He says, "Bhakti yoga is the practice of devotional disciplines, worship, prayer, chanting and singing with the aim of awakening love in the heart and opening one's self to God's grace."
That is a very nice definition because it shows us a three-fold process here. First step, we are doing something, we are performing these disciplines, worshiping, chanting, attending puja. If we do them successfully, what happens? We open the heart or awaken love toward God Siva. If we are successful at accomplishing that, the third thing happens. We receive God Siva's grace or blessings. We feel His perfect love.
Some of the ways in which we can increase our devotion for God Siva are as follows. Of course, we have talked about these before here. So they won't be new, but for them they will be new.
One of the easiest ones is, we always have to travel to the temple. Unless you are a monk, you don't live in the temple. You have to travel, sometimes we travel a great distance to the temple. How we use our travel time, what we are doing during that time, relates to the depth of our worship. So if we are gossiping or listening to rock and roll or doing business on the cellular phone or accessing the internet or whatever, we are not preparing ourselves to have as profound experience at the temple as we can. If we take the time while we are traveling to put ourselves in a devotional mood, if we are driving we can play some devotional music in the CD player. If we are riding a bicycle we can sing a Devaram. It helps put us in the right mood so that we can maximize the benefits, the blessings we receive at the temple itself.
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Innersearch 2003-4 in India!
We just completed the July 17-23 Kauai Innersearch, 2002. Bodhinatha will lead the next Innersearch to India, between Dec 2003 and Jan 2004. We will visit Bangalore and the Iraivan Carving Village, and settle in the South in Tamil Nadu, Click on the above for details on what will be an inspiring journey to our holy land of Bharat! |
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