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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 mystic lives within himself and deals positively with the events and forces outside himself. He is always consciously striving to realize that limitless Reality within him. That is his practice. Yet he welcomes the challenges of the world, not as a karma forced upon him against his will but as his own self-created dharma. If he is really a mystic, he doesn’t run away from these challenges. He inwardly knows that life’s daily difficulties bring forth his inner strength in response to them. He sees the underlying purpose of life. He accepts and doesn’t reject. He searches for understanding, for the lesson that lies behind each experience instead of resenting the experience, which then creates another subconscious barrier for him. He knows that most problems are with man and the way he looks at things.“

While in the San francisco Bay Area, Satguru visited scenic Mount Tamalpais to retrace our late Gurudeva’s first walk to the summit. Here is what Gurudeva said in Merging with Siva lesson 123 about his times there: “For eleven years I led a bhakti pilgrimage, a devotional pilgrimage, to the top of Mount Tamalpais in California, the first Sunday of every month. I never missed one. The devotees, in looking over three cities with me, could intuit that within each city there were problems. Each home in each city contained an area of the mind that was problem ridden.

“Those who had the devotion went to the top of the mountain. Hence, the opportunity to expand their awareness for an hour or so and look over the external states of the mind. There they set their pattern for meditation for the ensuing month. It takes great dedication, devotion and bhakti to disentangle awareness from that which it is aware of, to flow into and become aware of expanded areas of mind. The rewards are great. We are able to look over and through our expanded vision the totality of the exterior area of our mind and intuitively know the answer to the experiences that we are going through.

“This may seem difficult to comprehend, but it is really very simple. When awareness is burdened in the exterior area of the mind, we simply release awareness from that area of the mind that it is aware of. Release the burden—but not by taking on more burdens or trying to find out the whys and wherefores of it all. In other words, we alleviate the pressures that awareness and our nerve system feel because of being involved in the exterior area of the mind and thus become devoted to our own superconsciousness.”

After flying to Dallas, Texas, Satguru held a satsang at the home of sishyas Sanjiva and Tiya Thielamay, where he spoke to those gathered about the purusharthas, the four goals of life. Priest Kumar Gurukkal also joined for the evening.

Jai Ganesha!

Recently we’ve been exploring different formats to deliver our books to seekers, particularly for social media. Last week we created one of these short presentations for Path to Siva: Chapter One, and today we invite you to explore the content in Chapter Two.

Click below to play

Here are the slides as individual images:

This morning in Kauai we observed Gurudeva’s Chitra Padapuja for the month of May. In California Satguru Bodhinatha was also given padapuja at a satsang.

And, below are livestreams of the final day of kumbhabhishekam ceremonies at the Concord Shiva Murugan Temple.