Book Review : Temple of Destiny

Title : Temple of Destiny

Author : Neeraj Singhvi

Publisher : Pustak Mahal

Temple of Destiny takes us to a journey of self realization when a person named Harrod travels to India in pursuit of finding answers to his queries. He comes to Guru Satyanand's ashram and on the very first day he is put into a course of four cycles -

The cycle of connectivity and integration

The cycle of wisdom

The cycle of self recognition

The cycle of self actualization

This book is dedicated to Harrod's progress in the first cycle - The cycle of connectivity and integration. He is asked to follow a very simple regimen of getting up early in the morning, meditating a little while followed by spending an hour or two in observing a tank with some fishes in it placed in a room which has nothing else there. In the evening , Guru invites Harrod to share his emotions and experiences of watching the activities of the fishes in the tank. This seems like a very trivial task to Harrod initially. With his mind already working at an accelerated pace desiring to learn too much too soon, he had his own apprehensions and doubts whether he would be able to learn anything from this activity. But as he spends more and more days doing the same set of activities in strict timely fashion, he realizes how every little thing and every small activity has the potential of teaching so much. Every day he gets an opportunity to delve deeper into his observation about the fishes, their happiness, their feeding patterns, their attachment with each other as well as with him, their need to have clean surroundings in order to cultivate positive and happy thoughts and much more.

Harrod narrates his observations to the Guru in the evenings and Guru helps him channelize his thoughts in such a manner that he begins to correlate many things and starts seeing the connection and common thread binding all living creatures thereby showing him the essence of the principal of connectivity and integration of mind, body, earth and the universe.

During their discussions together, Guru talks about the futility of materialistic life and how unimportant it is compared to the inner peace and inner happiness that we could attain which would eventually go with us. He enlightens Harrod about the bond of love and how emotions start ruling a human mind which leads to more suffering for the person himself/herself as well as the others concerned.

But I guess the most significant lesson that he learns and in turn all the readers will learn is how significant it is to slow down sometime and observe our surroundings. Once we master the art of observing keenly, we will be able to mend our own actions ourselves.

As I began reading this book, I was a little unsure, what unique thing will this book offer when there is a deluge of self-help books in the market. On some points, my doubts were proved wrong while on some I felt I doubted it correctly.

However, there are some serious problems with this book - the author mentions the course of fours cycles for the self-realization process but nowhere in the text is this mentioned that this book is dealing with just the first cycle or it is part I or the readers should expect or should not expect the other cycles in the following parts or just the first cycle description was the aim.

Unfortunately another Indian book which suffers from typos, grammatical mistakes and repetition of words and even repetitive text. I strongly believe that these spoilers ruin the overall impact of the book.

Overall a one time read book, not great but not bad either. My rating for this book would be 3/5.