Jai Gurudeva!

Recently we observed our monthly Chitra padapuja for Gurudeva. In the early evening, monks and local members gathered to honor Gurudeva and receive his blessings. Yogi Dayanatha and Nirvani Tejadevanatha performed the abhishekam as other monks chanted Sri Rudram. Upon completion of the Rudram, the rest of the puja continued in silence. Aum Namah Sivaya.

"Look to the satgurus, who have themselves met and overcome the challenges that still lie ahead for you. Look to them and ask them to help you to look within yourself. Much of the mysticism which is the greatest wealth of Hinduism is locked within these masters, who in our tradition are known as the satgurus, the sages and the siddhas." Gurudeva

It's something we didn't foresee happening this soon, or perhaps not at all. Our founder, the late Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, always intended to record himself speaking the edited and published version of his Master Course book trilogy lessons comprising three 1,008-page books--Dancing with Siva, Living with Siva and Merging with Siva. However, his life of service and sadhana was quite busy, and taking the time to properly audio record already-published material was not a top priority. In the final years of his life, he recorded over a hundred lessons from Merging with Siva. He had the monks set up a high-end recording station and every afternoon he would spend an hour or two reading the lessons. He did this for some months. And then, rather suddenly in 2001, after returning from taking 72 Innersearchers through Northern Europe, he learned that it was time to release the physical body. Siva's Will Be Done. We created an audio CD of a few chapters from those Merging with Siva recordings, and contented ourselves with that and Gurudeva's other spontaneous audio talks for a number of years. Now and then we attempted to replicate his voice, but no one could make it work. So we waited. Just last year, AI capabilities took off. Over a year ago we saw articles popping up about voice cloning AI systems. Feeling that it would be good to research a potential fulfillment of Gurudeva's original intention, we looked into it. After trying out a few AIs, we found the ElevenLabs model to be quite promising. It wasn't excellent at the time, but their model has been evolving rapidly, and the results now are quite impressive. We have been able to replicate Gurudeva's voice to the point that it sounds so accurate those who hear it and who knew him are stunned. This is only possible because, fortunately, we have good quality recordings of Gurudeva speaking over 100 Merging with Siva lessons. We fed a couple hours of those recordings into the AI. We now have a voice clone that can speak any block of text that we feed into it. Though the voice is technically artificial, we feel the shakti is still present because it is created with the exact tones and style of his original voice. We plan to gradually create audio files of all the Master Course trilogy lessons, linking them in the web pages and daily lesson emails. Then we'll continue with Gurudeva's other books. One challenge is the use of Sanskrit words sprinkled amongst English. The AI English-language model we use is not able to recognize diacritical marks or long and short vowels to pronounce all the Sanskrit words correctly. Fortunately, ElevenLabs allows us to upload a lexicon text file of individual word replacements. When the AI is voicing a block of text, it checks this file to see if the spelling of any particular word in the block is changed, and then speaks out the changed version. We change the spelling to make it sound more phonetically correct. For example, when the word "jñānī" appears in a Merging with Siva lesson, we change the spelling to "yaanee," and then the AI pronounces it correctly. This is a slow process, as we have to experiment with various spellings until the AI gets it right. We are gradually building the lexicon now. We are firmly committed to ensuring that this digital voice is used exclusively for reproducing what Gurudeva actually wrote or said. Crossing this line would not only be confusing but also unjust to all parties involved, including Gurudeva himself. Enough theory. Below, we are pleased to share a sample of Gurudeva's digital voice reading from Merging with Siva, lesson one. As the AI model gets more refined, we expect the quality to increase even more.

Years back, about ten, a Buddhist priest shared his impressions of the monastery gardens. He offered that Iraivan temple is hard, granite, rigid, rectilinear, unchanging, strong--therefore masculine. And the surrounding gardens are soft, healing, pliable, nurturing--that is, feminine. He saw here the perfect balance of the two, Siva and Shakti.

One of the aspects of the Shakti side of this is that the gardens, being so alive, are constantly changing. Today we are dealing with a few of those natural changes. One team is repairing some damage made by the wild pigs in the newly planted Mondo Grass. Another is weeding Mondo on the other side. A third team is picking up trimmings around Dakshinamurti.

But the biggest team is a professional tree trimming crew that has come to remove a large banyan that fell into a pond during the historic April 11th storm that brought 14-16" of rain in less than a day. The tree was a bit aged and unhappy in the water. Once it is cleared, we can plant something special with the space.

We also give a BEFORE & AFTER slider of the temple itself.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva.

"The super­con­scious mind and the body of the soul have been around a long time. This immortal body of yours has been around a long time, and it’s seen many lives come and go, many experiences pass by the windows of its eyes. Some need no explanation, because they are the playing out of vibrations. Others do need an explanation, the explanation that would come and impress you intellectually from your super­con­scious, would give you power maybe to face an experience that was yet to come. So, don’t analyze every nuance of a reaction or try to anticipate the next series of experiential patterns, for life is a series of experiences. They are all great experiences."

Aum Namah Sivaya!

Something fun for the last day of our 5-day lunar phase.

And as they say, another day, another step forward in AI, and while for most of the world this technology is evolving too fast to keep track of (us not excluded), the monks at Kauai Aadheenam are still trying to keep up with the new developments—knowing that machine learning will play a common role in all of our futures. First chat bots, then photo generation (like the one of this robot composing music) and then video and music. All digital arenas seem to be an area that ai can reach into.

Our monks recently found this tool called Suno, which allows you to create instant songs about anything in any style. Currently anyone can log in with their google account and generate a handful of songs each day. It's undeniably fun to experiment with. We've been trying to get it to generate bhajans, but that doesn't seem to work too well yet. Still here are some just-for-fun examples we created. Most are generated with simple prompts such as "Folk song about the Monks of Kauai's Hindu Monastery" and after 12 seconds it gives you this, completely generated by ai:

A devotee took a number of portrait-mode clips during the two days of first anniversary festival events, and we have compiled them here. The monthly morning Krittika Homa happened to fall on the first day of the anniversary pujas, so clips of that are shown first. The first evening of the Samvatsara Puja is when Kauai faced torrential rains and floods, so that is captured in some of the clips.

Happy New Year of Krodhi!

Recently we bagen our new season and paraded out to our flagpole to raise the dvaja. This season also mark the beginning of the new year.

Here follows the passage from Saiva Dharma Shatras about how we should approach this new season:

Nartana Ritau, the season of Dancing with Siva, begins on Hindu New Year. This is the period of creation, the warm season, from mid-April through mid-August. The key word of this season is planning. The colors are orange, yellow-gold and all shades of green--orange for renunciation, yellow-gold for action, and green for regeneration. High above, the main Hindu flag flies the color orange, heralding the Nartana Ritau throughout this season, symbolizing sadhana and self-control. The other colors adorn smaller flags. This is the season of giving special attention to those in the grihastha ashrama. It is a time of awakening, renewal, review. The emphasis is on seeing ahead, planning for future years. It is a time of planning retreats and other activities for youths and adults for the entire year. During this time of looking forward, the Church's six-year plan is updated by the Guru Mahasannidhanam and stewards and another year added. The Saiva Dharma Shastras are studied; and any needed additions in supplementary manuals, representing new growth, are made.

The practical focus is completion of unfinished projects. Secular holidays to observe among the families include Mothers Day in May, Fathers Day in June and Grandparents Day in August. In the monastery intensive cleaning of buildings and grounds takes place. New clothing is issued and old garments mended.

This season of harvest and new growth is also the time to review and reestablish picking and planting routines for the gardens. It is a time for ordering seeds and plants for the year, of planting trees, fragrant vines and the annual crop. Review is made for scheduling the care of all realms of the Aadheenam. Kadavul temple and the Guru Temple are cleaned and renewed during this season, and the adjacent grounds receive special, abundant attention.

The daily sadhana is the Sivachaitanya Panchatantra: experiencing nada, jyoti, prana, shakti and darshana. In Sanskrit, it is a time of learning new shlokas and mantras. Shrine rooms are renewed and redecorated for the year, and the clothing of all is renewed in the Hindu style of the current fashion. It is a time of doing things for others, religious outreach. In the missions, Nartana Ritau is the time of bringing in new students and Church members. It is a time of hatha yoga and philosophical teaching.

The main festival of Nartana Ritau is Guru Purnima. The mathavasis hold special conclave on Vaikasi Vishakham, the full moon day of May.

Several teams of workers are busy at the monastery, laying water lines, tiling the temple pool, trimming giant palm trees, tending the gardens, moving mountains of soil, and more. So today we offer a buffet of images to give you an idea of what's happening.

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami gives his weekly upadesha in Kadavul Temple at Kauai’s Hindu Monastery in Hawaii. It is part of a series of talks elaborating on the inspired teachings of Satguru Śivaya Subramuniyaswami as found in his book Merging With Śiva.

"The next time the same experiential pattern appears, we approach it from a mountaintop consciousness, because we have conquered those instinctive elements. Our intellect has been trained by family and friends, schoolteachers and business acquaintances. We have to build a new intellect, an intellect from the soul out into the intellectual mind, rather than from the instinctive area of the mind into the intellect, to be successful on the path of enlightenment."

Aum Namah Sivaya

Here are some more photos of our recent Samvatsara Puja for Iraivan Temple. This two-day annual event is performed for the temple each year that follows its consecration. Photos by Rajkumar Manickam