ERGING WITH ShIVA: HINDUISM'S CONTEMPORARY METAPHYSICS IS THE CULMINATION OF FIFTY YEARS OF TEACHING. IT WAS DRAWN TOGETHER BY GURUDEVA IN UNFAILING DAILY AFTERNOON EDITING SESSIONS FROM JANUARY, 1997 TO NOVEMBER, 1998. This third book in the Dancing, Living and Merging with Siva trilogy was designed and illustrated by the acharyas and swamis of the Saiva Siddhanta Yoga Order at Kauai's Hindu Monastery on the Garden Island of Kauai. This second edition was edited and assembled in QuarkXPress 4.1 on a Fast and Gigabit Ethernet network of Apple Macintosh PowerBook G4 Titanium computers and PowerMac G4 Servers. The text is set in Adobe's Minion family of fonts to which diacritical marks have been added using Fontographer: 12.5-point medium on 15-point linespacing for the body of the book and 8.25 on 9.75 for the glossary and index. Sanskrit and Tamil fonts include those by Ecological Linguistics, Brahmi Type and Srikrishna Patil. Original artwork was scanned on a Heidelberg Linoscan 2200 flatbed scanner and color corrected in Adobe Photoshop 7.0. Production was supervised by Tiru A. Sothinathan of Uma Publications in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with printing on 85 GSM coated art paper by a Komori Lithrone L440 four-color offset press at Sampoorna Printers Sdn. Bhd. The cover is printed on Kivar 7 Performa Graphic White covering material with Antique embossing.

The cover art is a watercolor by Tiru S. Rajam, 83, of Chennai, India, commissioned for this book in 1997. The painting on the half title page is by the same artist, a venerable national treasure of South India, music composer and traditional Tamil Saivite artist whose work is permanently exhibited in the British Museum in London. The vivid oil portrait of Gurudeva on the back cover and the Ganesha facing the half title page were gifts by India's renowned artist and national treasure, Sri Indra Sharma, 77, during his sojourn on Kauai in late 1997. He was also commissioned to execute the portrait of Jnanaguru Yogaswami on page iv. The elegant and philosophically rich paintings that initiate each chapter, as well as the color alphabet initials, are the work of Tiru A. Manivelu, 59, commissioned in 1998, with several new paintings executed for "Cognizantability" in the months prior to the completion of this second edition. The background patterns adorning the title pages were created in Adobe Photoshop 7.0 by a gifted soul of our sannyasin order based on Manivelu's paintings. Assistance in original indexing and the glossary was provided by Mr. Jnanadeva Shanmuganatha. The index was finely retooled for this second edition by Tirumati Chamundi Sabanathan of Santa Rosa, California, using Sonar Bookends. Gurudeva enjoyed painting with vibhuti on black paper the art that appears on the title page of each chapter. A few of Gurudeva's original handwritten aphorisms and commentaries from the 1950S appear on the pages of "Cognizantability."

For the transliteration, or spelling, of Sanskrit words we chose the system used by Monier Williams (1819-1899) in his Sanskrit dictionaries. It seemed more natural to us than the system now used in academic texts. Denoting the ch sound and the sh sounds are two of the main differences. In the academic system, the ch sound (as in chakra) is rendered by a simple c. We chose ch instead, because in English the c is always sounded as c as in count, or c as in cinder, never as a ch sound, as in charm. We also sought a system that does not require a change in spellings when diacriticals are dropped off. That's why we also chose to not use the dot under the s for CE, and instead use sh, and to put an i after r, as in rishi. A chart of pronunciation is found on page 857.

Assistance in Sanskrit translation was provided by Dr. Swamy Satyam, with Sanskrit proofreading by Dr. P. Jayaraman, Executive Director, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Woodside, New York, and Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D., Director, Yoga Research Center, Lower Lake, California. Proofreading of the entire book was completed by Vayudeva and his wife Peshala Varadan of Rockville, Maryland, and Mrs. Sheela Venkatakrishnan of Fremont, California.

Finally, we express a heartfelt mahalo nui loa (that's our Hawaiian-style "thank you") to devotees worldwide who supported this book with pujas and prayers, and to all the insightful souls who thoughtfully penned encouraging reviews and comments. Thank you, thank you, thank you.