An Appeal to All Blessed Souls

Gurucharanam Saranam

An Appeal to All Blessed Souls

Mukundan P.R.


Great preceptors (rishis) impart the guidelines of dharma in each age - the cosmic scheme behind life and the duty of man according to the aeonic changes. The Rishis are considered the guiding authorities on dharma, justice and duty owing to their omniscience, life of self-abnegation and spiritual elevation. But due to our ignorance, we still follow rituals and traditions that create divisiveness and disharmony in the society. The ‘sudra’ represents the ignorant and downtrodden class in the world whose spiritual and materialistic elevation is destined to be actualized in this age. But for its realization, they require the guidance of an omniscient seer, who could show them the path of liberation.

The Brahmic Will to be self responsible for the divine dispensation for god realization existed from the beginning of creation itself and continues incessantly. It is the same godly will that manifests as the Subtle Being, Godhead, as a Deva, Sanyasi (sage) or a Rishi and accepts worship through these mediums in the course of ages. But there is a concept known as Yuga Dharma. Different aeons like Krita, Treta and Dwapara had their characteristic dharmic dispensation, which in the present age – Kaliyuga undergoes significant changes. These changes in the dharmic code (Yuga Dharma) are brought about by great seers of transcendental knowledge, who manifest as the embodiment of enlightenment and divine abstraction as willed by God.

Even during the ages of Treta and Dwapara that were oriented for polytheistic worship of Devi-Deva (gods and goddesses), the words of Rishis, the enlightened seers were depended upon as the guiding principles. At the time of Maharaja Janak, the judgments in regard to dispensation of justice were taken by the wives of Yagnavalkya, the great rishi of that age. They had the divine insight to decide on matters of justice without even seeing the contestants, the accused or the accuser. The blind folded goddess of wisdom has been accepted as the symbol of justice even today. Despite differences in rituals, in the matters of justice, the words of a seer (jnani) are taken as authoritative. The uniqueness of the Indian spirituality or Sanatana Dharma is this tradition.

We are ignorant about the differences in the result (virtue, punya) earned from the observance of customs, rituals and worship followed by us at the present time. Due to the moral degeneration and lack of virtue in conduct, majority of people have become ‘Sudra’. The word Sudra here includes people from all castes – Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaisya and Sudra. All ignorant and fallen people irrespective of caste, color, nationality and religious denominations are termed as Sudra, a qualitative term. As per the four fold caste system, the present age Kaliyuga belongs to the Sudra class for their uplift and enlightenment. The term ‘Sudra’ used here, as already mentioned, is a qualitative term used in a universal sense and includes Christians, Muslims, Budhists, Jains etc. and also the spokesmen of the modern computer age and the apostles of various ideologies and concepts. Therefore the word ‘Sudra’ embraces both the potentialities and also its limitations. The limitation of the Sudra is that he has no wisdom to dive deep into the spiritual light hidden in the historical past and apply it in life in the present age so as to enhance and enrich the glitter of his or her soul through a noble and righteous path of action.
According to Manu, the ancient law giver, this fourth age of Kali is earmarked for the Sudra for his liberation and enlightenment. But we should not think lightly of our lack of awareness and inability to understand the demerits in the customs, rituals and worship we follow at the present age, which are incapable either to liberate us from our (negative) karmic mould or to give us the blissful evolutionary soul experience. We might see the observance of caste system as insignificant which created the evils of social barriers and discriminations; we might ignore too the ignorance that termed spiritual consciousness as communalism. But how do we evaluate the corruption in the path of eternal dharma proclaimed by the Rishis in accordance with the Will of Brahman? How do we see the vested interests that disturbed the harmony at home causing motherly and fatherly curse and sorrow?

How can you justify the horrendous actions by which sinners who are useless for their home as well as the society, performing evil actions and accumulating great burden of sin, at last adorn the clothes of a Sanyasi, get elevated in the society with the support of caste or religion? How can you justify the wicked action of those men who castigated and belittled the sages, the embodiment of sacrifice and divine enlightenment and from whose mind, the pearls of wisdom churned out of the ocean of transcendental truth emerge; of those who raise the men of letters (mere scholars) to the pedestal of seers thus destroying the divine tenderness of dharma? The Sudra, the fourth in the caste hierarchy has got the right by divine decree to earn the karmic and ancestral purity required for the birth of noble souls and experience godly realization in this age. He has also got the luck to safeguard the oneness of mankind till the end of creation. But in whom does the karmic virtue exists to lead him to this goal – in the depth of the heart of a Seer or in some tantric rituals?

The Tantric and Vedic rituals and chants which were reverberating in the last century have almost come to a stop. Sri Marthanda Verma, the Travancore Maharaja used to feed thousands of Brahmins and give away handfuls of gift to them in expiation of sins, but for the last forty years the ceremony has become lifeless; the noble minded give importance to ‘Sadhu Pooja’ – the worship of sages than to the feeding of Brahmins. Who are the Sadhus or the Sanyasis? Is he a lowly beggar who has lost all hopes in life due to penury and lack of virtue or are they the ones who get afflicted by incurable diseases owing to their vices and sin and as a last resort adorn the clothes of a Sanyasi? No, on the contrary, as mentioned before, the seers are great souls who have sacrificed their life, body and mind for the cause of dharma. We should expect the fulfilling action that would be venerated by the ensuing generation, not only in our land but all over the world, only from such seers. The purity of their heart symbolizes the weighing scale of dharma and adharma. They are the divine personification of sacrifice and austerity.
What the world searches today with a longing heart is for such a seer of sacrifice through whom the grand unfoldment, development and fulfillment of Yuga Dharma is to take place. Do we respect that Universal Guru seated in the hearts of Krishna, Buddha, and Christ, Prophet Mohammed, Janaka, Vishwamitra, Maitreyi and Gargi imparting eternal, transcendental enlightenment? If we are waiting for the coming of that great Soul, the leading Light of the five-fold Gurus, the protector and elucidator of the concept of Yuga Dharma, why do we open ‘Bala Gokulams’ all along the roadside? Would we have been celebrating Krishna Leela which reminds us of the ‘Deva Dasi’ system rooted in base sensual enjoyment instead of the noble thoughts on God? Would we ever try to portray Lord Krishna who for the first time blew his Panchajanya for the establishment of Yuga Dharma as the lustful, sensual ‘Gopala Krishna’ through texts like Gita Govindam - creations out of great ignorance? Whatever it is, we are also the inheritors of that pernicious tragedy.

It may be due to the fact that we are also part of that sinful tradition we could not well understand Guru (Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru) and the Santhigiri Guru parampara. Nevertheless, Santhigiri Guru Parampara has reached the penultimate peak of luck. We have discovered the deposits of transcendental truth in the boundaries of Guru Parampara, born from the sacrifices of Guru. Through this medium God has prepared for us, in the form of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru, we have become the possessors of Cosmic Mind. Like Gargis and Maitreyi, the Jananis (Sanyasinis in Santhigiri Ashram) blessed with transcendental vision ennoble this Guru lineage through the worship of Guru.

This Guru Parampara which receives revealed words from Brahman, the Supreme Light of God promises the certitude of the divine birth of great seers, the initiators of great concepts, like Janaka and Vishwamitra in the coming ages. (It refers to the performance of ‘Guru Pooja’ in Santhigiri Ashram, by which Guru cleanses the ancestral and spiritual impurities and debilities and through which a generation with mental and physical prowess would take birth in the families thus purified by Guru).

In the divine experience of great souls, they see Guru as the illumination of all godly abstractions and the ever lasting, sublime light of love. We consider this glory as the ultimate path of refuge for all people and the entire creation. Lo, through that path of protection, we first walk, nearer and nearer. O Guru, you are enthroned as all Godly abstractions and divine consecrations. You exist as the Cosmic Will and the glorious abode of our veneration.

Submitting our prostrations at your holy feet, we purify the flaws in our ancestry, spiritual practices and customs and also find a solution to the familial curses and sorrows of our mothers and fathers. We have become singers of the glory of the universal path of liberation. We have fulfilled through this the prayer of great sages, the result of their penance of several ages. This path of purity is the fulfillment of God’s wish from the inception of creation itself.

We, the Santhigiri parampara, submit this in front of the whole world with a prayer for the mercifulness of Guru.

(Excerpts from ‘India O’ Rise’ published by Santhigiri Ashram, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala)

Gods Own Hermitage

Gurucharanam Saranam

Gods Own Hermitage

Mukundan P.R.


A great Light appeared on the spiritual sky of India on 1st September, 1927 at Chandiroor in the Alappuzha district of Kerala. It was a Thursday. Sri Krishna, whom the world venerates as a great Avatar, was born in a dark prison cell. Jesus Christ, whom the humanity worships as a Savior, was born on a bed of hay beside a cattle shed. Though the great prince Siddhartha of Kapilavasthu was born in a palace, he chose to reside in the rustic hermitages of wandering ascetics.

The great Luminance that appeared on the spiritual sky of India on 1st September, 1927 at Chandiroor was born in a decrepit hut made of mud and thatched with coconut fronds. The simplicity of truth and the immense magnanimity of the Divine is the mark of such divine manifestations. The great Light which descended upon earth at Chandiroor is none other than Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru.

God realization has nothing to do with religious identities and rituals. The great Guru realized this truth and did not hesitate to accept a Sufi fakir as His spiritual mentor in the initial years of search for truth. Today Santhigiri Ashram is home for all people seeking spiritual solace and guidance - irrespective of caste, creed and religious differences. A secular model, which aims to unite people, has great relevance in this troubled times of religious fundamentalism and extremist violence.

Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru, after tortuous experiences in life and wanderings without food and shelter and undergoing painful trials and crossing of spiritual stages, came to this place at Pothencode, in the year 1968, making it His permanent abode. It was as per a divine intimation.

A small hut was made with bamboo sticks and coconut leaves in the wild environment which at that time was surrounded by thorny bushes, wild animals and serpents. This was the nascent beginning of the great monument – the Parnasala, which stands before us today in all splendors.

The Parnasala – originally meaning a hermitage made of leaves has, apart from its meaning of simplicity and spiritual significance, an additional meaning, symbolized by its lotus shape. It is a meaning which takes us to the sublime experience of beauty, tranquility and divine joy, which is implicit in the concept of Lotus and into which experience, the Parnasala lifts up our soul.

Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru spent His life discoursing about the epistemological change required in this unprecedented age of transformation, which unless heeded can lead humanity to a civilizational cul-de-sac or a rupture in the march of humanity towards peace and progress.

Guru took great risk as well as pain to separate the clutches of religion from the pure joy and freedom of spiritual experience. The Secular Spirituality propounded by Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru is based on this separation of religion from the truth of spiritual experience.

Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru struggled to guide the downtrodden people to the knowledge of life-principles vital for soul enrichment and social progress – a knowledge that had been denied to them for several centuries in the name of tradition and culture. The Guru guided them and lifted them up to an astounding level of spiritual understanding in order to unite them, to build up and nourish their families and the society to which they belonged through life supporting charitable activities and enterprises.

Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru tried to lighten the struggle of life by initiating a way of life – a community-living on which the members of the community can depend on to find the means of living together without any discriminative boundaries of caste, religion, class and gender differences. This model of living and growth which Guru envisioned based on the belief in the Oneness of God and mankind is a perfect model for the ailing civilization of our times.

The Parnasala of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru represents all that is good in human endeavor to build up a unified world. It is one of the rarest monuments in the world and will be a land mark of great spiritual significance in the coming years. In addition to its status as ‘Gods Own Country’, Kerala will now become famous for the Parnasala; one might call the Parnasala as ‘Gods Own Hermitage’ or Home.

Let the bright light emanating from this most graceful edifice embrace the whole world and unite the heart of human beings in love and mutual respect, based on divine truths in nature. Navajayoti Sree Karunakara Guru has left behind the legacy of a Guru-Disciple order, the splendid gem of which is Her Holiness Sishyapoojita Amrita Jnana Tapaswini, who guides Santhigiri Ashram as its spiritual head and whose tireless prayers and conception for the last ten years have born fruit in this blossoming of the Parnasala into a magnificent divine structure of global importance.

An outstanding spiritual gift of India

Gurucharanam Saranam

Parnasala - An outstanding spiritual gift of India
Mukundan P.R.

The beautiful Parnasala of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru is an outstanding spiritual gift of India to mankind. The holy Parnasala of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru has a spiritual historicity – a historicity which is characteristically secular and evolutionary in the growth of human society. The humanity stands at the threshold of turbulent times and great civilizational perplexities. This stage of human predicament is probably the consequence of a past which overlooked the indestructibility of spiritual values and the truth of its evolutionary character.
The universe exists on the wheels of evolution. Disregarding this truth brings stagnation to human civilization. The human civilization has evolved from a primitive state to the present level of development through various stages of evolution, both in spiritual and physical terms. This magnificent Parnasala is the symbol of this human evolution at this age of ours.

The Parnasala represents the sacrifice and teachings of the sages, Rishis and prophets down the ages who aspired to unite mankind in the Oneness of God. Their aspirations for humanity stand actualized in this beautiful lotus shaped Parnasala of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru, emitting the tenderness of love, spiritual joy and fullness, beyond all boundaries of man-made discrimination.

Lotus is India’s national flower, which is not just a coincidence of choice. Lotus is connected to the acme of spiritual experience and joy, of purity and truth. Lotus conveys a message to us; rooted to the mother earth it exhorts us to transform ourselves into sublime beings of purity and truth, established in the love of God. Parnasala at Santhigiri conveys us this meaning.

The Lotus symbol of Parnasala is not born out of human intelligence or from the imagination of a worldly architect. Much before the blossoming of the Parnasala in the present lotus shape, after the spiritual fulfillment of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru In 1973, a Lotus with 2444 petals was shown in a spiritual vision. It was revealed further that the Lotus was symbolic of 2444 great souls who had taken birth for the spiritual evolution of mankind since the dawn of this new age – Kaliyuga, which commenced about 5200 years back, as per the ancient Indian time reckoning.

Since then, the Lotus carries a sacred significance for Santhigiri Ashram and occupies a place in its sanctum sanctorum. When the Guru left His physical body in the year 1999, again an oracle was received through Her Holiness Sishyapoojita Amrita Jnana Tapaswini that the small structure – the Parnasala of Guru, where His sacred body is interned should be rebuilt in the shape of a Lotus.

Her Holiness, Sishyapoojitha after she put the foundation stone for the Parnasala in the year 2001, directed the devotees in its construction day and night, as per the divine intimations. It was revealed to Her Holiness that the Parnasala should be built with a height of 91 feet with 21 petals and 21 supporting pillars. The 11 steps inside the sanctum signify Guru’s spiritual status of a supreme order. A lamp lit by the Guru many years ago, when He built the Ashram here, still burns inside. The flame will be kept burning forever. The memorabilia of Guru – the sacred articles used by the Guru shall be kept in the 12 chambers built above.

Thus the Parnasala of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru is the fulfillment of a divine Will in Nature for universal peace and opening of a new spiritual order. Both the western and eastern masters have predicted about the dawn of a new age of human development, peace and prosperity. The Supra-mental human evolution about which the great sage Sri Aurobindo Ghosh taught to his disciples refers to such an age of spiritual development, for which the world eagerly awaits.

In the present age of troubled peace and value distortions, of mindless violence and environmental threats, the teachings of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru give us a new insight and awareness into the human predicament. Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru has shown in an empirical way the possibility of a spiritual reconciliation and reorganization of religions into a single stream of spiritual awareness, which goes beyond religious rhetoric. There has always been a cherished desire in the heart of humanity, to have a unified approach to truth in regard to the Divine. It is this desire of the Universal Mind which finds its expression in the Secular Spiritual concept of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru.

Secular Spirituality of the great Guru has no religious, caste, creed, color or gender differences. Its premises are based on basic human concerns in its universality – concerns as much this worldly, connected to one’s health, family, society and environment as in the otherworldly, whatever meaning it holds for man. Guru focused on the subtle connection of health- both mental and physical to the soundness of the spiritual in man – a soundness based on human virtues in relation to his past, present and future encompassing even that of his forefathers who lived on this earth, who bequeathed the tradition and experience of long ages. The success and progress of humanity is based on this perspective of the past and its evolution in the onward march of time, and on an evaluation of what is wrong and right, and what is appropriate and essential to the age in which we live.

If this Creation has manifested from a Single Source, it is bound to have also its universality – a oneness which cannot be repudiated. The Secular Spirituality of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru realized this universality or singleness of man’s spiritual quest, which is all the more essential today to forge peace and unity among different peoples of the world.

India had a long tradition of secular thought as exemplified in the well known concept of ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbhakam’ – the whole world is one family. The vision of the ancient sages went beyond all human discriminations and touched upon the universal truth through internal spiritual visions of the Divine and of the worldly phenomena. The abstraction of the Rishis works in the same way as science, but only the methods differ. By the method of internal abstraction, as against the extraneous abstraction of scientific method, the Rishis of India had found the answers to the fundamental questions of existence, which physical science is slowly approaching to in concurrence.

Therefore, human civilization cannot forge ahead ignoring the embodiment of such spiritual abstraction in our midst. Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru is such an embodiment of universal vision and human compassion, who worked in His whole life for the peace of all people, especially the downtrodden, through life saving principles and activities for the development of society and life-situation, disregarding all man-made barriers. Guru taught them a method to live without the divisions and bitterness arising out of caste, religious, class and gender differences, as a commune of people working together for peace, family welfare and spiritual enlightenment, which is a unique model of development in the present age of rift and disquiet.

Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru affirmed that changes in thinking and in society cannot be superimposed; it should be brought about from the basic unit of any society, i.e., the individual and the family, in which women always have an important role. Therefore, Guru gave all prominence to women for their spiritual emancipation, an area, which is still conservative and unapproachable to women. The spiritual leadership of Her Holiness Sishyapoojita Amrita Jnana Tapaswini is a standing ovation of the success of women par excellent in the spiritual tradition of the whole humanity.

A new human generation will emerge in the world through the emancipating spiritual teachings of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru to affirm peace, spiritual excellence and overall development. Santhigiri will be the source for such a model of life and development on which the future can depend to address the universal concerns of degradation in different aspects of life that are troubling the conscience of humanity today.

The Parnasala of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru is the symbol of that hope of humanity. Parnasala indeed is the pristine spiritual gift of India to the rest of the world for spiritual sustenance and guidance. Parnasala, the hut where the great Guru began the Ashram and enlightened humanity on divine truths, is now the great spiritual banyan tree, permeating peace and spiritual joy to all, who come under its shade.

The Parnasala, which was dedicated to humanity by Her Excellency, the President of India, Smt. Pratibha Devi Singh Patil, will be opened for worship on 12th September, 2010 on the occasion of the birthday of Navajyoti Sree Karunakara Guru.