Date: November 10th 2008

From: Kauai_Hindu_Monastery@jnanadana.com Date: Sunday, November 9, 2008


The Master Course
The lesson of the day from Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami's trilogy: Dancing with Siva, Living with Siva and Merging with Siva
Lesson 211
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Lesson 211 : What Is Dharma? What Are Its Forms?
Dharma is the law of being, the orderly fulfillment of an inherent nature and destiny. Dharma is of four main divisions, which are God's law at work on four levels of our existence: universal, human, social and personal. Aum.


Sloka 56 from Dancing with Siva
What Is Dharma? What Are Its Forms?
Dharma is the law of being, the orderly fulfillment of an inherent nature and destiny. Dharma is of four main divisions, which are God's law at work on four levels of our existence: universal, human, social and personal. Aum.

Bhashya
When God created the universe, He endowed it with order, with the laws to govern creation. Dharma is God's divine law prevailing on every level of existence, from the sustaining cosmic order to religious and moral laws which bind us in harmony with that order. We are maintained by dharma, held in our most perfect relationship within a complex universe. Every form of life, every group of men, has its dharma, the law of its being. When we follow dharma, we are in conformity with the Truth that inheres and instructs the universe, and we naturally abide in closeness to God. Adharma is opposition to divine law. Dharma prevails in the laws of nature and is expressed in our culture and heritage. It is piety and ethical practice, duty and obligation. It is the path which leads us to liberation. Universal dharma is known as rita. Social dharma is varna dharma. Human dharma is known as ashrama dharma. Our personal dharma is svadharma. Hinduism, the purest expression of these four timel
ess dharmas, is called Sanatana Dharma. The Vedas proclaim, "There is nothing higher than dharma. Verily, that which is dharma is Truth." Aum Namah Sivaya.

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Lesson 211 from Living with Siva
The Computer Generation
You have all met the new, cool, calculating computer generation, about which I have an observation. And it is truly the human right of every soul on the planet, at this time in the Kali Yuga, to make observations and comment on them. Furthermore, it is the duty of concerned men and women to speak out on what they observe, to thus reaffirm the dharma. My observation is that learning from computers is taking youth in the opposite direction from sampradaya, the imparting of wisdom person to person, heart to heart, mind to mind, teacher to student, satguru to shishya. The teacher passes on not only information, but the mature refinements of attitude and behavior through personal guidance and healthy association.

Young people used to love and respect, honor and extol their teachers. They would work to qualify to get into prestigious schools and vie with one another for the privilege of sitting before an Einstein or a Bose. Now they can buy advanced teachings on a CD or order them up freely on the World Wide Web. Maybe soon they will be able to download their diploma, to sign, frame and hang on the wall!

In 1993, Prodigy, one of the largest producers of computer educational material, said that 300,000 of its two million online users are children. There they find encyclopedias, games, chat forums and interactive books and magazines, such as NOVA, National Geographic and more. There are several "homework helpers" that can access volumes of data at the click of a mouse. The Software Publisher's Association, a research group based in Washington, D.C., says the market for CD-ROM educational software is skyrocketing. For example, entranced before the computer, a child can explore every inch of an eighteenth century warship, displayed in cross-sectional views, meet the crew, study navigational tools and search for the young stowaway hidden somewhere in the hull.

"What's wrong with that?" you might ask. In itself, nothing. I am not against computers. We have dozens of them in our monasteries. My concern is that the student who learns predominantly from the computer receives too little person-to-person nourishment, and is not even obliged to express human feelings anymore. The feelings of love and appreciation, respect and adulation, of thankfulness, acceptance and responsibility can all be suppressed or, worse, never developed during the formative years of life.

Since the computer craze began, when Apple produced the Macintosh and Microsoft began marketing software, I have observed the impact on youths of learning mainly from computers rather than people. The outcome is a cool, calculating, almost robotic individual with a blank look in his eyes. He can just turn the computer off anytime and be the smartest one in the family. Does anyone really yet know what registers in the objective and subjective mind of a youth being educated by the computer, who spends nearly all of his waking hours glued to a computer screen? Does anyone care?
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Sutra 211 of the Nandinatha Sutras
Facing The Past To Prepare For Death
Siva's devotees give spiritual counseling to the terminally ill who are blessed with the knowledge of death's approach, showing ways to resolve the past so that Siva consciousness is their bridge during transition. Aum.
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Lesson 211 from Merging with Siva
Meet Your Physical Body

Introduce yourself to your physical body by looking into a mirror today, a full-length one if possible. Say to yourself aloud, "I am not my physical body. I am much greater than my physical body." You will immediately see this to be true if you approach the mirror and stand before it with these two thoughts in mind. Then listen to yourself saying, "I am not my physical body. I am much greater than my physical body." The physical body is only one of the vehicles through which your highest being functions. To gain a concept of how much greater you really are, you must first begin bringing those several vehicles under your conscious control. This is done first by using the power of understanding, which is about fifty percent of the application of control when it comes to the world of the mind.

Quite often new aspirants coming to me to enter the classical yoga path will say, "I am sick of this body and its desires. I want to renounce it and live entirely spiritually." There is nothing wrong with such a resolve, except that usually the aspirant really means, "I have no control over my body. I don't understand it, nor any of my emotional drives. They control me, and somehow I can't get away from the consciousness of them."

As long as you react to your physical body, despising or cherishing it too much, you cannot progress well in sadhana or religious life. However, through the practice of concentration of the flow of thought forces, and through the deliberate use of your willpower, the power of cognition, deep understanding will unfold within you, acting as a controlling agent of the odic forces that sometimes can be so turbulent.

As an exercise in concentration, locate the different parts of your physical body through feeling while sitting still. Feel all of your muscles. Feel each bone. Locate them with your mind's eye. Feel every organ, your heart, your liver, etc. Feel your circulatory system, the warmth, the flow. You are using the feeling faculties of the subconscious mind, the part of the subconscious that governs the involuntary processes of the body. The other part governs the involuntary processes of the mind, such as habits. In feeling the various parts of the body you are actually becoming consciously conscious of odic force, using the aggressive vibration of this force to become conscious of the physical body.