OM Keval's KornerOM

Mike Brooker's home on the Web


Welcome.  Bienvenue.  Swagatam.  Namasté.  Just what the cyber world needs, another personal homepage from a guy named Mike!  Yes, I know that Mikes are a dime a dozen, and for years Michael has been the most common given name for boys in the English-speaking world.  (It's also popular in the non-English world, as the name translates easily: Michel, Miguel, Mikhail, etc.)  But around my yoga buddies and spiritual fellow-travellers, I sometimes go by the Sanskrit name Keval (means literally "whole", or "absolute", and is the root stem of kaivalya "liberation") hence the alternate title for this home page.

Who I be:

Mike After evolving through numerous lifetimes, the "Mike Brooker" incarnation of a Homo sapiens  took birth in this body on March 18, 19something in Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A.   Never mind the year...suffice to say I was born during the Eisenhower and Diefenbaker administrations, but after the Dodgers and Giants moved west!  Although I've also lived for a while in Windsor, ON, Montreal, PQ, Sudbury, ON, and have racked up almost enough time at the Kripalu Center to qualify as a registered voter in the state of Massachusetts, my home town is the 5th largest incorporated city in North America¹ ², Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  I have dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship, as well as being a citizen and the de facto Head of Government of the Inner Realm of Patria  (Sanskrit: Antarbhumi Ramrajya), a sovereign, independent micronation - at least it is in cyberspace!  I am a graduate of the School of Translators & Interpreters at Laurentian University. I also have a diploma in Library and Information Technology from Seneca College.  Languages that I have studied, or at least have a working knowledge of, include French, German, Russian, Latin, Hindi, and Sanskrit.  I even attempted to construct my own language, "Patrienish", as a high school student, to serve as one of my micronation's official languages.

I don't intend to post my résumé on this website! Other than my micronational job as a Congressman in the Congressus Patriaë (Patria's national assembly, where I represent the city of East Castoropolis in the Precinct of Cæsarea), let's just say I have been gainfully employed, albeit in a few jobs that majorly sucked in the last century.  A good chunk of this site will be devoted to my spiritual evolution on the path of Sanatan Dharma - also known as Vedic Dharma, Sanatan Vedic Dharma, and often inaccurately in the Western world as "Hinduism" - and affirming this Dharma as a universal spiritual path in the 21st century.  Read all about it in Hinduism Today magazine.  Although I grew up in two of Toronto's major Jewish neighbourhoods, went to Hebrew school as a child, spent several childhood/Nixon administration summers at Camp Northland/B'nai Brith, was Bar-Mitzvah'ed, spent my teenage years at Forest Hill Collegiate (where 80% of the students were Jewish), and even had a close friend and grade-school classmate who became a rabbi, I would have counted myself Hindu on the Census of Canada, had I received the long census form that included questions on religion and ethnicity.  I began doing yoga in 1989 and experienced a spiritual awakening that began late in that year, inspired in part by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, but in a greater part by my going beyond the hatha yoga postures to study some of yoga's spiritual context. I fell in love with many of the Hindu deities, rituals, and chanting in a way that I still can't explain intellectually.  But to paraphrase the late Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign slogan, in my heart I know it's right.  Having always been interested in learning languages (I can still recite from memory most of my Bar Mitzvah Torah and Haftarah portions), my interest in Sanskrit came naturally.

That's me as a 5th grader in the Nixon administration, with my long-deceased pet rats, Goofy and Templeton. The latter name was borrowed from Charlotte's Web.  They've since evolved into higher forms of life.  But beware - the laws of karma can go both ways.  Your next birth may be as a rat!  If you are fond of pet rats <:3 )~~ visit The Dapper Rat.

I am not related to another Michael Brooker, a 6' 6" guard/forward who played for Vince Carter and Michael Jordan's alma mater, the University of North Carolina in 1999-2000.  You can still read his bio and stats here, although he has since graduated and never even got a sniff of the NBA.  I am also not related to a Michael Brooker who works for Foreign Service Canada in Ottawa, though I wouldn't mind having his job!

And oh yes, I am still single.  I would like to meet some unattached, non-smoking, spiritually-evolved yogic women, although I have an autism-related disability, Asperger Syndrome, (ignored and/or misdiagnosed for over 30 years) that severely affects my social skills and may make intimate relationships impossible, not that I've tried much since the Carter administration or the summer between high school and first year university.

¹   Since the creation of the so-called "Megacity" on Jan. 1, 1998 in which the provincial government forcibly merged the City of Toronto with the cities of North York, Scarborough, East York, York, and Etobicoke, only New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Mexico City have larger populations within their municipal limits than Toronto.

²  Although 43 people died of SARS in the Toronto area in the spring and early summer of 2003, and the World Health Organization briefly issued a travel advisory, the disease is now just a memory.  If you plan to visit Toronto, SARS won't kill you, and neither will H1N1 a.k.a. Swine flu, but the gun-toting gangs and thugs in this rapidly decaying out of control city might.

What's on this site:


There's also no java script, finicky applets, and other fancy doodads that add little to the content but could crash your browser and make the page painfully slow to load.

What's NOT on this site:

Root, Root, Root for my home teams:

U.S. flag September 11, 2001 -- Like Dec. 7, 1941, June 6, 1944, or Nov. 22, 1963, the date stands alone and needs no further explanation.  Please visit The Sept. 11 Digital Archive and let's hope Osama bin Laden and the other sick thugs who perpetrated this cowardly, dastardly act are eventually brought to justice or have the justice they've been escaping since 9/11/2001 brought to them.  God Bless America!  My country 'tis of Thee!   As a U.S. citizen, I am entitled to some flag-waving jingoism!  At least to remember the victims of 9/11, not to cheer on George W. Bush's war on Iraq, concocted only to make Dubya look like a big hero, finish the job for his father, clinch his legitimate election in 2004, and leave an unwinnable war -- not to mention a f***ed up economy -- for Barack Obama to inherit on and after Jan. 20, 2009.  Any idiot knows that Saddam has nothing to do with 9/11 or Al-Qaeda, and had no WMD's to boot. (Of course, 12/26 - the tsunami that struck Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, etc. on Dec. 26, 2004 - was far worse than 9/11 in terms of destruction and lives lost.  But can you get angry with or go to war against God?)

Dayashakti Sandra Scherer (1943-2003)
Dayashakti
In memory of a wonderful, nurturing teacher, who passed away (much too soon) of breast cancer.  I will always fondly remember Dayashakti's programs and workshops, particularly the "Riding the Wave" that she developed during and after her many years as a Kripalu resident.
Red Ensign  Restore the Red Ensign - Canada's true flag!

Thank you for visiting.  If you like this page, or even if you want to tell me "your page sucks", please e-mail me: aum108@idirect.com   Please copy or cut & paste the address into your e-mail system.  Sorry for the inconvenience, but I have removed the <mailto: > tags to stay one step ahead of the spammers, who often use "scavenger bots" to harvest e-mail addresses from Web pages.  Spammers will be larted, though it may not help much to get the buggers thrown off ISPs.

If you have Yahoo! Messenger, you can chat with me live.  My "buddy name" is Patria1818  You can also follow me on Twitter or poke me on Facebook.

This site was hosted by Internet Direct which used to be Ontario's #1 Internet Service Provider, back in the days when 56k dial-up was considered cutting-edge fast, before it was swallowed up by Look Communications, which in turn was swallowed up by Telnet Communications.  But at least they let me keep the Idirect.com domain name and my old e-mail address.

© 1999-2009, Mike Brooker. Page updated Oct. 22, 2009.  Reproduction in whole or in part without the express written consent of the creator of this page (that'd be me, not Brahma the Creator) is bad karma and a violation of Canadian and international copyright laws to boot.  Spamming is even worse karma.  Ahimsa does not apply to those bottom-feeding sewer rats!