Master Course

(This also contains a lesson from Chapter 45, Spiritual Training.)

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.

“Once someone said of my guru, Yogaswami, “You have to make yourself like a fool to go in front of that man. He will speak as a madman of God to you. But if you go to him in an ordinary state of consciousness, he will say, ‘I’m just like you. Go away. I have nothing to say. Nothing comes from the inside. Go away!’ ” You have to be an intellectual fool to be in front of the satguru. If you hear ordinary things from the guru, look closely at yourself. He is your closest mirror. He is only biding his time with you until the extraordinary ones come along to utilize his depths. Most gurus enjoy an exquisite inner life that is so refined and interesting, it keeps them very well occupied. “

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.

“Still a certain darshan power goes out to him, but the guru no longer consciously inwardly works with him as an individual. He knows it is too dangerous to work with this fluctuating aspirant, for there is no telling how he might take and use the accumulating power that would later be awakened within him. The satguru makes such a one prove himself to himself time and time again and to the guru, too, through sādhana and tapas. Sādhana tests his loyalty, consistency and resolution. Tapas tests his loyalty as well as his personal will, for he does tapas alone, gaining help only from inside himself, and he has to be aware on the inside to receive it. A wise guru never hesitates to “put him through it,” so to speak.“

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.

“Everyone has some feelings radiating from within, but they are emanations that fluctuate. Because you feel these vibrations coming from them, you can intuit how they are feeling. They do not emanate a constant or a building flow. It is a fluctuating flow of emotional, or astral, energy. The darshan I am explaining is really the energies flowing from the deeper chakras, sahasrāra and ājñā, the seventh and sixth chakras, or psychic force centers, in the head, through the kuṇḍalinī force within the spine. These energy flows do not fluctuate as the emotional odic-force energies do. They go on day and night and night and day through the illumined soul. Those devotees who are in tune with the guru can feel his physical presence when he enters their town because the darshan gets stronger. And it feels to them more ethereal when he is farther away.“

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.

“Several thousand years ago, a yoga master was born from his own realization of the Self. He was born from his search within, where he found Absolute Existence, deep inside the atomic structure of his being. This master’s realization came as he controlled the mind and penetrated through it to the very core of its substance. After Self Realization, his mind opened into its fullness of knowing. This knowledge he then imparted, as needed, to the students who came to him curious or eager to solve the philosophical and metaphysical puzzles of life. The first esoteric universities formed around the master in this way. Other masters have since come and gone. Each in turn battled and conquered the fluctuating mind and penetrated into the depth of being. Students gathered around them in a most natural sequence of events. Each master brought forth from his intuition the related laws and disciplines needed so that they, too, might attain Self Realization, īmkaīf, as it is called in Shūm, the language of meditation.“

In this upadesha, Satguru picks up from where he left off last week which was sharing about the fourth dimension in depth. Today he begins exploring Gurudeva’s profound description of the fifth dimension, which relates to the vishuddha chakra. “The perspective that all is well in the world, the experience that everything is as it should be, perfect right now, is of the fifth dimension. In this state we realize a great bliss, a comprehensive, all-encompassing acceptance of the universe as it is, which reveals that the whole of existence is working proportionately one with another.”

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami shares the upadesha that he gave at satsangs in Singapore and Malaysia last month. He quotes Paramaguru Sage Yogaswami comparing the inner climb up the chakras to reaching the summit of Mount Everest, and then elaborates on the stages of this climb.