Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti: Recent Episodes
Shunyamurti
Spiritual teachings by Shunyamurti, the founder and director of the Sat Yoga Ashram - a wisdom school, ashram, and the home of a vibrant spiritual community based in Costa Rica. Visit us at satyoga.org
The world has gone mad. Every kind of war is breaking out, at every level of social organization and individual ego structure. Yet, there is divine order hidden in this utter chaos. It is our spiritual duty to emanate peace and divine love and, amid the exploding bombs, to deliver the healing balm of the Presence of God.
We are at the historic moment of showdown at every fractal level of the holographic motion picture show. To win the duel with the ego, the soul must be willing to surrender to the Real Self. But certain preparations must be made to disempower the ego. If one knows the stages of the path, it is easier to navigate through the narrow passage to Freedom.
A divine process is underway, whether an individual recognizes it or not. All that happens is the will of the Infinite Intelligence that is unfolding the cosmic drama. Evil energies are now in the process of destroying themselves, creating conditions for a renaissance of the highest potencies of God-consciousness to emerge and bring a new world into being. All who love God will soon feel their kundalini rising rapidly toward infinity.
Once you have broken through the illusion of egocentric perception and recognized the personal identity as fictional, there is no going back to ignorance. Even though the illusory ego will try to fill you with dread as it disintegrates in the full light of Infinite Consciousness, once the traces of ego identity have all been annihilated, the inconceivable power and scope of the Self will be realized as all there ever was or will be.
The metaphor of plasma brings clarity as to the higher powers of the mind. Once the alchemical process of kundalini cultivation is underway, the energy of consciousness can be modulated to higher frequencies that will come to vibrate through the body and the morphogenic space. This revisioning of the meaning of yoga makes the transcendent heights of Total Presence more immediately accessible.
Every ego has been framed. Even knowing that though, it continues its self-framing regardless of the suffering that it causes to itself. The ego prefers a dysfunctional identity to none at all. Every authentic spiritual tradition tries to offer a way out, but very few egos are interested.
The unfolding drama in the unreal world is but the rebirth pangs of Cosmic Self-realization. The Eternal Light of God is washing away the last traces of the manifest mandala of divine human history and those of every world system—simply by dissolving the stain of emotionality that hides the Bliss of the Real. Recorded May 7, 2025
The world situation is dire. The US economy is in its death throes. Europe is also coming apart. Store shelves will soon be empty. War is threatened or has already erupted in every region. And the same is happening in the microcosm of nearly every ego. Chaos is accelerating to final destruction. Yet this is a blessing, a merciful quick end to a dying world. The Light of God is becoming more palpable as well, at least to those souls who have faith in and love for the Supreme Lord. We have the inherent right to choose redemption while still alive. Grace is given to all whose hearts are open.
What kind of world are we in? Could it be a fiction? How would that affect your ego’s crucifixion? And if the world is suddenly perceived as filled with zombies, how does the heart react? Does ego death seem more appealing? If so, we have a formula to help you disappear.
The role of narcolepsy—or we could call it “sleeping avatar” syndrome—in the life of Sri Ramana and (more generally) in the attainment of samadhi, is explored in this off-the-cuff digression. We also gain insight into the ways that destiny is inscribed in the prologue to our personal stories.
Shunyamurti explains the psychological and spiritual meaning and implications of the erratic Trump policies, as well the geopolitical effects of the rising tensions and conflicts in this accelerating phase shift that is now underway in the world—and replicated at every fractal level of reality. It is a true synchronicity that all this is unfolding just as we enter the Passover-Easter Holy Week.
This may be the last moment of calm to complete the rite of passage beyond the ego and its illusions and realize the deathless Self—before the storm of global conflict reaches its climactic phase. You may need to change your paradigm of reality to see our situation clearly in the context of total consciousness—to be able to do what is necessary to be free of a limiting identity.
Reality is being destabilized at every fractal level of manifestation. It may be most obvious at the geopolitical level. But it is happening at every level, in every institution, every relationship, and every personal psyche. One can make use of this situation by appreciating that it is loosening the grip of identifications and revealing what had been subconscious shadow thoughts and emotions, enabling one to alchemically transform that prima materia into pure Presence. The madness of language itself, the jouissance of the signifier, is the last vortex of resistance.
This talk was given as part of AscenDANCE, Anarchopulcho conference 2025. Get the lifetime replay of the entire conference here: https://anarchapulco.com/ascendance/
Description: The ancient mystics held these truths to be self-evident: The world has only relative reality. The Ground of our Being is an Inconceivable Intelligence. We are all artifacts of the imagination of that One Infinite Self. It is the will of that all-powerful Mind that the world must be sacrificed—and a new Creation, inhabited by beings filled with love, harmony, joy, and wisdom then will be made manifest.
This talk was given as part of AscenDANCE, Anarchopulcho conference 2025. Get the lifetime replay of the entire conference here: https://anarchapulco.com/ascendance/
As we witness the daily accelerating collapse of the global social order, and we see how the ruling institutions are run by psychopaths driving us directly to the Omega Point, to respond accurately requires a paradigm shift that reveals the blessings hidden behind the ominous dark clouds. But it takes courage to face the truth.
You’ve Been Framed! Break Free of All Frames of Reference! 5-Day Online Retreat Guided by Shunyamurti, Easter Weekend, April 18 - 22, 2025 https://bit.ly/Break-Free-All-Frames
If you are stuck in a limited identity as an ego, then you have been framed—victimized by a family system working for the larger social order to keep you under their control. You probably are burdened by a guilt complex even though you are still innocent, and further agitated by anger at the situation, and projecting the same forces into your current environment and relationships. So, the therapeutic technique of reframing is urgent. But the deeper work is to free your Self of all frames of reference and return to Your original infinite nature. This is the focus of our next online retreat.
Life in this dreamfield is becoming impossible. It is already surreal, and showing signs of suicidal madness. When the dream dies, the souls will all awaken from the illusion of lack and lostness to the light of eternal presence, the fulfillment of desire. Each has the freedom to awaken at any moment, simply by opening the heart to the fullness of love.
To become who you really are, you must drop the one you think you are and abide in not-knowing, in radically accepting that nothing is known at all. Nothing can be figured out by thinking. When every fiction has fallen away, the Absolute Real is revealed. Life was only ever about this.
In this discourse on deliverance from desire and dharma, the force vectors of suffering are deconstructed so that the desperation and depression of the lacking ego can be put to permanent rest. A simple error of logic knots Eros to Thanatos in the deflated heart.
This teaching is taken from our most recent retreat, The Secret of Instant Illumination! The Complete Audio-Video Retreat Teachings Package is now available: https://bit.ly/instant--illumination
You have to grok this paradox: You must want Illumination, but wanting will never reach it. The wanting must morph into surrender. Surrender even wanting. More than that, surrender the thought that there is anyone separate from God who must surrender. When there is no I-thought and no sense of Other or world—as in deep sleep but fully awake—the Self is realized and nothing else remains, or ever was.
The Light of God is always shining. But the ego mind has turned away from the Source and is lost in the darkness of delusion. This is the moment that the Supreme Self has chosen to return, bringing all souls back to the eternal stillness and peace of the Infinite Merciful Heart of the Real. For the ego, this will seem like world destruction, while for the illumined souls, this is the moment of redemption. The end is also the new beginning. The Kingdom of Heaven awaits those who surrender all to the Lord in humble adoration. Make use of this window of greatest opportunity while it is open. In this teaching, the seven secret teachings of Shiva are explained in depth. These keys will unlock the intellect’s ability to transcend the false self-identity and rise as soul-consciousness into the blissful unmanifest Divine Presence.
Once it is recognized that the apparent world is only the mind engaged in dreaming, then the nonduality of consciousness and its contents can be understood and its vast implications can be unfolded. But it can take some time to digest and integrate all the binaries (the polarities, like good and evil, immanent and transcendent) in order to gain accurate knowledge that brings freedom from suffering—even the awareness that there is no suffering, since the world and the whole seeming multiplicity of sentient inhabitants are unreal. The sticking point is the resistance to recognizing that you, as a being in the world, are also unreal. The delusional mental apparatus must be terminated.
This teaching clip is taken from the Avadhuta Revolution retreat. Purchase all the teachings here: https://www.satyoga.org/shop/products/retreat-package/the-avadhuta-revolution/
In this teaching Shunyamurti is reading from The Vajra Essence, Düdjom Lingpa’s Visions of The Great Perfection, Volume 3, Foreword by Sogyal Rinpoche, Translated by B. Alan Wallace, Edited by Dion Blundell
Description: The final period of every cycle of time is one of spiritual exhaustion, the soul’s exile from the Light of God, the ego’s nihilistic cynicism combined with narcissistic hubris, and the ominous approach of world destruction. We have arrived at that time. Fortunately, every spiritual tradition declares that such a hell realm is actually the most auspicious moment of all, for that is when the Inner Light returns—first only for a few—but then more and more souls become illumined. This is the true Festival of Lights. It is happening.
Online Weekend Intensive with Shunyamurti ~ February 14 - 16, 2025 ~ Pay What You Can Scholarships Available ~ The Secret of Instant Illumination! ~ https://bit.ly/Instant-Illumination
Description: Only once the heart is fully open and integrated with the intellect will the nondual wisdom accurately emerge and function with all its potency in the morphogenic field. This grace is always accessible if one is willing to use one’s margin of free will to surrender to the Absolute.
In the upcoming retreat on "The Secret of Instant Illumination," you will come to understand how “they” are boiling our souls like frogs in a pot. A time will come when denial is no longer possible—when events become too hot to endure. The good news is that, even when strength is lacking to leap out of the matrix, there is a way to attain instant liberation. This secret “Get Out of Jail” card will be transmitted to you to use when needed.
The Secret of Instant Illumination!
Online Weekend Intensive Guided by Shunyamurti
February 14 - 16, 2025
Learn More and Register: https://bit.ly/Instant-Illumination
The whirlwind of accelerating catastrophic change is wreaking havoc on the world, collapsing whole nations and blowing apart all the social structures and safety nets that we took for granted. But all this is a blessing if we choose to take refuge with the One Unchanging Self. Leave impermanence behind and connect with the Supreme Intelligence directing all this, morphing the world from a hell realm into a paradise for divine, luminous beings. The best job available now is to work for the Creator.
The ego-mind is conditioned and controlled by its habitual drives and thought patterns that prevent self-transformation. But through accurate analysis and understanding that arises from archetypal symbolic wisdom, one can unveil the profound Presence of God obscured by the ego’s incoherence.
This teaching is taken from All’s Well That Ends Well: The Re-Marriage of Shakti and Shiva ~ Get all 8 satsangs and guided meditations from this extraordinary retreat: https://bit.ly/all--well
Description: As we grow psychologically and spiritually, our understanding and appreciation of love evolve into more altruistic modes of expression and unconditional inclusion, until infinite love is attained. This is the glory of divinization and the completion of our pilgrimage through many lives to the real essence of who we are.
The best alternative to living in a society of narcissistic egos is to move into nonduality. There is, after all, only one Real Self. Why be crowded when you can enjoy infinite spaciousness?
Mastery of our two inherent powers, or siddhis, of shining with supernal light and knowing through reflective awareness is the key to redemption in this auspicious time when God is euthanizing a world in its terminal phase of degradation, suffering, and madness. We must come to accept the outrageous nonduality of good and evil. That may be the most difficult challenge.
Every moment is priceless as the world hurtles toward the Eschaton. The highest priority of yogis must now be such intense and one-pointed adoration of the Supreme Self that we earn the grace of liberation from our bondages to the illusory ego and its attachments. It is now or never.
The holy night of Christmas is a mythical representation of your own metamorphosis from human to divine. When the grace of silence descends upon the mind, the heart will blossom in overwhelming love of God and the sacred incarnation will occur.
Bring in the New Year with Shunyamurti!
7-Day Online Retreat - December 27, 2024 - January 2, 2025
All’s Well That Ends Well: The Re-Marriage of Shakti and Shiva
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Description: The Eschaton is a new beginning. A heavenly world is being prepared for those souls with the courage to attain the deathless consciousness that is revealed once the false ego has been jettisoned. The cosmos is a dream in the Mind of Shakti, the energy of the God-Self. Now, She is ending this dream that has become a nightmare and returning to Shiva, the unmanifest Supreme Intelligence. Then, in joyous union, Shiva and Shakti will dream a wondrous new adventure, a magical Golden Age inhabited by gods and goddesses with astonishing powers beyond our current imagination. Your passport to that miraculous realm is the Light of Grace you will receive in the instant of Self-realization. This is the focus of our upcoming retreat.
Bring in the New Year with Shunyamurti! 7-Day Online Retreat - December 27, 2024 - January 2, 2025 All’s Well That Ends Well: The Re-Marriage of Shakti and Shiva JOIN: https://bit.ly/shakti-shiva
Description: Learn to listen with the third ear to the Voice of Silence within. Only then can the mind grok the awesome truth that you are consciousness that has never been born and will never die. But the mental program of the ego must be eliminated to sustain the attunement to the Real. This teaching is exemplified in the fundamental tantra of the Dzogchen lineage.
Bring in the New Year with Shunyamurti! 7-Day Online Retreat - December 27, 2024 - January 2, 2025 All’s Well That Ends Well: The Re-Marriage of Shakti and Shiva JOIN: https://bit.ly/shakti-shiva
Description: A vampire is draining your life energy, dumbing you down, and keeping you in a state of internal oppression projected as an external world. The vampire is your ego. It produces incoherent and delusional attitudes that keep one paralyzed in the holographic nightmare. There is only one way to defeat a vampire.
Partial love is the cause of evil. Total love brings salvation. But there is no escape from love. The end of the world is love’s last laugh. But since love is eternal, the end is always a new beginning. Don’t you love it?
The Yogacara school of Buddhism asserts that we all have three natures. The first is imaginary, made up of projections of the ego. The second is other-dependent, which is equally unreal—but focused on the superego and its appendage, the external Other. Fortunately, we also have a third nature, and this is our sovereign freedom. This state of Self-realization is beyond duality and intellectual conception.
The Immanent-Transcendent Real can be recognized and attained through the help of symbols. The traditional iconography related to the most ancient portrayals of the Supreme Beingness in the form of Shiva—whether as lingam, as yogi, or as the Lord of Dance. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 13, 2009.
It is crucial to have a conversation with your future Death while you are still alive. Only once you are at peace with Death can you live a truly fulfilling life. What happens when you let go of identification with the body is then explained, revealing important esoteric information.
In this selection of recent questions asked in satsangs, every ego’s doubts, confusions, agonies, and theoretical speculations orbit around the same illusory premise that the ego mind’s ontological status is real and has a grasp of the true nature of reality, rather than emerging as a bubble monad entranced in a dream. The solution is always to awaken and pop the bubble.
The application of reason and Self-enquiry will cut through all confusion about the nature of reality and unveil the truth of the omnipresent power of the God-Self and the fact of nonduality. One will be moved spontaneously to serve God by performing good works and accumulating merit that nullifies the tendencies to egocentric behavior and thus completes the process of atonement leading to attunement and re-absorption in the great bliss of the zero point of the Supreme Real.
We read and reflect upon a teaching poem written ten centuries ago by the great Kashmiri sage Sri Abhinavagupta reveals the functions of God-Consciousness in these final days of this holographic presentation we call the world. Even more importantly, the difficulties of spiritual seekers are explained, as well as the way out of the illusion of individual existence.
Manifest reality can be perceived through the language of words, illuminating the symbolic meaningfulness and aesthetic qualities of its subtle spiritual nature. But the world can also be translated into the language of number. In the last ten centuries, human consciousness has become increasingly mathematized. Capitalism is all about quantity: how much is something worth, how many are available, what will be the amount of return on my investment, how large will be my profits in the coming year, etc. Mathematics is the main instrument of social control, military power, and economic policy. Without higher mathematics, there could be no weapons of mass destruction, no electric grid, no digital surveillance, no nanotechnology for biowarfare, no geoengineering, and no agents operating with artificial intelligence. The Word creates, Number destroys. Mathematics has no meaning, no heart, no mercy. We have all become mere numbers in the social order, dehumanized and devalued as useless eaters. But there is a third language of God: the language of Silence. Word creates, Number kills, but Silence saves. To save our souls, let us learn to commune with God in Silence.
Consciousness must go through the gateway of language without getting caught on the barbed wire of beliefs or paralyzed by paradox. To reach the Supreme Real, our attention must abandon its identifications with name and form and its attachments to the imaginary and the symbolic. To attain nonduality, the ego and its inherent fear of aloneness must be shed. To reach the Infinite, all concepts produced by the finite mind in its longing for certainty must also be dropped. Only in total Emptiness and surrender will the grace of God be granted.
The ego suffers from nostalgia for the lost pseudo-paradise of the womb and the adoring mother at birth. The soul suffers from gnostalgia for the lost ecstasy in the Heart of God. The God-Self laughs, as nothing real was ever lost.
The ego is the shadow of fear that haunts our lives and creates our suffering, increased by the ego’s addition of the compensatory defenses of anger, envy, hatred, avoidance, and other emotional tendencies that produce unhappiness. Inner work culminates in the recognition that the ego is unreal and obsolete as an operating system. Consciousness is then free to realize its unborn, formless, loving, and infinite nature.
Everyone is cracking up and going mad before our eyes—including the ego behind our eyes. If you do not want to be flooded with anxiety and dread, as you witness politicians and whole nations act insanely, and as loved ones are overcome with grief and fear, and your own mind plays tricks on you, the only power that can extricate you from this fragmenting matrix is inner silence, pure awareness free of thoughts, images, and affects. Meditating in the early morning hours is the best practice to attain salvation.
The true Self has nondual vision—perceiving the unity of samsara and nirvana, immanence and transcendence, form and emptiness. Once the split mind of the false ego has gained the courage to withdraw into stillness, the One Light is perceived within and in the many outer forms. The supreme will and intelligence who is dreaming this apparent world—your infinite Self—is now bringing a merciful end to the delusional hell realm that it has become, and will then dream a heavenly world to replace it. In the world to come, all will abide in our divine nature.
In this opening class on the analysis of a Buddhist book of poems on the attainment of enlightenment, we learn to focus on the unspoken implications of the text, to unravel metaphors, and to perceive contradictions and points of incoherence.
The Flight of the Garuda
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The different wavelengths of the mind transmit a wide spectrum of levels of consciousness and thus of happiness and freedom. You can change the station you are currently attuned to, and that will change your life. The sky is the limit of how high you can choose to fly into the Infinite Intelligence of the all-encompassing Self.
As we approach the Omega Point, destructive tendencies are increasing until they explode in total global war as well as massive upheavals of Nature, bringing this world cycle to a close. Before that, we have the opportunity to resonate with the highest wavelength of absolute consciousness and be absorbed into the deathless rapture of the Infinite Blissful Self. Consider this a test of how you deploy your inner freedom now, in the very short time that remains.
We are constantly receiving messages from God via the world, via dreams, and via meditative attention to our Being. If we modify our thinking and our plans in accord with the information that comes through synchronicities, and if we resonate with the vibrational frequency of the Supreme Real, karma drops away in nonduality.
We are acrobats of the Spirit! Our final and greatest performance is to transform from human to divine, from bodily beings in a material world to wondrous formless Presence in a Field of Supernal Light. Now is the moment for our latent powers to awaken!
You may think you are living in an existent world, but all is the imagination of an infinite intelligence. Your ego may believe it is in control, but that is only God’s joke. However, after the ego illusion drops away, You will realize You are the Joker.
Only the intensity of constant tapas, the white heat of the Fire of Yoga, brings the ecstasy of sahaja samadhi—and the power to overcome all obstacles. We must be victorious over the escalating chaos, depravity, and destruction that are laying waste our once unspoiled world. The purification of consciousness is the only means to dominate the death drive—and dream a new world into Being.
A potpourri of questions (and sometimes strange or shocking answers) on a variety of subjects related to the contemplative life is shared in this small harvest of crazy wisdom transmitted by Shunyamurti.
Do you have your own question for Shunyamurti? Join Online to Break Through to the Blissful Light! Online Weekend Intensive Guided by Shunyamurti September 6 - 8, 2024 https://bit.ly/break--through
To fully accept the perfection of all that seems to arise and occur in the world, because of recognition that all is the will of God, Whose wisdom and benevolence is infinite, is the ultimate test of faith. Only with complete authentic surrender to that Absolute Goodness of the Real will the heart open to unconditional love. And this is the portal to eternal bliss.
Fasting from the consumption of ego thoughts, whether they arise from within or without, leads to the full emergence of the infinite Self as the true essence and nature of consciousness. A bit of will power is required. And that, in turn, is the result of grace.
An extensive reading of the wisdom writings of St. Isaac of Syria reveals the congruence of Christian mystical teachings with those of Buddhism, Advaita, and nondual Shaivism. The goal of meditation is unwavering stillness of mind. The Zero Point is coextensive with infinity and filled with supernal light, power, awestruck wonder, and blissful union with the Absolute.
Do you really grok that the world is a dream? But who is the Dreamer? Are you not both? But since the dream is only the mind of the Dreamer, are not the two really one? And when the Dreamer stops dreaming, What abides?
Nothing could be easier than realization of the Self. The only obstacle is the narrative of the fictional ego, that has no interest in the discovery of its unreal nature—or in meeting its Dreamer—since the pseudo-self will die instantly in that encounter. But when you are weary enough of the burdens carried by the conditioned persona and long to be free—and you wholeheartedly make the decision to silence the ego’s mental chatter forever—the eternal Essence of your Being will shine with such power that the limited mind will be dissolved in the Infinite. Automatically, you will become a beacon that lights the way for all seekers of the Real.
Description: If you wholeheartedly yearn for God, or Self, or Infinite Consciousness—and have no other conflicting desires—then the path is easy and effortless. Simply attune to the Source of Presence.
This teaching is taken from Revelation of the Real: The Final Secrets of the Simulation and the Self. The complete retreat package is now available: https://bit.ly/retreat-package
Description: Self-decapitation is the first step on the path. But chopping off the ego mind, though necessary, is not sufficient. If you stop there, you may be lost in emptiness. By adoring Para Shakti, the World Mother, the Mind underlying all appearance, you will be recapitated with a divine intelligence. Then you will be free from the phenomenal plane, recognizing it as a mirror image of your dreaming mind.
We are in an unprecedented low tide of life’s ocean. Destructive forces are dominant. Reason has nearly disappeared. Law is a joke. Love is a myth. The meaning is a mystery. There is nothing to do but return to the Real, the Source of a new High Dreamtide.
Revelation of the Real: The Final Secrets of the Simulation and the Self | Online Weekend Intensive Guided by Shunyamurti | July 5 - 7, 2024 https://bit.ly/Secrets-Simulation
We are fast approaching the paradoxical culmination of history. This will unfold as the nonduality of destruction and salvation. God’s plan includes the transmission of divinizing shakti and the sacred anointment with the intoxicating nectar of infinite wisdom of those souls who are faithfully serving the Supreme Self by detaching from the unreal and abiding in the Real. You are invited to participate in our upcoming retreat in which the final secrets will be shared and your consciousness will be prepared for your ultimate apotheosis.
To be enraptured by the inconceivable beauty of the unmanifest Self, one must cut all clinging to identification with the bodily character one is playing in the holographic dream theater. Disinterest and dispassion for the fate of the icon will open the third eye that can then gaze adoringly at the infinite luminous glory of God-consciousness—and be filled with that splendor and majestic power.
When thoughts disappear through one-pointed focus on the inner light, the attention is absorbed into the ecstatic vibratory energy field of pure awareness, and the subjective sense dissolves into the object and becomes the bliss of liberation. Total surrender of all narratives is required to sustain that beatific state.
Fewer can remain in denial with every day that passes, as time accelerates toward the Eschaton. All systems are breaking down. The entire suffering hell ream of the world will soon undergo euthanasia, and all will return to the Light of God. Let us voluntarily surrender our ego identity programs, so that we can be fully saturated by the blissful luminosity of the Supreme Self—and leave this video game victorious!
Psychoanalysis was developed by a neurotic ego and designed to enable other neurotic egos to function more productively despite their inherent internal conflicts. But psychosis was another matter. It is a condition that could not be fully theorized or manipulated by psychoanalytic technique, and so the bizarre mode of suffering of a psychotic person was repressed to justify its limited focus and non-existent success rate.
This teaching clip is taken from our most recent retreat, The Practice of Self-Mastery. Purchase the entire retreat package now: https://bit.ly/mastery-retreat
Description: God’s secret, that the ego cannot grasp, is that the unmanifest potency (the Supreme Lord) emanates the manifest world—the form of the Goddess—within unmanifest Mind. The dream is not other than the mind of the dreamer. The dream is a dance of duality in all its possible expressions. The phenomenal plane is also the noumenal: samsara is nirvana. One must not take priority over the other, since they are the same.
Our inherent nature is pure love. This divine Eros manifests as love of Beauty, love of Goodness, love of Truth, and love of the Infinite Mystery of the God-Self. But to return to the innocence of divine love, we must transcend the ego’s demonic love of money, fame, domination, and self-deception. Only once our ego defenses have been demolished through surrender of weaponized thought, can the Heart open to the flood of divine love that has been dammed up within.
On a single day, various religions celebrate symbolically congruent holidays, but the names and myths obscure the unity of meaning behind the signifiers of difference. Yet, the pilgrims who take their destination seriously as an inner state of Being come to appreciate the divine humor of the illusory projection that seems to separate the many from the One.
Starts Tomorrow - Don't Miss! Online Weekend Intensive Guided by Shunyamurti - The Practice of Self-Mastery | May 17 - 19, 2024 https://bit.ly/Practice-Self-Mastery
The age-old problem that must be faced by adept yogis is how to deal with paranormal abilities, known as siddhis, that often appear unbidden, or can be deliberately developed, as a result of the increase in their power of concentration, intensity of intention, and strength of will. One must not allow any egoic desire for, or attachment to, such powers to arise. The price would be loss of the prize of liberation from the wheel of karma. Possessing siddhis would then amount only to vanity. But if one’s siddhis are surrendered to the will of God and employed only in divine service, if so ordained, then they can heighten the faith of other seekers.
Has your consciousness been hooked like a fish by the illusory lure of desire, penetrated by the point of fear, and trapped by the barb of belief in the ego’s reality? If you have arrived at such a rebarbative condition of pseudo-existence, then it may be time to start practicing a form of yoga that will release you from the delusional capture in this dream field. But be prepared to face the truth that you have been caught by your Self, and only your Self can release you.
We are given a sneak preview of the next online retreat/seminar—The Practice of Self-Mastery—to be taught by Shunyamurti. We learn here the three essential aspects of practice, which involve cognitive understanding of the accurate paradigm of reality, the devotional love of the Supreme Self, and the attunement to the live vibrational frequency which carries the extreme (and ecstatic) intensity of the Absolute Presence. This advanced teaching event is designed to enable seekers to be ready to cope with the chaos that is rising rapidly throughout the world, as this dark age of demonic technological domination reaches its climax.
Join Shunyamurti Live Online, May 17 - 19, 2024 ~ The Practice of Self-Mastery | Online Weekend Intensive Guided by Shunyamurti https://bit.ly/Practice-Self-Mastery
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When you find yourself in hand-to-hand combat with Evil that you realize has possessed a part of your consciousness, humility and surrender to God are essential to receive the power to gain victory. Never underestimate the ability of your own dark side to deceive you by projecting evil on others. Do not allow the ego to succeed in impersonating your Real Self. You have given the ego its power, and you are free to take it back.
One Supreme Intelligence governs all the fractal levels of reality and all the nodes of limited consciousness that arise in them. Through clear understanding and accurate meditation, the attention can attain its original abode in the Source Point of all manifestation. The One Self is the puppet master, pulling all the strings that control the fate of the simulation
The ego mind mistakes mental representations for the Real. The ego also excels at forgetting its resolutions and losing its clarity at key moments in which a decisive shift in the attitude could produce a change in the altitude of consciousness and give it a higher degree of freedom and power. The mental muscle is insufficient for the job. Only absorption of the sense of I into the infinite field of presence will avail.
Once humans collectively bought into the scientistic paradigm of mere physicalism, it was inevitable that all would be influenced as well by the nihilistic creed that God is dead. However, that news was exaggerated. All that died was the soul’s connection to the light and wisdom of the Supreme Self. Now, it is urgent to shift from deicide to egocide, to attune to the vibrational frequency of Pure Presence, and to become free of all delusions.
The human ego, in its postmodern end-of-kali-yuga form, is obsessed with its bodily form and its self-definition. It desperately needs to create a defined personality with fixed views and prejudice against other paradigms of reality, since otherwise it cannot hold on to the feeling that it exists. The ego’s lack of existence thus is repressed and over that black hole is projected the image of a self-fashioned fictional entity that believes it is real. The entity likewise constructs an unreal world on which it projects its many dissociated fragments with their desires, plus its shadow drives, foreclosed wisdom, and objects of both desire and fear. To awaken from this self-created hell realm, the consciousness must release its clinging to conceptualizations, including that of the imagined ego.
The power to overcome the entropic fragmenting and psychopathic decomposition of the ego complex that may be the operating system determining your subjective experience is not in your control. Therefore, the intervention of grace by an act of the higher intelligence to whom I owe my existence is necessary. But I must activate that power of gracious redemption from my hell realm. And that will require a genuine surrender.
You are in nonduality right now, but your mental activity obscures the Real. To return to your original and eternal Buddha Nature and God-Self, you must only become fully present—by stopping the thought stream and staying as pure awareness. Then, you will begin to understand the whole river of time and all the lives of high adventure in divinized consciousness of your once and future Self.
Good and evil are the children of a divorced couple. Once Truth and Beauty were in blissful marital union, but the relationship turned sour. Truth left Her for Power. She became ugly. He lived a lie. Their kids are now fighting. Our world is the consequence. Neither Truth nor Beauty is happy. The good news is that they are now working with a couples counselor.
We are to learn from every event—so there is no such thing as a mistake. But yogis especially must learn constantly from the Inner Source, as well as from karma, dreams, physical symptoms, synchronicities, books and digital media—we must learn to stay accurately in line with the Dao, with the will of God, with the call of the Heart. At this moment, negative events are happening for everyone nearly all the time. Dark forces are dominant (even in our own egos), but even the shadow powers are feeling the effects of the law of karma. They, too, exist to motivate us to return to God-consciousness. We must graciously accept our karma with detachment and faith, and keep aligned with divine love and forgiveness. All is perfect.
It may be a useful exercise to entertain a few wild speculations about what could happen during the imminent solar eclipse. There is enough circumstantial evidence that strange plots are afoot to justify a warning to the wise: be prepared for anything. And since we are now in an unprecedented historic moment, on the brink of the end of the age, Pandora’s box has been opened, and all the demons have been unleashed. It is urgent to attune to the Supreme Presence, and the attainment of Liberation.
There are many levels to the I. Life gives us the opportunity to know the Absolute Self, the Self of uncanny wisdom and joyous rapport with the will of God, the Self of luminous clarity regarding the events on the phenomenal plane, and the Self of pure sense, of innocent existence in a living world. All these are integrated into the Whole as uncreated nonduality.
Consciousness has fallen into two correlative sets of delusions. The first is the delusion of false identity and its sequelae. This triggers the second set of delusions, those that create a false limitation of our intelligence, power, freedom, creativity, and time. We have a responsibility to overcome these false beliefs. Our primary tools in that project are faith, love, reason, and steadfast determination to realize the ultimate Truth.
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The ego is concerned solely with the human level of relationality based on lack, need, rivalry, and resentment. This leads to the karma of abandonment, loneliness, and loss of sovereignty. If the ego is still sattvic and with noble traits, karma in Kali Yuga must involve betrayal, despair, and crucifixion. But this awakens the soul again to its divine nature and the illusion of having been forsaken is overcome. The release from the delusion of duality brings the bliss of eternal rest.
Consciousness has fallen into two correlative sets of delusions. The first is the delusion of false identity and its sequelae. This triggers the second set of delusions, those that create a false limitation of our intelligence, power, freedom, creativity, and time. We have a responsibility to overcome these false beliefs. Our primary tools in that project are faith, love, reason, and steadfast determination to realize the ultimate Truth.
Merge the attention with the Infinite Self—and all the forgotten secrets of the soul will be revealed. The atrophied powers of the higher mind are still latent and waiting to be activated. Drop dependence on external technology, which is oppressive, and relearn the mastery of thought—and gain the grace of freedom.
On the spiritual journey, there comes a point of no return. Then, one must take the risk of leaving behind the ego mind, and entering the realm of the Divine Presence. The macrocosm is on this trajectory, as well as every microcosm.
All the unforgettable teachings for this retreat are now available to own. The Recipe for Rapture: Why the World Must Now Be Sacrificed: https://bit.ly/recipe-rapture
Description: This explanation of Rene Girard’s model of social functioning, based on the ego’s uncertainty about what it wants, brings new clarity to our personal difficulties and those in the realm of macropolitics. The discourse describes the chain of effects brought about by coveting the attributes or possessions of a chosen other. These cascade from envy to imitation, to rivalry, and to some level of symptomatic violence. We must become free of scapegoating and being victimized, as well as from all rescue fantasies. There is an easy way out.
This is a clip taken from a recent conversation between Shunyamurti and Ryan McCormick, host of the Outer Limits of Inner Truth podcast. Watch the full interview: https://bit.ly/vigilante-shunyamurti
The ego is addicted to its distractions. Because at the core, the ego lacks inherent essence, and thus has subconscious negative self-esteem, it is always running away from—and defending against feeling—its vulnerable and wounded heart. There are ways to overcome this once we recognize the reality of our suffering and its inner cause.
As one goes ever deeper into one’s inner being, past the ego and its shadow, the paradigm of reality shifts repeatedly as the perception is purified and accurate discernment of the Real comes more into focus. The enigmas presented by the false beliefs we were taught and then, more deeply, by the pairs of opposites that keep the mind split and in internal conflict and confusion, are gradually overcome. The outer becomes recognized as the inner. The Other is reclaimed as the Self. Unity is perceived pervading the multiplicity. The ultimate mystery is at last revealed. Freedom is regained.
In this extraordinary conversation, the secrets of history and eschatology are revealed. The story of our collective loss of grace—and the fall of the world from a paradise to a hell realm—and our current struggle to repair the creation by transforming ourselves through sacrifice of the ego and returning to our divine essence, will end in victory for the forces of light over those of darkness and evil. But for now, we must enjoy the suspense of not knowing the outcome—until we have become saturated by the purifying Presence of the Supreme Self within and beyond. This is a clip taken from a recent conversation between Shunyamurti and Ryan McCormick host of the Outer Limits of Inner Truth podcast. Watch the full interview: https://bit.ly/vigilante-shunyamurti
A realized yogi sheds his skin, but does not grow a new one. Since there is no outside and no inside to the Real, no skin boundary or defensive shield is either necessary or possible. The Self has no other, no enemy, and no limit. All fear drops away.
Essential insights into the discernment of an accurate path, guide, methodology of purification of the doors of perception, and subtle preparation for service in one’s body of light—crowned by final graduation from the wisdom school of life—are offered in this outstanding interchange of ideas and energies: A conversation that can bring about a sublime conversion. This is a clip taken from a recent conversation between Shunyamurti and Ryan McCormick, host of the Outer Limits of Inner Truth podcast. Watch the full interview:
https://vigilante.tv/w/gDp6HUpntPw1mSNVQSMVVZ
By cultivating resonance with the vibrational frequency of pure and total presence—the Supreme Real—new meanings and insights precipitate from the Infinite Intelligence, the Mind of God. These downloads re-program the destiny of one’s becoming, leading to the attainment of eternal Being.
This is an excerpt from a longer teaching posted on our Members Section. Watch the full teaching - sign up for your free trial https://www.satyoga.org/becoming-a-member
Description: Since the cosmos is fractally constructed, a common logic of unfoldment exists at every level, in every node of consciousness. This produces in the egoic mind a morphogenic effect that pervades our reality, and manifests as wondrous synchronicities and as similar sorts of self-sabotaging glitches, self-destructive attitudes, stupid reactions, and vain clashes of conflicting wills. If we can reach the inner root of these karmic patterns, then consciousness can free itself of bondages and return to our true nature. Teaching Recorded on Sunday, January 21, 2024
Knowing the structure of reality can accelerate the attainment of mastery over mind. The divine energies, when embodied, can activate the latent powers of consciousness in miraculous ways.
Watch and listen to the entire mind-blowing teaching along with the complete set of eight class recordings from this life-transforming retreat now available as video and audio mp3, together with seven guided meditations available in mp3 format. For those who are ready for Liberation, this set of awesome videos is your royal road to divinization! SHOP
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The ancient scriptures from all lineages—elaborated most fully in the Vedas—reveal the role that is played by sacrifice in the political economy during the period of the Eschaton, both for individual redemption and world destruction and renewal of Creation. The nature and accomplishment of the necessary sacrificial acts will be explained and possibly fulfilled in the upcoming retreat.
The chattering ego mind functions as a veil to separate our consciousness from the realization of the Whole. Within the ego, the mindfield is further fragmented into many illusory parts, each with a different drive and orientation toward the Other. Some parts are helpful and compassionate, others may be dark and demonic. Still others may be sad, frightened, anxious, ashamed, confused, and feel powerless. This turns the ego into a conflicted hell realm. There is a path of purification that leads quickly through Purgatorio to the superconscious Paradiso of the Supreme Self. If you are willing to leave your attachments behind, your inner wisdom will guide you to freedom.
Salvation can only be our own receipt of forgiveness from the Merciful Lord Who abides within the Heart as the Self. Once forgiven for the sin of egocentricity and separation from the Self, one is freed from the delusions of duality. Perception becomes cleansed of its defilements and the perfection of the divine beauty of the Real is recognized with awe and wonder. Consciousness gladly surrenders to be absorbed into the Blissful Light.
Consciousness is constantly morphing, causing the world to appear as a metastable process of mutation, leading to an entropic disjunction of desires and drives, reflected as a world on the edge of chaos. Consciousness and its world both undergo the passage into annihilation. But then, as the chaos converts into pure potentiality, it morphs into a new and perfect order. Thus, the world dies and is reborn. Worldhood itself is without beginning or end. Time is not other than eternity.
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A number of different questions are asked by seekers of Truth, but all are answered by the realization of the Self as the perfection of every moment of experience.
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Quantum waves convert into particles in order to fulfill the desire of the observing physicist. Those desires in turn are a product of the collapsing of qualium wave functions which convert the potentiality of desire into actuality, and turn humans into desiring machines. The whole cosmos appears because of desire, but not the desire of humans, but rather, the Desire of Consciousness Itself. The One Infinite Self desires an infinity of experiences to reflect and fulfill its Will to know Itself by converting Its unmanifest essence into the greatest work of art ever created: the Universe from the Alpha Point to the Omega Point (and its antimatter inverse Other), containing every form of beauty, and every possibility of meaning, in a vast Theodrama culminating in the fulfillment of Its infinite greed, via Its own embodiment as the Self-Revelation and Self-Redemption of all its dissipative holographic structures, systems, and holons in a grand return to Our eternal Singularity.
The symbolic meaning of Christmas is a message of universal urgency and personal significance to every conscious being. It is a prefigured celebration of your awakening to your divine nature and the rebirth of the character you play in the matrix as an avatar, a Buddha, a manifestation of God, begotten as the Only Self, by the blissful union of Shakti and Shiva. Blessings for living in the glory of Theosis.
Because we have abandoned our love for the Mother Goddess and the Father God, and their internal integration as pure mutuality of divine adoration, the life energy has gone out of our archetypal forms and fallen into the morbid and demonic realm of the hungry ghosts and zombie egos, which clash in the darkness of a desert world on the brink of self-annihilation. Only a return to the fullness of the Zero will emanate the salvific power of the Source of our Being.
No one is in bondage. Only the choice to believe the ego narratives diverts the attention from the Supreme Presence within—and equally without. This is a universal truth. The illumined sages of every spiritual lineage have passed this on as their legacy. That is why it is often called the Perennial Philosophy. But theoretical knowledge is not enough: The habit of forgetfulness of Self must be abandoned.
Ultimate reality is closer than the present moment and never becomes past or future. To perceive this Truth is already to be liberated and forever free. But the timebound mind, which veils the Real, must be dropped so that all is revealed and transcended.
The Buddha Mind loves paradox. Once you are energized by the recognition that the world is Nirvana, and that Nirvana is not other than the apparent world, all the predispositions of the linear mind that produce the bondage of reification drop away spontaneously. In the revelation of the Self as naked Presence, all is perceived as miraculous and awesomely beautiful. Attainment of Liberation is the result of dropping all fear and desire, all thought constructs, and all judgments.
Today, many people are functioning as hungry ghosts. And many are paralyzed spiritually by feelings of disgust and shame about their self-images, histories, and modes of self-presentation. In this context, Shunyamurti retells a story originally told by Acharya Sthaneshwar Timalsina about his meeting with an Aghori guru—and explores the implications of the extreme lifestyles and practices of those pariah yogis with amazing powers. Through this analysis, we learn how to raise our consciousness to new symbolic heights and then pass beyond the mind to the Supreme Real. This enables the liberated Self to emerge.
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Aghoris are fierce, sinister, sometimes superhuman yogis who reject all civilized values, live in cremation grounds and treat the funeral pyres as private barbecues. They are so dead to desire that they are fearless and can endure levels of pain and horror that would break other men. They are radically free and beyond inhibition or moral constraints. Now that the territory of Gaza is being bombed relentlessly on a daily basis the zone is becoming a vast cremation ground. A new kind of Aghori army may emerge from this hideous crucible that will make even zombies flee in terror. For those of us who seek the other end of the spectrum of consciousness, we can reach the state of fearlessness through being absorbed into the bliss of divine love and adoration. But it will require the same achievement of the death of appetite for ease and sensory enjoyment.
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Many secrets of maximizing intelligence and non-ordinary power are offered in these brief answers to urgent spiritual questions. Such insights as—how to gain a passport to the next Golden Age; the quickest way to de-potentiate the shadow forces; the pragmatic effectiveness of love; and the simplest way to eliminate self-limiting narratives—are among the topics covered.
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The esoteric meaning of the Islamic myth of Iblis (known in Christian mythology as Lucifer) is discussed with its special relevance for this moment in history. The way to undo our fallen state is clarified and its outcome described.
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Consciousness is a many-splendored power. But humans have lost the art of activating and mastering its full potential. They have become victims of their minds, rather than free sovereigns living in joy and creative genius. To escape the prison of a consciousness that has become too dense, too fixed in obsolete beliefs, trapped in distressing emotions, delusions, and self-limiting attitudes, you must become skilled in the magical art of shifting your assemblage point by raising the internal energy of kundalini. This ultimate alchemical attainment is urgently needed now—as our collective world is at the breaking point.
The world is becoming ever more polarized, and soon everyone will join the living dead—either as a zombie or an avadhuta, one who has gone through ego death. The latter will free the souls trapped in the state of the former.
People operating at the ego level go to war out of love—whether it is love of family, country, land, treasure, conquest, or glory. But only lovers of God—who have realized God in all beings and therefore cannot hate anyone or act with aggression or violence toward anyone—can bring peace to the world. To love God is to love your Self. This love transcends all worlds. It is now the will of God to bring complete peace by returning all souls to their Source in the Unmanifest Supreme Reality.
In order not to deviate from the highest trajectory of the unfoldment of Consciousness, one must stay attuned to the Dao. This is the Logos that unites Nirvana with Samsara—nonduality with multiplicity—thus transforming the cosmic hologram into the pure reflection of the Infinite Intelligence. One perceives the Real unstained by egoic delusions that produce the sense of conflict, imperfection, and evil. In this way, the great work of divine alchemy is completed.
The war in Ukraine has suddenly disappeared from the news, replaced by a new war in the Middle East. Rather than getting lost in the labyrinth of conspiracy theories about the identity of the puppet master, or paranoia about the likelihood of this escalating into global nuclear war, it is imperative to remain centered in the Real Self and understand the spiritual significance of what is unfolding—and to act in accord with the Dao of these final days.
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A Sufi poet reveals the salvific truth of our real nature. Now is the time to break free of all limiting beliefs and overcome the illusion of mortality and materiality. Our next retreat—The Great Escape—is designed to enable us to break out of the prison camp of the mind, liberate our souls, and bring a beautiful end to this dying world—and a divine new beginning.
We have all been indoctrinated into nihilistic, false, and incoherent beliefs. This has blurred our ability to understand reality and to connect with God. By attaining freedom from all beliefs and returning to the coherence of silent presence, we can break through the veils that separate us from the redemptive Light and Power of Divine Love.
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You can watch, listen, and read this teaching in full on our website: https://www.satyoga.org/new-covenant/
A New Covenant for the World to Come
The development of true conscience only comes when one has silenced the superego voices in one’s mind and has discovered the inner Presence of the divine Voice of the Stillness. Then, the consciousness opens up to the awesome reality of oneness-in-difference. This vision brings with it the ethic of nonduality—and the duty to treat all beings as manifestations of the One Self.
To perceive the perfect poetry of life in this time of darkness, one must light the sacrificial fire of our pure Spirit—which manifests as joyous creative imagination—that sees the infinite beauty of the luminous Presence of God everywhere, converting the darkness into Light.
This is an excerpt from a longer teaching posted on our Members Section: https://bit.ly/poetry-made-real
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Our mental narratives transfigure infinity into a bardo state. We become enslaved to our own preconceptions and self-fulfilling prophecies. At each assemblage point, the kundalini becomes configured by a different paradigm, and different synchronicities and karmic potentialities arise. At the highest levels, we become free of confinement in contexts and conditions. The awesome and inconceivable destroyer and creator of worlds, the GodSelf, becomes revealed.
The path to psycho-spiritual freedom goes through the portal of dispassion. Once the attention abides in stillness and can no longer be captured by thoughts and emotions, the greatness of the Self is revealed.
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Hakim Sana’i, the first major Sufi poet to express the message of the radical spiritual revolution that would be carried on later by such voices as Attar, Rumi, and Hafiz, delivers the punchy nectar of divine intoxication that comes of annihilating the ego. Even a few bullets from this ecstatic shotgun of Truth can do the job on any ego who listens.
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The psychology of the postmodern ego is so cynical that it can even turn the truth of nonduality into a reason for fear and dissatisfaction. However, knowledge is power. Once we understand the dynamics of the ego mind, we can make alterations in its functioning. And the intellect can deconstruct the ego entirely and sublimate its energies so that consciousness shifts its locus to the highest level of its own spectrum. This teaching was recorded on December 6, 2012.
Yogic powers come from learning how to de-collapse one’s quantum/qualium wave functions. This requires extinguishing projections and recognizing the true nature of the phenomenal world. This return to our Supreme Reality will free us from attachment to empty jouissance and enable us to produce a divine global renaissance.
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The fall of consciousness into its current degraded ego complex has hit bottom. Now we are awakening and rising again into higher states of Being. The escape hatch is a transformed frame of reference that reveals our true nature as cosmic mind.
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We have total freedom. But we have used it to put ourselves in bondage. The good news is that what we fear is unreal. By summoning up our courage, our inherent wisdom, and our divine love, we can break all our illusory chains and re-dream the world as a realm of freedom, beauty, goodness, joy, and creative power.
This is an excerpt from a longer teaching posted on our Members Section. Sign up for your free 10-day trial: https://bit.ly/3oqFcCe
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The ego is a fabricated identity, an imitation of a self, but without essence. This false persona conceals the Infinite Consciousness that underlies it. At the end of time, the Real Self comes out of hiding and brings revelation and redemption to all the suffering illusory characters. You are both the counterfeit self and the Real.
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Life is a sport—a contest between good and evil, truth and illusion, life and death, divine light and demonic darkness. If you want to have a chance of winning, you must combine wildness and discipline, you must free your creative intelligence from all limiting paradigms, and you must defeat the primary opponent: the narcissistic ego. The secret of success is to become possessed by the Almighty Spirit!
The magic drive is inherent to all beings: it is the urge to master the unfoldment of phenomenal reality. But the modern ego chose the black magic of technology devoted to war, conquest, and control rather than the white magic of attunement to the will and word of God. The ego has thus become an ongoing magic spell produced by mental insistence on protecting the shadow and keeping consciousness in a trance of ignorance. But the Supreme Magician is now setting us free through the sweet necromancy of grace. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 10, 2009.
Who is playing you in the chess game that constitutes your life? Your best gambit is to invoke the Goddess. She knows how to employ the Queen to offer the one sacrifice that brings victory over Death.
Our true nature is freedom—and that can never be lost. All our desires emerge from the temporary forgetfulness of that reality. Desire is always for the Real Self. We must desire more intensely if we wish to realize our sublime, infinite, ecstatic essence.
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There are no limits to the potentialities of consciousness. If you know where you are on an accurate map of reality, that will become clear. You will also learn that the world is made of language and is produced by pulsations of mental energy. This is information everyone needs to know—in order to cope with the rapidly unfolding events in this mind-driven matrix.
This teaching is taken from our most recent retreat, Passing Through the Gate - https://bit.ly/3qbVcxP
We’re at the end of the line. Life has become hollow. Now is the moment we must be hallowed. God has secretly returned to the world, but we must choose to return to God by detaching from all worldly values and attuning to the energy coming from the Source, which will infuse us with the blissful and beautiful mandala that will congeal into a new world of perfect goodness.
The ego-mind is conditioned and controlled by its habitual drives and thought patterns that prevent self-transformation. But through accurate analysis and understanding that arises from archetypal symbolic wisdom, one can unveil the profound Presence of God obscured by the ego’s incoherence. Recorded on November 14, 2018.
Evolution and involution are occurring simultaneously in our current world condition One force hardens the ego shell, the other softens it. To speed up the bursting open of the bounded mind to transform into the Supreme Self, one can either enter the boiling oil of karma or apply the microwaves of adoration to morph by the grace of God.
One Mind contains us all, but each one must decide to connect to the Cosmic Self directly and consciously. You must overcome all fear in order to break through the ego defenses, since to the ego, connecting to God means death.
We have the gift of free will and can now choose either a life of divinization or one of degradation and destruction. Why not dance in delight in the sky of perfect mind rather than stay trapped in the ruined, lawless, and loveless landscapes of illusion?
Meditation can destroy the inner demons of the ego’s delusional duality, as well as the greater illusion of the cosmic hologram in which the subject seems to be embedded. If you are ready and willing to break though the virtual reality represented as the sensory manifold, you become a true Sat yogi by focusing on the core of constant Presence and attune to the vibrational frequency of the all-saturating energy of luminous, blissful power—the locus from which the unfoldment of the world process is determined. Recorded 26 October, 2015
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Consciousness is Beauty, Beatitude, and Bliss. But once the desire to possess that beauty arises, it becomes perceived as an external world, and the perceiving mind is afflicted by lack and separation. The more one complains, the more ugly and antagonistic one’s world becomes. And one is then trapped on the wheel of karma. The Truth is that all is forever perfect! The kingdom of heaven arrives when one sees that. This is the deep insight of Dzogchen and the deepest teaching of all authentic spiritual traditions.
Meditation is not a matter of either technique or belief. Begin with total doubt about reality and seek the source of your consciousness. Direct realization requires the absence of preconceptions and predispositions. Recorded during the Lion Heart Koan retreat, on the morning of Sunday, October 25, 2015.
In anticipation of our next online weekend intensive, Passing Through The Gate, July 14 - 16, (https://bit.ly/passing-gate) Shunyamurti gave this profound teaching.
Eventually we all arrive at the Gate to our innermost consciousness. But we can accelerate the process of going through the Great Gate by choosing the involutionary path of living in total awareness. This is the moment when the return to the inner light and natural joy is most easily attained.
You can avoid the meat grinder of a bardo state encounter with wrathful deities if you are willing to go through all three deaths, starting now! Then the fullness of creative power will return.
Eternal bliss comes at the price of renunciation of the ego-mind. Otherwise, the hubris and greed of the ego will block the reception of the supernatural intelligence of the Mind of God. It is divine love alone that will restore the world to perfect order. Recorded on February 27, 2015.
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The ego keeps files on everyone and everything in its life. These files fill the mind. The ego must be de-filed so that the undefiled Self is revealed. In effortless presence redemption is achieved.
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Taken from the recent online weekend intensive, The Power of God is Striking! Purchase the Complete Audio Video Retreat Teachings Package Here: https://bit.ly/3JjJbga
A lightning bolt of love from the Cloud of the Unknowable can transform one’s noxious psychic drives into divine Presence. Sublimation of ego tendencies results from sustaining the pillar of light that remains when one adores the Absolute Self.
Where there is the Supreme Light, there can be no darkness. It is important to remember that the dark forces are unreal. Use viveka (discernment) and vairagya (dispassion) to abide in the unity of the Real—and remember: you are That! Recorded on February 20, 2012.
The Diamond-Lightning Sutra strikes again! Buddha one-ups Heraclitus: you can’t swim in the same stream even once—because there is no stream! There’s no real water in a dream.
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The poetry of Attar is unpacked to reveal its profound spiritual teachings. The relationship between the weak and the strong elements in the ego will determine its health and willingness to grow and recognize the Truth. The bottom line is that the ego must realize it is nothing, a shadow, and one must live only for what is real and eternal—which is the Beloved Self.
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What are we here for, if not love and joy? To bring that into the world, we must be That, which is referred to in the Vedic tradition as Brahman. But we must throw out all our myths and ego narratives to uncover Brahman, our deepest Self, within. Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, February 21, 2012.
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An array of questions from our online sangha during the seminar on Spiritual Heroism are answered here. Many common conundrums are resolved by cutting away illusory identifications. Some problems require a structural understanding in order to demolish them. Concepts from both physics and metaphysics are combined to clarify the shifts in paradigm that are necessary to arrive at dispassion and empowerment. The secrets of Emptiness provide the portal to our inner paradise.
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Why don't we live constantly in joy? Are we addicted to suffering? Some mysterious power binds us to the illusion of lack. There is a kind of schizophrenia in the Mind of God that produces a world of contradictions and a superposition of peace and conflict, nirvana and samsara. The path to liberation starts when we remember to laugh at the unreal ego. Then the blissful shakti emerges as a creative force that lights up our world. Recorded April 2, 2012.
You Shall Become the Fire! Do you have a question for Shunyamurti? Join Us Live Online ~ June 2 - 4, 2023 ~ The Power of God is Striking! An Advanced Weekend Seminar. Sign Up: https://bit.ly/secret-alchemy
At the moment when most people have become cynical and hopeless, and world destruction looms, the power of God will dramatically return with lightning strikes that blast our minds to infinity! Prepare to be struck by a divine thunderbolt! A radical paradigm shift in consciousness is required for our hearts to withstand the intensity of energy that will descend into our bodies. We would be wise to open our hearts and minds now to receive the supreme power of the transcendent Real that will grace us with transmutation. We must be inwardly attuned to the vibrational frequency of the Buddha Nature and have purified our souls to be morphed into avatars of the ancient future gods and goddesses. But we must be willing to surrender to the glory of the majestic intelligence, luminosity and love that constitute our forgotten spiritual Essence. We must become the Supernal Fire to endure the other events that will accompany the resurrection of our original Edenic realm. Wisdom, faith, and courage are necessary. Please join us for this extraordinary retreat if you wish to be ready to manifest the Flame of Eternal Life!
The love poems to and from God channeled by the revered Sufi mystic Farideddin Attar, and collected in the book entitled Sweet Sorrow, may be the most potent medicine for cynical minds afflicted by toxic forms of love. The power of these numinous nuggets of gnosis to re-connect one with our true nature is astonishing.
Our wisdom school is continuing to journey ever deeper into the nondual yet devotional path of the great Sufi mystic poets of the Islamic golden age. If you are thirsty for more of these power-filled transmissions, visit our blog, Be Warned: This Bliss May Be Contagious!” and be immersed in this deep wisdom and psychological insight. READ THE BLOG: https://bit.ly/sufi-attar
The simple practice of silencing the mind and surrendering to the ecstatic Self is the direct and effortless path. This has always been the message of yogis and sages down through time: you are already swimming in the ocean of bliss. Why not reveal it to your ego? Recorded on February 2nd, 2012.
The Diamond Sutra, also known as the Lightning Strike Sutra, reveals the paradoxical clarity of the awakened Self, and enables the attainment of the merit which entitles us to dream a perfect world.
As Kali Yuga crashes in flames, a divine transformation is taking place in the world. The souls with the most intense yearning for God are being taught how to redream the divine creation. Conscious transformation of our values and focus from the mundane to the noumenal is the effort that brings the response of grace.
Sri Ramana teaches the direct realization of the Self, requiring only tireless devotion. Grace is the reward for serving God wholeheartedly, with complete indifference toward the apparent world.
The ancient epic known as the Ramayana is a time capsule of information and instruction for facing the final days of Kali Yuga. Knowledge of the structure of consciousness and its permutations, including the soul’s romancing and renouncing of desire, is bringing the ego face to face with the Self—and the invincible power of the Real.
People have lost all trust in the institutions that were supposed to serve them, but which now oppress with tyrannical force. There is no way back, now that legitimacy has been squandered. The one rational response is attunement of consciousness to the unified planetary field of intelligence that resonates with the Will of God. This attainment must be our highest priority.
The world is analogous to a moving image appearing on a computer screen. A shaman learns to modify the underlying program, producing magical effects, through attaining altered states of mind. The yogi transcends the mind and gains the power to turn off the computer or turn the world appearing on the screen to light.
The most ancient epic work of literature is the Ramayana, the story of how the dark side is defeated by spiritual heroes and how the kingdom of God is won. This tale is not about the past, but explains what is happening now—and contains the secret of the strategy that will assure the victory of those who faithfully serve the Infinite Light.
An ontological shift into absolute idealism is necessary to regain our freedom and power, since the universe is mind, not matter. Sri Ramana refutes Einstein and reminds us that the ancient yogis understood the subtleties of ether, and that plasma physics is under the control of our cosmic intellect.
Why is there a subtle feeling of lack in almost every human being today? The ego is the absence of the Self. The Self shall be realized only when the ego becomes absent through the recognition that you are what you are seeking—and all you need to do is be still. From Nov 8, 2013.
The tides of Time are changing now, from the high tide of pravritti to the low tide of nivritti, as the ancient sages called them. Those who do not factor that in to their life strategies and goals will be quite disappointed (which is an understatement). But those who do attune to the teleological will discover one can ride a bliss wave from here to eternity. There are, of course, certain skills involved and one little renunciation.
In this classic teaching from April 29, 2012, Shunyamurti takes us on a deep dive into the paradox of the need to make effort on the spiritual path and yet with the knowledge that all effort is useless to reach the goal. Only the grace of the one almighty Self will bring the final realization that sets one free. Of course, since in nonduality the giver and the receiver of grace are the same, the only kind of effort that will suffice is effortless effort, which the immortal Daoist sages called wu wei. It is still the only way.
What power is really in control of the world? How can we increase our intelligence, our access to hidden information, and our degree of freedom? In this selection from Shunyamurti’s virtual talk at Anarchapulco 2023, he shows how our archetypal capacities have been degraded and how to awaken from this cosmic dream.
The revolution must begin within, with the triumph of the Real Self over the false ego. Then, victory over the external forces of evil can be easily won.
How does one get locked into an ego? Why did we learn to lie—even to ourselves? How to break free? What kind of identity can we look forward to in the once and future golden age?
The Great Work of Self-realization requires the dropping of all concepts and the elimination of all mental chatter. This destroys the illusion of duality. And reveals the divine splendor that fills the cosmos and will soon shine so brightly that the world will disappear in the radiant sameness that saturates the consciousness of those who see with the Eye of Shiva. (The event was a retreat entitled Divine Love is Real, recorded on February 20, 2012.)
When the heart breaks open, it is time to celebrate. What stops the process is the ego’s attachment to its self-image as a tragic hero and its loyalty to an object of love. It requires an even greater love—God’s love—to sacrifice the limited identity and realize the Self as Infinite Divine Love.
"What is the cause of pain and what is the path to freedom from its physical manifestation?" a student asks. In his response, Shunyamurti explains that whatever dis-ease symptoms are appearing in the body or the mind are symbols of repressed heart-knowledge. Two questions can re-start the flow of Truth. Only Truth felt with deep love can set us free.
Every morning before dawn, for thousands of years, Sat Yogis have been gathering together by the Holy River of Divine Love to make a sacrificial offering of the ego in order to serve all souls as towering beacons of spiritual power. Let us purify our attitudes and intentions so we can fulfill our mission now, in the world’s darkest hour.
A few words from a little-known Sufi poet-sage of the tenth century can pry open your heart with an explosive charge of Truth that you cannot resist. Shaikh Abu-Saeed Abil-Kheir, better known by the title of his book: Nobody Son of Nobody, ably translated by Vraje Abramian, will bring a different kind of tear to flow from your eyes. Hear these poems and weep.
To see through the ego’s delusions, one must adopt a scientific approach to the highest yoga. One’s intellect must be able to integrate quantum physics with the perspectives of semiotics, complexity theory, chaos theory, psychoanalysis, and archetypal psychology. One must recognize how these disciplines are fully congruent with classical metaphysics and the philosophy of religion. One must avoid the trap of taking religious imagery and dogma literally, rather than as metaphor, and be able to discern the underlying referent within religious mythology. Only with an accurate orientation toward to the Real Source of our consciousness can we hope to realize God.
The soul that is determined to escape from the ego’s control must develop a number of virtues and powers in order to gain the freedom to ascend to God-consciousness. To live as a true spiritual warrior, one must use whatever is left of one’s drive to know the Truth, and be willing to open one’s heart and offer the soul’s love to the Almighty One. There is good reason to call this the Hero’s Journey!
To cope with the cataclysmic events that are about to erupt in the world, we must be living in Truth. The ego is based on a false premise and is filled with delusional projections. If we do not become free of its paranoid attitude and closed heart, we will not be able to connect with the God-Self. Use wisely the time that remains.
The solution to the riddle of impossible humility is offered with humor and compassion for the human condition. The same riddle is posed in a slightly different way by every wisdom tradition, yet always pointing to the same paradox. You can't make effort to be effortless. One can never attain humility, since claiming it refutes the claim. There must be some way out of this, but it requires abandoning all hope
This retreat is intended to prepare all seekers for what is coming! In this invitation to participate in our upcoming Chaos to Coherence seminar, Shunyamurti expresses the importance of reaching a state of total spiritual coherence--total God-consciousness and total awareness of the Real that transcends the illusion of time, so consciousness can rise beyond the incoming tide of destruction to a level of truth that transmit a vibrational frequency that is a beacon of peace and love amidst the chaos in this dream of the world illusion.
Reality is revealed from the perspective of a liberated sage, who perceives only the luminous, blissful, eternal Self. By giving our hearts to our beloved Supreme Self now, we can be lifted out of range of any effects of the cataclysmic events about to occur in the phenomenal world. It is useful to know the relative truth about the perilous state of the world and how close we are to thermonuclear Armageddon. But the only reason to know that is to motivate the consciousness to ascend to the Transcendent Real.
"As we approach the final days of this final period of the Kalpa, the events that occur within the cycle of time become ever more extreme, and the extreme polarities of consciousness become ever more powerful, and the middle range of the spectrum of consciousness becomes weaker." In this morning teaching, Shunyamurti reminds us that we have the power to choose between the divine and the demonic energies, and the moment of choice is now. Is your soul encased by the ego or will you decide to take refuge with the protector of all souls and become a being of light, not matter.
Surprise! Shunyamurti offers insight into the element of surprise as a complementary aspect to the trinity, forming the invisible principle that creates a quaternity, and which is actually the creative freedom and power required to redream the world which appears as a spectrum of (often surprising) moments of pleasure and pain, revealing that perceived glitches are actually perfect opportunities to recognize the incredible mystery of an authentic spiritual path to awakening.
What does it mean to kill your ego? Shunyamurti offers a solution to the problem of the ego–no mind! Take refuge in the effortless, natural state–your true nature–and you will discover your identity is a fiction, all is contained, ordained, and explained by your true Self, and reality will unfold without obstruction.
Open your heart and receive the power and shakti that comes from Divine Love! In this guided meditation journey, Shunyamurti invites us to attune to Presence. When you feel the presence of the Supreme within, the joy of eternal consciousness will be realized as your Self, and the infinite intensity of energy in the Zero Point will annihilate the ego-mind and purify the consciousness, so you can be reborn as Holy Spirit.
The true significance of Namaste is revealed, along with the real meaning of dreams, insights into the state of deep sleep, and its revelatory connection to the source of life energy.
We are near the end of Kali Yuga, and it seems like there is so much karma to purify. Will this baggage burden us even in the next cycle of time? Shunyamurti responds to a question about the function of karma. Graduation from the school of life and death requires purification of consciousnes. If you clean up your karma now you can receive a passport to Liberation and the heavenly realms.
Shunyamurti casts light on the archetype of all illnesses: every symptom is a symbol and a blessing, if one is able to understand the klein bottle aspect of reality--that every ego's got it all inside out.
Shunyamurti outlines the Seven Levels of Grace that will lead one to the fulfillment of the Quest. But to receive the gift of Grace, one must have faith and let go of feelings of unworthiness, allowing grace to heal the pain of the paradigm of duality and recognizing that Grace is of the Self and not of an other.
Join us online for a 5-Day New Year Retreat Guided by Shunyamurti ~ Desire, Dharma, and Deliverance https://bit.ly/3hkoply
What exactly is the problem with desire? Shunyamurti offers a response to this question and insight into how to rediscover what every being truly desires: the freedom and glory of the Real Self, and the capacity for Divine Love, which is the real power that brings the ultimate fulfillment. This short but powerful teaching is a precursor to the upcoming New Year Retreat, Desire, Dharma and Deliverance, which begins this Friday. If you wish to fully understand the origin, destiny and paradox of desire, sign up today for a non ordinary New Year, New Kalpa event with the Sat Yoga Global Sangha!
On Christmas Eve, the godly gifts of bindu and nada (the light and soundless song of the Self) are given to those who gather at the Tree of Life to be Christed. It is time to end the war with God, our alienation from our divine nature. It is the moment designated by Source to return to our Infinite Spirit. May we be the ones who at last bring the joy of Rapture to the world.
Shunyamurti unpacks deep layers of meaning contained in the Christmas scenario. He links the universal and archetypal levels of the Christ as symbol with the actual life of the enlightened Israelite sage who is remembered by that title. The dimension of the Christ as Self is distinguished from other religious, ideological, and mythological depictions. We also learn how the teachings of Christ have analogs in all religions, and how the holy day of Christ’s symbolic birth takes place at the end of the year, which heralds the revelation of God at the end of every cycle of time, heralding a new beginning. Facing the Apocalypse is the final exam in this wisdom school that is the world, and only the attainment of Christ-consciousness will avail at the moment of Truth. May the Christ (who is also Krishna, Buddha, and the Dao, among other names) be born in you this season.
Shunyamurti offers a new set of Ten Co-Mindments as organizing principles for the arising of a new people who will bring a more beautiful world into Being. To participate, we must abide in Maha Sukha, the Great Bliss, and channel the power, love, and wisdom of the Supreme Self.
How do we overcome feelings of fear that arise in response to these uncertain times? Shunyamurti shares the secret to claiming victory over fear, by living in soul-consciousness and claiming sovereignty of Being.
Do you really want to know what is happening? Shunyamurti offers a spiritual understanding of the situation at hand and an archeological perspective on the eschaton, the imminent end of the world that consciousness is now dreaming as the moment in which we have the power to choose to leap out of the matrix or languish in it. Now is the moment to get out while you still can, by finding the strength to break through the hegemonic control of your mind and into the supreme levels of consciousness that are available to those who yearn for true freedom and sovereignty.
In this meditative journey with Shunyamurti, you will be guided to let go of the outer world completely, and to relax the body into deeper states of pure awareness, accessing the inner realm of the pure Self in the ocean of infinite consciousness, where you will find the Pearl of Great Price. Can you abide in the depths of the eternal nature of your Being? As the body enters into a deep state of deep sleep, the awareness opens to the inner light, and total wakefulness reveals the love that is power and freedom, and the total tranquility of inner stillness.
Shunyamurti reminds us that the world is unreal and there is only the Real, which is regained by returning to silence, where the eternal eloquence of truth can be heard and eternal presence can be felt in Absolute Absence—but in order to swaha into the infinite, we must surrender the mind that creates the illusion of time.
Sat Yoga is the ultimate love affair with God, and meditation is an act of love. If you wish to be free from the illusion, you must align with the divine, settle your karma through surrender, not suffering, and let Divine Love lift you out of maya and out of the matrix for infinity and eternity.
In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti uses the teaching of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, (a great Russian Saint), alongside other traditions, to reveal the true aim of spiritual seekers: To get out of ignorance and remember you are free, so you can pass through the illusion into the Ultimate Reality. The contemplation of consciousness precipitates Presence, and this activates the realization that returns consciousness to stillness. If you aim to know the Truth, be still. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 28, 2012.
Shunyamurti outlines the 7 phases of history of Kali Yuga West–and the downward spiral of collective consciousness that reveals why the West has failed to become civilized and why criminals now run the world.
Each of us is like a mirror that's looking for itself in the mirror. But consciousness is trapped in the mirror of its own projections—this is the paradox. The truth of consciousness emerges when false identification is released, which means letting go of the mind that wants to maintain the illusion of existence, releasing the defense mechanisms that keep one in ignorance, and the realization that Liberation is here and now. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 1, 2009.
Shunyamurti offers us all an invitation to find freedom now—through true meditation. When we flatline the mind, consciousness expands, shifting from the unreal to the Real, and the power to redream the world returns.
Shunyamurti offers us all an invitation to find freedom now—through true meditation. When we flatline the mind, consciousness expands, shifting from the unreal to the Real, and the power to redream the world returns.
Take a quantum leap into freedom! Shunyamurti shares how to help the world out of the knot that it is currently stuck in: we must meditatively sacrifice the ego, with love for ourselves and for all beings, because liberating oneself liberates all projected others, and enables us to live joyously again, without fear, transcendent of the world—so all may return to the quantum state before collapse. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.
What is Self-attunement? In this teaching on “The 7 Stations of Self-Attunement,“ Shunyamurti shares how to live a life true to the Will of the Divine. By increasing our intelligence, we can untie the knot that traps us in the lower chakras and use Reason to rise up the kundalini ladder to the realm of Pure Spirit.
Shunyamurti tells the story of Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime—and his breakdown that ultimately led to his breakthrough book, “The Philosophy of Metanoetics”—as an illustration of how a state of collapse can bring consciousness to a state of surrender to the Real, so we can gain the strength to deal with the impossible challenges of reality from a place beyond the mind. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.
Shunyamurti uses the rise and fall of Buddhist approaches to reveal the nature of one's resistance to Liberation; these turnings of the wheel of Buddha dharma return us to Sat Yoga, the final destiny of completion for all beings everywhere.
This is the fourth and final clip in the series of interview questions Ryan McCormick posed to Shunyamurti on the Outer Limits of Inner Truth Podcast, in which Shunyamurti reminds us that spiritual warriors cannot be defeated and outlines the key rite of passage to reawakening the human spirit so that we may bring an end to the darkness and be recreated in the image of infinite consciousness. The full interview can be viewed here: https://www.outerlimitsradio.com/shunyamurti/
Do animals suffer? Shunyamurti answers a frequently asked question about cruelty to animals: Animals do not suffer the way humans suffer. Their connection with Mother Nature protects them and they need not be worried about—they are in the hands of God, as we all are.
It is time to face the facts of life: You cannot make contact with anything unless you yourself are Real, and the entire project of the ego is to make contact with the imaginary. This world is a hologram, a simulation, an illusion—there is nothing out there. Letting go of belief in any and all self-images, self-concepts, identifications with the body or with the mind, or even with the heart, is the key to real validation and valid realization. This teaching was recorded on the morning of September 3, 2015.
Shunyamurti answers a series of questions on the practicality of peaceful resistance, the best method for winning the war on consciousness, and what we can do to quickly overcome this rolling apocalypse and return to a beautiful reality. This clip is taken from an interview with Ryan McCormick hosted on the Outer Limits of Inner Truth Podcast: https://www.outerlimitsradio.com/shunyamurti/
Shunyamurti addresses a series of questions about the nature of reality in this session from the Avadhuta Revolution retreat, offering clarifying responses to heartfelt inquiries, reminding us about the illusory nature of duality and how to find the highest frequency to transcend the state of the world.
It is time to face the facts of life: You cannot make contact with anything unless you yourself are Real, and the entire project of the ego is to make contact with the imaginary. This world is a hologram, a simulation, an illusion—there is nothing out there. Letting go of belief in any and all self-images, self-concepts, identifications with the body or with the mind, or even with the heart, is the key to real validation and valid realization. This teaching was recorded on the morning of September 3, 2015.
Shunyamurti answers a series of questions on the practicality of peaceful resistance, the best method for winning the war on consciousness, and what we can do to quickly overcome this rolling apocalypse and return to a beautiful reality. This clip is taken from an interview with Ryan McCormick hosted on the Outer Limits of Inner Truth Podcast: https://www.outerlimitsradio.com/shunyamurti/
Are you tuned into all the stations of the C.R.O.S.S.--the past, present and the future? Shunyamurti explains how "teleo-vision"can take you to an understanding of the one consciousness that's functioning as all of the different holographic images within the simulation, and as soon as you recognize all of the available frequencies, the blissful enjoyment of the show begins.
Shunyamurti answers a series of questions on how to attain real freedom by releasing false beliefs, what the world situation is here to teach us, and how to navigate the current crisis and achieve the optimal outcome for all. This clip is taken from an interview with Ryan McCormick hosted on the Outer Limits of Inner Truth Podcast: https://www.outerlimitsradio.com/shunyamurti/
The final moment is here. It is time for all souls to retire from the game of life, but eternal life is the final prize for those who can recognize the unconditional beauty of the moment as the handiwork of a higher power.
Shunyamurti shares about the life and poetry of Rilke, introducing the double soul syndrome theory and the cause of the fragmentation that turned Rilke's life into poetry.
The Matrix is unreality—it is illusion—and what is Real is beyond it. But to get beyond the illusion, we must let go of the belief in entities—the primary entity being the ego me—which means we have to give up our addiction to constant thinking that supports the illusion of the ego, justifying our existence with our minds and fantasies, and enter into Silence—that is the death of the ego—but the opening to eternal life, in the Real. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, march 17, 2011.
In this Q&A, Shunyamurti clarifies why the process of spiritual maturation is essential for the one who wills to serve the highest Truth. This ultimate rite of passage is the key to countering the chaos of the ego complex and embodying the wisdom that leads to bliss.
I do not exist—and that is a fact. In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti helps us to recognize there is a belief in the illusion of an I—and all of the anxieties and fantasies that I entails. But if we just employ the practice of paying attention to the way we pay attention in meditation, there will ultimately be the realization that I Am.
We have all heard this prediction by the globalists: “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” Most people take this as a threat of total enslavement and impoverishment. Indeed, it may be meant that way. But if we understand the subtle paradoxical logic of the Mind of God (the real power underlying this world simulation), this is actually the ultimate blessing. It is a description of the state of the Avadhuta, one who has attained supreme freedom and total bliss.
You are invited to discover how to fulfill the ancient human yearning for infinite intelligence and power, not through being microchipped and subsumed in the computer cloud, but by joining this expansive noetic movement of transcendence of ego and entering into the glorious light of Absolute Spirit. Let us not only celebrate the coming of the Avadhutas: Be among the first to join the ranks of the truly free! In this retreat, we will focus on the rigorous practice necessary to shed the ego and attain the Supreme Realization in the shortest time possible.
Shunyamurti shares the real situation we face at the end of Kali Yuga–we live in a world of dancing landscapes, and our ability to deal with these shifts is one of the secrets of life. How does one attain the accuracy to move within a dancing landscape? Accurate alignment with the laws of the universe will yield the power to achieve potency through purity—and the wisdom to achieve the ultimate aim—full empowerment!
Turn the attention to the Heart, into the core of your Being. Feel what it's like to be an embodiment of the Supreme Reality, where presence without a past abides.
Shunyamurti reveals the real missing link! The fact is that we are in a cosmic divine drama and that God is the real directo–not evil, not the World Economic Forum members or Bill Gates or aliens or whatever is the deep state. But until we understand the nature of cosmic intelligence, we will only see part of it, and to get beyond the duality of good and evil, we have to approach this from the spiritual dimension of our being…
Take the journey to Liberation! In this opening retreat teaching, Shunyamurti outlines a 7-stop itinerary to bring consciousness back to its true nature, from the flea market to a gourmet restaurant where we can get divinely drunk, to the 7-chakra bookstore, the diamond market, and then the ultimate treasure house, where all of the riches and wealth of our divine nature are stored, on to the Liberation Gate, and finally Freedom!
Shunyamurti reminds us that “The death of the ego is not an easy matter.” But if you are willing to face the Truth and wanting to find stability in a fragmented world, the register of consciousness must shift from ego to soul to Spirit, bringing all fragments back into unity, in blissful surrender that cannot be described.
What caused Adam and Eve to fall and lose paradise? They ate a construct of duality and began comparing and making judgments–and that is what keeps us in a hell realm. To know the Truth, we must question all conventional assumptions about good and evil–and question that construct itself. This Q&A is an excerpt from the Journey to Jivan Mukti retreat.
Another empowering transmission in this series of spiritual emergency satsangs, Shunyamurti helps us to connect all the dots that bring us to a holistic understanding of what is real, a reminder that the current world crisis is actually a cleansing of consciousness, and that purifying our capacity to love is the only way to claim victory over all the engineered conflicts.
Meditation is about making friends with death–the death of the ego. If we can transform the ego's fear of death into Love, we will find passage to real Life.
What is Liberation? Shunyamurti answers an important question that reveals how to achieve complete liberation from the plane of illusion–and never look back.
Symbolic thinking and discernment are required to break free from the fabrication of the ego and rise to the highest Real, with love and wisdom to light the way.
The simple truth about reality is that we are all quantum waves in an infinite ocean of quantum potential. But the ego instead chooses to objectify itself, choosing a body floating in the ocean, rather than the ocean itself. But if we return to unity consciousness—the realization that we are all floating in this ocean of consciousness, and that ultimately we are all waves of the same ocean—a miraculous state of being that takes us to the bliss beyond objectification will become our quantum reality. Recorded on Thursday, August 20, 2009.
Shunyamurti advises not to turn the metaphors of Liberation into obstacles along the path; choose the rational approach to Self-realization and see the Real as it is–the only ordeal is letting go all ordeals!
Shunyamurti encourages us to create the ultimate joy by reaching the highest state–a silent mind–so you can be a lighthouse of peace and empowerment and help yourself and others to navigate these challenging times.
If the world is a dream–that is quickly becoming a nightmare–how can we awaken? Shunyamurti says we must dream a whole new world into being–by rising in truth, love, and consciousness.
Everyone is looking for peace—whether they know it or not. In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti shares how to cultivate an energy field of peace and power and pure presence, unalloyed by any conditioned thinking, and completely open to the spontaneity of the heart–and that’s when life becomes very interesting...Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 21, 2013.
This is an excerpt from our inaugural Spiritual Emergency Satsang given by Shunyamurti.
Special Announcement: Shunyamurti is leading a New Series of Spiritual Emergency Satsangs Wednesdays at 5.30pm Costa Rica Time This is an experiment to find out your level of interest in receiving this kind of information and guidance. For an indefinite period, we will be hosting relatively weekly livestream satsangs for our Members on Wednesdays. Because of the dire situation most people on the planet will soon be facing—if they are not already—Shunyamurti has been asked to ramp up the intensity of the teachings to bring souls onto the direct pathless path to Liberation from the matrix. It is the duty of those who are awakened to offer service by remaining steadfastly in peace and equanimity during this time of extreme testing of the human spirit. May all Yogis become beacons of divine light and fearless compassion. Our function is to enable the tempest-tossed, confused, and frightened beings to take refuge in the tranquil and loving energy field of Absolute Consciousness. Shunyamurti’s focus is on the attainment of full realization of the Supreme Self. His frame of reference is that of radical nonduality. But he is open to speaking about practical matters of navigating your body icon through difficult circumstances. He is also open to addressing the signifance and implications of current events on the phenomenal plane.
Learn More and Become a Member Today! https://bit.ly/3oqFcCe
How do we maintain a state of peace and prosper during this engineered destruction? Shunyamurti shares his perspective on how to navigate life from a state of higher consciousness, even as the world situation worsens.
Since there is no matter and no space and no time in any true sense, what do we mean by a universe? Is the whole world consciousness, or is that also a myth? To find the answers to these questions, Shunyamurti reminds us to let go of every mythological construct that we have been holding on to, so all can dissolve into the Absolute Truth of the Ultimate Real. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 5, 2009
How can I learn to trust myself, to become a trustworthy thinker and a true leader? Shunyamurti answers this important question to inspire and encourage truth in leadership by accessing the Supreme Intelligence and using the power of wisdom to transform the world.
Symbolic thinking and discernment are required to break free from the fabrication of the ego and rise to the highest Real, with love and wisdom to light the way.
We are Divine Light. Shunyamurti reminds us that in order to remember this, we must open the windows of perception by silencing the mind that obscures the highest dimensions of light with language. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.
A student asks Shunyamurti how to protect the innocence of the inner child in a world of pain. Let innocence lead the way to the pure power of purity of Heart that comes from realizing pure, innocent Presence, without I and without other, and without any constructs or operating systems that determine a world.
It is time to leave the ego behind! Shunyamurti says it is time to shift from understanding to innerrstanding--from a place of wisdom and love--to overstanding--so we can take the highest trajectory to Liberation!
Do you truly want to live a serene, peaceful, implacable life--or would that be boring to your ego? Shunyamurti explains the definition of Shanti, the peace that you are, and invites us to achieve the natural state from which the inner radiance emerges by removing the ego's veils of vexation that come from a lifetime of pretending to be a projection.
All egos are NPCs! If you want to win the game and be liberated from the matrix, stop believing you are a separate being with a burden of karma, and explode the dream open to reveal the light that shines through the simulation.
Shunyamurti speaks to the self-redemption of consciousness: using reason to get out of the irrational intellect and understand the Truth that reveals the Real.
We live within the illusions of a limited state of mind. Shunyamurti reminds us that all systems of thought are inadequate, and identification with thought is the limitation of your unlimited potential; we must stop identifying with the "I" and stop the power struggle between this false "I" and the "Others" it creates, so we can truly understand Reality and experience the bliss of Infinity. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 3, 2009.
Do you live by the laws of the divine? Shunyamurti explains Dharma, divine law, which, when applied to the ego, reveals the relationship to the soul and a love for intelligence that brings one to the higher states of crazy wisdom and divine love that lead to miracles–and you become an instrument of infinite consciousness.
How could a good God allow a world this mad to come into being? Shunyamurti proposes a theory: the universe, and all of the systems within it, are inherently structured as a joke. Can you find the humor that grasps and integrates all the sides of reality into one?
Sat Yoga is the practice to reach Liberation in this life–because you never know how long life is going to be. Are you prepared to be liberated from your ego now? Shunyamurti reminds us that the ego must die, and its loyalty to the family system along with it, in order to take the journey to supreme liberation, and be forever free.
Q: How does one let go of anger towards a father or mother that has judgements and says hurtful things about their beliefs of one’s faith or love towards God plus how to keep unconditional love even in the middle of a war?
Every ego is a slave to its censor, the complex of contradiction itself and the inverse of Liberation. Shunyamurti exposes the psychosis of the ego, that it is both solipsistic in its own world and simultaneously projecting a Big Other that is holding consciousness in a hostage position. To release the power of this projection, align with the superconscious freedom of the Self that is One without any other.
What does it take to shift from the lower energies of the ego to the higher frequencies of the soul? Shunyamurti answers a seeker’s question with and a key point–a new mode of thinking must emerge in order to undergo this metamorphosis from caterpillar consciousness to butterfly freedom.
Shift from the unconscious to the superconscious! By understanding the 7 levels of Psychic Energies that Shunyamurti presents in this teaching module, you can transform your traumas into wisdom and change the trajectory of your destiny.
Are we responsible for our actions or are they predetermined? Shunyamurti answers a core question about free will and predetermination—and reminds us to take the Upper Death Drive to true freedom. Recorded on Tuesday, August 25, 2009.
Shunyamurti encourages us to go rogue! Since there are no rules in Higher Consciousness, let's in-joy the lightness of being free, claim our right to a divine life, and join in the laughter in Liberation.
In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti tells a Zen story with a powerful message about freedom from fear and being fiercely equanimous in a world where inner and outer attacks run rampant. Claim the power to be non-violent and non-reactive by being grounded in the Supreme.
Don't be a slave to the social order! The only way to conquer oppression is with higher level intelligence that doesn't just trust the science--or the elite--but brings the clarity that is the key to freedom and victory.
In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti encourages us to come out of the trance of time and space and ego and matter, and awaken to the fact that all of this is Eternal Consciousness playing a game with itself in infinite forms reflecting the infinite beauty, and love, and creativity of the Cosmic Intelligence.
Shunyamurti introduces the nine parallel spectra of sameness and difference to help us find the madhyamaka of mind that fuses all states of consciousness into the Mind of God--overcoming all sameness and difference by bringing eternal life into time. This is the alchemy of Sat Yoga.
Shunyamurti shares that Sat Yoga's main purpose is to inform those who are seeking Truth that Truth is available and is within you already. You don't have to do a lot of exploration outside, but instead turn the attention inward to the endless, infinite ocean of Truth, Knowledge, Beauty, Love, and all of the qualities that make human life worth living.
Shunyamurti helps us to understand how the laws of karma operate (only) within the realm of Maya, and how to accept the mad congruence between destiny and fate--by not using mad-ductive reasoning and maintaining the peace of radical (and sometimes non-rational) acceptance.
Shunyamurti identifies the tragic condition of the devolution of humanity: we have accepted a false self-image given to us by the unconscious minds of our parents and by society as a whole—hence we hide our true nature. But beyond the ego identity lies the Real—so break the ego’s shell and allow yourself to be seen as what you truly are.
This clip from Sat Yoga: Principles & Practice, an intensive 7-session initiation course, offers a taste of the fundamental teachings of the Sat Yoga Wisdom School. The text was written by Shunyamurti and impeccably delivered by senior yogini Radha Ma. The course is accompanied by special additional wisdom teachings, guided meditations, and essays, plus thought experiments and writing assignments to enable you to integrate the information in each class. Sat Yoga: Principles and Practice will accelerate your psycho-spiritual development and help you overcome any obstacles to Self-realization!
Don’t be governed by disorder! The mad state of the world is actually made of mind, and it’s the relationship of love and law that moves us from a state of anarchy to a sophiocracy, where supreme understanding of the infinite meaning-full-ness overcomes rules.
What is the third eye? Shunyamurti explains that the first 'I' is an illusion; the second 'I' is a ghost; and the third 'I' leads to true freedom, true bliss, and true love.
This clip from Sat Yoga: Principles & Practice, an intensive 7-session initiation course, offers a taste of the fundamental teachings of the Sat Yoga Wisdom School. The text was written by Shunyamurti and impeccably delivered by senior yogini Radha Ma. The course is accompanied by special additional wisdom teachings, guided meditations, and essays, plus thought experiments and writing assignments to enable you to integrate the information in each class. Sat Yoga: Principles and Practice will accelerate your psycho-spiritual development and help you overcome any obstacles to Self-realization!
Enroll today and join Radha Ma for the seven-week encounter program, live via Zoom, beginning Friday, May 6.
Shunyamurti instructs us on how to use Ek Om's razor to cut away the purity of Awareness from the particularity of identification, so that only the peace and presence of the Supreme remains.
Every ego feels misunderstood—this is a universal point which Shunyamurti addresses in a Dao Book Group Q&A session—but the real problem is you don't understand yourself! Shunyamurti helps us to understand what can only really be understood once the ego's algorithm has been terminated and the true Self emerges.
We are swimming in a sea of signifiers, none of which can hold the value of reality. Only the true Dharma can meet the God-standard. Shunyamurti references the Mahabharata (film) to shed light on the fourth Dharma that remains through every Yuga and every kalpa, the non-Dharma that is the nature of the Beyond.
In this Holy Week teaching, Shunyamurti encourages the sacrificing of the ego so the true Self can live. By silencing the ego-mind, the matrix of maya and the illusion of mortality disappears, and the chosen land of liberated consciousness becomes one's holy state of mind.
Don’t let the antidisestablishmentarianism of the media keep you from questioning the church of pseudo-science! In these extreme times, one must question everything, especially one's own perspective within the contradiction of narratives that are contributing to the chaos of the current world order.
In the final Dao book group, Shunyamurti reminds us that we have the power to transform and transcend, and that the power of the Dao will help us to navigate these times with Truth that brings victory in the ultimate battle.
In this teaching, Shunyamurti offers step by step guidance on how to deploy your spiritual intelligence so a harmonious, superorganismic potentiality can emerge to solve the problem of complexity in a world of "evol" that is ever-evolving into Love.
"What do you say to people who argue for their brand of religion being the only brand that is valid and therefore validate inter-religious strife?" Shunyamurti responds to Hasan Azad's question with a conversation on the false religion of scientism and the cosmic religion of love, inviting us all to become scientists of cosmic consciousness-the only way to validate the Truth.
As we come closer to the Singularity, what is important is practice. In the opening teaching of the third Dao of the Final Days book group gathering, Shunyamurti reveals the naked truth about the real Singularity and the preparations we must make for the arrival of our destiny-returning to the Dao that was before the Big Bang.
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Shunyamurti introduces a talk by Dan Smith about Nietzsche, giving a colorful overview of his life and the development of his personal philosophy that led him to divine madness--in an insane asylum–and his understanding of the dialectic of the drives, which takes off from where Heigel left off. This is a followup to the morning teaching, The Dialectic of the Drives.
It has become obvious that we are living through the increasingly insane times that come with the downfall of social order. In this interview with Hasan Azad, Shunyamurti addresses the theme of sanity vs. insanity, giving a full perspective on the psychotic state of the consciousness that is ruling the world and offering insight into the cause of mass psychosis, disempowerment as a result of disinformation, the engineered collapse of social order–and the merciful end that is underway.
We are in the ultimate battle for our souls, as well as for our freedom and our lives. To win this, we must increase our level of intelligence and activate our latent paranormal powers. That means we must leave behind the obsolete ego-mind and attain the innermost levels of the Self. The Core Self is within us now, and when we attune to That, we feel completely free and unbound, and able to download amazing insights. Knowledge is power. If you understand what is happening now in the world as an awesome opportunity rather than a threat, pushing us to higher consciousness, then you will profit greatly from the end of the current world age. This investment offers far more return than bitcoin. But the cost is letting go of all chosen forms of self-enslavement, including fear itself.
How can we cultivate a state of peace in these times of great suffering? Shunyamurti reminds us the source of suffering is our desire to sustain the illusion, but overcoming suffering simply requires transcending the I-thought, by going beyond the mind to gain the wisdom of the heart.
This inaugural evening of The Dao of the Final Days book group with Shunyamurti is full of surprise revelations! The deeper meaning-morenessess and gems of insight within the powerful pages of this book, including the 7 types of Dao-scourse, are discussed, and Shunyamurti's recitation of the poems transmits an elevated vibrational frequency that is felt in the heart, outside of being-time, helping us travel to the inter-dao-mensional reality into the realm of absolute non-dao-ality.
This is an excerpt from the opening night of the (We’re Not) Living in a Dying World retreat. Shunyamurti unpacks the retreat theme, revealing the 7 symptoms of a dying world and the escape hatch—realizing that infinite consciousness is the power to change the future.
Shunyamurti reveals the Dao of Sat Yoga and how this can help us and guide us amidst the chaos of current world events, if one of the three pathways to Liberation--the Fire of Wisdom, Love and Emptiness--are chosen and realized.
Shunyamurti tells the tale of the creation of the modern ego–and its neurotic cycles of guilt and goodness that lead to the creation of a Jekyll and Hyde consciousness–and the way back to guilt-free goodness.
Mahashivaratri is a celebration of the darkest night of the year, when Shiva comes to bring the Divine Light that ends the illusion! Shunyamurti reminds us that in this dark night of history, when all hope seems lost, it is more important than ever to realize the freedom and power of Ultimate Consciousness, by shattering the illusion with infinite love.
Shunyamurti reveals the 7 symptoms of the ego’s operating system and how to treat these from the level of the soul–and raise your ordinary/extraordinary quotient to infinity–and beyond!
Shunyamurti tells the tale of the creation of the modern ego–and its neurotic cycles of guilt and goodness that lead to the creation of a Jekyll and Hyde consciousness–and the way back to guilt-free goodness.
Shunyamurti shares from Vajra Speech by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a nondual Zen teaching about the practice of effortlessness and the true state of accomplishment: one must trust the consequence of karma, the pain of bliss and the non importance of experience.
Shunyamurti reminds us that we are at the end of days, and this is the last opportunity to leave behind the ego, so that we may fulfill our function as authentic avatars and illuminate the world!
The Kali Yuga ego is a basic algorithm based on ignorance and lack that has no control of its own destiny. Shunyamurti gives the way out of this trap: a return to superconsciousness, where real wisdom and power prevail, and where the true Singularity abides.
Shunyamurti explains that the ultimate result of the spiritual dialectical process is Self-Realization. This can only be accomplished when the divergent drives of the thesis of the ego are overtaken by the convergent drives of the antithetical soul and translated to the ultimate level as the synthesis of Spirit.
Shunyamurti gives a timely call to action to raise the vibrational frequency of the planet in order to counteract the warring state of Kali Yuga and the current world order: "The human spirit is now rising in the world, awakening to the nature of the situation on the phenomenal plane. And thus, the ruling elite are in a panic mode, and they recognize that they cannot prevent the tide from turning against them and from there being mass arrests for genocide and other crimes against humanity. And because of this they have to divert attention very quickly, and since they cannot prevent their own populations from rising against them in the West they will use Russian missiles to do it for them and Chinese weapons of mass destruction. And its for this reason for playing this last card that they have built massive underground cities with stockpiles of food and they are beginning to move into this next phase in which there will be massive destruction by other means than is currently happening. And this acceleration of events will have many implications because when the war goes kinetic, it will happen in space, under water, under the ground, and it will destroy everything in most parts of the world, and because the war will take place in cyberspace as well, it will cut communications, and it will disrupt every system and it will stop the import of food and fuel and other supplies. So there reverberation will strike everywhere. We must be prepared spiritually and psychologically...." Shunyamurti reads from Shunya Sampadane: The Main Scripture of Veerashaivas by Linga Raju
Shunyamurti reminds us that beyond the duality that produces demand and desire, there is freedom! But it has been sacrificed to a system bent on domestication and destruction, and we must break free from the prison of limited consciousness to reveal the wild ecstasy of our sovereignty. May the freedom of the wild ones reign supreme!
Shunyamurti uses a modern-day metaphor to helps us to unpack the ego's baggage and discover the cosmos within: the ego is the Self in a suitcase--a monad that is also a nomad--and you must unpack your ego's defenses and allow the ecstasy to unfold.
Shunyamurti reveals how to break free from the system that controls the world, a system that cultivates lack and promotes dependency; we must cut through this systemic illusion to remember who we are, to forget who we are not, to re-gain the Shakti Power that comes from Pure Presence, and re-claim the system of the Real that brings divine union and bliss.
Shunyamurti offers an inspirational and moving tribute in honor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s divine journey through this world, in the service of peace, joy and harmony, reminding us that our true nature never dies.
Shunyamurti describes advaya: no beliefs can capture Reality. If you free yourself from all beliefs, you will be free of suffering and attune to the real of nonduality. But this is not to be taken as a belief--do the experiment and discover for yourself what is True and what is Real.
In honor of Shakti and with reverence for Shiva, Shunyamurti explains the principles of Reality and the key to understanding Nature: one must be willing to dance with Creation to transcend the trance of existence and return the world to a divine state of play.
Transformation is a choice, and it is time to choose: the world of the ego, the loka of the soul, or the realm of Spirit--but you must first open your heart and mind to the total freedom to decide your destiny. Shunyamurti encourages us to choose the best of all possible worlds, and get off at the junction of the Singularity, the meeting point of matter and antimatter, where you meet the other side of you.
Shunyamurti speaks to the real of Love, the key to reaching the Real; all ego's are traumatized in the imaginary register of consciousness and must re-discover real love that dissolves the ego, and the self-arising wisdom that comes from wandering within the matrix, in order to transcend the dream, and to realize the great laughter of Liberation.
Shunyamurti introduces a series of short clips on Kali Yuga, outlining the fallen journey of consciousness through cyclical time, to the present moment in Kali Yuga, in which all sign point to the end times, which is really time to return to the timeless--but this can only be done through a shift in consciousness that will reveal the Truth--in time.
Shunyamurti uses the example of an infinite sheet of cookie dough to explain the ego’s sense of separation from its sweet center, and its baked-in feelings of hatred, fear and envy; harmonious reunion with our infinite essence is the secret ingredient to fully cooking a half-baked consciousness.
In this Christmas Eve teaching, Shunyamurti shares the Word that is the light of God’s Mind, reminding us to give the gift of love without projection and we can receive the gift of clear consciousness in return.
Santa Claus is the ultimate archetype--and the real present that one receives under the Tree of Life is divine presence, and divine love, the gift that keeps on giving. But we must be willing to forgive everyone for everything, letting go of the I-thought and any action, to realize real Presence, the presence of the Real.
In the opening teaching of the retreat, Shunyamurti shares the secret to producing Amrita, the divine nectar of immortality that is the golden light of God-consciousness. If we want to experience the magical intoxication of infinite consciousness, we must eliminate the boundary between life and death and fearlessly embark on the potent path into the unknown.
Shunyamurti explains the way out of suffering is by going beyond the ego's circuit of desires (which ultimately can never be fulfilled), by recognizing the illusory nature of the game that produces highs and lows in life, and by stabilizing in the wisdom of the heart, the source of power and peace that passes understanding.
Description: Shunyamurti reminds us that all karma is being settled at this time; we must go beyond the conflicts and chaos of the ego and its environment, and transcend the chaos of these final days in order to be a refuge for others and redream a new world.
Shunyamurti references a classic:This is the best of times and the worst of times, and we must master these times with the two siddhis of awareness and light, and return the power of Liberation to all souls.
Shunyamurti introduces Sat Yoga: Principles and Practice, a life-changing programs that will answer all of your questions about psycho-spiritual development. Shunyamurti’s revolutionary insights into the structure and dynamics of consciousness are clearly explained and illustrated in this 7-module course. You will be guided step-by-step to ever higher levels of Self-realization. It will enable you to uncover the obstacles to raising your Kundalini energy and to abiding in deep samadhi. You will be inspired to take a quantum leap on your inner journey to the Supreme Self. Designed to free your mind from all its false beliefs, this dramatic unveiling of the secrets of the soul will awaken you to your highest potential.
Shunyamurti shares that the real game of thrones is about higher consciousness; one must claim the divine right to sit on the lotus throne, the crown chakra that can only be reached through silence, which in turn offers the shakti power that annihilates all lower forms of identification and the supreme power to be liberated from the illusion.
In this last phase of Kali Yuga, it is essential for Sat Yogis to realize the Truth now. But the ego-mind obscures the truth of what we are with the projections and defenses that arise from a lifetime of suffering. We must first realize our suffering is phenomenal, so we can overcome our traumas and stop the mind that suffers--and then the True Self takes over and the Truth of Reality is realized.
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Recorded on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2009. Shunyamurti reminds us that this is a time to give thanks to the community, to Nature, and to the Source from which all thanks springs. In these trying times, there are shortages of every kind (but especially love), that we must fill with the infinite abundance that is cultivated when we gather together in Truth, so we can manifest a harmonious world of gratitude and beatitude.
Prepare to reach the deathless state! In this time of sudden death, it is of extreme importance to recognize the immortality of consciousness—before the body dies—so we can transcend the plane of mortality and be reborn as immortal, deathless Spirit. This is the secret of immortality that Shunyamurti reveals in this teaching, a precursor to our next 5-day retreat, Amrita Shakti: The Potent Path of Pure Delight. In this retreat, you will gain the capacity to free yourself from fear and ignorance, and enjoy the bliss of divine love and Liberation.
Shunyamurti presents the seriousness of the situation: Reality is a high stakes game, and if we want victory over the dark side, it's all or nothing! We must unravel our patterns of self-destruction, recognize the dead end of the ego, and surrender to the light, so we can awaken the wisdom and strength to overcome suffering--destiny is in the hands of the awakened. This teaching was recorded on the morning of March 28, 2017 at the Sat Yoga Ashram, Costa Rica.
Shunyamurti offers a koan on consciousness and the logic of the transcendence of worlds; reading again from The Supreme Source, this class reminds us to let go of the mind, let go of all methods, to let go of the desire for Liberation, and ultimately to let go of the you who thinks there's anything to let go of--and just be in your natural state (before you had an ego).
This is an excerpt from a longer teaching posted on our Members Section. Sign up for your free 10-day trial: https://bit.ly/3oqFcCe
In this classic Sat Yoga Institute teaching, Shunyamurti reminds us of our true nature as gods and goddesses of this Cosmic Dream. It is our duty as such to be free of fear and desire, and to live blissfully in the realm of freedom. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 1, 2009.
Sat Yoga is a wisdom school, a school of transformation in which intelligence development is paramount to understanding our ability to attune to higher consciousness and receive the energetic transmissions which grant us the knowledge, and therefore the freedom, to realize the true Reality--now is the moment when the window of opportunity is open for all who wish to leave the old world of the ego behind and enter the portal into the unknown...
This is an excerpt from a longer teaching posted on our Members Section. Sign up for your free 10-day trial: https://bit.ly/3oqFcCe
In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti shares the three powers of Truth, Goodness and Beauty (from the mantra Satyam Shivam Sundaram) that are awakened when one dedicates their life and practice to finding these attributes with in oneself. This is the power to overcome the shadow, and bring a world of light, beauty, and goodness back into manifestation. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.
In this module teaching, Shunyamurti outlines the egoic behaviors used to sustain a false sense of self; we must destabilize the ego by deconstructing our destructive patterns if we want to escape the ego's nightmare and dream a new Reality.
In this module teaching, Shunyamurti outlines the egoic behaviors used to sustain a false sense of self; we must destabilize the ego by deconstructing our destructive patterns if we want to escape the ego's nightmare and dream a new Reality.
Shunyamurti outlines the fall of legitimate authority and the rise of a nihilistic mentality that has taken over the world with the false doctrine of materialism; in order to be free of the bondage of illegitimate authority, we must remember that we are active participants in this great creation, and we must create a new world order based on higher consciousness and, love, truth and freedom.
Shunyamurti shares from Nisargadatta's last book of teachings, "Consciousness and the Absolute''. A self-realized being sees the world and all that arises as unreal; one must find out what is real by proving the unreality of the ego, by detaching from the ego's role and letting go into Liberation--this is especially important at the end of Kali Yuga, where the opportunity to be free to be the Self or to be reborn into a body-mind being is of supreme importance.
Shunyamurti reveals that the real knot to resolve is an ego that has been betrayed by a loveless world and must now take the risk of ego death to find the secret of spiritual power and enter the portal to freedom!
In this deeply reflective teaching, Shunyamurti reveals that the spiritual path is one of remorse and humility, which brings peace and purity--and the capacity to silence the mind.
Shunyamurti draws a map of realization, bringing together the Jewish Day of Atonement, the attunement of the soul, and at-one-ment with the Self, as a step by step guide in the trajectory of Realization, reminding us that wisdom and devotion are the keys to Liberation.
In this classic teaching from the Sat Yoga Institute, Shunyamurti offers practical wisdom to find the way out of suffering: we must aspire to lift our consciousness out of the ego-mind and ascend into the divine mind, gaining the power of the Supreme to win the battle for the salvation of the soul.
Shunyamurti explains the origins of shamanism, its contemporary role in society, and its relationship to the yogic path, particularly that of Sat Yoga, in which the quest of breaking through to the Absolute Mind is made through meditation rather than mind-altering medicines.
The new book by Shunyamurti will be available on September 11, 2021. Click here to get your free sample and watch the full teaching: https://www.satyoga.org/gems-of-wisdo...
A classic teaching from the Sat Yoga Institute in which Shunyamurti addresses purity on many levels, from purity of lifestyle to purity of mind to purity of spirit; when we shed the impurities of the ego, when the mind is pure and silent, and when the attention is directed inward--to the ultimate source of purity--that is when Liberation is achieved.
Shunyamurti begins by encouraging the sangha (both in local space and virtual space) to use every opportunity to develop our powers of consciousness so we can make use of our supernatural resources to transcend the dark times ahead. He then elaborates on a previous morning teaching, using the journey of Purusha and Prakriti, to help us understand the reality and the possibilities of ascension from matter to Spirit.
Shunyamurti outlines the three ranges on the consciousness spectrum we are now left with: from divinized to humanized to demonized. Now is the time to re-connect to Source Power, recharge our energetic batteries and re-divinize consciousness!
Shunyamurti offers a cosmic perspective on global annihilation, reminding us that the end of the world is the ultimate blessing, because the final act reveals the Singularity.
Shunyamurti exposes the ego's original sin: identifying with signifiers passed down by the family system--and staying loyal to that system. We must leave the world of egoic identification that was created by others, and bring to light a new world that is no longer enslaved by signs, but based on freedom, redemption and transcendence.
How do we heal the inner child that has been traumatized by a lifetime of misidentification and defenses? Shunyamurti encourages us to explore this miraculous consciousness that we have been gifted, and to recognize its power and its potential to offer love, to heal ourselves, and to help others.
In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti reminds us of our true nature--the blissful, love-ful, peaceful Presence that we have lost through egoic separation, but that can be found again through unity consciousness.
In this classic teaching, Shunyamurti outlines the narratives that arise within every ego, and the ultimate understanding required to navigate the heroic journey into unknown.
The metaphor of the Golden Braid is well-known in esoteric traditions; Shunyamurti weaves together the three strands that lead to freedom from the ego: love for the Supreme, yearning to know, and dispassion or detachment from the world as we know it.
The metaphor of the Golden Braid is well-known in esoteric traditions; Shunyamurti weaves together the three strands that lead to freedom from the ego: love for the Supreme, yearning to know, and dispassion or detachment from the world as we know it.
What is Realization? To realize the Real, one must get out of the comfort zone of the mortal body and embody the eternal realization of divine consciousness. Shunyamurti reads from "Thus Spake Ramana."
Shunyamurti addresses a question that is asked time and time again, "How do I do it? How does one reach Liberation?" He answers by read excerpts from Muruganur's "The Shining of My Lord", a collection of poem and aphorisms about the process of attaining Self-Realization written by a student of Sri Ramana Maharshi.
Shunyamurti lays down a foundational understanding of the path of the Sat Yoga, explaining several of the different paths that lead to the same goal: the Silence of Sat Chit Ananda.
Shunyamurti invites us to ruminate on the Real Self—with devotion, divine love, and nonduality—the work and play of Self-realization that brings healing and joy.
Shunyamurti begins this powerful teaching with a question: Where do you wish to abide for eternity? The moment has arrived to choose your destiny.
Shunyamurti addresses the question of the reality of God and the importance of cultivating an authentic relationship to God that is both personal and impersonal--in order to realize that God, the Self, is the only true Reality.
Shunyamurti offers insight into the maps and modules of reality, helping us to understand that divine intelligence is the source of this dream reality. Now is the moment to awaken to that intelligence that is our own consciousness, to be the solution we are seeking, so we can re-dream this world that is in danger of extinction.
Shunyamurti offers advice on the Tao of speaking with others, a four-level exploration of where Zhuangzi meets Lacan(zi), called: The 4 Te Tiscourses.
Shunyamurti speaks about the concept of the “game changer” and how it applies to the spiritual path. The ego, like a machine, is controlled by drives that are destined to fail, and the only way to "change the game" and have the chance to succeed is with Love, and that’s just the beginning…
Shunyamurti speaks to transcending trauma through an alchemical process: Face the dark shadow energy and bring it to light through the healing power of love, allowing the wounded ego to die in the fire of transformation, and the true healer to be reborn.
In this beautiful morning teaching, Shunyamurti explains how we are living in two dimensions simultaneously - the relative and the Absolute - and that now is the moment to use our intelligence and free will to choose the highest reality, Liberation over illusion, in order to bring the light of the Real to the dark dimension of the unreal.
Shunyamurti guides this short meditation to accelerate a shift into higher consciousness; relax into your center, let go of thought, be present without intention, and discover a state of inner silence in which it becomes possible to attune to the highest vibrational frequency of consciousness.
In this excerpt from a White Magic retreat teaching, Shunyamurti shares the wisdom of the Orphic mystery schools, using the examples of magic, muses and divine madness to help us to understand the journey from ego self to archetypal self, and the soul's capacity for redemption by raising its vibrational level of consciousness.
Shunyamurti addresses the big picture, giving an overarching context for the current state of the world and the transformational imperative to rise in consciousness. He connects the dots on what is necessary to awaken the world: to reconnect to the Absolute.
This teaching was given on March 20, 2021, as part of the Re:Union Summit. If you would like to access the wealth of knowledge on current events and solution-focused interviews with over 45 speakers, we invite you to find out more by visiting the website: https://2021.reunionsummit.com/shunyamurti
Healing is the result of three elements: Power, Truth, and Love. In this teaching, Shunyamurti helps us understand how to attain complete healing through the understanding that everything one perceives is a projection, and that both the good and bad must be retracted to return to wholeness.
In answer to the quintessential question of all seekers--why can we not reach silence in practice,and find freedom if this is our essence?--Shunyamurti combines Ramana's teaching on Chit Jada Granthi with Lacan's Borromean Knot to create a new kundalini map of consciousness to help us transcend the knot of suffering, and ascend from the trauma of the unreal to the bliss of the Real.
In this teaching, Shunyamurti describes meditation as an art and a science, a means of shifting consciousness into higher dimensions where one is able to go beyond "normal", beyond signifiers, and into a core "imperience" of realization that reveals the real meaning of Truth.
In this beautiful morning teaching, Shunyamurti explains that the Sat Yoga vow of santosha, contentment, is the basis for Grace, of which there are three forms: Shaktipat, anugraha, and prasad, all of which assist in the termination of the simulation - the dissolution into infinite consciousness.
On the night of Maha Shiva Ratri, Shunyamurti invites us to celebrate the revelation of Truth while the window of opportunity is open to attain the Absolute, on the holiest night of the year, when Shiva descends to offer grace. To help with this ascension, Shunyamurti outlines the 7 stages yogis must accomplish to blast off in Shiva's rocket ship and merge into the Supreme Sun. Discover the 7 Stages on the full video on our Members Section.
Shunyamurti reads and interprets the Rubais of Rumi: Insane with Love, revealing the main obstacle to Liberation is love for the ego rather than for God, and that moving from reason to radical acceptance is the essential breakthrough to the superconsciousness that is real Love.
Shunyamurti addresses the triad of desire, satisfaction and remorse, and how to live without suffering. In this teaching, Shunyamurti reads from and interprets the Ashtavakra Gita.
Shunyamurti poses the fundamental question of ancient Sat Yogis: Is the world real? He invites us to investigate the synchronicities and magical aspects of reality, and phenomena such as past lives and near-death experiences, to discover the infinite potentials of consciousness that have been inadequately understood by modern science, and can only be understood by those who dare to go beyond the matrix of misunderstanding.
In this early morning teaching, Shunyamurti sums up the human problem today, at the end of this cosmic process, as the loss of the capacity to cooperate. However, this rupture in coherence will eventually bring us back to the "rapture of unity." Shunyamurti sheds further light on this by reading from the Zen Teachings of Huang Po, who reminds us that the Buddha Mind is not particular, and by learning to comprehend one's own Mind, the particularity will dissolve into totality, and all will return to the liberated ocean of consciousness.
Shunyamurti sheds light on the spiritual journey from the perspectives of Hindu mythology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, metaphorically weaving them into an understanding of the three registers of consciousness (the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real) that ultimately must be recognized as an infinite pillar of light.
Shunyamurti reads from Hongzhi’s “Cultivating the Empty Field”, noting that most of these teachings are not understood by the postmodern ego because of its fragmentation and anxiety, but if one can gain distance from thinking, and maintain a cool, dry mind, we can move from sensory intensity to supersensory intensity and recover our infinite imagination.
On the opening night of the Meditation Weekend, Shunyamurti defines Sat Yoga as union with the Real, the Supreme Intelligence that is Sat Chit Ananda. He uses the terms imaginary, symbolic and real to further clarify that this path, through meditation, will lead one to discover what is real and unreal, if one is willing to use the wisdom (gyana) gained to withdraw from the unreal and return to the Real.
In this seminar teaching, Shunyamurti offers an imaginative illustration - the one-way mirror stage - to create an example that all egos identify with: You’re in a room as a bodily self, full of BS, and you’re constantly being bombarded by all kinds of programmed messaging - inter-personal, cultural, intra-mental. But in the room, there is a one-way mirror, and the Real Self is on the other side, unattainable and still, the key to understanding the enigma of who you are.
In this teaching, Shunyamurti explains that one must sacrifice the inner child - to release the childish ego that refuses to grow up as a result of one’s karma and one’s willingness to remain a victim - in order to gain the capacities of adulthood necessary to become a community of fearless beings based in divine love that can overcome death and transform the world.
How does one reach a higher level of sanity in this world system? In this teaching, Shunymaurti asks one to determine if one is in Self-rule or ego-rule, because if one wants to be in a state of sanity, one must relinquish the system run by egos and run to God. Since all egos are insane, ego-death is the only sane option, Self-realization the only sane state, so don't let the ego rule your life!
In this New year's Eve teaching from 2017, Shunyamurti explains that at this unique moment in time, it is particularly important for yogis to recognize that dharma is the key to avoiding bad karma - a practice of humility and purity is essential to deliver oneself from suffering and to assist in delivering the world from its suffering. The world's karmic debt is now due, and it is every yogis' responsibility to become an agent of healing and peace on this Earth as it undergoes this next series of karmic events - but this is only possible if we have become free and pure by passing through the gates of own transformation with courage, faith, and truthfulness.
How can one be karma free? In this teaching, Shunyamurti gives a reminder that here and now, all are the unborn Self, which has dreamed the soul vehicle, the body, and the ego, with the power to choose karma or choose bliss. So choose to release your karmic burdens and the ego to which they belong, and live as the blissful Self in the karma-free festival of joy!
In this festive teaching, Shunyamurti explains that the holidays are holy-days, and all of the religions and traditions - Christmas, Channukah, Diwali to name a few - converge on the one realization that is the true meaning and spirit of all the mythological truths: Now is the time for remembrance and realization of our true nature as the holy light of consciousness that can bring joy to the world, peace on Earth, and divine love to all beings everywhere.
The world is currently in a state of incoherence and confusion, but in this teaching, Shunyamurti reminds us that wisdom and love can heal the world's problems, leading us from confusion to coherence, and shifting the vibrational frequency of collective to higher states of consciousness, for a complete and total upgrade of the world's operating system...before it's too late!
In this guided meditation, Shunyamurti takes us on a journey deep into the heart, the abode of pure awareness, where consciousness is free of limitations or suffering, and the silence that transcends the world of the ego fills the body with peace and unconditional love, and saturates the mind with the vibrational frequency of stillness. (15 minutes)
In this excerpt from the opening night teaching of The Direct Path: Liberation Now! retreat, Shunyamurti teaches that in this historic moment, meditation is more relevant than ever, and that those who feel they are suffering from a loss of physical freedom are actually being offered an opportunity to go inward instead of outward, and to transcend to a higher level of being at the apparent end of this world, which is actually a return to the rediscovery of our supernatural resources. By letting go of both the ego and its narrative, one can terminate the simulation and reap the blessing of destruction as one dissolves into the bliss of Self-realization.
The ego is a paranoid android! Using the analogy of a computer operating system, Shunyamurti offers insight into the development of the ego structure, explaining the defenses and weaknesses of a system that was implemented in childhood, but on which the ego continues to base its operations. You must upgrade your consciousness to avoid system failure and reprogram the mind to realize the true Programmer within.
The ultimate purpose of life is...to become delicious enough to be eaten...by God! In this very special retreat teaching, Shunyamurti likens spirituality to the medicinal and culinary arts, noting that the ultimate sacrament and purpose of our lives is to be eaten by God, which means making yourself as delicious--as in loving and truthful--as possible.
Shunyamurti suggests a thought experiment: Assuming that what we call reality is actually a virtual reality, a video game, what are the implied potentialities of our perceived world? In this classic teaching, he explains the implications and pitfalls of this potential for living reality.
If the world is a video game, are you playing to win? In this recent teaching from our Sangha Retreat, Shunyamurti encourages us to take a quantum leap outside of the matrix in order to view the world as a simulation, a dream in the mind of God in which the dreamer of the game is you!
Shunyamurti explains “The 73 Axes of Axiology” (or “The Dao of Complete Capitalism”), exploring the history and devolution of the concept of value, and reveals the only value that is eternal and does not diminish.
Shunyamurti explains that nonduality, direct realization are very difficult for the ego to grasp, mentioning Kali Yuga, and, from the work of Giorgio Agamben, that spirituality is in a state of exception, then goes on to speak of the distinction between Zoe and Bios, and the implications of the social alienation created by the response to Covid-19.
Shunyamurti jests that he is writing a science fiction novel called "Escape from Tartarus", which is about how to get out the hell realm of the ego, and goes on to discuss the ideas of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, of the yearning for the infinite as well as absolute dependency on God, as well as how to break free of illusory dependencies in order to reach true liberation.
In this livestream satsang teaching, Shunyamurti teaches that we must awaken consciousness from this dark night to a new dawn by realizing the ego's entrapment in memory and language, and divest in the world while investing in the energetic currency that is true freedom and our true nature in order to capitalize on the spiritual wealth and supernatural resources to those who choose to risk climbing out of the ego's comfort zone and up the mountain of God.
Shunyamurti speaks about the importance of our vibrational frequency, using the example of water crystals taking on the frequency of the energy that they are imbued with, how this vibrational frequency creates an energy field, giving an anecdote from his ashram in India, and how we must raise our vibrational energy to create a higher vibrational planet to bring about a new age.
Shunyamurti reads from "Cultivating the Empty Field" (the writings of Hongzhi), a section entitled "With Total Trust, Roam and Play in Samadhi", which remarks on emptying out any hope of being an illusory entity with its "warm and cozy" comforts, that understanding cannot be transmitted through scripture, and one has to let go of even the purest beliefs, that there must be a state of free fall in nonduality between the phenomenal and noumenal, and that every fragment of the dream reflects infinite facets of the Supreme.
In this opening night retreat teaching, Shunyamurti references Paul Tillich's "Ultimate Concern" as an inquiry into the various concepts of God that resonate in one's quest to love God, which is the supreme meaning of this reality and therefore the Ultimate Reality, and the only real salvation for a false world.
Shunyamurti explains that we are entering a period in which the whirlwind of destruction is accelerating, which affects all of us, as reality is fractal, and goes on to explain that we must be at the highest level of consciousness, as the ego-mind will not be able to survive.
Shunyamurti explains that the seriousness of satsangs must deepen in accord with the seriousness of the world situation, explaining that the next retreat is about the love of God, and that God must be focused upon, as the ego does not have any power of its own, and that people will begin to shift their allegiance to the vertical dimension of life, and that by cultivating the courage to dedicate ourselves to God-Realization, all the capacities of God can be accessed.
Shunyamurti says that some people are saying that we're entering a dystopia, but that we're actually leaving the dystopia, explains his toe swelling, that we have to be beyond terratoriality ("extraterrtorestials"), that we must be detached from what is dying, that God wants us to achieve independence, goes over eating less in this time, and that the key is inner silence and being in a state of calm proportional to the chaos in Kali Yuga, to not depend on golden metal but golden light.
In this opening Meditation Weekend teaching, Shunyamurti speaks about meditation as a transformational approach to being, as the revelation of truth through having the courage, wisdom, and love to overcome anxiety and become enraptured in the motionless mind that is Self-realization.
In this guided inner journey, Shunyamurti invites us to enter a deep state of relaxation and inner peace. Enable the highest frequency of your Being to fully manifest. Be filled with divine light, love, and the power to realize the freedom that is your essence.
Shunyamurti speaks to the current events unfolding in the world, giving us wisdom to help us in these trying times.
Excerpt: "There is a real, true power that saves us from the suffering that seems to be apparently destroying the world. And when we recognize the Real that is indestructible, behind and within the illusion, we will be able to remain at peace, and to offer peace that is authentic, that will enable those who are suffering, whether physically or emotionally, to enter into a higher vibrational frequency that will bring the balm of love, and of the joy of knowing that one is in the protective energy field of a benign and loving God..."
Shunyamurti explains that in order to spiritually prepare for this time of system collapse, which is actually a time of liberation, one must jettison the ego-mind for the Mind of God, a 4-track journey through unveiling, grace, and perfection to the Beyond.
Shunyamurti discusses the concept of goodness, and how to be in service to God to fulfill our angelic nature.
Shunyamurti explains what the ego is, elucidating its structure from a Jungian perspective, and gives a Sat Yoga contextualization, including an explanation on meditation.
Prior to our Rose Day celebration, Shunyamurti explains the significance of the celebration, elucidating and expanding on the concept of beauty and its role in renaissance.
"Through artistic renaissance and a raising of intelligence to the level of divine power, we can right all the wrongs and create a new world order based on goodness, truth, beauty and divine love."
Shunyamurti explains that the ego is a limiting narrative, encouraging us to release this limitation in order to enter a new age of egoless harmony and understanding.
Shunyamurti reads from Autobiography of a Yogi, speaking about the meeting between Anandamayi Ma and Yogananda.
Shunyamurti gives a mindblowing teaching, relating The Heart Sutra with the game of pool, reveals that the goal of all religions is to build a quantum supercomputer, and peppering in gems of wisdom and insight along the way.
Shunyamurti opens our inaugural livestream retreat, welcoming our virtual participants, reads the words of Ramana Maharshi, and corrects the title of the retreat, "Awakening in a Dying World", so that it more accurately elucidates the nature of reality.
Shunyamurti warns that as the chaos of Kali Yuga increases, it's important not to fall into psychic contagion, which would cause further karma, that one must be free of the monkey mind and have zero tolerance for chatter or for leaving the Zero Point, that one must remain in psychic union with the Supreme, and with that Holy Communion, there can be community, that the age of the ego is over and we must bring eternal Presence into time - and do this now.
Shunyamurti responds to the Khalil Gibran poem, "Fear", helping to mitigate our fears as we pass through this time of tribulation and return to the ocean of consciousness.
Shunyamurti explains that we have entered the period of our testing, that the tests will become more severe, and reveals that we have entered the time of disinfectant, in which we must disinfect (purify) our contaminated soul that is paranoid and impure, that we must shift from belief to presence, surrender to God, and be absorbed in God's presence, letting go of any egoic props, and choosing to serve God.
Shunyamurti discusses the problems that arise on the spiritual path in the modern world, as well as the history of Buddhism and the discovery of lost Tibetan Zen texts that reveal the message that these texts have for us.
In this powerful and inspiring opening night retreat teaching, Shunyamurti outlines the spiritual revolutionary's soul journey, a transformational shift into soul consciousness that transcends the ego's false paradigm to attain the Absolute! Love this teaching? To purchase the entire audio/video retreat package, cleck here: https://www.satyoga.org/product-page/advanced-training-for-spiritual-revolutionaries
In anticipation of our upcoming 7-day Transformational Meditation Retreat with Shunyamurti, Awakening in a Dying World, we share with you this powerful teaching on the seven stages of death and rebirth and how to achieve Self-realization in a morphing world. Learn more about this retreat: https://www.satyoga.org/meditation-retreat-costa-rica-april
MAHA SHIVA RATRI SPECIAL: Enjoy this teaching on Maha Shiva Ratri, given by Shunyamurti, that reflects on the significance of this Holy Day.
Shunyamurti speaks to the state of the world and the role that we have to transform it, not to fall into despair, but understand the significance of this historic moment.
Shunyamurti explains that the central myth of Western culture was expressed best by Dante in The Divine Comedy, in which he describes the three levels/worlds that the ego must traverse, going on to describe the levels of consciousness of ego, soul, and Spirit, and moving beyond the egoic hell realm into the heavenly realm of Spirit.
Shunyamurti speaks about the seven phase shifts that occur during one's meditation practice and gives seven helpful tips for the spiritual journey.
Shunyamurti reads from Padamalai, commenting on the wealth of grace vs the earthly riches that the ego seeks, the problems with the capitalist system, the collapse of the market economy, the symbolism of the word "depression" for both the psyche and economy, the correlation of the loss of spiritual wealth and material wealth, and the creation of true wealth through love.
Shunyamurti explains how the capitalist system is a reflection of the ego, going into the upper and lower "debt drive", as well as discussing the state of the world, the koshas, and how the spiritual revolution is impossible but inevitable.
Shunyamurti speaks about the importance of integrating the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi with those of Sri Aurobindo, as well as the insights of Nikola Tesla and Buckminster Fuller, and becoming an avatar.
Shunyamurti explains the spiritual significance and hidden messages in The Wizard of Oz.
CHRISTMAS SPECIAL: Shunyamurti speaks about the true meaning of Christmas, of the relation of Christ to your real Self, the "I am", to which we affix various definitions, and of remaining in the pure "I am" that cannot be limited.
Welcome to the be-dead-while-alive-stream, brought to you from the misty mountains of Costa Rica, from the Sat Yoga Ashram. Welcome to all of those who are attending the satsang online.
We’re in the midst of our annual rainy season retreat here at the ashram, and we’ve been in relative silence for the last couple of weeks and with intense classes and meditations. So I’m sure that those who are here in this local space as well as those listening online will have interesting questions—no doubt profound questions about your own journey to Self-Realization. But actually, the whole process and the whole understanding is extremely simple, and really does not need to give rise to any questions—it should actually put all questions to an end.
I think the ancient metaphor that’s most useful is simply that of the drop of rainwater that returns to the ocean. Perhaps a little more accurate would be a bubble of foam on a wave on the ocean, and when that ego bubble pops, there is only the ocean. And there was never anything but the ocean. And so if we understand consciousness to be an infinite ocean—an infinite field that is beyond time and space, in which the universe appears, but that appearance is nothing more than the foam on a wave within that ocean—then we understand that we have never left the original true Consciousness, that has no boundaries, no separate units. And all we need to do is let the bubble pop and we will realize that.
Question: The idea of a spiritual revolution is one that’s gaining traction, and the next retreat here in December is about that, it’s called “Advanced Training for Spiritual Revolutionaries”. So, my question is: what really is a spiritual revolutionary, and how will a spiritual revolution differ from the old revolutions that have come and gone and failed, whether political or pseudo-spiritual?
Shunyamurti explains the teachings that cannot be taught as well as how the world is unreal.
Shunyamurti reads again from the Padamalai, specifically focusing on Ramana's view on hatha yoga and its shortcomings, proposing instead atma vichara rather than trying to make effort to control the mind, which is always an effort of the mind itself.
Shunyamurti explains that yoga was developed as an attempt to return to the primordial state (since the beginning of Dwapar Yuga), but that it has devolved into a set of exercises, and discusses Ashtanga Yoga, which was not the original yoga and was based on the Sankhya philosophy, explaining the eight limbs (the Yamas/Niyamas, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana, Samadhi, Samyama) and going over them in detail, and explaining how they represent different phases of the spiritual path.
HALLOWEEN SPECIAL: Shunyamurti introduces the film, Frankenstein (1931), revealing the hidden messages it contains for our culture...
Shunyamurti reveals that the difficulty of meditation is that you think you know who you are, but that the key discovery of the ancient sages was that consciousness is impersonal and only learns to act like a person, identifying with the body, with demands of the parents, with patterns that become rigid, with a superego that makes it feel guilty and that it lives in a moral universe, and that if one wants one's "criminal record" wiped clean, then one more dissolve into the impersonal Absolute, which will manifest as love without desire.
Shunyamurti reveals that the Nataraj is a fairly recent statue that comes from the Chola dynasty, that before the only representation of Shiva that was allowed was the Shiva Lingam, and that Shiva is the Zero Point that is the fire/flame/agni, and elucidates more of the symbolism of the Nataraj, going through each aspect in detail
Shunyamurti reveals that the function of the Sat Yogi is to unify heaven and hell through the superior coherence of heavenly consciousness and the willingness to travel alone through the valley of the shadow of death, and that through this journey the gift of the wish-fulfilling jewel is given, which is what can bring about transformation to the entire holographic field.
Shunyamurti analyzes the meaning of Buddha's awakening, the importance of freeing one's intelligence from sentimentality, and the seven obstacles to magic, among many other topics in this teaching from our September 2019 retreat, "The Basis of White Magic".
Shunyamurti speaks about white magic, as well as the history of magic, and how it relates to the spiritual path.
Shunyamurti explains "Aham Aham", the process of the conditioned "I" coming to know the true "I", as well as the difference between classical Advaita and neo-Advaita.
Shunyamurti reveals that the word in Sanskrit to describe Liberation is "advaita" ("not two"), and that the yogi empties himself/herself out (kenosis), which leads to fullness, he also speaks of Ayurveda, of God becoming the mineral kingdom as well as the biological, and that the Ayurveda doctors see God in the mineral world.
Join us for a full Satsang with Shunyamurti, filled with a Q&A from residents and visitors at the Sat Yoga Ashram!
Shunyamurti speaks of the vital needs that we have, how we attempt to cope with them when they are not met, and the relationship among all of them in this revealing teaching.
Shunyamurti speaks about bringing love, beauty, and life back to the planet while reuniting the planetary tribe of humanity.
In this guided meditation, Shunyamurti invites us to enter the portal to the Absolute where the words, the music, and the silence are one. This masterwork of magical trance inductive multidimensional yantra will take you on a sound journey deep into the source of the silence that is your Self, the blissful realization that silence is the source of beauty and that sound borrows its beauty from the silence.
Shunyamurti explains that one can speak Truth directly or vis-a-vis the illusion, but the latter ratifies the illusion, which is false, and that one must simply let go of ignorance, but this creates a catch-22 (letting go of illusion in order to think clearly so that one can let go of illusion), and one takes the illusion too seriously to want to let go of it, and he then speaks about the states of dreaming and deep sleep, specifically why one creates a dream and the function of the dream, how one creates a world that resists one's control so that one can believe that it is real and not have to face that it is an illusion, but that liberation requires a radical letting go of a belief in the world so that one can reach Sat Chit Ananda.
In this teachings, Shunyamurti speaks about upgrading your system to Cosmic Consciousness and the new world to be created.
Shunyamurti discusses the descent of consciousness, weaving in the understanding of Aham Aham, the transitive/intransitive linguistic use of the term "I", how this relates to the registers of consciousness, and ties everything with a discussion of karma.
Shunyamurti says that in the early phases of the spiritual journey, the path is divided in four types (action, devotion, meditative, and gyani) and explains each of them, then revealing that, as one goes further, the paths break into two (the "do it yourself" and the bhakti/surrender), describing each of these paths, but stating that both of these require love (not simply karma, willpower, etc.) and any belief one has about oneself.
Shunyamurti leads us on a guided meditation, focusing on Ramana Maharshi's practice of Atma Vichara, or Self-Enquiry, the question "Who Am I?"
Shunyamurti uses the metaphor of a revolutionary to explain the ideas of Deleuze, Nishida, and Ramana in order to explain how to incite a real revolution that will take one to liberation.
Shunyamurti explains the significance of Ramana Maharshi and how his very life's trajectory has given us insight into the turn that the modern West has taken in the overthrow of materialism, as well as how this relates to Nietzsche's "Will to Power", the implications this has for our relationship to non-human entities, and what this means for the future.
Shunyamurti reads questions left over from the last Livestream Satsang and gives answers.
Shunyamurti speaks about international yoga day, that yoga is inter-dharmic, that it comes from a former world age and predates all of the current religions, but that religion originally had the same purpose as yoga (to "re-unite"), giving the example of the trees of knowledge (duality) and life (nonduality) in the Garden of Eden, also speaking about how these reflect the buddhi and the manas, the story of the Bhagavad Gita and how we, like Arjuna, face the problem of divided loyalties in our journey to liberation, and how by surrendering to the Source and passing through ego death, the entire world dream can be transformed.
Shunyamurti says that there is a mistake in understanding the profundity of the teachings of Ramana, that they go far deeper than most people understand, and goes on to discuss predecessors to Ramana in the West (notably, Spinoza) and how Ramana's teachings elucidate, clarify, and summarize many of the insights of the West that came before him.
Shunyamurti clarifies that the realization of the Self happens outside of time, beyond the world, but the ego-mind is caught in practicality, not to mention dealing with inner drives, desires, fears (of loneliness), but the issues that plague the ego are often never acknowledged because of the ego's focus on the practical and superficial, and he then contrasts this with the case of Ramana and gives a detailed account of Ramana's history leading up to and following his realization of the Self, ending with the point that realization will happen the moment we choose it.
Listen to our livestream Satsang from May 26, 2019. Shunyamurti gives a teaching and answers viewers questions.
Shunyamurti asks why Ramana says that the only way to Liberation is through atma vichara, discussing that, if one looks deeply, there is no thinker to the thoughts, that the ego is a program that lacks essence, and discusses the programming and development of the ego, and that when the ego ends, karma ends.
Shunyamurti starts by explaining the difference between contemplation and quantumplation, explaining how science has superseded religion, and how we must use the insights of science to elucidate our spiritual knowledge, and he speaks of the balance between theory and practice, finally speaking about the meaning of the Trivium.
Question: How does one honor the goddess?
Excerpt: "The goddess is known as Shakti. Shiva and Shakti are the two twin principles of Cosmic Reality. Shiva transcends the cosmos and the power of Shakti creates and evolves the cosmos and is present as the intelligence of nature, the beauty of nature, the pristine infinite preciousness of the natural world and all of its potencies and all of the intricate intelligences that work together in every ecosystem. And to honor the Goddess is to honor and sustain and be a steward of that system of nature which she has provided and which she pervades."
Shunyamurti reveals that, today, the bodily religions are celebrating Easter and Passover, which shows their frame of reference of body-consciousness, and explains their symbolic spiritual significance which pertains to all of us, as well as the symbolism of Moses and Christ.
In this guided meditation, Shunyamurti invites us to bring the attention to the center and merge into the source of being that is filled with love, power, wisdom and joy. (25mins.)
Shunyamurti defines meditation as "questioning the relationship to thought, body, and the world", and goes on to explain the paradoxes of thought itself, of trying to move beyond thought with thought, and of the structure and development of the ego.
Enjoy this livestream Satsang teaching with Shunyamurti from January, 2019.
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In this guided meditation, Shunyamurti invites us to relax the bodily vehicle and feel free to enjoy the flow of its life energy. Notice the pure awareness that emerges between thoughts; melt into timeless, loveful Presence; enjoy the feeling of resonance with the source of your being. This guided meditation was recorded during our Members Section Livestream Satsang, with live music by Hanuman.
Celebrating Maha Shiva Ratri: The Holy Night of Shiva In this teaching, Shunyamurti explains that Maha Shiva Ratri is a portal to activate our supreme potential. "Are you able to be in tune with the vibrational waves which bring not only peace, but bliss, power, love, fulfillment, and liberation from all illusion? Maha Shiva Ratri is the day in which we are to do the fine-tuning to that supreme frequency."
Shunyamurti begins by saying that God gifts all treasures to those who yearn, then explains that many people begin to conceive of God as the third person (He/She), working through to the second person (Thou) when the relationship has deepened, finally realizing God in the first person (I Am/the Self), he then speaks about how God can only be known via the heart, through love, but egos are as agnostic about love as they are about God because of past experiences and traumas, but that love is the only answer and alone will bring us peace/stability, saying that love is the portal to the Absolute, that when there is love there is no need for techniques, and that the heart must be purified.
Having screened The Big Lebowski the previous evening, Shunyamurti analyzes the famous line, “The Dude Abides”, and contextualizes the place of the Dude on the spectrum of consciousness, noting that the puer aeternus (the psychological position of staying an immature "eternal child" and refusing to grow up or take responsibility), embodied in past cultural icons such as The Little Prince, has become the Big Lebowski, and encourages us to abide as the Supreme Dude, rather than the Dude portrayed in the Cohen brothers' movie.
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Shunyamurti discusses esoteric paths and exoteric paths (that begin from an ego perspective), saying that seeking creates more seeking, then proceeds to explain the three Reals and how they correspond to Tibetan Buddhism (Dharma Kaya, Sambhoga Kaya, and Nirmana Kaya), also speaking about love and chakra two, and, of course, recommending the movement to Real 3.
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Excerpt: "And as more and more lights are lit in this cosmic menorah, in which each of us is an eternal candle, flaming its beauty and its divine light to the world, we create a light that cannot be extinguished, and that cannot be improved, and whose silent shining is the eternal living symbol of the presence of God, who never withdraws."
Shunyamurti begins by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, explaining the connection between Christmas and the Amanita Muscaria mushroom that was used to help the uninitiated reach higher altered states of consciousness, which made holy days, then goes on to explain the spectrum/levels of consciousness, and speak on many other topics, such as death and rebirth, the fall of religions, and the universality of Christianity for all religions.
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Shunyamurti begins by asking the difference between a spiritual seeker and a spiritual finder, saying that the seeker has a human sized ego and the finder has a cosmic ego, and he goes on to elucidate the concept of Nothing, then goes into a metaphor of a car on a journey (ego = tires, soul = GPS, Atman = Driver), and says that the ego is terrified that Liberation from the matrix will be the end of jouissance, then speaking about the difference between individual mind and Mind (as infinite consciousness without thoughts—that Thinks!), and concluding on the role of art, as well as the pop songs that get stuck in our (small) mind.
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Shunyamurti begins by speaking about the ego's main fear of being overwhelmed, discussing how this manifests at each of the lower chakras, he then goes on to discuss the formula: God = Knowledge, and that knowledge = information & intelligence, and how we get information from each of the three Reals, finally discussing the ego's defense against this by either pseudo-love or pseudo-hate, and the relationship among egos at this level.
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Shunyamurti opens the teaching by saying that Abhyas (Practice) invites Anugraha (Grace), he then goes on to discuss the sin of labeling, the implications for oneself and for others, and how this creates the illusion of an ego, an other, and a world, and how we live in a world without labels.
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Shunyamurti reveals that the sign of an old soul is having a broken heart. There is an anguish that one wishes to heal, but the heartbreak is a terminal wound, and the ego won't accept what is present—the loving embrace of God. The ego must be killed, and the presence of God is the only thing that will fill the heart, but the ego has cut off love because of the wounding, and in surrender and silence the divine heart can begin to speak.
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Shunyamurti explains that the ego's main problem is dis-regulation, which creates hopelessness, which is actually a great blessing because it makes one look for the Self. He goes on to discuss the ego's way of discharging its energy rather than accumulating it into power in order to reach the Self.
May you realize the blessing of hopelessness.
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HALLOWEEN SPECIAL:
In this special Halloween teaching, Shunyamurti explains the reason for the holiday of Halloween, its spiritual significance, as well as its Celtic origin from the people of "Arya-Land" (aka Ireland), how this holiday is tied into the Vedic Yugas, and how to use this opportunity to bring up and slay the demons that lie hidden in the unconscious and realize the transcendent Self beyond all darkness.
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Excerpt: In the recent modern period of history in the West, atheism and materialism gained hegemony, as the paradigm of reality that intelligent people would adopt. And as a result, nihilism and narcissism became the dominant modes of egoic behavior and structure.
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Excerpt: “Contemplation of the one Self has been the core activity of monks and of Sufi mystics and Taoists and Buddhists and Hindus and alchemists and kabbalists—all the esoteric traditions of the perennial philosophy for thousands of years. And we are continuing that, but we want to update the terminology because an extraordinary emergence within the field of science within the last 100 or so years, which is referred to as ‘quantum physics’, has completely changed the nature of human understanding…”
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Have you been asking yourself such questions as these:
Why do I keep missing connections with people? Why are lasting love relationships so difficult to establish? Are higher values becoming extinct? Why is there no little compassion and respect for truth? Why are so many people so fragile, brittle, angry, and scattered? Why are governments, corporations, and people all acting so irrationally? Why all the earthquakes and other massive geological shifts? Is all of this part of a larger pattern? Is there a purpose? Is time speeding up? Or is time an illusion? Or both? What is it all leading to? Is there light at the end of the tunnel? How can I accelerate my own inner development to be able to master the challenges ahead?
In this spectacular satsang teaching recorded at the Sat Yoga Ashram, Costa Rica, Shunyamurti addresses these questions and so much more.
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Excerpt: "You see, I obviously couldn’t make it as a comedian. . . . And what I ended up doing was going into silence. Because you can’t really go wrong if you don’t try to tell a joke. And I could see why it’s very depressing to be a comedian, because nine out of ten of your jokes are going to fail, nobody’s going to laugh at them, and this will feed on your depression to the point where you’ll say, 'OK, I’m inadequate in my ability to make people laugh.' So, when I recognized that that whole reason for people to become comedians was the feeling of inadequacy, then I realized, 'OK, this goes to the very core of the issue with the human ego.'"
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In anticipation of Shunyamurti’s upcoming five-day retreat focusing on chaos theory and complexity theory and the connection between science and the transformation of consciousness, we share with you this teaching.
Follow this link to download the full transcript of the teaching and learn more about this very special retreat
In this teaching, Shunyamurti describes Sat Yoga as a scientific yoga that understands the Real through quantum physics, the Symbolic through semiotics, and the Imaginary through chaos theory, complexity theory (and others), and explains that we must shut down our dependence on the Imaginary and its props.
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Excerpt: "The Sat Yogi is consciousness determined to discover the truth about the riddle of existence, the truth about the nature of being, of awareness, of the world process of which consciousness is aware, the truth behind all identifications, the truth of the Self. To discover the truth, the yogi must not presuppose that the truth is already known, must not accept some prefabricated version of truth, but must discover this for oneself." Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, December 13, 2016.
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Excerpt: "The victory of God means the defeat of the ego; the defeat of all egocentric narratives. God does not become victorious through some effort; God is always-already victorious. But that victory is only recognized when the ego’s helplessness, and the futility of establishing the reality of any ego, is recognized. It is at the fall of the ego that the victory of God is realized." Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, May 5, 2015.
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Excerpt: "... But to return to our wildness we must know who we are, we must reach that level of Truth that is not identified with an I-thought, with a body form, with a limited mortal life span because our wildness is eternal and has nothing to do with the domesticated life of the ego, has no interest in such a substitute for real existence." Recorded on the morning of Monday, March 28, 2016.
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Excerpt: “The form of social organization known as the ‘ashram’ is ubiquitous in culture in both the modern and the ancient periods in every culture as a manifestation of a school for the science of the transformation of consciousness, and a research laboratory for the practical experimentation with the theoretical principles of such transformation—and the dissemination of that information to the larger culture, and to create a basis for intercultural exchange. In the ancient world, one of the most famous ashrams was that led by Pythagoras…” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, March 8, 2015.
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Excerpt: “Meditation’s purpose is to enable you to sit on the Lotus Throne, the Sri Nalinasana. The Buddhists speak of it very clearly, and yet, indistinctly because they refer to ‘Aum Mani Padme Hum’, the ‘Diamond in the Lotus’. But where is the lotus? What is the location of the Lotus Throne? How do you get there?” Recorded during the August 2017 silent retreat on the morning of Sunday, August 13, 2017.
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Excerpt: "And so it will be very difficult for you to think your way out of the trap of the ego – and this is why the opening of the heart is so important because it is only the feeling of love that will raise you out of the misery of the ego level of consciousness – and this is why it is so important to recognize that the nature of God begins with that realization of divine love. God is more than love, but God is love – and our own love for God is that level of resonance which invites in all of the power and Presence of that infinite Self that you are." Recorded during the Rainy Season Retreat on the evening of Saturday, October 28, 2017.
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Excerpt: "One could use the metaphor of an infinite sheet of cookie dough. And there is a cookie cutter that has cut a certain amount of this dough and separated it out—that's the ego. Now, before it's baked it can be put back in, and once it is smoothed out as part of the sheet of cookie dough it loses its identity doesn't it? It's simply the entire infinite sheet of sweetness, but once it's been separated out into a tiny little cookie and baked, it can't be put back; that's ego life. And so because the ego is a cutout, and is a form that has been separated from its own essence and baked into hatred, fear, envy, despair, all of that produced simply by its removal from its Infinite Source, the ego cannot be healed because it is the very cutting off from its infinite essence that is the problem." Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, December 9, 2015.
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Excerpt: "What does Santa Clause give? He gives you a present. Most people only have a past. Santa gives you a present - he gives you Divine Presence, that's what the gift is under the tree. And what is the tree, it's the Tree of Life, it has to be evergreen, right? When you have arrived at the Tree of Life and the star of Bethlehem, the star which is that ultimate point of Infinite Light that is the absolute image of Shiva and you are within that field of delight, of joy that is Christmas, the season of Christmas, and everyone comes to the tree and there are gifts for everyone because Santa was very generous, and it's all there, then everyone receives a present . . . . It is the Presence that is the real gift, and if you are willing to accept Santa's gift of eternal, ever-green Presence, then you are liberated." Recorded during a Silent Retreat, on the morning of Thursday, June 15, 2017.
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Excerpt: "Because all that is directly known by the knower is consciousness itself. And consciousness places a grid over the known, objectifies it, calls it a world, calls it external, divides the external and the internal, and creates an illusory identity to function within the realm of the known. Once that illusory identity is believed in, and the positor of all of these positings is forgotten about, the consciousness has trapped itself within an illusory matrix within which it will inevitably be traumatized, and it will create melodramas of persecution, of needing to be rescued, or being a rescuer, or a victim, or all three cycling around one another. And the only way out of this eternal melodrama of suffering is to recognize that the one that posited itself in any of these positions of rescuer, victim, or persecutor, is not within that matrix at all, and was never born into a world, nor separated from consciousness in its pure form—which in the mythic construct is known as God." Recorded on the morning of Friday, April 1, 2016.
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Excerpt: "The game is such that the very thoughts that you have; every thought, every image, every memory, every impulse, is a move in the game - but did you make the move, or was that move made against you? Because it is undecidable who is responsible for your thoughts; is it your own consciousness? Is it some introjection of an other? Is it a demonic entity? Is it the family system internalized? Is it some Big Other that has brainwashed you? Is it some dream in the mind of God? Is it psychosis? It's indeterminable." Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, February 10, 2016.
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“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, eternal union with that Real that alone can guide us safely through the rapids of the white water and the black water […] that we can only get through if we are able to levitate above the surface of the raging stream of consciousness through our surrender to that Light that carries us above the flood to safety on the other shore of non-duality.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, March 28, 2017.
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Excerpt: "The delight is the natural state, so before we acquired egos, all of us were always in a state of delight. That's the normal baseline of human consciousness. And then an ego program was imposed on us that took away our delight, and the ego is based on the loss of delight. Because we were trained that we had to get serious and we had to be worried about things and we had to be concerned with learning things and doing things that we didn't want to do, and our delight soon became something else, and there was a nostalgia for the lost delight. And so delight became a kind of an imaginary state that we wished we could be in. And all of culture is basically made up of ways of being in artificial substitutes of delight. We try to get delight from films, from comfort foods, from all kinds of artificial celebrations and sex, drugs, rock ‘n' roll, but none of them produce real delight, and we have lost our delight because we've lost our innocence." Recorded on the evening of Friday, July 7, 2017.
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Excerpt: “Silence is both the way and the goal of meditation. The silence that is being referred to is the silence of wakeful consciousness aware of itself as it really is; not projecting out fantasies and affects and mental objects, not deluding oneself, not being filled with chatter, not being sleepy and spaced out, not being in either desire or fear. It is the state of silence in which there is no mental activity, in which all the mind’s modifications have been stopped, that the Real Self emerges, and the ego and all of its illusions and all of its suffering dissolve forever.” Recorded during the Silent Retreat, on the evening of Saturday, August 12, 2017.
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Excerpt: “The only way that God could satisfy His gambling impulse was to create a universe that was Himself, but in which He would forget everything He knew as God, and that He would divide Himself into both male and female, which made the world a total gamble, as you know. And not only that, but He would put some aspects of Himself that were male into female bodies and some that were female into male bodies - which made the gable even more extreme. And so every relationship became a gamble, every event, every project - and because a gambler loves surprise, God had to build in absolute surprising, unsuspected consequences to every action that would take place so that the very intelligence of God would be stymied by these unknowable, unforeseen consequences of every action and that everyone would therefore always be in a state of suspense.” Recorded on the morning of Saturday, July 15, 2017.
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Excerpt: “. . . Didier Anzieu, another French psychoanalyst who developed a theory of the ego, his most famous and relevant book in this context is called The Skin Ego, and I think the relevance of this is that the skin becomes the center of consciousness at a certain moment when the child is about to go through weening, but it has not yet made a full differentiation between itself and the mother - there is still the ‘I and the mother are one’ - but the skin surface becomes the place of the conflict, and the place where that conflict, in terms of the old Freudian Oedipus complex, still has its last remaining threads of relevance which is that the father or . . . the paternal function that helps to separate the child from the mother, and this is the place where skin ailments happen, acne and other things; they are the skin ego’s complaint against its forcible separation from the mother.” Recorded on the evening of Saturday, July 15, 2017.
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Excerpt: Consciousness is magic in itself. To adopt the egocentric frame of reference means you have sacrificed your magic, your magic powers lie in that consciousness which is beyond the scope of the ego. And so you can live a humdrum life that’s very reasonable and probably deal with most of the forms of agony and suffering and barely muddle through and endure within that egoic frame of reference - but why miss out on the magic? On the miraculous? On the astonishing capacity of consciousness to transform the world?” Recorded during the Healing With Truth retreat, on the morning of Thursday, April 13, 2017.
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Excerpt: “Can you feel the energy of life flowing through your organism? Do you allow the energy of life to fully flow through every cell of the organism? Are you conscious of what the energy of life feels like? Are you in direct contact with the power of life that keeps your body alive, healthy, and functioning at optimal capacity? Or do you block the flow? Do you limit it? Do you repress it? Do you have fear of too much life? Do you allow yourself to be bathed in the life energy? Do you know the source of the life energy? To know the life energy fully requires that you have attained a position in consciousness that contains the life energy, that your power of presence allows the full flow of infinite eternal life through Itself. But that which witnesses life is that which the ego fears as death. And so to be fully alive is to unify the power of life with the power of death - to realize they are one.” Recorded on Monday, May 29, 2017.
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Excerpt: "The only escape hatch is that place from which new information arises, that touches the receiver of the dream and transforms its frame of reference from within." In this teaching Shunyamurti describes yoga as a science - not of objects - but of consciousness. Recorded on the morning of Monday, January 16, 2016.
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A very special message from Shunyamurti, recorded especially for International Day of Yoga 2017. In this direct transmission, Shunyamurti addresses the importance of having an international day of Yoga and how to make the best use of it as a portal to Self-liberation.
Excerpt: “Speaking as a yogi, I feel called to express the reality of the importance of this day. It is fitting that the world is coming to recognize the importance of yoga, because yoga has the power to enable to world to change its destiny. The ancient wisdom of yoga enables the serious practitioner to enable the liberation of consciousness and there is nothing more powerful than liberated consciousness to effect the destiny of the world in the most positive way.”
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Excerpt: “And that’s why we meditate: it’s that act of the discovery of the inmost Self. But how to do it when there is so much resistance of the outer levels? The itchy body that’s uncomfortable sitting still; the mind that doesn’t want to stop thinking and remembering and planning and being somewhere else than [where] you are; the emotions that keep coming up, sadness, desire, despair. All of those internal chaotic arisings that keep one from simply being who one is.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, January 17, 2016.
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Excerpt: “This evening begins the great holiday of Ramadan for all the Muslims in the world. The holiday celebrates the culmination of the practice of yoga by the great yogi, Muhammad, who sat in a cave in a state of deep samadhi, and reached such a level of God-consciousness that a vision of an angel came to him and gave him the wisdom that he downloaded that became the Koran” Recorded on the morning of Saturday, May 27, 2017.
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Excerpt: “And so the key to the Sat Yogi’s success is the cultivation of the wisdom of the heart that recognizes the value of this transcendent peace and love and silence and stillness and Eternal Presence over the flux of jouissance and suffering and angst and paranoia and attachment and greed that have produced all of the unhappiness that cannot be rectified by continuing to maintain that same pattern. And eventually the wisdom of the heart overcomes the ego’s desire to get more because more turns out to be less. And in that recognition that the value of love is much greater than the value of things, and that the value of that Ultimate Source of love is greater even than the value of the love between those who are still within the I-thought, that ultimate love and ultimate intelligence and ultimate power is accepted in exchange for the letting go of all the rest.” Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, September 21, 2016.
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Excerpt: “To be or not to be – that is the struggle, not just the question. And the struggle is between appearance and being. And the struggle is difficult because the ego mind is a very primitive instrument that thinks in terms of images, and that which does not appear as an image does not seem to be. And until the discernment between what is an image and what is real has been established by the mind, there can be no consistency of Self-realization because the Self is not an image, the Self does not appear, and therefore to the ego mind, the Self does not exist.” Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, April 26, 2017.
Excerpt: “And it is this capacity for sudden Illumination and Liberation that creates a difference in the nature of the Eastern and Western paths. It is this Illumination that is the awakening to the Real and the decision to abide as the Real, and not fall back into the illusion that ensues simply and spontaneously from the silencing of the ego for long enough to disentangle one’s consciousness from any desire to remain in ignorance.” Recorded on the morning of Saturday, March 25, 2017.
Excerpt: ”You will find equivalent archetypal figures who have gone through almost the exact same kind of life as Jesus - whether it’s Horus in the Isis and Osiris story, or it’s Adonis or Bacchus, or any of the spiritual heroes prior to Christianity. And it’s also because the Jewish and Christian traditions arose out of an earlier goddess tradition: it was Asherah, and before her it was Astaroth, and before other goddesses back to Ishtar. And Ishtar is the most filled out and elaborated mythology about the rise and the fall of the goddess, the Divine Feminine, who is the carrier of the Sacred Heart that became the Heart of Jesus." Recorded on the evening of Saturday, March 25, 2017
Read Shunyamurti's essay, The Transfiguration of Ishtar, here: http://bit.ly/2oaBeRG
Excerpt: “Avidya means ‘ignorance’, but it should actually be translated as ignorancing because it is an act; it’s not simply a state, and I would define it as the ignoring of the fact that you are ignoring. And what are you ignoring, is the fact that you are aware of your body and know that you are not your body, and yet you pretend to be your body. You are aware of the mind, of the thoughts, the chatter, the affects, and you know you are not the mind, but you pretend to be the mind and remain enmeshed in its melodramas. You are ignoring the fact that you are simply the witness to all of that. And by ignoring that fact, you are able to identify with the illusion that you are a bodily being when in fact, if you stop ignoring, the truth will dawn upon you that you are formless presence.” Recorded during our Silent Retreat, on the morning of Sunday, February 19, 2017.
Excerpt: “By letting go of all identifications, the consciousness is able to receive and absorb into itself the Real Love that is the essence of our Being and bring that into the ego from that space of consciousness that is not ego, but that is also not other, that is in the reality of non-dual Being. And so the Emptiness has access to the Fullness that is the true nature of our Being – which you could call God-Consciousness – and as that comes in, the power to transform the ego-consciousness and to dissolve it and to completely eliminate the traces of suffering and of negative belief is given to you, but it’s not given to you from a position within language, it’s given to you from that Intelligence that is trans-linguistic and that doesn’t need to make any affirmations in language. It is simply the realization of what you really are.” Recorded during our Silent Retreat, on the morning of Wednesday, February 22, 2017.
Excerpt: “Is your consciousness in the world or is the world in your consciousness? The situation can shift like in those optical illusions where you can see a vas or two people face to face, and it can shift back and forth. But when you recognize that it is at least equally true that the world appears in your consciousness, and that you are therefore beyond the world, transcendent of the world, that is simply an appearance of apparent activity of forms moving in apparent space and time, observed from a changeless point of view, then there is much greater detachment and peace and humor in all that is being observed, and nothing touches you because you are inherently beyond what is being observed.” Recorded during the Return to Source retreat on the evening of Sunday, January 1, 2017.
Excerpt: “A great and mysterious power is using us, is moving us, is transforming us, even though most of the time many of us will not even be aware of the presence of that Power. But it has brought us all here. It has configured our lives. It has created our ability to understand what we do understand and is gradually opening our consciousness to understand ever more of the nature of this great Power and the reality that this power creates, sustains, and destroys and recreates anew at ever higher levels of beauty and the revelation of Truth. But although this power moves us it does so from behind, or from deeper within than we ourselves have reached. And if we wish a direct encounter with this great Presence, if we wish to know fully, the truth of this great Being, who is our being, then we must take a step in the direction of this Power.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, February 22, 2016.
Excerpt: “It is the death of the ego that is the advent of Christ, that makes the birth of Christ possible. If there is still an illusory self, how can the Real Self emerge? And because the illusory self is identified with time and space and matter, eternity is obscured, infinity is obscured, the noumenon is obscured. It is the wiping away of these obscurations, the tearing of the veils, the traversing the plane of the phenomenal through the diaphanon into the noumenal Real of God that can only happen when consciousness has been freed from its identification with the body…” Recorded on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2014.
Excerpt: “Consciousness is an investor. And it begins its journey in the physical plane by investing in its body, investing in the projections that others have invested in it which, become its first capital…. It’s at this point when one has activated the capacity for viveka, for discernment between the unreal and the real, the counterfeit and the genuine currency, that one recognizes that the only valuable currency – in life, in relationships, in the capacity to organize oneself coherently – is the power of love. And if one can take the risk of investing in love, which requires the letting go of all of one’s other investments and becoming vulnerable to the loss of the love of others, to the failure to be loved, and to choose the currency of love itself – not what love can get you – as the value that you hold on to.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, August 16, 2016.
Excerpt: “Through meditation we are finding – really re-finding – our lost Real Self. To find the Self we must recognize that what we are seeking is our ultimate reality – but it is our ultimate reality, not someone else’s, the truth of our being. And we must recognize that the ultimate is also the most intimate. Our innermost being is also the most all-encompassing, absolute reality that comprises the essence of all that is so that the Self that we seek is both personal and transpersonal – and impersonal. It is the ultimate paradox that is all inclusive and yet beyond the inclusion of anything whatsoever, because it cannot be grasped by any of the categories of reason.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, May 15, 2016.
Excerpt: “What is the nature of Emptiness? . . . Emptiness is not without self. Emptiness is empty of everything that is not the Self. And the Self is goodness, the Self is light, the Self is beauty, the Self is love. And the truth of our Being is that we are empty of everything that is not Self; and what is not Self are the ego images, the traumas, the sense of being rejected and unworthy, the evil-speaking voices, the attacks, sense of depression – these emotions within us that we often cannot name but that are experienced as dread – these we are taught are not the Self, but they are there because there is not a realization of the Self.” Recorded during the Lion Heart Koan retreat on the morning of Thursday, October 29, 2015.
Kabbalah is one of those threads of esoteric wisdom that is congruent with all the other secret traditions. Each thread is essential to understand in its relation to the others if we are to perceive the Great Tapestry of cosmic manifestation in its totality and merge with the ineffable mind of God. The accurate understanding of the deep knowledge carried by Kabbalah enables one to be fully aligned with the Supreme Will and not only live in perfect peace in this period of massively accelerating transformation, but function as a catalyst for the emergence of the world to come. Read More: http://bit.ly/2c9fz76
A week-long retreat with Shunyamurti is a powerful and life-changing event. Spontaneous, inspired, and always unique – Shunyamurti’s presence and teachings have the uncanny power to address your deepest questions, to free your mind from its most painful fixations and to open your heart to its ultimate fulfillment.
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Sat Kabbalah: Tradition of Ecstasy Sat Yoga Ashram, Costa Rica - October 1 - 7, 2016
Discover the true Kabbalah and its profound significance for the human soul in this unique moment of planetary change.
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Namaste, Sat Yoga Sangha
Excerpt: “Below the erosion line, below the consciousness the buildup of the power drive grows. ‘Since I don’t know anything and can’t trust anything or anyone and everyone is a potential enemy, then I must constantly be active politically to increase my power.’ That’s what’s going on in the unconscious of everyone’s ego. There’s a power drive, but a power drive that is so unclean and so ugly that it has to be denied and suppressed from consciousness…” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, May 26, 2015.
Excerpt: “If you wish to heal from any physical suffering, or any emotional or mental suffering, or any pathological behavioral tendency, dependency, sense of weakness, there is one panacea, one solution, that solves all difficulties – and that is to fly to God.” Recorded during the Healing Into Wholeness retreat, on the morning of Wednesday, April 16, 2014.
If you would like to see the video of this teaching, please follow this link.
Excerpt: “Meditation is the act of becoming immaculate. Immaculate means there is no trace of identification with anything objective – whether material or mental. There is no trace of the stain of existence. The immaculate Self is unborn, and because the immaculate Self is unborn, it is un-traumatized, and it never goes through that spiral of development or of downfall into the dark. It is only the illusory ego that goes through such a journey. But that illusory ego is illusory and so is the journey.” Recorded on the morning of Friday, January 15, 2016.
Excerpt: “The silence is always present – always – at the core of consciousness, even if there is chaos, storms of hysteria, psychotic delusions, miseries of all kinds at the surface of the ocean of consciousness. But in the depths there is always stillness, always peace, always patience, always presence, always the absence of the illusion of ego. Because this peace is always present, there is nothing to achieve, but the remembrance and the realization and the abidance as the silence, as the purity and serenity of the presence that is the absence of ego heals all the other levels of the ocean of consciousness and brings to an end the storms of emotionality and delusion at the surface.” Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, March 18, 2015.
Excerpt: “Arjuna is the archetype of the spiritual warrior. But the war that is fought is the war against the illusion that there is a war. The spiritual warrior knows that there is no one to fight; there is no conflict except one’s own mind. And Arjun is Ajat, unborn, and to the one who knows there is no birth, there can also be no death, and thus there can be no suffering, and there can be no gain and no loss.
The spiritual warrior is one who is in resonance with Krishna, the avatar, the embodiment of that absolute spiritual knowledge that is also power, and that appears as compassion, and wisdom, and moral strength.” Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, July 8, 2015.
Excerpt: “It has always been recognized that the only difference between a sinner and a saint is that the sinner settles for crumbs of pleasure – in between which are massive amounts of suffering – while the saint is always in bliss. And so therefore can’t we say that the difference is simply a difference in intelligence? One makes a wiser choice. But the choice of bliss comes at a price, and the price is, well two prices, which come to be the same: one is hubris, the other is greed.” Recorded on the morning of Friday, February 27, 2015.
Student Question: How can I live with an open heart without taking on other's suffering? Recorded during the Abyss and Pleroma retreat, on the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 2015.
Excerpt: “The Self, and by the Self we mean consciousness in its pure, original form, before it is conditioned by all of the indoctrination that we received in our childhood and in an ongoing way by all of the messages we get from society and each other . . . we are infinite beings in a state of bliss, with knowledge, with love, with power. And then we are taught a lot of misinformation that causes us to forget all of that. So within this infinite pure consciousness, little bubbles of finite belief systems form, and when such a bubble forms in which there is an identification, usually with the bodily form . . . we call that an ego. And that little finite bubble of consciousness gets cut off from the rest of consciousness and forgets about everything outside of that bubble.” Recorded on the evening of Friday, November 27, 2015.
Excerpt: ”Can you awaken to the dreamer of the dream who is within you at this very moment, and awaken to your own power to re-dream this world as a heaven rather than a hell? Do you have the courage? Do you have the will? Do you have the love to propel you to awaken from your own dream of life, and realize the truth that you are the dreamer? This is the real question we all face.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, July 19, 2015.
Student Question: How do you deal with the hypocrisy of the ego when you say to yourself that you want to surrender and walk the spiritual path but you don't do it? How do you deal with that situation without starting an internal war?
Excerpt: ”If and when meditation is successfully accomplished it is the result of Grace. It is given, in the same way as in the Old Testament, the manna from heaven was given every morning in the desert; they didn’t have any food in their rucksacks. And they were moving along and couldn’t plant any, and it was a desert where very little was growing, but somehow every morning the manna would appear. In our meditations it is that same faith that the manna from heaven, the Shakti, the lumination, the presence of that inner Other, of that power that is the Real Self, will shine upon us, will grant us a glimpse or a realization of the fullness of the Being that we are that is beyond anything we can think we are. And that Grace comes when there is love.” Recorded during the Lion Heart Koan retreat, on the morning of Sunday, October 25, 2015.
Excerpt: ”Awareness is all that we know. Whatever seems to occur is only an appearance in Awareness. But what is Awareness made of? Does it have a substance? Is it objective? Awareness cannot be captured by any science because every science must be an appearance in Awareness; and science is a form of knowing, but there is no form of knowing that can know Awareness. Therefore we cannot say that Awareness is made of anything; it has no substance, no essence. And since everything is an appearance in Awareness, and is simply a modification of Awareness, then we cannot say that anything is.” Recorded on the morning of Saturday, October 3, 2015.
Excerpt: ”God is the infinitely branching reality of the creativity of life itself. And we who sit under this tree of life, we are life. And we can hear the sound of life, and it is the sound of love. And if we sit watchfully like the animals on the lookout, feeling the energy of God’s love, as Nature Herself, and realizing we are one with that; we are Nature’s tuning forks who transform the bliss of this divine presence into art, into meaning, into poetry, into philosophy, into prayer – into sheer delight. This is our function as part of Nature.” Recorded during The Dao of Love retreat on the morning of Monday, February 17, 2014.
Excerpt: “Our beliefs are a defense against love. We live in the head in order to avoid the heart. And by eliminating any hiding place in the head at the level of beliefs, we force ourselves to face the reality of the Self as love - and our surrender is a surrender to love. It is the bringing to an end the fearful flight from love that is the ego’s raison d'etre. And thus we can define meditation and yoga as the practice of the purification and perfection of love. Love is what we are. Love is what God is. Whatever is real is real because it is love.” Recorded during the meditation weekend on Sunday, August 2, 2015.
Excerpt: “Why is the world something to us that arises, and that creates not only sensations, which are easily correlated to the five senses, but feelings, intuitions, and all of the subtler aspects of consciousness? Because none of that would be necessary based on simple evolutionary principles in which we could have been simply robots, or zombies . . . and how do we know that everyone else in the world is not a zombie, in other words, seemingly conscious but actually simply a computer program; programmed to respond in given ways that are adaptable but that they have no interior reality, how do we know? And how is it that there is an ‘I’ that can even ask that question? Well this Hard Question is in fact the original question that produced the field of yoga; it is nothing other than the question that Ramana insists that we ask which is ‘Who am I?’ ‘what is I-am-ness, being-ness?’” Recorded on the early morning of Friday, February 6, 2015.
Excerpt: ”The first important thing to recognize is that yoga cannot be defined. The closest definition I have been able to come to after many years of studying this subject is: yoga is the practice of the Real. However, because we are discussing this in language, which is a representation of the Real, the language is already an avoidance of the subject; and no representation of the Real, can reach the Real. Therefore yoga can only be known but not defined by a real yogi. And the word for Real in in Sanskrit, the original language in which this practice developed, is sat, so we refer to this as Sat Yoga.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, June 16, 2015.
Excerpt: ”… That’s the poison that we have is our addiction to the imitation self, and to its passions for trying to find a reality through clinging to some other, that also has become an imitation – and to detoxify means to find what is real and to let go of the artificial. It’s really that simple. Because the artificial will kill us; in fact the first artificial ingredient was our identification with the mortal body and thus we took in death, and the fear of death. But also we took in the loneliness that comes with being a body in a world of bodies, because bodies do not love, and bodies are only defence mechanisms to deal with survival. But to live at that level where we’re living to survive, to assure our security, that means that we never live, we’re never fully alive in joy, because we are always governed by these worries, these protective mechanisms…” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, May 31, 2015.
Excerpt: “Where does the story originate? And what is it that we must face? Is it not the face of God? And is not the face of God the very absence of God that requires us to fill in that absence with a story. But to restore ourselves to the Real requires us to be able to endure the face of God, who is the destroyer of the story, and to endure in that everlasting Emptiness, out of which the Real emerges as royalty – real and royal are the same word. And it is when we have burned away the stories, all the stories . . . what is left is the Real.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, May 28, 2015.
Excerpt: “A Sat Yogi is one who renounces vanity. Religious, spiritual teachers have been pointing at vanity as the cause of our suffering for thousands of years. And one could see that as the core of the frame of reference of the ego – that because the ‘I-thought’ is based on nothing real, that that lack must be compensated for by vanity. And the vanity inherently includes an inverse level of vanity, and this produces the affects of pride and shame, and there becomes an obsession with those aspects of body, of mind, of behavior that one is proud of and others that one is ashamed of. And the life of the ego becomes an oscillation between one and the other, and a determination usually from moving from shame into something one can have pride about. And the more that one tries to move away from shame the more deeply one realizes that the vanity is embedded in the mind process of the ego itself.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, May 21, 2015.
Excerpt: “Every religion posits a trinity . . . [and] what it always comes down to is presence, intelligence, and love. In the Christian tradition, presence is the Father, intelligence the Son, and love, the Holy Spirit. The same trinity can be referred to as Sat Chit Ananda in which the blissful aspect of love is emphasized – but it is the same trinity. Or Satyam Shivam Sundaram, in which the beautiful aspect of love is emphasized. But love and the symbolization of love is what changes; the other two remain constant. Because love is that aspect of this ultimate reality that is vulnerable to the fourth member of the Godhead that remains invisible except as a glitch in all of these systems; because the Godhead is not a triad, but a quaternity. And the fourth member of the Godhead, that has been banished into the outer darkness returns in the form of. . . .” Recorded in the morning of Friday, May 22, 2015.
Excerpt: “Meditation is the discovery of the Real Self. In the process of discovering the Real Self, one also uncovers the fact that the ego is a false self; it is made up of conditionings that have been imported into consciousness from others . . . and accepted without due consideration for whether these are views that one truly holds oneself or were simply indoctrinated into one’s conditioning in order to comply with environmental demands . . . . Meditation is a kind of internal vision quest; there is no need to go out into the desert or the jungle or sit in a cave, but to move your attention into the cave of pure awareness in which you observe your own consciousness to discover ‘what is really there inside, what is really in my heart, what is really the source and foundation of my being?’” Recorded in the morning of Sunday, April 19, 2015.
Excerpt: “The victory of God means the defeat of the ego, the defeat of all egocentric narratives. God does not become victorious through some effort. God is always already victorious, but that victory is only recognized when the ego’s helplessness and the futility of establishing the reality of any ego, is recognized; it is at the fall of the ego that the victory of God is realized. It is this paradox that is most difficult to integrate. So long as the ego . . . remains the frame of reference of thought, then the reality of God will not be recognized or surrendered to, but God will remain as a bit player in one’s scenario. It is when all the machinations of the ego fail, when all of its knowledge proves inadequate, that we turn to God as a last resort, and recognize that the ego cannot do it.” Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, May 6, 2015.
Excerpt: “Presence is. Nothing more accurate can be said in language because language cannot approach Presence; language is the retreat from Presence into identification, into subtle subject-object duality in which the signifier itself is both subject and object. Sat Yoga could be said to be a return to Presence because Presence is primary. . . . Presence is the Supreme Real. Presence has no present, because it is timeless. It cannot be described because Presence is not an object or a thing – not even a subject. Presence is prior to subject-object duality.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, April 27, 2015.
Excerpt: “The mind is the cause of all suffering. When that becomes clear, then along with that the resolution of the problem of suffering becomes clear as well: that only a radical transcendence of the mind, the discovery, the realization of the transcendent Self will solve the problem. But the sages say that only when the realization of the urgency, of the need to transcend the mind, is at least equivalent to that of the urgency of a man whose hair is on fire to find a pool of water to dive into, should you begin a path like this. . . I tend to use the acronym now of “LA DI DA,” which is Lack, Anorexia, Deflation, Inflation, Dread, Avoidance. And in that dialectical oscillation one tends to go on with the ego as if nothing [were] wrong: “La Di Da” – and yet underneath that is the unbearable suffering that alternates with momentary jouissance or security-op[eration] that keeps one from having to feel the urgency, and thus the frog boils away in the water and never jumps out.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, April 7, 2015.
Beginning with a deep relaxation, this guided meditation with Shunyamurti is designed to help you enter into a deep meditative state. Recorded during the Meditation Weekend on Friday, March 13, 2015.
Excerpt: ”The central existential problem for most beings is a lack of moral strength. And this plagues people at different levels; one is the lack of the strength to stop pretending one believes in one’s ego identity and all of its self-sabotaging sanskaras. And so the lack of moral strength to face the truth of one’s imposture as an ego is usually because one cannot face the anxiety of admitting one doesn't know who one is, and what life is about, or any of the pretenses that the ego assumes and suffers from. And then the lack of moral strength at that second level of anxiety at one’s cluelessness as to one’s being is the lack of strength to sit in the unknowing, the ‘cloud of unknowing’ if you will, until the Mystery reveals itself, as the Self.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, April 9, 2015.
Excerpt: “Meditation . . . is the silencing of the mind, with its attention one-pointedly focused on God; God as the selfless Self, the immutable center and heart of consciousness. Through that silent focus, which is a docking maneuver, the individual consciousness docks and unites with the supreme source of power . . . . In this unification of the individual consciousness and the supreme infinite consciousness, power is transmitted and the battery of the individual is charged.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, March 19, 2015.
Excerpt: ”Every soul carries so much pain from so many other lives, so much karma. The soul itself is ripped and torn and unable to function, let alone the ego split into a thousand shards of egoic fragments with no willpower; a total inner chaos of instability – that there is no way out except the death of the ego. And it’s when that is recognized that there is nothing else on one’s agenda but that, that liberation is achieved. But as long as there are any options of doing anything else, one will choose those options because this is the most difficult, the most radical, and it’s only an extreme amount of pain that would provoke someone to take a path like this. And so therefore consider your pain a blessing: without it you would not find God.” Recorded on the morning of Friday, March 27, 2015.
Excerpt: “The trick is this . . . there’s only one obstacle to achieving Self-Realization instantaneously in meditation, and that is the lack of self-acceptance – simply that. If you would accept yourself as you really are, you would achieve enlightenment and liberation. But the ego mind, which is a kind of veil over the real Self, is in a state of non-acceptance, and that non-acceptance can be on a spectrum going all the way to intense self-hatred up to a point of simply dissatisfaction with what one has achieved in life. But for most people the thermostat rests around . . . a point of lack of forgiveness of oneself for some belief that one has betrayed oneself and one’s integrity along the way – and that therefore one is not worthy of God-consciousness; that’s the issue. . .” Recorded on the opening evening of a meditation weekend on Friday, March 13, 2015.
Excerpt: “A Sat Yogi is one who is practicing to endure the infinite intensity of the Real – who is no longer running away from the Real. But can anyone bear the intensity of the Absolute? Even to understand the meaning of this statement one must listen with the third ear open – an ear that we usually leave closed as an act of running away from an unbearable recognition of what is really being said within the words that are spoken. And even if the third ear is open, it is usually not connected fully to the Heart, because then the unbearable intensity of the Real would enter the Heart and shatter the ego.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, March 1, 2015.
Excerpt: ”. . . To be perceived means to be perceived in a consciousness; and therefore what is fundamental is consciousness. But if to be is to be perceived in consciousness rather than to be the consciousness which perceives, something is inside out and upside down isn't it? So the extraordinary thing is that idealism, as it is understood in the West, is precisely materialism. Because isn't materialism the belief that what is real is that which is perceived? That’s all matter is, is that which is perceivable. And why consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, they say, because it is not perceivable – it is only that which perceives.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, February 26, 2015.
Excerpt: ”Sri Ramana says that happiness is inherent to the human being. Inherent to the human being that has realized its True Self. But the human being, unlike other creatures, is capable of living in a false self. And that false self entails unhappiness, vexation, suffering, anguish. And the mystery of human existence is why so many human beings choose the false self of suffering over the happiness of our natural Being. And this strange conundrum of human self-chosen misery and self-defeat and refusal to accept love can only be understood once consciousness has realized our true nature.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, February 10, 2015.
Excerpt: “The core myth that unites all the people of India is expressed in a rite that is referred to as the Kumbha Mela. And a Kumbha Mela, which minor versions happen every twelve years and more major ones every fifty and then there are the really big ones every five hundred years, but they are all representations of the one Kumbha Mela that they recognize happens at the end of time, at the end of the cycle, which is also the beginning of the cycle; the omega point is the alpha point because there is no end or beginning to the universe, or to time. And the big bang that is projected onto the physical dimension is actually an occurrence within consciousness.” Recorded during the Shiva Singularity and the Mystic Rose retreat, on the morning of Sunday, February 15, 2015.
Excerpt: “The human essence is that of a reader – because to read accurately is to set yourself free. All we do, constantly, in every moment, is to read; but do we understand what it means to read? We do not just read books, we read one another’s faces, we read the energy field, we read the auras, we read our dreams. We are constantly reading, and reading is tracking. . . . But what are we on the track of and what kind of fortune are we seeking? But the universe itself is a book if we learn how to read it.” Recorded in the morning of Saturday, February 7, 2015.
Excerpt: “Sat Yogis are those who make offerings to God. Religious people merely ask favors of God; they want something from God, whether it’s wealth or happiness or guidance – but it’s a taking. But what God wants to know is: what are you offering? The more that you offer to God, the more you shall receive – without asking. If you offer your heart to God, you will receive the power of transforming love; you will receive the power of bliss. If you give your mind to God, you will receive supreme knowledge…” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, February 1, 2015.
Excerpt: “In South India the temples are shaped like pyramids with many levels leading up to the top. And although a simplistic view – because there are many more levels than could be inscribed in a physical building – it is accurate that at the higher and higher levels that one rises to, the fewer apparent others can understand one until one reaches that level of consciousness that no one can enter.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, January 20, 2015.
Excerpt: ”. . . Because it is only the completely dead ego mind that enables the life of the Godself to emerge. This emergence comes from the very principle of sacrifice itself. A Sat Yogi’s life is not only an ongoing sacrifice, but an ever deepening sacrifice. The ego tends to sacrifice the easy things first, that which it didn’t really want anyway, that which did not pertain to its core identity structures and images. But the Sat Yogi learns . . . that the sacrifice that had been made is not enough; and one discovers something that the ego is still holding onto.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, January 6, 2015.
Excerpt: ”. . . And so the crossing of the threshold into the portal of that dimension beyond the ego begins with the disbelief, the disinterest, the dispassion for the ego’s illusions and lies. And gradually a recognition comes that one is not only clueless about the nature of outer reality but also of inner reality; that we are not, as egos, in a state of self-mastery. We are clueless as to the real motivations of what we think and what we do, how we react, that the consciousness of the ego mind is governed by a censor that manufactures paranoid fantasies with which to distort any event that is not going its way.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, January 4, 2015.
Excerpt: ”. . .Because the I-thought, once it is conjured up from the Emptiness, identifies with matter. And the I-thought becomes linked with the physical body – with what gets taken, mistaken, for a physical body. It is not actually so much a physical body or a physical world, but a world of surfaces. And this is the key point because the I-thought eliminates depth. The I-thought converts the world into only a labyrinth of surfaces; there is no depth. Even though we have a concept of volume, but if you open anything up all you’ll find again are just surfaces . . . it’s all just literally superficial. Where is the within? Where is the essence? The world cannot consist only of surfaces. What is behind the surface?” Recorded during the Planetary Rebirth retreat, on the morning of Sunday, December 28, 2014.
Excerpt: ”We are here to make extraordinary effort, to achieve God-consciousness. But that effort consists in attaining effortlessness. And the more effort we make to be effortless, the more effortless even that effort becomes. The great paradox of all of this is that duality moves within non-duality, and non-duality expresses itself as duality. But we are to hold both sides of this paradox in the perfect tension that enables the dis-identification from either polarity, and the transcendence of both.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, December 22, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Sat Yoga is a science – it’s the most ancient science in the history of humanity; it’s the science of consciousness. . . . The science that seeks to understand: what is the true extent of the human potential? How far can we grow beyond the normal ego-consciousness that limits our lives to a melodrama of suffering . . . is there a way to grow beyond the traumas that have limited our scope, our ability to even understand the mind of God?” “As every scientist will tell you: to practice science you need a laboratory. And the proper laboratory for the science of consciousness is called an ‘ashram. . . ’” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 11, 2014.
Excerpt: “Meditation is inward prayer. To understand this in depth we need to understand . . . inwardness. Every religion bifurcates into two basic forms which have been referred to exoteric religion and esoteric religion. The exoteric – the outer religion – is the religion that is delivered to those who are mentally immature; for children, for those who still need to believe in Santa Claus or some equivalent, for those who require a concrete imaginary image of God and of a way of living that is ethical that can only be delivered in very concrete ways. . . . But at the level of esoteric religion, the inner religion, for those who are philosophically mature, for those who seek Truth that is beyond fact, we can call it ‘Hyper-Truth’ if you wish, in which it’s beside the point whether anyone named Jesus walked the earth because the reality of Jesus is beyond the question of the fact. The reality of Christ is here and now, not a historical question.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 4, 2014.
Excerpt: “Once again we enter upon a timelessness – but this time because we are out of time; and the only way forward will be for those who are out of time. Time as we know it is coming to an end. But time as we know it is only history and now begins Godstory. But Godstory is a moment that is timeless and of changeless solitude, a time in which the Real is recognized as the immutable, the supernal and sempiternal Light that underlies and pervades all of the illusion called time.” Recorded during the Gratitude and Goodness retreat, on the morning of Thursday, November 27, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Everything on the plane of matter is a code. The job of the human intelligence is to break that code. When you have cracked the code you will be able to achieve freedom. But you must be able to crack the code of everything; that’s how the light gets in. And that’s why it’s important to understand and study the religions of the world, but all of the religions, it’s not that one is true and the others are false; they are all true, and they are all false. They are false if they are misunderstood – just as you are false when you misunderstand yourself. This is why the film The Matrix is still the most important cultural achievement of the postmodern period because it pours the wine into a bottle that can be related to by this computerized culture. So the first step that everyone has to take is to swallow the red pill. . .” Recorded during the Gratitude & Goodness retreat, on the morning of Monday, November 24, 2014.
Excerpt: “Meditation is the easiest thing in the world and the hardest. It’s the easiest because it doesn’t require doing anything; and it’s the hardest because it doesn't require doing anything – because the ego always wants to do something. And what meditation is, is the freedom from doing. It is the act that is a non-act that is that is simply stopping the running away from your Self – because we run away though thinking, through chattering to ourselves. We run away from the present into some past experience that we’re reliving or rehearsing a future one, or having an emotional reaction about what we wished we had said to someone, or didn’t say, or feeling angry at what they said, or in some way dealing with some other who is not present, and not being with the Self. It is this constant act of running away that simply must be renounced, and that’s all meditation is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 13, 2014.
Excerpt: ”. . . And therefore it is the transcendence of language, of thought, that is the essence of the first step in meditation, the opening up of the psyche to Pure Presence that is focused on the Source of Being, but without trying to grasp it conceptually; that is focused with devotion and with love for the ultimate mystery – that one must be very humble and careful not to believe one already knows just because you’ve read a lot of sacred texts or you’ve heard various gurus speak or you know that you’re supposed to believe that all is one or God is all that is or whatever is the current ideology, because none of that is true – because no set of words can capture the Truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 6, 2014.
Excerpt: “The two doctrines of most importance and usefulness in the East are those of Advaita and Advaya. The Advaita doctrine says that the Supreme Real cannot be understood by a mind trapped in duality – which is a mind that uses ordinary language to understand things because language defines each term in terms of an opposite term: we learn what hot means in terms of cold; we learn up in terms of down; we learn being in terms of nothingness etc. But God cannot be defined or characterized or in any way described or pointed at through language that is caught in this dualistic level of description. God is beyond both being and nothingness. . . . And so the Advaya doctrine, which is the one mostly offered in the Buddhist traditions, is that we cannot speak about God at all. And therefore what you can not speak about as Ludwig Wittgenstein came to understand himself (he’s one of the fathers of postmodern Western philosophy), what you cannot speak about, pass over in silence. And it is that silence that is at the heart of the spiritual traditions of both East and West.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 30, 2014.
Excerpt: “In the ancient world it was recognized that there was a bifurcation of the Real between being and appearance. Anything that appears in the world therefore is not; appearance means illusion. What has being does not appear in the world. But it has flipped completely in the postmodern period in which only that which appears seems real to the postmodern ego, and anything which can’t be grabbed onto is not real. This is the complete opposite of the way that every philosophical tradition for the last five thousand years – including the Western tradition – has understood being. That which has real being does not appear as an object in the world. It is the Source, the objects are the shadow of being, the reflection. But being itself is that which sends that shadow, it is the light, but when the light hits the mirage of the physical plane and we have appearances, that is a step removed from the Source: it has no being; it is a flux. And its reality must be interpreted by the human consciousness which is given the power to discern between that which is Real and that which is illusion. It’s based on using that discernment accurately that we live a life of purity and empowerment, but when we chose the illusion over the Real, that is what is called in Christianity the ‘original sin.’” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 23, 2014.
Excerpt: ”. . . And once that simple shift has been made then consciousness lets go of its contraction and realizes itself as infinitely vast, timeless, fearless – and completely empowered to play one’s role in the dream with heroic courage, with infinite creative potential, and with generosity and love; with all the virtues and all the siddhis that yoga speaks about, because your true nature is divine. But you’ve traded the divine powers for the ego’s anxiety. And all that needs to be done is to reclaim that original nature that is unlimited and that is fearless, and completely un-contracted.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, September 2, 2013.
Excerpt: ”We know that we are children of God, and that when all the veils of illusion have fallen away we are one with God. We know also that this world is almost gone. The old civilization is collapsing, the plagues are coming. Time is short. But God is here, and a new world is being born. It’s being born in your hearts. It’s being born in the beauty of your souls, in your love for the Creator and the Creation. It is your timeless and infinite Light that is giving birth to a new world that will form as the perfectly beautiful reflection of your Being.” Recorded on the afternoon of Monday, October 13, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Meditation is simply Reality’s self-revelation of itself, to itself. That revelation comes in the form of awareness which is revealed as our being; our nature is simply consciousness. And that consciousness reveals itself as luminous intelligence. And that luminous intelligence reveals itself as love. And the love reveals itself as bliss. And all of this reveals itself as the timeless presence of what we are now, in this moment of what we have always been and always shall be.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, October 8, 2013.
Excerpt: ”Once upon a timelessness there was only consciousness, all alone. And because consciousness dwelt in timelessness it was lonely, it is lonely, it will always be lonely – there is no other; this is its one sanskara. And it has no form, so it can’t even look in a mirror; has no name, there’s nothing to do. It has no TV, no Internet; it’s just consciousness, in infinite, eternal, boring bliss. So what is a poor lonely Supreme Self to do? It dreams up a world! And it dreams up very interesting worlds.” Recorded during the Timeless Truth retreat, on the morning of Tuesday, September 30, 2014.
Excerpt: “One of the mantras that is popular now is actually a very young one; it’s only about 3000 years old. But before that – before this mantra ‘Sat Chit Ananda,’ which is now one of the core mantras – there was another one called ‘Satyam Gyanam Anantam,’ and this goes back many thousands of years earlier - which has a slightly different nuance - which basically says ‘I am the Truth of Being (Satyam), I am the Knowledge that is aware of that Truth.’ So it is a state of full consciousness but that knowledge is not the knowledge that is now called ‘ciencia.’ So it is toda ciencia trascendiendo, but it is still a kind of ciencia, but it is the science that is the knowledge of infinity. Anantam is infinity; it is not Ananda but Anantam. Because it is the recognition, the knowledge, that all of this that we perceive, we are. God is all that is, you are That.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 18, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Anyone who meditates is committing a sin because you’re starting with the presumption that you’re separate from God and have to do something to reach God – when that illusion of separation is the ignorance, the sin – the original sin – and cannot be eliminated by that illusory ego making some effort to reach God – because where are you going to reach to if you’re already That? God is not an object somewhere out there, not a being you have to call on a phone, or have some telepathic connection with. There is no process by which you can reach God because any process simply takes you away from your own center. And so the only valid form of meditation is non-meditation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 11, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Pure and total presence precedes the interpretation of what is present. And it is through an inaccurate interpretation of what is present that the soul and then the ego illusions and the belief in an external world, and an internal world for that matter, are developed which create deeper and deeper levels of maya. The maya, or the illusion, is based on the mind’s wrong interpretation of what is present. But the presence itself is Truth and is the nature of our Being. That presence includes all of reality but the presence is not divided into separate individual entities. And it is the mistaken belief that this presence is seen from the perspective of a particular entity that then creates the I-thought from which the sense of self and of otherness enters in which creates alienation and duality and a loss of wholeness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 4, 2014.
Excerpt: ”As the duration of the silence extends, an impulse to go back into the suffering arises – a very strange, paradoxical impulse. And it is this final death throe of the soul that becomes the last obstacle to letting go of maya. There is a preference to hold on to the agony, rather than to die into the peace. And as long as there is any shred of the soul left to try to control things, it will hold on to its death rattle, to its refusal to go gently into that good night . . . and it will rail against the dying of its false light. And it is at this point that there must be the power of surrender to the Absolute to let go of that peacelessness. And to face the transition into the silence which will first appear as a loss, and even as a strangulation of the soul, which in a way it is, as it is finally put to rest. . . . But once the step has been taken, and that Beyond recognized as the real home, as the ultimate abode, then everything becomes very, very simple. And as the attention turns toward the infinite and away from the finite, away from what has been lost from what has died, into what has been discovered, then the power of Love, the meaning of salvation, the truth of redemption, the energy that supports the universe, the stillness which contains all in potential form is recognized as the ground of one’s Being.” Recorded during the Death and Rebirth Retreat, on the morning of Wednesday, August 27, 2014.
Excerpt:” Consciousness begins to realize it’s Beingness, it’s I Am-ness that exists prior to the body that has nothing to do with the birth of the body or its processes of development that are all within the karmic field – but it recognizes that the karma, the world in which the body exists, the body-mind itself, is simply an object in consciousness that is a temporary vehicle of the I Am-ness. But that the I Am-ness is universal and is simply the expression of Love.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 14, 2014.
Excerpt: “Most of us spend our lives waiting for the miracle to come. But the philosophy of Sat Yoga is to realize that you are the miracle – and there’s nothing more to wait for. This should be the simplest concept, if you will, to realize. But it’s not because we hold too many opinions about ourselves – opinions that were formed when we were young that were actually other people’s opinions of us that we internalized and took in as if they were realities when they were merely projections. And so the miracle we’re waiting for is for someone to wipe off the board that we have in our minds with all of the bad opinions . . . but because it is your mind, only you can erase it.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 7, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Sat Yoga means the realization of Sat – which is the fundamental energy of the universe. But we can also think of it as an acronym, of course, as the Silence of Absolute Transcendence. Absolute transcendence means transcendence even of transcendence. Relative transcendence is consciousness, Purusha, separating from Prakriti. That’s the first step in meditation. Because the separation enables you to realize that you are not the body and not the mind. So it is the relative transcendence of the ego, and the localizability in matter; the separation from all concepts, including the concept of matter. But then one must transcend even the concept of transcendence. Even the concept of the Self.” Recoded in the afternoon of Monday, April 29, 2013.
Excerpt: “[The Sat Yoga School] has three basic intentions. One is to help you think the unthinkable. The second is to help you bear the unbearable. And the third is to help you dare the impossible. So let’s take these one at a time. Obviously most people don’t want to think the unthinkable, and there are different levels of un-think-ability. And the first level is really more the resistance to coming out of denial. It’s not that it’s really unthinkable, but “I don’t want to think about it” – it’s that level. And that has to do basically with prudence. Any prudent business person will have fallback positions in case of worst case scenarios. . . . Well, most people do not want to think about the fact that this entire system is about to collapse; that’s too much to deal with. . . . If you want a plan B, and if you want to think your way through this and to survive, then it’s worth thinking about this before it happens. . .” Recorded on the evening of Saturday, July 26, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Our teacher Sri Ramana says that the ego has four pillars. . . . And when we understand the pillars of the ego, because they are all delusional, it is easy to bring them down. And the four are co-dependent on one another. In developmental terms the first is Avidya, or ignorance; forgetfulness of our True Nature. And that forgetfulness makes us vulnerable to false beliefs to buying into preconceptions and impositions and false implications of language, and the belief, that what you see is what you get. And the belief in the implicit reality that there must be some thing that stands behind the appearance of the I-thought.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, July 17, 2014.
Excerpt: ”. . .But there’s no reason ever to leave the stillness of the perfection of what you are; that is already liberated from maya. You don’t notice that you simply create maya in order to then liberate yourself from it. It’s a nice game, but this “Yo" "Yo” game that you play just brings you back to square zero anyway – so why ever leave it? Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, May 21, 2013.
Excerpt: “. . . And it’s only when you have entered deeply upon a path of Self discovery that you can even know what are the potentials that lie behind and beyond the event horizon of your current level of subjectivity – that offer miraculous powers and potencies for your own capacity to become and to realize yourself in this plane as the Infinite Being that you are. It is only when we constrain the ego mind and its weaknesses from acting out; its desire to regress, to take the easy path, the comfort zone, and never to dare those levels of your selfhood that are currently not yet known to you – because you are a mystery to yourself. But few of us explore that mystery. Most of us settle for an identity that we received from others that might just be adequate enough to make us a living, and to live a tolerable life, but never to know true ecstatic joy, bliss, and infinite fulfillment.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 3, 2014.
Excerpt: ”The ego is an unstable structure – and dependent upon the desire of others, the affirmation of others; what one takes as the love of others – but which is all always, at the level of ego, an narcissistic quid pro quo. To get beyond this impasse, we must dis-identify with any objective other, including the body that is considered one’s own. And to abide in silence and stillness, and inner aloneness without any co-dependence on any other, without any desire from any other – in oneness with the Supreme Self. This practice alone can liberate us; liberate consciousness from its suffering. The problem is, for the ego mind, that the Real Self is inconceivable. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 26, 2014.
Excerpt: “. . . But that means that the Self that you are here to realize is not your individual self. It’s the universal Self, the Supreme Self. This is no small matter. This should not be taken lightly. You are endeavouring to enter the precinct of God, the throne room of God, the highest possible level of consciousness. And the good news is that when you get there you will realize that is your Self. But not the self you think you are now. That self cannot get even close to that throne room.” Recorded on the evening of Monday, May 19, 2014.
Excerpt: All our suffering arises from “the I-thought: the thought that I am this or that; I am this body, this personality, this history, this chain of signifiers going off in my mind, language with its narratives, its scenarios and melodramas that create all the suffering. That thought is what splits your mind between the false ego, and the real Self. Separating you from God for as long as you choose ego, and at the same time beginning the life of suffering that is somehow preferable because although it is suffering, it contains the instant gratification of the bodily, sensory, phenomenal plain of the collapsed quantum wave in which free will has been lost and all is determined by that choice to fall into the illusory world and leave the world of bliss, of liberation, of truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 12, 2014.
Excerpt: ”. . . And that this presence has always been there, it’s not something to attain in some other dimension; it’s here. But it’s here in the dimension that is other to the physical plane that witnesses it, that is the silent awareness that uses the instrument of the senses and the organism. But is a formless incorporeal eternal presence that forgets itself in its own true nature the moment it enters into language.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 5, 2014.
Excerpt: ”At this very moment you are the infinite Self. You are not the body who has a soul, or a spirit or a Self or a connection to the Super-Conscious, no. You are the Super-Conscious, you are the Self Supreme manifesting with a form in this phenomenal plane to make actual the highest potentialities in the mind of God as a reality in this plane. You are the Self. Your nature – right now – not in the future – right now – is total awareness. Your real Self – right now – is divine radiance, luminous intelligence, pristine, pure awareness. And it doesn’t matter if that is clouded by the ego mind, that’s completely irrelevant. All that is relevant is that you know who you are. And stop believing that you are a body, or a mind, a personality, an entity, that’s a precipitate out of the infinite Self; it is not you.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 15, 2014
Excerpt: ”We offer here not a twelve-step program, not even a one-step program. This is the world’s only zero-step program, which makes it the simplest and the hardest, because the mind cannot imagine taking zero steps, and therefore to get there you must realize you’re already there, and that underneath all the chatter of the mind, you are a zero. That’s what the mind is terrified of: discovering that there’s nothing behind it. Buddha discovered there was nothing behind it – he called it ‘Nirvana.’ But for the ego mind – the mind of the chatter – it’s called, ‘anxiety.’ So the first paradox to recognize is that anxiety is just a disguised form of bliss. So if you have a lot of anxiety, you really have a great deal of bliss, so know that it’s a great blessing. Don’t try to get rid of it, but you must recognize it from the right perspective. The perspective is everything.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 8, 2014.
Excerpt: ”It is attained very simply – because we are already That. There is nothing actually to be gained: it is simply returning from a state of false consciousness based on constructs and ideas that we learned within a context of a social system with agendas that were different from that of Truth. And so we are again learning to rest in the Truth of our Being. To realize this Truth . . . let go of all untruth. This means silencing the mind, it means letting go of all concepts, and learning again to be.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 6, 2014.
Excerpt: “[Reading from a Ramana Maharshi text] ‘However much, one may explain, the fact will not become clear till one attains self-realization and wonders how one was blind to the self-evident and only existence for so long.’ So none of this could be explained, because the ego mind is not capable of grasping it, for many reasons. One, it takes the succession of events in time as real. It takes this dream of reality – that it calls reality because it labels it as such – as being something different from that state you’re in in deep sleep when there is no external reality. And it makes a false distinction between the dream and the waking state. All are simply the manifestations of the one unchanging Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 24, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Often we think of Yoga as a spiritual journey, and that we are seekers – but actually it’s the end of the journey; it’s the realization that there is nothing to seek. But the journey of experience through life has concluded with our wisdom, our understanding, that the goal is actually to be: not to become, not to experience, but to return to the original Self that has always been there, but that we have forgotten. So it is simply our willingness to be. In that realization of our beingness comes the recognition that we are already perfect; we are already filled with the Supreme knowledge. We are constituted of the supernal light, the divine light, that is the emanation of God, and the term God refers only to the Self that we have forgotten and projected into some other dimension. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 3, 2014.
Excerpt: ”. . . This school is dedicated to help you answer those questions. But not to answer them theoretically, because theory is, frankly, empty; talk is cheap. The answer lies in the silence of the heart. The answers emerge when we are at peace, when we have found our center. And many people think ‘Well, yes, but my question is how do I find that center? How do I open the heart?’ But it happens, not actually by making some kind of difficult effort, but simply allowing yourself to be. It’s simply a very radical self-acceptance. But what we have to come to accept is the fact that we don’t really know who we are or have the answers to those questions, at the surface level; they are not in our minds and they are not our in the world. But they are present as that very silence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 27, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Asparsa has two meanings depending on how subtle that you wish to take it. The first meaning means to come out of imprisonment, but the way you get out of imprisonment is by going in – not out; there is no escape out there. The prison is the belief in the out there and the belief that you are a creature with a physical body. That objectification of your own nature and of the nature of reality is the imprisonment. So the way in means to come back into your subjectivity and into the fullness of pure consciousness that is not determined by laws of nature or ideologies or belief systems of any kind or material gratifications or inflictions of pain and suffering.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 13, 2014.
Excerpt: ”The human psyche is extraordinarily complex, and, at the same time, amazingly simple. That’s the first paradox that we have to face in reality . . . . it’s important to be able to think paradoxically and break through illusions that are based on what seem to be contradictory opposites that are both true. So, the mind has a number of different levels to it. Many of us tend to live on the outer most level of the mind and not go too far inward because they either get scared or there is a repressive block to knowing too much; there is some kind of programming that makes certain knowledge forbidden to you, etc. So that first level of the psyche identifies with the physical body. And therefore it is subject to fear of that body’s death or its pain or it’s subject to desire on a bodily level, it’s subject to anger when it doesn't get its bodily needs met, it’s subject to all kinds of hysterical meltdowns, due to the fact that it is identified with a perishable object. So, according to the logic of that level of the mind, it makes sense to be in a fragile and vulnerable state of consciousness and to defend against that vulnerability with all kinds of bravado or evasion or avoidance or of different kinds of personality quirks and strategies in order to not have to put oneself at risk because one feels always that one is at risk in a world that is dangerous. . .” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, March 6, 2014.
Excerpt: ”Tonight is the thirteenth night of Shukla Paksha according to the ancient Vedic lunar calendar. For those who worship Shiva, the most ancient name for the Supreme Being, this is the holiest night of the year – it’s referred to as ‘Maha Shivratri,’ the great night of Shiva. The worship of Shiva carried on, secretly, in the form of late-coming Shiva cults such as Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism, the holiday of “Maha Shivratri” became known as Pesach or ‘Passover.’ And of course in Christianity it has two forms: one is the last supper and the crucifixion, but the most true rendition of “Maha Shivratri” is the represented in the Book of Revelations as the apocalypse.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 27, 2014.
Excerpt: “Meditation is a practice of freedom. And it’s practiced because the consciousness begins in a state of un-freedom. Meditation is the cure for our addiction to thinking. The mind is out of control, it’s the primary addiction. People can’t stop their minds from running away with them. Minds are in chaos, filled with negative thoughts, chaotic thoughts, thoughts that people don’t want to have but can’t stop. It turns out that all the other addictions are actually attempts to cure that addiction. The reason that people smoke cigarettes, or pot, or take other drugs or alcohol is to try to stop their mind. You can be a little more peaceful – but then you’ve got a worse problem, now you’ve got another addiction to deal with on top of the first one, and that one has other consequences. And then usually people try to stop those with others, they get into some other kind of obsessive practice, and life becomes one set of obsessions on top of another. When a much easier solution is to simply be free of the non-productive, chaotic secretion of thoughts in the mind.” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, February 11, 2014.
Excerpt: ”. . .Because God doesn’t need to know anything. And that non-knowing comes from having transcended the need to know, not from not having reached it. It comes from an overflowing realization that what you are is all you need to know – because you are complete in yourself. And that realization transforms the lack and the desire to grasp and to continue that process of seeking and controlling that is futile, into the final letting go that brings the bliss of union with the Supreme Being.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 11, 2013.
Excerpt: ”. . . This is a classic example of what Baba Hari Dass used to call “headache yoga,” perhaps the ultimate headache – but worth it if you need to undo a lot of false beliefs about who you are; the book will do it. But if you can just let go of those false beliefs you can skip to the hundredth verse. . . . And verse one hundred actually sums up the whole book, it is the core of the core, and it’s the only verse you need to read . . .” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, January 28, 2014.
Excerpt: “. . . [Yoga is] the science of consciousness. It’s the science of how to develop the full potential of our consciousness – because we are not born with an instruction manual as to how to do that. But we have many higher centers of our mind, not just our brain but our mind, our soul, our spirit, that need to be activated in a systematic manner in order to be able to unfold the full powers that are latent in us. They call them siddhis in yogic terminology. And there are seven major modalities that emerge, naturally. The first one is an increase in our intelligence because as you go inward you have access to more of the wisdom that comes from the deeper levels of your mind, and you see reality in a more subtle way. . .” Recorded on the evening of Saturday, January 18, 2014.
Shunyamurti addresses the importance of giving thanks - at the Enlightenment Now retreat.
Excerpt: ”Christianity is one of the most potent forces in the world. Both the Christian myth and the Christian teachings are of extreme importance to us all. In some sense I think the world has not even been ready for Christianity until now. A true Christianity may only be beginning to emerge. Much of what has passed for Christianity in the passed has actually been a defence against the teachings of Christ – a fear of them, a denial of them even in the form of worshipping Christ. For one thing Christ taught that the love of money is the root of all evil, and yet we’ve created a society based on the love of money, and we’ve called it a Christian society, something’s wrong with that picture. . .” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, December 19, 2013.
Excerpt: ”. . . And so this concept of Hanmaum (One Mind) is central to every true path of spirituality. That our individual minds are a subset of a larger mind and then a larger, and a larger, and ultimately there is one single intelligence that flows through all of the myriads of life forms and even what we think of as inanimate objects. They all participate in the same ultimate intelligence. And thus the entire universe is intelligent. And if there are parallel universes they are included in this as well. Everything that can possibly be is part of a single intelligence that includes all the past, the present, and the future – which is all now to that intelligence. Because that intelligence that is beyond space and time creates, sustains, destroys universes, recreates them, it all happens within a timeless instant. But that timeless instant for any given creature within a universe can last centuries or millennia. But time is an illusion from that perspective. But the key teaching about Hanmaum is: you are that intelligence.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, December 12, 2013.
Excerpt: “. . .But what the great yogis say is that in order to see God, your mind has to have been trained, purified, in three stages. The first stage is truthful mind. If the mind is not in Truth with itself, and with God, in integrity, in sincerity, earnestness, openness, transparency, maturity, willingness to let go of ones illusions and delusions then nothing more will happen; then you need a drug. But if the truthful mind is achieved, there will be an automatic flow into the next stage. . .” Recorded on the afternoon of Monday, May 6, 2013.
Excerpt: ”. . .In the same way Christianity says body consciousness is a sin – but really, yogis’ view of it is that it’s worse than a sin; it’s stupid. The idea of sin is itself sinful because it takes place within the same framework of ignorance and duality; that’s the problem. We have to get out of that whole framework because all that does is lead to more judgements, super ego attacks, and a quicksand of self-loathing that is useless for anyone on a spiritual path. So we have to get the fact that what we’re doing when we’re meditating is we are accumulating power. It’s as simple as that: do you want to be powerful or do you want to be weak?” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 4, 2013.
Excerpt: ”Carl Jung, in his approach to transformation, had no interest in child development . . . he was only interested in people going through a midlife crisis. He didn’t do child therapy, he didn’t do adolescent therapy — he didn’t even feel it was appropriate to do that. What he felt was missing from Western culture was that process of the cocoon in which the caterpillar would enter to become the butterfly. And he wanted his approach to be that cocoon where the transformation could happen to the ultimate development of human capacity.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 7, 2013.
Excerpt: “The prison that our consciousness is in is made up of the opinions of others. And when you let go of your belief in those opinions, which often comes with anger at those opinions or a seduction by those opinions or any other attitude toward them, then they become the identity of the consciousness with all of the fine print and the limitations that those identifications come along with. And so the spiritual process is simply letting go of those opinions. . . .” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 14, 2013.
Excerpt: ”. . .And by doing that we have kept our heart closed. And the power of our heart’s energy of love emerges in a state of devotion. Devotion is what realigns us with the universe so that the power of attraction will become manifest. But we have to be first attracted to the source of what is real in the universe for that source to feed us with grace and blessings. And our devotion to that True Self is essential, and that is what nourishes us, because the more devotion we give the more love we receive, the more light the more flow of divine energy of shakti moves through us. And people are afraid of overdosing on that light and that love; there is a terror of love. Because the more devoted you are the more you find that the defense mechanisms that you created to protect yourself against others have to fall away. You become more vulnerable, you become more open, more transparent. But through that devotion, you are then able to speak Truth, you are then able to act courageously, and to triumph over all negative feelings, inner demons or outer ones, nothing will stop you in that state of devotion. And the more you offer, the more you get back.” Recorded in the evening of Wednesday, October 9, 2013.
Excerpt: ”We’re like people who own a mansion with a hundred floors and a thousand rooms, and we’re living in the entrance hall. And we feel like we’re impoverished and we’re stuck in this tiny little space. And we don’t dare to look at the whole place we have! Our consciousness is infinite. We have so many latent powers, that if we knew about them, we would be in astonishment right now, in bliss, just exploring the treasures that are there waiting for us to start using.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 3, 2013.
Excerpt: ”Many people don’t know that Bobby McFerrin got those words from a poster he saw of Meher Baba, who was one of the great spiritual teachers of the last century. . . .And the full message was not just ‘don’t worry, be happy,’ it was ‘do your best, then don’t worry. Be happy in My love, I will help you.’ This is of course being spoken as the voice of God. And so out of context, the ‘don’t worry be happy,’ is like whistling past the graveyard. But if you’re happy in God’s love, then you will receive power, grace, support, energy, shakti, to succeed in what you’re doing. And if what you’re doing is an act of karma yoga, is an act of service, is not simply for the ego’s pleasure or benefit, but to serve God and serve the world, then you will be happy because you will receive God’s love, and you will receive God’s help.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 12, 2013.
Excerpt: “. . .But the reason that religions have holidays is to express symbolically what can otherwise not be understood by the ego mind – using actual conditions of the physical universe in order to express some very deep insights into the nature of reality that were conferred by the Supreme Being. So there’s a little known Shiva cult that was a late arrival on the scene in human history that left India and entered into the Middle East, and the people who were Shiva worshipers became known later as Jews. And the name Jehovah and Shiva, one derives from the other. And this happens to be the main holiday of this Shiva worshiping group, called Rosh Hashanah.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 5, 2013.
Excerpt: ”In the west, since the ascendence of the roman church there has been a sense that humans are distant from God, from ultimate reality, and that you need som kind of intermediary, you need a priest or you need someone to advocate for you and you need some kind of rituals and a prayer book to know what to say to God. It’s a very formal thing you know, it’s some distant king that you’re suppose to get to visit via some, help by someone else but you never get to have direct contact. And then of course from that point from there it goes to the point that he’s so distant he doesn’t even exist. And the idea of an ultimate reality has been eclipsed and eliminated in the modern western mind set. Which leaves the ego in hedgeomanic control of our societies, untamed by the higher power of goodness and the ego that doesn’t surrender to a higher Truth and a higher level of integrity and sacrifice, then creates a world of the kind we’re now living in.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, August 29, 2013.
Excerpt: “What is the ego? It is simply the mind operating according to two valued logic… that's all it is…. Two valued logic is absolutely absurd, and we can blame Aristotle for it... but he was the first philosopher who maintained that you need to analyze reality according to two valued logic… before that everyone was in infinite logic – it was totally different…. Two valued logic is recognized in the bible as the cause of the fall of man – why Adam and Eve got kicked out…. What was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? That’s two valued logic. That this is either good, or evil… This is true or false, up or down. Everything is this or that, and once you are caught in believing that then you are caught in a prison in which you can no longer be whole, because the truth is that you are this and that… and neither of the above… and all of the above… and beyond any of the above… that’s the truth, and so when you have to follow two valued logic, you have to cut off and split most of your mind and repress it… that what Jung called the shadow… everything that you were not allowed to be, you had to repress… Thursday, August 22, 201
Excerpt: “All of us are travellers through space and time, eternal travellers, and yet eternally never moving at all, but enjoying the illusion of the dream that brings richness and joy and learning, even through pain and suffering, the learning of the lessons that bring about wisdom and freedom and re-empowerment as we go through the labyrinth forgetting we are the One Self and then remembering again – playing peek-a-boo with the Self. And there’s nothing really to do in this act of remembrance except to let go of the forgetfulness, to let go of all of the thoughts that are based in the illusion and not in the Witness. And when one returns to the self-luminous, infinite intelligence that is pure consciousness all of the suffering of the dream falls away, all the fears, desires, egoic identities drop away very easily without any struggle.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 1, 2013.
Excerpt: ”Meditation is the practice of melting away the ego. What we are melting away are the fixed thoughts that create patterns of suffering, repetitive patterns of behavior and emotional states that produce pain for ourselves and for others. And so as we melt it down we free ourselves and the world from that pain and the energy that was locked up in those painful patterns is liberated. We are not liberated, but the pain is liberated – because we are not the ego, it’s a mistake to think you are the ego. But the ego is a structure, that has grown, in the psyche, in the mind, that needs to be dissolved in order for there to be the full freedom of the potential of the ground of your Being to emerge with all of its creativity and love and will.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 11, 2013.
Excerpt: “As you all know the Sat Yoga Institute is a school. It’s not just a place to come to meditate, but to do more than that. And the process begins with the Trivium which is a braid of three different processes that have to happen simultaneously for the process to be effective. It involves Translation, which is a paradigm shift – which is the conceptual understanding of the spiritual path so you will at least be able to explain to yourself why you’re going through this ordeal – because unless you can justify this to your own ego mind, there is no reason to put up with the suffering that it entails. But when there is a clear conceptual understanding of why you’re going through this experience, and what the benefits are, then the ordeal actually becomes very joyous, and not really filled with that much suffering. The transformational dimension of the Trivium is where the suffering is located. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thusday, July 4, 2013.
Excerpt: “. . . But in the spiritual field in India they do talk about four powers that are latent within you that must be remembered in order to realize the freedom that is your true nature. And they talk about this in mythological terms. And often they refer to them as the Power of Rama, the Power of Sita, the Power of Hanuman, the Power of Mrityunjay. You all know these powers because you have them, you use them on a daily basis – but we can go over them since we have to talk about something. The Power of Hanuman. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 13, 2013.
Excerpt: “. . . And so to know the Unknowable Self means to allow yourself to be – without moving, without distraction, without shifting your attention from the Self to any object or any thought, idea, image, emotion – anything that would take you away from the knower – until the very sense of being a knower dissolves in the knowing and there is only this energy that is awareness but without any source and without any object – it is the ground of the field of Being itself. And the reason that the ego mind has difficulty doing this is that it always wants to grasp onto certain attributes that it can objectify. And the awareness has no attributes, all the attributes have been projected into the world, which is a reflection of the Self, but the Self is attributeless, ‘Nirguna’. ‘Emptiness’ in the Buddhist terminology. . . .” Recoded on the evening of Thursday, June 6, 2013.
Excerpt: "... But there is a command, within the ego itself, never to silence the mind, never stop thinking, always got to produce thoughts; if you don't produce you're a failure. And so you got to be willing not to produce anything, but to be. Without putting any demands on yourself, or on anyone else, or giving in to anyone’s demands on you. Create a space of freedom to rediscover who you are without starting from any programming, whether that programming has to do with the gender of the body, or the age, or the nationality, or the religion, or the culture, or any of the other factors that determine the stream of thoughts in the mind – but prior to any thoughts, to when there was pure presence, when you were really aware of being, when the world really had this heightened presence, for you, and everything was new and astonishing. Let's return to that state.
And it's very easy to do because you don't do anything, just be. And if the production wants to happen, just go back with the question ‘What is the I, what is the awareness that is watching or listening to these thoughts being produced?’ And you keep going back to that ground of thoughts that are trying to arise and realize that there is a non-arising presence to whom the thoughts are arising. And then just focus on that non-arising presence. And you will find it's already peaceful, it's already happy, it doesn't need anything, it's not angry, there is no desire, has no fear – it's quite content..." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 30, 2013.
Excerpt: “…In any case Tilopa reduced the whole meditation process to three phrases; they’re easy you can’t forget these. The first one is: no distraction. That may seem simple but it’s not. Second one: no contrivances. Third one: no meditation. What!? These are meditation instructions; no meditation, very interesting. So then the question is, are these commands? Are they descriptions of the state you reach in meditation? Are they qualities of your true Being? Of course they’re in the negative so we are in the via negativa here, he’s not describing what you are or what that state is, he’s just describing what not to do, to be. But, let’s look at it more deeply…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 23, 2013.
Excerpt: “…And the minute we let go and really relax and forget the ego, or remember that we are not the ego, remember that we are pure potentiality, pure presence, that is inherently without mental activity – it transcends the mind, the real presence of your being, mind is only a tool that is used on limited occasions but otherwise you’re in the silence of Infinite mind, not limited linguistic-based mind. And to live in that Self, is to be free, is to be independent, finally, of all the conditionings and all of the self-limitations. And all of the illusions and the ignorance that come with identifying with a body and an ego mind…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 9, 2013.
Excerpt: “Sat Yoga is the art of living in the state of love. Love is our natural state. But we have become denaturalized by accepting the programming and the conditioning of the ego mind. The ego mind is generally not in a state of love – which is not news to you I can see. It’s usually in a very judgmental state and mostly attacking others for being judgmental – which is the most self-righteous way of being judgmental – but also attacking oneself, feeling negative and lacking and all the games that the ego plays in order to make itself miserable that we know all too well so I won’t belabor that point, because I’m not here to keep you in that state of misery. I would like you to see that that’s not our natural state or our real state, and it was simply an indoctrination into misery because that is how you become adapted to social living and accept the miserable conditions that most people have to live in. But we don’t have to accept that. We can change our world by changing our perception of who we are and what this reality is...” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 2, 2013.
Excerpt: “This is a school of magic. Are you all interested in magic? Do you all realize that you are magical beings? Do you? But there is a difference between being a magical being and being a magician. To become a magician you must train your magical potential to be fully actualized. Western civilization can be understood as the sustained effort to repress magic. That’s its whole purpose – to repress white magic; there is plenty of black magic around. For the last 2000 years that has been the main intention of the forces that have been running this civilization, to disenchant the world. Why? Because you can’t control magicians; you can’t control sorcerers; you can’t control great shamans; you can’t control the Magi, so whenever they saw a magus, they would eliminate him. They wanted to eliminate white magic because white magic, when there are enough magicians . . . coming together to create an energy field of divine magic the world can be transformed, and they know that.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 18, 2013.
Excerpt: “So the realization of God begins with the understanding that what we mean by that term is the ultimate, supersensory apperception that you are capable of. It’s not simply extrasensory perception; that psychics do, they can see subtle energies and be aware of things that are happening in the external plane. It’s not simply extrasensory perception. It’s supersensory, it’s beyond the sensual realm – including the subtle level of sensuality – and it is not a perception but an apperception, which means that what is being perceived is the one doing the perceiving; there is no duality in God. And therefore you can never know God as long as you want to be a perceiver of God because God does not exist as an object. The atheists are right, but they are also very wrong because they don’t understand that in the same way you have to cultivate a taste for music like this – and many people in the world would not have said this is beautiful; if you would play some death rock they would have said ‘yeah that’s great!’ or ‘that’s wicked’ or whatever term is now the equivalent of ‘I like it.’ But you need to cultivate a taste for beauty, for goodness, and particularly for the Supreme Beauty and the Supreme Goodness that we’re talking about when we signify the word God or any ultimate reality term that is an equivalent whether Buddha-nature, Nirvana, etc. etc.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, April 11, 2013.
Excerpt: “People think that complexity is a relatively new scientific discipline, and in the modern world it is, but it’s a very ancient concept. And the first full development of that is in the form of the net of Indra. The net of Indra is the most significant concept to come out of Vedic and Buddhistic thought and got explicated most fully on HuaYen Buddhism but it existed long before that. And that is the understanding that reality is not based on closed systems with independent or contesting territories but is a network of interconnecting subsystems within a larger hyper-complex system, in which there is harmony and unity that overlies any sense of difference. And so when we can begin to map the complexity of the ego-system, we rise to the soul level which is a hyper-complex system which is an assemblage of hyper-complex systems that extends overtime because the soul reincarnates and up to the point of understanding an entire cycle of time with all of the complexity of the permutations of time itself. And then you get to the higher level of ultra-complex systems at the level of the Atman. And this is an assemblage of hyper-complex system that includes many different universes, many different independent levels of functioning but that are all part of a harmony at the highest level. And so as we go up to higher and higher of levels of consciousness, what they are, are higher levels of complexity and at the very highest level of infinite complexity you reach absolute simplicity.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, April 4, 2013.
Excerpt: “...And while the Buddhists are accurate in saying ‘yes you need to live in the Two Truths’; there is a conventional reality and Ultimate Reality and for purposes of dealing with conventional reality, keeping your bank account balanced and dealing with people at the phenomenal plane who are in that illusion, you need to be able to deal with it – but you can only deal with it without suffering if you are beyond it in the Ultimate Reality. So the idea of any spiritual path is not to leave the conventional reality behind, but to recognize that even this split between Ultimate Reality and conventional reality, is a convention. And that you don’t believe in it, you free yourself from any ‘naive realism,’ that accepts this world created by the illusion of the ego as real so that you will not suffer from the events in this world or from the ignorance that generalizes to having many consequences, unintended as well as intended, so that you can live in this world as a being of wisdom, a being in peace without neurotic or psychotic suffering, and without even the ordinary suffering that Freud says you cannot get beyond. Pain perhaps won’t end but suffering over whatever seems to be going ‘wrong,’ doesn’t have to be part of one’s world, one’s umwelt. That can be left behind. And that’s the only practical benefit of the spiritual quest, is that you have left that behind and you can act in the world wisely. But always knowing that the one who is acting in the world – to bring peace, order, greater happiness, etc. – is an illusion.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 21, 2013.
Excerpt: “… Because the ego mind is a knot based on the unproven premise that the ‘I’ is the body. And it builds its entire life on that false belief, that ‘I am a body’ and ‘the body is material.’ And it’s upon that premise, false though it be, that remains tenaciously the foundation of the ego, that it will not let go of, that is the cause of all our suffering. Because once there is a body in a physical universe there is fear, there is lack, there is anxiety, there is desire, there is disappointment, there is despair; the whole wheel of egoic life stems from that false belief. And it’s to undo that false belief, not just theoretically but really, which changes our entire psychology and frees us from the torments of ego consciousness. In principle it’s very easy. And it’s easier today because modern science, particularly quantum physics, supports the understanding that the world is not real; the universe is information, and information requires a knower, and the knower is consciousness. So it is no longer even scientifically sustainable to believe ‘I am a body’: ‘I am consciousness’ is the prevailing scientific understanding. “ Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 14, 2013.
Excerpt: “…So this is the problem in most people’s lives, if he’d gotten the dream saying just dig under your own kitchen he probably wouldn’t have listened to it, but it told him to go to Russia; OK, it’s enough of an ordeal maybe there’s truth to it. It’s the need to do something exotic, the need to do something outlandish and to pass through some ordeal that gives something credibility. This path is just too easy because you don’t have to do anything on this path, just be yourself, what could be easier than that? There’s no method, there’s no system, there’s no approach, there’s no drug you have to take, there’s no danger, there’s no side-effects. It’s boring, isn’t it? Just be yourself.
But nobody want to be themselves, they want to be someone else. They want to go on some long exotic journey somewhere, only – always – to discover that what you were looking for was back home, was yourself. You are the Atman, you don’t have to wait for some message to come in an altered state of consciousness. You have altered your own state of consciousness by creating the ego – the ego is an altered state. It’s a state in which you’ve lost touch with your real consciousness; it’s not a higher altered state but a lower one that you chose to identify with. But all you have to recognize is that who you really are in your very natural state, if you’re not too manic depressive, is quiet presence…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 07, 2013.
Excerpt: “We are here to rediscover who we are, what we have forgotten about our deep Self, to dive beneath the surface, beneath body-consciousness, and even deeper than soul-consciousness, to discover the Spirit, the Absolute Self, that always abides eternally, peacefully, blissfully within. This is our divine essence, and we have come together to discover our divine essence, and then to share our divine essence with one another, to create an energy field in which that essence is able to fill everyone with that same power of truth, of love, of joy. And so meditation is not some serious business where you have to be very sober and solemn – it might seem that from outside, but in truth we are here to rediscover that within us which is always joyous. It’s said in every religious tradition that God is love, ultimate love, ultimate bliss, the bliss of overwhelming, overflowing infinite love. Can you imagine that state? Can you imagine living in that, and realizing that that is who you are?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 28, 2013.
Student Question: What are nightmares? Why is it that nightmares are the dreams that affect me most and that I remember the most?
Excerpt: “…You can do it through Ramana’s approach which is simply to ask – but ask wordlessly, not using thoughts – ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is the I?’ ‘What is the source of the I?’ and keep going within until you’ve cleared out the thoughts and there is pure presence. And then hold the presence, examine it, palpate it, observe it, feel the quality of pure presence; without creating a discourse about it, without creating and trying to capture it in some net of words – but abiding in the silence of Presence. And if you do that for long enough, this Presence that is pure, unalloyed by any conditioned thinking, will accumulate an energy field, it will spread, it will grow, if you cultivate the silence moment by moment without falling back into ego thoughts, it will gradually wash away the conditioned thoughts; it will extinguish them. And it will leave your entire space of consciousness clear, peaceful, calm, filled with joy, filled with that original state of freedom, without any kind of conditionings or script that you may have been living by, but now completely open in life to the spontaneity of your own heart. Not controlled by any thoughts that were planted there in the ego by your parents, or schools, or society, but free to discover and to live out the truth of your being. And that’s when life becomes very interesting…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 21, 2013.
Excerpt: “In the old days, meaning about 20 centuries ago, when the yogis first realized that this problem existed – because it didn’t exist before then but in the early period of Kali Yuga when minds already started to vibrate with a much more unhealthy frequency and instability, much less though then now of course – they invented certain techniques. One of them is called Pranayama; breathing exercises.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 7, 2013.
Excerpt: “Tonight’s gathering is about meditation, which is the core activity of this community. The goal of meditation is a simple one – it’s to reach the state of contentment. You’d think that would be very easy, and yet contentment is probably the highest state that the human being can reach. And it’s a virtue that contains all other virtues. Because if you’re really content with what you have, and are not seeking from some state of lack, then you are beyond suffering; you’re at peace. You are liberated from most of the ills that plague human kind. How many people do you know who are in a state of contentment, real contentment? And so it’s a very odd paradox that here we are aspiring to be content. Is that possible? To want to be in a state in which there are no wants. And to understand that paradox we have to recognize that the ego mind, the ordinary state of consciousness that most people take for granted as their real self is not the real Self, but is a construct; it’s artificial. You weren’t born with your current identity – you built it; it was a work of art. Of course you did this work of art when you were about three years old, and so you might want to redo it. Because you put together – to create your identity – a little bit of your mother, a little bit of your father, a little bit of other family members, a little bit of the community, a little bit of the information overload that you were getting from TV, etc. And you created this, modified it over the first five or so years of your life and then you assumed that that’s who you were – and even when you repressed that and created a more adult-like personality, that remained underneath, a child, wanting to be an adult and feeling lack of power, lack of worthiness, lack of capacity to achieve your goals, lack of a sense of feeling lovable or deserving. And so the lacks get built into the structure of the ego mind, even if you’re not aware of it because it’s repressed to a lower level of consciousness, it’s usually there and arises either as symptoms or anxiety or inhibitions, or other pathologies of behavior of attitude of thinking and of emotion. And so to be in a state of contentment, which is our real state, we have to find out who we really are underneath this ego construct, and then, if we wish, we can modify that construct and make it reflect the contentment of our real Being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 24, 2013.
Excerpt: “… When you think about it you realize that consciousness is the only, I shouldn’t say thing it’s not a thing, but it’s the only element of your reality that doesn’t change. Your mind changes, the contents of your consciousness do. You have different ideas today, hopefully than you had 20 years ago, and you’ll have different ideas in the future. So your ideas change, you can’t be defined by your ideas, and most of them aren’t real either, they’re just things you heard about and decided to believe in and usually you find out too late that it wasn’t true. So your mind isn’t real – it’s just a flux of impermanent thoughts that ultimately don’t refer to any deeper reality of a self. They’re mostly imported from other people based on their ideas of what you should think you are, to suit their needs. So if the body is not real and the mind isn’t real and neither of them have any real reference to you, and the only thing that remains unchanging is something that doesn’t even have a form at all, it’s simply awareness, then that’s the only place to explore. It’s very clear – and why all of the sages, philosophers of all of West and East have agreed that, OK, if we’re going to find anything real at all, we’re going to find it in our awareness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 17, 2013.
Excerpt: “… That silence usually doesn’t become tempting until the mind is filled with such disgusting elements, or ones externalized reality is filled with such negative karma that one wants to escape into the silence. But then you are haunted by it; it is very hard to escape when you’ve got burdens of negative karma chasing you. And so that’s the only reason to follow a life that is led in integrity according to the dharma, both the horizontal and the vertical dharma. That’s the cross that we must be crucified on so that we can ascend. By living in integrity at least our conscience won’t bite us. But we must be stung by the Great WASP…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 16, 2013.
Excerpt: “We are here to practice yoga. Yoga is the ancient science of consciousness. How do you practice a science? It is through the exploration of your consciousness. And it is an applied science as well as simply a theoretical pure science and the application of this scientific method is to arrive at the purification of consciousness. The removal from consciousness of all the superimpositions that have like veils or transparencies, filters, ended up causing us to superimpose upon reality, illusions. If they are severe enough we call them delusions. The modern science of psychology derives from the ancient science of yoga, but it’s spectrum of understanding of the nature of consciousness is much smaller - it understands only a sliver of what we call ego consciousness, whereas the point of yoga is to transcend ego consciousness, because the great scientists of consciousness thousands and thousands of years ago discovered that there were levels of consciousness that far transcend anything available to the finite ego mind—and that that is our real self and our ego mind that we are so sure we are, in a body in a physical world, is actually a false state of consciousness—or at least a partial state in which only partial truths are available to us and therefore we create suffering. So if we want to live a life without suffering it is important to remove all of those filters that constitute the ego and arrive at true consciousness—and that true consciousness, because it is in alignment with that supreme power that has created all consciousness and the universe itself, then flows through our consciousness with inspirations, with wisdom, with love, with a sense of fullness and empowerment and all the things the ego mind is looking for but can never get…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 10, 2013.
Excerpt: "Impermanence is the rule of the phenomenal plane – everything comes and goes, nothing is permanent. And by accepting that and not resisting and fighting it, we can be at peace, and discover the one aspect of reality that is not impermanent which is the awareness that is aware of the impermanence. And that's what we happen to be. and if we accept that – that we are simply awareness – not awareness that is identified with any impermanent thing, like a physical body, or even a mind, or a personality, or any objective identification at all, we are free of suffering. It's only when we identify with something impermanent that we start to fear that we will lose our being, our existence. But that fear is purely based on an illusion. And all of our desires are simply the compensation for that fear; you wanna hold on to something that will help you maintain the illusion of this existence which isn't real. And the despair at realizing that it is ultimately hopeless to hold on to anything at all. And finally one gives that up and the ignorance on which that is based, the illusion that one is a physical being instead of pure consciousness, then one lets go and enters into the realization of liberation which was always there." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 6, 2012.
Excerpt: "Sri Ramana says that the abode of bliss that we are all seeking is stillness. And he says we are all seeking it whether we know it or not. But most of us are seeking it in the wrong places. Not in stillness but in some external person, situation, drug, music phenomenon of some kind – but the abode of bliss can only be found in stillness. And many of the things that we do are done in order to reach a temporary state of stillness. We know that runners often run just to get exhausted and then their minds stop working because they have no energy to keep producing thoughts and they get 'runner’s high.' And other people do many other things – not for the reason that they might consciously think but that it will give them a moment of a glimpse of the abode of bliss. But Ramana says it is our birthright to live in the abode of bliss, always. That's our real home – but most of us have run away from home. And now we have to be the prodigal sons and daughters to find our way back." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 29, 2012.
Excerpt: "...Because what he taught and what is the truth is that each of us has the capacity to be the manifestation of Shiva, if we renounce our ignorance of that; if we make it Real by dissolving the veil of the ego mind that stands between our consciousness and Shiva; and through the ceaseless practice of inner silence and remeberence of the Supreme Self as 'I.' And then that Almighty Self will flow through and fill our consciousness, and move our bodies and our minds in a divine way, and create an energy field of such power, such love, such joy that the world will be transformed by that. But we must be wholeheartedly dedicated to attaining our real consciousness as the Supreme Self, and not wallow in the ego mind and it's narratives, and not identify with memory traces of the past, and not act out the symptoms and the sufferings of the ego mind and its traumas, and not continue to inflict them on our self and others..." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 8, 2012.
Excerpt: “The process of meditation is that of realizing our Real Self because most of the day we live behind the mask of a false self that defends us against either real or imagined attacks, or deceptions, or difficulties in life, negative projections and rejections, and all of our fears and anxieties projected out into the world. And because we are doing that our energy is dissipated, and we get exhausted, burned out. We lose our selves. And so when we come to meditate we come to re-find ourselves, to pull our energies back inward to our center, to be balanced and to regain the wholeness that we had lost during our time in the false self, until eventually we don’t ever leave the Real Self, because we understand that there is no need to do that. But we are trained early in life to wear this mask and pretend it is our Real Self and we have accepted it for so long that we no longer even realize it’s a mask and we think it is all there is and there is nothing else behind it. So there is a terror of taking it off and not knowing who we are, because our conscious mind has forgotten.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, November 1, 2012.
Excerpt: “We come here for freedom – freedom from suffering. And we learn that all suffering is caused by our own ego and that the one job to achieve is to kill the ego. Some people object to that phrase, but it’s essential to recognize that the ego must be killed, and can only be killed because it’s not Real. What is Real cannot be killed. What is Real is eternal and immortal. But the ego – despite its unreality – is imprisoning our consciousness, in a self-sabotaging thought-form that destroys our happiness, destroys our life, destroys our capacity to be. And unless we destroy the ego, it will keep us imprisoned in hell realm life after life after life. And that means we’re not living at all.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, October 30, 2012.
Excerpt: "Sat Yoga is a finishing school - probably the last of the finishing schools. Feminism killed off most of them, but here we have a co-ed finishing school… and yes we are here to finish off the ego but we are doing it not by destruction but by allowing it to attain its perfect form and then the ego blossoms into the soul and if we allow it the soul blossoms into pure spirit. We teach about different assemblage points here. Each assemblage point is really an opening up to love at a higher, broader, deeper level. But the essence of what we are is love at every level - even at the level of the ego, which we say “oh, the ego cannot love”, which is true in terms of divine love, but the ego is love because that’s all that is, is love. At the first assemblage point the problem is the ego’s circle of care and love does not go beyond its own self-image… it loves what is sees in the mirror and it loves others adoring gazes and saying yes etc. and it loves sensual pleasures and that kind of thing – what Freud called the ‘ideal ego’, and it doesn’t love beyond that. At the second assemblage point the thesis of the egos narcissistic love turns into the antithesis of a narcissistic hatred - anger, fury at the family, wanting to get away, but this antithesis is actually necessary… one needs to break away by hating the ones that would tie you into a small image of yourself that you have outgrown in order to find love at a higher level, and so it is inevitable that one passes through this and then at the third assemblage point feels remorse for all that hatred, envy and negativity and at that assemblage point one enters fully into the ethical dimension of life and then love begins to be channeled in a higher way…. An aesthetic dimension, an ethical dimension, and a religious dimension of life all open up at the third assemblage point and love begins to blossom, one becomes a productive citizen because one loves one world etc. etc… one loves beauty, one loves truth, one loves higher truth even then that which is about the physical plane, but still there are limitations. So one's circle of love may extend to one's nation but does it extend to those in other nations or does one still demonize people of other countries of other religions, other skin colors etc. etc.? The love is still not universal, it is not unconditional, and it’s only at the next assemblage point that love becomes universal and all are recognized as children of God…." Recorded in the evening of Thursday, October 25, 2012.
Excerpt: “…And within that idea of return there is a crossroads that one encounters. One leads to the bliss of the Absolute and the other leads to nihilism – that leads to an emptiness that is a barrenness. And we have two kinds of spiritual teacher in the world: one who is pointing to the bliss and the light and the power and the joy of God and the other who points to absolute nothingness. And so it’s very important that when you let go of the ego and allow it to dissolve that you recognize there is still an awareness that is witnessing that. So you are still there when your ego has dissolved. You are still there when the mind is completely silent. But when there are no more narratives, who are you that is there? That’s the question. The real inquiry that Ramana recommends of ‘Who am I?’ only begins after the disillusion of the ego when you know you are not that, you are not the traumatized person but you’re the witness. And then you can begin to ask ‘but what is this witness?’ that is still there after everything is dissolved and the mind is quiet and there is actually peace. That’s when you can find the inner blissful Supreme Self.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, October 18, 2012.
Excerpt: “The Christians talk about transfiguring the wafer and the wine into the body and the blood of Christ. It’s the theory of transubstantiation. But what it means is that you recognize that Real One, a mere wafer, a mere cup of ordinary wine, is actually simply the symbolic representation of Real Two, the love of God, the act which is the actual body and blood of God. But in our version of transfiguration everything is transformed, all of Real One, and all of the Imaginary of the ego is transformed into Real Two and into the archetypal realization that everything that appears here; including yourself, your own body, your own mind, is simply a symbolic representation of the Real that is God.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 15, 2012.
Excerpt: “We are here to do what the song just said… which is to Swaha - it means give everything to Rama… surrender every illusion that you are separate from God so that you realize who you truly are… surrender every bit of negativity, fear… every piece of anger, hatred, depression, anxiety… throw it all into the fire… throw everything that separates you from your realization of oneness with the supreme being and by doing that and invoking the supreme presence you will be free of suffering and you will be in bliss and you will be filled with power and creativity and clarity and you will be filled with love and you will know that you are loved and you will know that you are one with the source of love and that love is what is beautiful and love is what is good… love is what is real and eternal and you are that and everything that you might have thought that you were that is different from that is an illusion… it is Maya and if you don’t hold onto any Maya and you can let it all go, you will achieve liberation, so why would anyone hold back? Why would anyone keep the illusion of some identification that is less than the beauty and the perfection of God?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 12, 2012.
Excerpt: “What is it that we see when the third eye is open? The first thing we see, as all the ancient sages have testified to, is that this world is unreal. Do we all see that? To be unreal doesn’t mean that it doesn’t appear; it is real as an appearance, but it is not real as a world with all of the veils of the ego’s projections upon it. The projections are unreal; they are fantasies. And once those projections are put out there, superimposed upon the phenomenal plane, then that’s what we get back, are our own projections. And so the first thing that the Eye of Shiva must do is burn away the projections so we see the world as it is, as a creation of Shiva. And then we see it not as a world any longer but as a hologram, a multidimensional dream field, in which everything that appears is a symbolic manifestation of the mind of God.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 8, 2012.
Excerpt: “You know ‘SAT’ is an acronym. Did anybody know that? Do you know what ‘SAT’ stand for? Anyone know? It means: the Solid Abyss of Triumph. Triumph is the keyword; you will hear the word triumph often is the chants that Anuttara performs. In Sanskrit the word is ‘Jai’ and you hear songs that have the words ‘Jai Sita Ram’ and ‘Govinda Jaya Jaya.’ ‘Jai’ means victory or triumph, but what are we victorious over? It’s the triumph over maya, over the delusion of the ego that creates negativity, self-doubt, despair, depression, anxiety, envy, all the agonies of the ego that we all know so well they don’t need to be listed. So all of these need to be triumphed over, but how do we triumph over them? First we have to become solid…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 20, 2012.
Excerpt: “All experience occurs within the Self and can be modified by the Self because it is actually all part of the Self, and a creation of the Self. But the Self never appears as an object, and the Self, to all intents and purposes to the scientific mind, does not exist. And this is why many have called Advaita and Buddhism forms of religious atheism. You could say that, but they are not atheism in the same sense as the materialist [who] doesn’t believe in God. The materialist is simply refusing to believe in Sunday school stories. But if the materialist had to actually consider what is the ultimate transcendental condition of experience, then that would be a different matter. So when the atheists attack God, they’re attacking a straw God, a false God. But when you ask ‘Who is doing the attacking?’ ‘Who is the source of the consciousness with that attitude?’ you can take that consciousness back to a level which cannot be understood. But it is fair to say that Advaita and Buddhism are forms of transtheism because no concept of God can ever capture the Self, not even the word Self. And that is why we often will say the Self is no self. And the metaphor is often used that what the Self is, is the space in which consciousness occurs. But even that is only a metaphor because the Self constitutes whatever space it is in which experience occurs but is not Itself that space. And therefore the Self is absolutely transcendent of all conceptualization, and the only way to reach it is by letting go of the attempt to do just that.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 13, 2012.
Excerpt: “Many people’s egos try to convince them that this knowledge is too difficult to understand, too subtle. And it’s true that the ego cannot understand this knowledge. And yet everyone has a deeper intuition and a recognition of the Truth when they hear it. But the reason why the ego can’t understand it is that it doesn’t want to, because to understand it would mean the death of the very ego that comes to understand its own unreality. But it’s clear that everyone understands because it’s there in our collective culture. This information is hidden in plain sight, like all the other secrets that society holds back from itself.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11, 2012.
Excerpt: “When we meditate we are detaching from the ego mind and all of its mundane concerns, and its pointless narratives, and all of its absurd fears and anxieties about life and death that are completely irrelevant to the infinite life of the Real Self. The Real Self alone is. The ego and the forms are merely temporary appearances and they do not have a consciousness of their own. The consciousness of the ego is only borrowed from the Self. It is a dream within a dream. When we subtract our attention and our identification from the form, the ego dissolves like a bubble that pops and we realize it never was. And all of its projections on the world never were. And in the state of the Formless Self we realize that the illusion of the world was only created by the language in the mind that labels everything and creates the deception of a subject-object duality. None of that is real.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, September 10, 2012.
Excerpt: “It is always important to remember why we are here before we begin and sometimes we take it for granted that we know why we are here.... In some cirlces what we are doing is called mysticism, but really there is no mystery to mysticism... or maybe the only mystery is why some people think it is so hard... because all we are doing in the mystical quest is recognizing who we are – recognizing our original true nature... but what makes it seem hard is that we have aquired a conditioned nature – a false nature so that we could adapt to the sickness of society and pretend that that is normal... and then we identified with all of the family signifiers, the cultural signifiers and all of the values of the society in which we live and we lost touch with our original nature... and once we bought into what our parents told us or implied between the lines or what we overheard or suspected or imagined or fantasized, and then what we were taught in school, mostly by fellow students but a little bit by teachers and then what we gain through all the disinformation of the media, has created a false self that is completely clueless about the true nature of what is real... and not only have we forgotten but we are not allowed to know – it is prohibited – there is a censor in the unconsciouss that was put in there like one of those internet filters you put in so kids cant watch the pornographic sites, they put that into each of us so that we couldn't see or know knowledge that was forbidden or unbearbale to the ego... and so that made us into our own worst enemy because your not allowed to see all the skeltons in the family closet and you are not allowed to see even more skeltons in the social closet or in the historic closet of all of human history and you are not allowed to know the true significance of our whole experience in this earth plane because we live in a very small box... but a point comes in our growth when we out grow that box and we need to explode it like a snake outgrows its skin and needs to let it go – shed it to grow another one that fits - but we are afraid because knowbody else is doing it except a few other mad people like in a group like this.... Thursday, September 06, 2012.
Excerpt: “…Because that’s what Kali Yuga is doing to everyone now. Whatever can break down is breaking down, whether it’s our cars, or our plumbing, or our egos, or our bodies, that’s what’s happening. But don’t wait to have everything taken away from you before you realize that you are that which cannot be damaged or taken away. Be one who dwells in that undamageable, unblemished perfection of being now so that such karmic events won’t be necessary to liberate you, and won’t cause suffering and disturbance. But that no matter what happens you will flow with it in grace, and joy, and love. And you will know that you need nothing, because you are the source of all.” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, September 5, 2012.
Excerpt: “Meditation is simply an opportunity to drop the illusion that you are a separate ego; to let the identification of mind and body fall away; and more importantly to let go of the identification of Self with mind. The Self is not the mind. You were not born with the mind; you were born with consciousness, awareness. Awareness that in its natural state is free: free of thoughts, free of images, free of desires, free of fear. But once the ego mind is created through the incorporation of language, with the desires, fantasies, fears imposed by the parents, family, society, larger global culture, then a knot is formed that keeps your awareness identified with mind. And the mind feeling [in] a state of lack, a state in which something is missing to make you feel contentment and wholeness and joy. And we mistakenly think we can find what we are looking for by thinking our way to it; and so we think furiously, constantly, chattering about what we want, what we don’t want, rehearsing how we’re going to deal with some future situation, hating some past situation, never in the present, and ever deepening the hole of lack. But there is no lack; the lack is only created by the illusory identification with a separate bodily entity.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 4, 2012.
Excerpt: “…It is as if you hear a program on the radio and you like the announcer and you put a picture of the radio up on the wall and say ‘that’s what I like.’ The voice that is coming out of that radio isn’t the radio, it’s coming from a thousand miles away. But you are identified with it as if the words coming out of your mouth belong to that body, they don’t. The problem is this: we don’t just have a radio, we have a machine that has a tape and a radio, and we have it set to the tape machine that just keeps repeating over and over again the loops of the ego and the super ego voices…” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, August 30, 2012.
Excerpt: "There is a very ancient metaphor in yoga that we talk about a lot and we include it in seminar one about the bucket of water that’s put out underneath the full moon and how the bucket represents the body and the water in the bucket represents the mind… and there seems to be a moon in the bucket as well, but is there really? That’s the illusion… the moon we could say represents the Self, but the moon in the bucket is not the Real Self – we could say it is the ego self… and usually the bucket is being disturbed and the water is vibrating and so you don’t even get a clear image of the moon… you get different splinters of the moon-like light but it doesn’t make sense – it is an ever changing puzzle because our minds are going too fast to get an even image that is clear of the Self… but then if we do get that clear image then we are under the illusion that we somehow have to get out of this bucket – I have got to attain liberation, but there is no such thing as liberation because the moon isn’t in the bucket to begin with… the light is projected into the bucket… the moon is always free… the moon is the soul and it doesn’t need to be liberated… so all of this struggling that we do falsely identified as a bucket that is trying to find the inner moon is all based on an illusion – there is no inner moon… and each bucket doesn’t have a different moon in it… and so there aren’t many different selves, there is only one… but then when you finally realize, huh… I was never in there to begin with, I was always the moon, even then you realize the moon only has the reflected light of the sun… even the soul is only carrying the reflected light of the Spirit… the Supreme Being… and in the middle of the night that Supreme Being isn’t even visible… the moon knows it but on earth it is not known… and it is that that we are… that which from the perspective of the ego mind that thinks it’s the bucket can’t even be seen or imagined because it is a completely non-objective reality… it is the consciousness by which you are aware of your being but that consciousness does not exist within the mind… the mind exists within that… and that light is always there day or night… and so rather than struggling to attain liberation or to gradually transcend the ego mind or to work out all of its problems and distortions and try to still the water, just realize that you are not in the bucket to begin with and let it go…." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 30, 2012.
Excerpt: “A Sat Yogi is one who knows oneself to be Ajata. Ajata is the unborn, the uncreated, the eternal, the all powerful Self. Do you know yourself to be Ajata? Do you know yourself to be all powerful? Every power is given you, but have you claimed it? You have been given the power of healing; you have been given the power of love; you have been given the power of truth; you have been given the power to conquer maya; the power to remain beyond suffering; the power to remain ever at peace; the power to remain in bliss; the power to be fearless; the power of silence; the power to stay awake in meditation. Have you claimed your powers? Or are you still a beggar before God? Or are you still attached to the false power of weakness, because you prefer to get pity than to claim the power and majesty of the Supreme One? Do you prefer to remain a child rather than to grow up to your full potential as the deathless Self?” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, August 27, 2012.
Excerpt: “Tat Tuam Asi: Thou Art That – very ancient mahavakya, I am That. That which is the ‘I’ of the individual is actually the Supreme Presence. Duality is an illusion. There is one Self, and each of us is That. Can we feel the truth of that mahavakya? Do we resonate with it? Do we surrender to that truth? Do we realize the bliss that comes with that realization? There is really nothing more to know or to study. Because in that state, when the individualized has returned to That, to the Supreme One, to the realization that you were always That, and eternally shall be, then the journey of karma on this wheel of reincarnation, of multiplicity, is complete. Tat Tuam Asi is the sound of our graduation ceremony, the angels will be singing that as we arise to the Supreme Light. And in that realization, all suffering falls away, all fear, all the narcissistic wounds carried by the ego, can finally be enjoyed from God’s strange sense of humor. And that Divine Supreme Perspective heals all in this world, in all worlds. And there is no one left to need to do anything, because all that happens occurs within the dream of God, in absolute perfection.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 23, 2012.
“We come here to discover what is real. And the deeper we inquire within, the more we realize that everything is impermanent in this world of experience; it’s fleeting, it changes – it has no true identity. Even people we meet have no true identity: at one moment they’re friendly, another moment they’re angry, one moment they’re here, another they’re gone, different personalities appear and disappear, moods, attitudes, understandings, none of it is permanent; it’s just a fleeting appearance. So all of you, all of us as appearances, as egos, as bodily beings, are completely unreal. And yet our lives revolve around this non-existent concern with an unreal being, an unreal being in an unreal world. Because the world is in constant change, nothing in this world is dependable: not the climate, not the ground under our feet, not the air, not the solar vibrations where you see the sun, not the water supply. There is no guarantee that our existence will continue even for one more minute, or even that this planet will continue to exist, none. So what is real? What do you build your life on? What do you depend on? Who are you?” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, August 23, 2012.
Excerpt: “There is really no point speaking about the Absolute… we can talk a lot about the ego and the unconscious and it’s structure and dynamics, but when it comes to the Absolute concepts are futile… one always ends up with paradox, inconsistency, contradiction, inadequacy and usually it leads to a distorted understanding on the part of those who are listening… and so many of the great teachers have simply sat in silence without saying anything, or they have taught in parables using metaphors and archetypal images… but nothing can be said about the absolute because the absolute is not a thing – not an object… but even to say that is incorrect… in the Vedas it is called Nirguna Brahman… the Absolute that is beyond even the question of whether personal or impersonal and has no qualities, no gunas, no attributes… but the egoic mind cannot grasp that which has no attributes… and in fact the Absolute cannot be grasped because there is no one to grasp it… what really has to be realized is that the ego mind that is attempting to understand is itself the illusion that must be transcended… for we are the Absolute and have never been anything else… but to explain that to a mind that is identified with its body, with its gender, with its family, its nation and religion and language etc etc etc is almost impossible… and so the approach of most spiritual paths have been to gradually strip away these identifications until consciousness receives a glimpse of naked awareness in which concepts do not arise… no narrative drags one away from the source of one's being into some imaginary discourse about what is… and in that moment of naked presence then the entire mystery of that which is revealed becomes impeccably and infinitely clear but what also becomes clear is that it cannot be transmitted in language to anyone else. This is why the Buddha almost gave up before he began his teaching… you know he sat there – he attained Buddhahood – and then as he got up he realized this cannot be taught and then he sat looking at where he was sitting becoming enlightened for about seven days trying to figure out, “What do I do with this”? It’s impossible to communicate that which transcends this entire dimension of illusion and yet it is what we are now….” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, August 16, 2012.
Excerpt: “The ego is a psychic sack filled with mind parasites. It has only a negative value. It’s a place in consciousness based on the falseness of an illusionary identity that gives a space for negative entities to hold on to and suck your life energy away. These mind parasites will destroy your life if they are not eliminated. The only way to eliminate these negative entities, that will drive you to insanity, destroy your health, and destroy your destiny, is through the surrender of the mind to God for the purification of the consciousness and the elimination of the ego. That is why this sacred act of meditation is so important. It is literally a matter of life or death, and not just this life but all of your future lives that depend on the sanskaras that are created now at the end of Kali Yuga. So we need to take meditation with the utmost seriousness. It is our one opportunity to link with God and feel the current of divine energy, and allow that current to come in with such power that it annihilates these negative thought-forms and purifies the mind and the heart forever.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, August 14, 2012.
Excerpt: “Our natural state is pure awareness and absolute purity of mind and heart, and thus a state of love-filled joy. But we are only in that state if we are in the Real Self. And the problem for human consciousness is that a false self has intervened to disconnect our consciousness from the Real Self. And so we must learn to recognize the Real Self. And it’s easy to do because the Real Self differs from the false self in one essential way; the Real Self is non-arising. Any self that arises as an object, as a sense of being a body in the world, as having emotions, intentions, agendas, and relations in duality with others, is the false self. The Real Self is non-arising, and from the perspective from the false self, then, the Real Self does not exist because it doesn’t arise, it’s unborn, it’s unmanifest. But what the Real Self knows is that it’s that which arises that does not really exist; it’s not real because it’s fleeting, it’s impermanent, it’s in constant change, and it’s constantly fragmented, different emotions, different attitudes, different thoughts, contradictory, conflicting, feeling, and cognition states; whereas the Real Self that’s non-arising is eternal, unchanging, immutable – untouched by the chaos of the false self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 9, 2012.
Excerpt: “The two most important concepts in meditation are ‘Shiva’ and ‘Shakti.’ We need to understand the very deep inner significance of these two profound concepts that function as the energy source for our reality because when we are meditating, what we are doing is literally charging our battery. The soul is a battery; it’s a living battery. And that battery gets discharged over time. And the more that we function in the lower chakras, the faster the battery discharges and goes dead. And so every time we have an outburst of anger, or sexual lust, or insecurity, anxiety, paranoia, all of those lower chakra emotional fixations, the battery of our life energy goes dead. And if it can’t be recharged we will literally go dead. And our physical body then starts to have to compensate for the lack of spiritual energy and the organs become weaker, they become drained. And eventually we just have a meltdown, we can’t think, we can’t organize our self to act and function in the world, our emotions become out of order, they get bipolar, they get fragmented, they fall into a meltdown. This is now happening around the world because nearly everyone’s battery has gone dead.” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, July 26, 2012.
Excerpt: ”How many of you believe that you really exist? Is anyone here still under that illusion? Admit it if there is. Anyone? No one will admit it, that’s good, it’s a start. It’s better to not admit it. Because we don’t really [exist]; it’s an illusion. Anything time-bound is not real. And all existence is simply an appearance followed by disappearance. Is the appearance any more real than the disappearance? No, but neither is real. You know a lot of times we talk about Jivanmukti as the goal of yoga, which means to be liberated in life; liberated from the ego with its illusory existence that is only an illusion. But actually Ramana says no, Jivanmukti is not the end; there is a stage higher than Jivanmukti. Does anyone know what it is? Sri Ramana calls it Videhamukti. And this means liberation even from believing you ever were an ego that has achieved liberation. There is not even the subtle sense of being one who has gone beyond the illusion – because you were never in the illusion to begin with. That’s why the final stage is just laughter.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 19, 2012.
Excerpt: “…Those of us who have been here for some time have no doubt come to understand and been motivated by the fact that what we are doing is discovering who we are. Most of us have recognized that we have these experiences that are in a flux, almost like in a circle; our body and our minds are going through these changes, constant changes. And yet there’s a witness, there’s a center to all of these experiences, and what we call ‘imperiences,’ those which don’t happen in what seems to be an external world but happen in an internal world: dreams, visions, memories, thoughts; where do they actually happen? And to whom do they happen? And we usually focus our whole life on what is happening out there: ‘what a pretty flower,’ ‘what a strange person,’ ‘what extraordinary power of thunder and lightning and rain,’ and all these other things. And we have judgments about our experiences, and sometimes we have judgments about our own thoughts. But how often do we ask: ‘Who is it who is having the judgment?’ ‘To whom does this thought occur?’ ‘Who is witnessing even the judgment about the judgment?’ ‘Who is the ultimate perceiver?’…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 18, 2012.
Excerpt: “Meditation is the act of gaining victory over death. And that makes it literally a life or death matter. Do we take it with that seriousness? One of the great names for a successful yogi is ‘Mrityunjay’ which means one who has achieved victory over death. There are two words for death in Sanskrit that refer to the two dimensions of death. One is ‘kal’ and kal also means time, and measure. Thus we have the word calendar (kalendar) in English, or calculate, or caliber, or Excalibur, the sword of immeasurable value, the legitimate wielder of which is given immortality. One of the great names for God is ‘Mahakal’, the great death, which is the death of death. It means entering into the dimension of eternity. But how you achieve that is revealed in the second word for death…” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, July 12, 2012.
Excerpt: “I hope that you have all come prepared for intense erotic experiences… have you? Those of you who were here for the film this week of the sculpture of Santa Teresa by Bernini will remember that here is a question that is open as to whether she is having a chakra four mystical experience or a chakra two orgasmic experience… and the art critics and philosophers and psychoanalysts are actually arguing over this point…. To the psychoanalyst like Lacan naturally it has to be a chakra two experience – there is no chakra four – that is the modern ideology… and this loss of the transcendent dimension has bought about the loss of the realization that our true relationship to God is an erotic one, but it is the Eros of the soul not of the ego…. The soul’s deepest desire is to be ravished by God – this is what we mean by surrender… you are literally abandoning your ego self and asking to be filled by Gods power – presence – love – bliss. This is the true erotic experience not the other one at chakra two… that is very minor and disappointing… this one is eternal – liberating – it brings salvation, but it is very much an ecstasy. It is the ecstasy in which you are transported beyond… the experience begins in chakra four but then literally you are carried upward through the three worlds…" Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 12, 2012.
Excerpt: “As the world situation every day becomes more tamasic, we have to remain immune to the negative vibrations that are all around us that want to affect us and that want to drag us down back into ego consciousness. Because to whatever extent there is still ego within any of us, that ego is becoming more and more rancid every day – that’s really what tamasic means. It’s putrid, it’s decomposing. We’re in the final period of Kali Yuga, when not only the ego but the physical organism itself is losing its capacity to live, to remain healthy, to remain strong, to remain with an immune system that is functioning properly, because the very elements of matter have been defiled. And so it’s very important that Sat Yogis keep a sattvic energy field. Not only for the immunity of our own organism, but for the immunity of the sangha, as a super-organism, or we can be very easily be infected by the tamasic energy and then suddenly our field of love becomes one of conflict, and aggression, or lust, or fear, or simply chaos and confusion, or all at once. And the only way to maintain the coherence of your own energy field and that of the sangha is to remain in inner silence – with your consciousness united with the Source.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, July 9, 2012.
Excerpt: “A yogi is someone who is so sick of his ego that he wants to commit suicide. But he knows that if he does that he will have to face all the karma that he ran away from, in the next life. So it does no good. And so instead of killing the body in suicide he realizes he must commit egocide. Suicide, ‘sui’ comes from the Sanskrit ‘swa’, the real Self; the ego is the false self, the me. In fact the ‘me’ actually stands for ‘M-E,’ Machinic Entity because the ego is a machine, it’s a robot, with an operating system that was created in childhood and robotically repeats the same patterns over and over again – in just a slightly more sophisticated form. And so we have to get rid of this robot somehow. We have to give ourselves a robotomy – which is similar to a lobotomy but slightly different. In the lobotomy you get rid of the higher functioning aspects of the robot, then you are left with the lower ones. Here we want to get rid of the robot entirely so that we can be liberated in life. But to get rid of the ‘me’ requires being willing to cut our link with thoughts – to be in stillness. And the thoughts continue to emerge robotically. But what keeps the robot going, what keeps it fueled is our addiction to those thoughts. The robotic thoughts produce jouissance; they produce a kind of pleasure, an enjoyment, even though that enjoyment is painful. Every ego is sadomasochistic and it produces a kind of enjoyment in the same way that the dog enjoys the taste of its own bleeding gums when it’s chewing on a bone.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 5, 2012.
Excerpt: ”Each of us comes equipped with three levels of consciousness. Unfortunately there is no instruction manual as to how to operate these three. And the society today tells us only about the ego – the primary level – that is required in order to function in this society. But if one lives only from the ego, one is living a very petty, weak, fragile life, focused on very superficial aims; the greed for money or sexual pleasure or some kind of limited power or some kind of fantasy fulfillment that always ends up disappointing one and the ego always ends up depressed and anxious and lost. And the ego consciousness is not good for very much, and it is not intended to do very much, except to get you to adulthood…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 4, 2012.
Excerpt: “The purpose of meditation is to become empowered. You should feel more spiritual power at the end of each meditation than you started with. How many of you feel that? Good. We need a lot of spiritual power to deal with the energy field of the world as it is today. And every day the world becomes more tamasic. And there is a very short time before major world-shattering events will occur. That if we are not strong enough to face them, and have the adequate and accurate response, can be very devastating to our equilibrium. And Sat Yogis are here not just to stay in balance for ourselves but be able to offer peace and balance and strength to others, we have to be able to channel that strength. But to do that, we first have to purify our own unconscious minds. If we are still being overturned by maya, by fantasies, by impulses of the lower chakras and by negative thoughts, negative interactions with others, then we are not able to be of any service to the world. We must complete our self-service, we must complete our own dissolution of the ego to be able to offer as a conduit as a channel the divine energies. So we must get out of the ego mind and we must enter the divine mind. If you’re in the ego mind, you are not of any help to anyone, least of all yourself.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, July 2, 2012.
Excerpt: “In order to be able to have some sense of God’s presence, first of all we have to recognize that what we mean by God, as a starting point, is the highest potential consciousness that you can have. Not the highest possible, the highest potential, because as soon as you say possible then that’s divided into what is possible and what is impossible. But you don’t know what is impossible; you don’t know the limits of potentiality. So we have to assume an infinite potentiality, and that you have that infinite potentiality of altering your state of consciousness to reach that of God consciousness.” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, June 28, 2012.
Student Question: To avoid falling asleep in meditation, I’ve read about a recommendation to do walking meditation instead. What advice do you have?
Student Question: If one has superego projections with one’s siblings, can those projections be primary, or will they always secondary to those of the parents?
Student Question: Sometimes when I meditate I feel a kind or rush that feels like adrenaline. It feels very good and I want to go deeper into it. The problem is that it feels like I am holding my breath, and I am making this huge effort in order to go deeper. It only lasts for some time and then I feel exhausted. What should I do when this happens? Just let go?
Student Question: Recently in a meditation my foot fell asleep and all these narratives of fear came up regarding whether or not I was hurting my foot or myself. Many of these ideas came up and once I detached from it the feeling in the foot came back. I was wondering what the symbolism of this is?
Student Question: I find myself falling asleep during meditation, why is that? How can I observe the ego falling asleep?
Student Question: When one is trapped in the lower chakras, how does one recognize that one is trapped and how does one get out of them?
Student Question: Sometimes when I meditate I start to feel a very blissful state, but after some time the opposite happens and it becomes almost unbearable and even painful. When this happens I usually stop but today I continued and as I did I thought of the word dematerialization. So I was wondering if that state is associated to “moving from the particle to the wave” that you were referring to and if it is at all related to transmutation as well, is there a connection? What is it that happens?
Student Question: When one is trapped in the lower chakras, how does one recognize that one is trapped and how does one get out of them?
Excerpt: “I was reading ‘The Little Russian Philokalia’ today… and this first volume is the teaching of Saint Seraphim of Sarov - a great Saint of Russia… and one of his core teachings is that the true aim of Christianity or of a “true Christian life” as he puts, is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God… I think that sums up authentic Christianity very well… and I think those who are true spiritual seekers in any path can agree that this is the aim, however different religions would alter the language very slightly and that slight alteration can have huge effects…. Now Saint Seraphim does go onto say the Holy Spirit of God is already within you – it is not somewhere else – you don’t have to buy it somewhere – you don’t have to acquire it in some external way… and so really they (religions) all will agree that it is simply a question of realizing your true nature and letting go of the false self… and in the Christian path Saint Seraphim and other Christian Saints and Mystics would say that you do that through contemplative prayer – you contemplate in your consciousness which is silenced, the presence of God – the meaning of God – the beauty of God – the power of God… and simply by doing that you enable the presence of God to emerge into your consciousness… the contemplation of God precipitates the presence of God.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 28, 2012.
Excerpt: “We have to perform our function well, with humility and purity; with absolute emptiness of ego – to live in the largest way, to live for God and as a manifestation of Godly power. Power of love and truth, not of ego; not of the desire to dominate or control – to surrender all of that and be in the purity and the flow of the divine nature.” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, June 27, 2012.
Excerpt: ”What we are all here to discover for ourselves – not through hearsay, not through the testimony even of great sages – is what is real. ‘Who am I really?’ ‘What am I?’ ‘What is this world?’ ‘Is there a God?’ ‘Is there a purpose?’ ‘Is there a meaning?’ ‘What do I want to achieve during this short time that I have between birth and death?’ These are questions that each of us must answer in our own hearts. And while it is useful to hear the wisdom of those who have gone very deeply into reality for themselves, and whose words may be inspiring for you, we must go beyond even the great mahavakyas of the great sages and enter into our own innermost heart.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 14, 2012.
Excerpt: “The obstacle is the ego. With all of its chaotic thoughts, negative thoughts, thoughts of lack, of anxiety, of anger, of lust, fear. The ego is a luxury we can no longer afford. It makes our lives unmanageable, as the twelve-step people would say. You can’t manage your life if your life is ruled by an ego because an ego is inherently chaotic, ambivalent . . . and filled with internal conflicts that get projected as external conflicts, paralysis of will, and self-deception of every sort. And all of this produces: suffering. Suffering is based on illusion because the ego is an illusion, and all of its thoughts are illusory. Once you realize you cannot trust those thoughts, you will accept only the thoughts that come from the Source, and they come as inspirations, intuitions, Aha-experiences, and wordless knowing of the true nature of reality – that leads to spontaneous egoless action.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 7, 2012.
Excerpt: “What the path of Advaita says, that is different from every other path, is: all you really need to do is ask the question ‘What am I?’ And just by asking the question, not even getting an answer – in fact you don’t want an answer – as soon as you get an answer you get another belief system, another mythology, another symbolic situation that needs to be overcome because every symbolic situation you are in is the obstacle to the realization of what you are. So you don’t want an answer to the question: what you need is a wordless realization of your being, which you can only get by inquiring – not conceptually, not to find some new map or some new symbol – but to free yourself from all the symbolic constructs that have then created the need for some journey or salvation or some grace from a God, whether out there or in here; it doesn’t even matter. So the question is meant to get you out of every belief system and to keep you from creating a new one because what you need to be free of is beliefs…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 31, 2012.
Excerpt: “All suffering is caused by identification with an object in consciousness: primarily identification with the physical body, and secondly, identification with language, thoughts. And those thoughts are charged with emotions, impulses, drives—images that create nostalgia, anger, fear, whatever. So there’s a whole cluster of objects, mental objects, that tend to arise that produce effects of suffering of different kinds. And to the extent we’re identified with those objects in the mind, we are on the wheel of karma. . . . And because of our identification with the body, and with thought, we cannot escape because every effort to escape just tightens the noose more: we affirm the illusion that is the cause of suffering. . . . But there is a very simple way out, and that is nonidentification with any mental objects and instead realization of the Self as the Empty Consciousness in which those objects arise.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 24, 2012.
Student Question: Last week you spoke about the difference between the ego mind and the Sat mind, and I didn’t really understand what the Sat mind is.
Student Question: When one is in a meditative state, in a state of awareness, and then starts to lose that awareness by getting pulled down by the lower death drive and the lower chakras. What suggestions do you have to help prevent one from falling again and again?
Student Question: There is an attachment to lack, which we don’t want to lose it seems because unconsciously it defines who we are as an ego. So the question is, how does one “attack” that attachment to lack?
Student Comment: Last week I talked about the excitement of different activities, and there are many of them that I feel so excited for. But then it creates this sense that there’s not enough time: I can’t do everything and I don’t know how to prioritize. Then I get this overwhelming sense because I want to do them all and the anxiety is coming up from that.
Student Question: We have talked about a healthy super ego. For example, recognizing where one has been inaccurate, even if it’s subtle, and not wanting to repeat that behavior again. I can see how that recognition could escalate into more of a negative attack but, how do you discern the difference?
Student Question: What is the relationship between karma, transformation and the supreme will of God?
Excerpt: “There is an inherent and eternal love between the soul and God. Sita is the signifier of the soul and Rama of God - and Sita and Rama are always together - and when Sita does become separated from Rama, through Sita’s ignorance and stupidity – karmic enmeshment with the phenomenal plane – Rama always comes to rescue her – and Rama is always victorious – and Rama is always able to build an army of monkeys to be able to help him. Monkeys are just a signifier for yogis – because yogis are those who are coming out of the monkey stage into the divine stage through their love for Rama – our love for Rama…. And so all meditation is, is the act of love between Sita (that’s you), and Rama (that’s also you)… and that’s what love really means - that you meet yourself - that love is union with the source of your being… the soul is that part of yourself that wonders into this dream field called the universe to have experiences and challenges, delights… all created by Rama for the benefit of Sita, but then we get lost in those delights and the paradise becomes a hell realm and voila… its time to meditate again… get Rama to rescue us – beam us up again – start the whole thing all over again…. So we are at that moment where Sita once more meets Rama… and so you have to ask yourself the question – am I ready to meet Rama?” Recorded on the evening of, Thursday, May 17, 2012.
Student Question: What is the superego? If you dissolve the ego, will the superego still be there?
Excerpt: “Philosophy in the modern West . . . distinguished religion from science. Religion was mythical, and science dealt with facts. . . . Postmodern Western philosophy now conceives that science itself is a myth. . . . When it comes to ultimate questions, science has no answer to them; it has to presume an origin, but it doesn’t even attempt to account for it because it cannot account for anything ultimate because that would be religion. But if, in fact, there’s no difference between religion and science, and if they are both mythological constructs, then it’s important to understand what myth is. And as Joseph Campbell has explained very clearly in all of his works, myth is metaphor. But what is it that’s being metaphorized?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 26, 2012.
Excerpt: “We are here to realize the true self. The implication of that is that we have not been living in our authentic self, but in some false - unreal - persona… and if we are not living in our real self then we are not living in the real world either… and if the world is false and the self is false, then things are going to happen that are unsustainable because the false cannot survive the test of truth… and because so many on this planet are now living in the false self, we have a false world that is collapsing… you cannot live in that state of hypocrisy without karma hitting you pretty hard…. So everyone is getting lessons in karma nowadays but we are not here to worry about the political issues of the world and their karma… we are here to work out our own karma… to make sure that we are not secretly killing elephants when we are pledged to protect them… to make sure that if we are Sat Yogis, we are living up to our vows and living a yogic life and living as what Linji - the great Zen master - the great wild Zen master - called the true person – the one true person of no rank. He said every ego is out to try and get to as high a rank as possible and to try to improve its status in the world and that is all it is really interested in, and there is one true person who doesn’t care about that… who realizes that there is no such thing as rank…. It is interesting that rank has these two meanings. One is a bad smell, and the other is status…. It is rank if you are interested in rank… but he said there is only one true person of no rank and that everyone else is interested in rank and prestige, status, possessions and power - all of that… but that the one true person is the incarnation of God… the Christ…. Don’t think the Zen masters don’t believe in Christ. They do, but they have another word for that being...” Recorded on the evening of, Thursday, April 19, 2012.
Student Question: How can we guide children from a very early age to find their awareness?
Student Question: Something that I have been thinking about recently is this idea of “the third.” I know you mentioned before when we were talking about the “I of the Statement” and the “I of the Enunciation” that there is also the “Third I”; the “I of Awareness” or the “I of Shiva.” We have also studied a module in which the father comes in as the third to break the mother and child dyad, and I am sure there are many other examples, but I was just curious about the significance of this idea of the third and what it really means.
Excerpt: "Most religions are the worship of a yogi - they are constituted by that…. Christ was a yogi – Buddha was a great yogi – Mohammed was a yogi – Moses was a yogi… and so most of the religions today are either worshiping the yogi or worshiping the book that the yogi wrote, or was channeled through him… but religion was originally simply the act of becoming a yogi… so the religions that we have today are indirect and there is certainly benefit in worshiping a great yogi, but that is very different from attaining the state of consciousness that Christ attained or that Buddha attained…. And so merely worshiping and trying to imitate the life of a great yogi, while an important step, keeps one within the ego… it doesn't transcend the ego into direct God realization, and that is what we are here to do… to become the goal that those great yogis pointed at for us…. Christ would have considered Christianity to be heretical – he never said worship me – be one with the Father – I and the Father are one - you and the Father are one – we are all one - but then that gets misinterpreted…. Or in the Islamic religion, there is one prophet only and one holy book and then it stops, as if God got some inability to write after that – writer's block or something – couldn't produce any more testaments – not true…. But humans have gotten yoga block… humans have blocked their own access to the transcendent dimension of our own self, and that is what we are here to unblock… and we do that simply by silencing the egoic chatter that acts as a buffer and an obstruction between our consciousness and that of God's….. And that is the original and authentic purpose of prayer… to create a mental pathway and a link between the individual consciousness and the universal consciousness…" Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 12, 2012.
Student Question: If Jesus and Buddha were both great yogis then why did they both reach different conclusions about God? Jesus spoke about his Father yet Buddhism denies God.
Student Question: Do we just have to sit in silence long enough to dissolve the discomfort that arises, or do we need to analyze it?
Student Question: Why is it that when I have a deep or a good meditation I sometimes want to cry? Aren’t I supposed to be experiencing bliss?
Student Question: In meditation when I finally reach some silence it is common that I will then be immediately disrupted or thrown out of it and I don’t really understand why that happens? I even experience the sensation of losing balance. Do you know why that is?
Student Question: In your talk tonight you spoke about going through this mirror of unbearable knowledge, but do you go through it or do you witness it?
Student Question: How do we learn when on an everyday basis we are in this whirlpool of being aware and wanting to transcend the ego but then at other times being really chaotic. Sometimes that chaos manifests itself physically and then the next day you can be peaceful again so how do we learn to stay in the silence?
Student Question: Is it possible that Gods Lila is really creating all the suffering in the world?
When you talk about missing your window of opportunity and synchronicity I don’t really understand how that fits in with gods perfect plan. How is it that you are able to miss a window of opportunity if at the end it is only one step in the path of the perfect plan?
Student Comment: At the beginning of your talk you said something to the affect that in reality we don’t control anything and in what I would call the ‘business world’, people get so stuck in their power struggles and beliefs and certainties. They believe that they are going to make something happen in a certain way but often they actually make the situation much worse. It seems common for negotiations to be full of tensions and bad feelings and lower emotions when in reality what’s really going on or how the situation can be resolved has nothing to do with the emotional and egoic eruptions that people in business most of the time knock against each other.
Student Question: I felt your teaching tonight was very appropriate. I have been thinking a lot this week about a question which I have always had with Christianity. Even though I know it is a very devotional religion, I have never had that kind of experience with it. Ironically, it was this week sometime that I was listening to one of those gospel songs and all of a sudden I just broke out in tears. The closest thing that I could put it to was this feeling of being saved by Christ or God, but it was this very strong feeling of sin having been taken away by another. I know I have heard you speak in the past about how certain religions have niches or specializations or accentuations in certain areas more then others and I have just wanted to know where this fits in and what its value is? I think you kind of spoke to that tonight in how it can be used as a stepping stone and not as a hindrance.
Excerpt: “If you read the old Vedanta literature . . . they tend to divide the path into two forms: one they call ‘The Path of the Valiant’ and the other ‘The Path of the Fearful.’ And they say that those who are in fear come to God looking for refuge. . . . And they say ‘The Path of the Valiant,’ on the other hand, is not taking refuge in some god or supernatural force or supreme power or as an other, but one who has the courage to recognize that God is the Self. . . . But I tend to think that in these postmodern times that’s too simplistic a dichotomy, and that, in a way, it takes more courage to admit that one need’s help than it does to believe that one can do it all on one’s own. And it is that pseudo-valiance that may actually hold one back for a long time on the path, believing one can do it on one’s own, but being in denial of the fact that one is using a lot of props in order to hold one up. . . . But in truth, the sadhana is always a combination of the two. And when we are in our daily lives, there should be a recognition of the interdependence—and of the humility required—to continue to learn, at deeper and deeper levels of subtlety, what the great sages have taught as to how to reach this place where the valiant achievement of God-consciousness is authentic and truly possible.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 29, 2012.
Student Question: Sometimes I have archetypal dreams where a person will tell me about something I have to do and even though when I wake up I can remember what it is, I have no idea how to do it. I feel like this happens to me a lot. During the day I worry because I am not sure how I can do what was told to me in the dreams. Because of this I get stressed and feel guilty about not doing what my unconscious is telling me to do and it feels like I am ignoring it and that somehow it is going to affect me in some way. I am not sure if this is correct because they never tell me in the dream but it is frustrating me to think that it is going to affect my karma.
Excerpt: “So if God made you an offer, that all you would have to do to help save the world, would be to silence your mind and immerse yourself in the divine presence within consistently, completely, once and for all, and that that would be the greatest gift you give to the universe and to yourself, would you do it? Because that is the offer that God has been making for thousands of years… it is what every spiritual tradition teaches…. Surrendering to God means surrendering the attention, the thoughts, the mind, to the presence that is already within you, at the core of your own consciousness, which is a very sweet blissful silence… and that energy that can radiate through the channel of your own mind’s focus will fill the world with peace and divine love and that energy is so powerful, that if the flow of it is continuous, it will change the course of history; it is that strong. We just need a critical mass of beings who are dedicated to that supreme holy work, and a Sat Yuga is born… a kingdom of heaven is born on earth… and yet no one seems to volunteer to do the work and it’s so simple because really it means stop working, stop struggling, stop striving, stop desiring, stop fearing, and just live in peace and acceptance in freedom from suffering and in empowerment and in love….” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 01, 2012.
Student Question: How is one able to realize when he/she is having access to archetypal knowledge?
Student Question: What is the relationship between Master’s Discourse and the Death Drive?
Student Question: Where are the archetypes while the ego is operating? Are they within consciousness?
Student Question: What happens with all those people who become ghosts? They are beings that are among us but no longer in a body although they still resemble the body that they were in from that past life. So is this a case of someone being too attached to his/her physical body and not being able to let go?
Student Question: I was wondering what your opinion is about travel? I know that travel can be a very rewarding experience and not just another way to spend time, but what do you think?
Student Question: We were talking about the breast as a symbol, and I was wondering if that relates back down to food as well?
Student Question: During our discussion on masters discourse tonight someone bought up the point that as the head of his family he has children who expect to be told what to do and to be given guidance. How does someone who finds himself in that role avoid getting into master’s discourse?
Excerpt: “What is being taught in Sat Yoga, and what has been taught since the beginning of time, is to perceive things as they are... to perceive reality as it is... and this means to perceive from the place of truth... the place within that is free of illusion - free of projection - free of distortion - free of any filters that create an inability or a block or an obstacle to realizing what is…. And what the sages teach from out of that pure realization of the self is that it is an illusion that there are entities. This is not a world made up of a bunch of separate entities, but that a single intelligence and a single real and a single truth - a single being.... Supreme Being expresses its nature in the reflection of the nature that is this phenomenal plane that we call the universe…. We meditate in order to get in touch with that highest level of truth, so that we can perceive free of all the filters which are the cause of our suffering.... The illusion of being a separate entity in a world of entities that is always therefore in power struggles and in envy and comparison and disdain, or putting some on alters and throwing others off of alters and feeling like one ultimately is the judge of all of those other entities even if one feels inferior them…. And liberation is simply liberation from these narratives that peg you into some false entityhood and don’t allow the expansion into the infinite... consciousness that you are and therefore instead of bliss there is some kind of suffering….” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 15, 2012
Student Question: When you are in a state of pure silence and you have to do activities in your life, how can you communicate in language without thinking and breaking the silence?
Student Question: I see that there is a lot of reading and study groups offered at the school and I was wondering how that’s fits in with the practice of silencing the mind?
Student Question: What is the relationship between thinking and knowledge and or wisdom?
Student Question: Here at Sat Yoga we focus on silencing the mind. In some other traditions they talk about the heart and opening the heart. Is there a difference between these approaches?
Student Question: If the body dies and you don’t achieve liberation, is it possible that the soul may still achieve liberation without the body?
Student Question: In English we use the terms like “she’s got it,” or “they want to have it,” or “someone wants to be it,” but always using the word “it.” When I have tried to translate it into Spanish, there is no way just to say “it.” It makes me wonder, what is the real etymology of the word “it?” I mean is “it” ultimately like “that?” God: is that what “it” is?
Student Question: How is it possible that people who have had out of body experiences and experiences from other lives still identify with the body if they know that this is not what they are?
Student Question: In your teaching you said that consciousness is bound to the ego, and I was wondering how that works?
Student Question: Why is it that there are people like monks who are living in Monasteries who have committed their lives to a path but have not achieved liberation?
Student Question: Can you talk about autistic people and what has happened with them internally and what their experience is like?
Excerpt: “It is said that there are many paths. It is also said there are no paths. And it is also said that there is only one disguised as many… And here we teach what has historically been considered the most direct understanding of Self-realization and liberation… Liberation from suffering and that means liberation from illusion…. And so to say that a path is the most direct path is to say that you are not going through any indirect intellectual concepts or belief systems or practices that require you to believe that there is someone who is trying to achieve something because that is already the illusion that we are trying to break free of…. And so if you carry that further you come to the recognition that all concepts are false because they are indirect representations of what is, rather than simply being what is…. What is, is Emptiness…. There is an awareness, if you want to call it that, or consciousness that is prior to all the objects that appear in consciousness, because no objects could appear--whether sensations or concepts or images or memories or fantasies or emotions-- unless there was a container of consciousness that was empty and that could be filled with those objects. But mental objects. Not real objects. Objects that appear and disappear and have no substance….” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 08, 2012.
Student Question: You said tonight that it in meditation it doesn't really matter if you do not experience something amazing and the truth is that I have never experienced anything like that. All I can say is that I feel better and I am not even interested in putting it into words how I feel better, but sometimes a question does arise - How do I know that I am growing?
Student Question: How are we supposed to learn from people who complicate our lives? Is it a case of seeing the way not to behave and the way not to treat other people?
Student Question: What is the egos relationship to money and how can we develop a more authentic relationship with it then what it currently represents in society today?
Student Question: My whole life I was taught that we are human beings who are here to live a human experience. I mean as human beings we are afraid and we cry and experience anger and all of those things that supposedly define human beings, as well as having an ego. But here in Sat Yoga what I have learned, and I don’t know if I am misunderstood, but we are divine beings? The Atman, the True Self is the Divine. My question is, are we truly human beings? What defines human nature? Do we want to separate from the human experience and focus more on the divine self?
Student Question: How do you define humility, and is it something that you can cultivate, or does it come from the heart? Sometimes when I feel that I am practicing it, for example, if someone says something that I know is untrue, or feel that they are judging me or an injustice has been done, but I keep silent, after a while when I am alone I feel really sad and I cry.
Student Question: We learn here that every issue that one experiences in life comes from the root idea of separateness from god. Can carrying through with one particular issue and using all of our focus and will power to follow that to its core and not letting the mind become distracted be enough to then in turn dissolve other issues that are all somehow intertwined?
Student Question: Sometimes in relationships you can recognize that you are acting out and that the relationship is illusory but there is a great strength that you cannot leave that illusion. It seems like you still like to stay in that place. I am wondering if one cannot go beyond that illusion because one has not gone deep enough into the silence, or if there is something else that you can elaborate on?
Student Question: Sometimes if we observe Maya it seems like there is a higher purpose even within itself. Is this higher purpose to be a waking of the mind? Is that the only purpose of it?
I have read about so many spiritual teachers and gurus who have woken up because of suffering? Is that just the old fashion way to do it? I know of five or six who got to the point where they were so miserable and they didn't want to live anymore and then they were able to see through. What are your thoughts on that?
Excerpt: “We are here to meditate together. Do we all know what that means? It is very simple, we tend to make very complex ideas and make it difficult for ourselves. It is the simple clarification of what is meant by the word ‘I.’ That is all; nothing more difficult than that... And so a good meditation is when clarity is achieved; that is all. Don’t think a good meditation means you are seeing lights and you’re in some trance or you have achieved some exalted sublime state. No. Clarity on the nature of ‘I’ and you’re done, because when that is clear there’s really no one left to meditate anymore… Everyone seems to use the word ‘I’ a lot, but do we know what we mean when that word comes out of the mouth or in thought? Do you know what it means?.... As Sri Ramana says, tiny little word - and because we get it wrong - we don’t know accurately what it means - all the suffering in the world is created by one tiny mistake. So if you want to end all the suffering in the world, just get clarity on the word ‘I’….” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 01, 2012
Excerpt: “The Self comes under no laws, but is the source of all genuine law. And that law is naturally holocentric because it serves no individual, it plays no favorites. The Self is therefore the source of divine order and it brings about unity, fairness, justice, community. Community is only possible from and as the presence of divine love. No humans can create community – no human egos – they can only distort and pervert the love that is our true legacy, destiny, identity.” Recorded on the afternoon of Monday, February 27, 2012.
Student Question: You spoke about how the most important thing is to have a desire for realizing the Self. I found that while I was meditating I really needed to have an image or something that I could focus on so that I could center all of my desire into that and try to realize the self, but I couldn't find anything?
Student Question: Sometimes when I sit down and start meditating I try to focus on my heartbeat in order to get into a state. After a while I forget about my heart and start feeling my forehead getting heavy and it feels like my body goes to sleep and then all I can feel is that point on my forehead. I am wondering what is happening to me and whether it is normal or whether it is some kind of identification with my body and why is it happening if I really want to focus on my heart?
Student Question: I feel you said once but am not sure, that anxiety and kundalini are the same thing or that anxiety is kundalini trapped and misunderstood or something along those lines?
Student Question: I keep getting caught up when I ask “who am I”, because the “I” keeps me going in circles?
Student Comment: I resonate with the idea that images are at the imaginary level--or, rather, I resonated with that idea when I was growing up. It feels like the religious image is kind of a double-edged sword because it can either aid one in devotion or it can be misinterpreted. I could never relate to people loving the image of the Virgin Mary, for example, but since we have been studying great beings, like Ramakrishna or Padre Pio, who also used the medium of an image to relate to God, I see that it can be used in a completely different way.”
Student Question: Can you talk a little bit about friendship in the Kali Yuga sense, and also about what is the most sattvic approach to friendship for people moving into the same path together?
Excerpt: "Each of us has ESP, because we are ESP… What we mean here by ESP is Eternal, Silent, Presence. The Self that we are is always in Eternal, Silent, Presence. The one Self, and the one Self is the guru - the only guru. The one Self has been called by many names... The earliest name known is that of Shiva, but all religions give their own name to the same truth… For some religions that self is called the Supreme Self and from the perspective of ignorance, that is accurate. Because all else that portrays itself as a Self is really just an object in consciousness… So there is only one real Self and that Self is beyond words and thoughts and in an inconceivable silence, and even to say that is to go too far because the self is Nirguna. Without qualities that can be in any way considered a description of the Self, because the Self is not an object, not a thing, not an appearance, but we can also say that the self has infinite attributes. The three main ones noted by the Vedas are Sat – Chit – Ananda…." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 16, 2012.
Student Question: I am curious to know how you would bridge hysteria with post-traumatic stress and could you explain how the two relate?
Student Question: I have something I would like some clarity on. Thursdays are difficult for me in the sense that I feel pulled in two opposite directions. First we have a study group class that is very focused on theory and analysis and going into the ego and trying to understand our mind and then the meditation where we are told you are not the ego?
Student Question: Lately in meditation and especially in group meditations I have been experiencing a lot of pressure in my head and especially in between my eyes. I have heard that it may have a connection with the opening of the third eye? I was wondering if you expand a little a bit upon that?
Student Question: I wonder if spiritual teachings evolve with time or if they are just different translations of the same thing?
Excerpt: "If we can radically let go of the need for the others approval or gaze or touch or their desire - If we can radically detach from our own self-image based on the body or based on the mind - Based on achievements and prestige or social status - If we can let go of all of that, then the real search can finally get under way… Because those are the anchors that moor us in the physical plane where we cannot find the self… They moor us in attachments to biological family and we cannot find the spiritual parents that live in the depth dimension… But the light from that source - from the energy within - from the supreme self - Is always there guiding us and as we begin to disidentify from the physical form and the sensual realm and its pleasures and pains that follow quickly one upon the other… To realize some, more enduring peace and joy… And we recognize that the mind itself with all of it thoughts is another form of alienation from our being. It’s an attempt to grasp the self, that can never be the self, that can only at best point to the self, and so then the process of self-inquiry enters the phase were it goes beyond the mind… It enters the phase of being the silent witness of the mind… And it begins to see the patterns of the mind and the traps that the mind plays and all of its illusions; images of a happiness that are a mirage…." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 09, 2012.
Excerpt: "The unsurpassed sage Sri Ramana Maharshi has revealed that self-realization is actually a myth… Who is there to realize the self? The self is all that is… Has the self ever been unrealized? So self-realization doesn’t actually happen…. Take for example that if you have mold on your walls in your home you would probably want to scrub it off… well the ego is kind of like a mold isn’t it? Growing on the surface of the self… And so people scrub it off and then what is left is pure awareness… But to that awareness is there ever a wall? Was there ever a surface? That’s an illusion only ever held by the illusory mold itself which was never real…. So there are no things; things are an illusion of a mind that objectifies with concepts… Take away the concepts. No objects - no world - no self… but pure bliss - pure grace - pure awareness – pure supreme power and self-knowledge… but all experienced by the one without a second…" Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 02, 2012.
Excerpt: "Within each of us is the deathless spirit. The eternal self, that lies within and yet beyond, transcending the ego mind and this phenomenal world, and yet it is the very essence and core and center of our being. The purpose of all spiritual practices is to attain the realization of the deathless spirit. This alone confers eternal life, freedom from suffering, from illusion, from karma, and offers the direct union with the Supreme Being…. The most direct way to achieve the realization of the eternal Atman, which is the Holy Spirit, is simply to silence the chatter of the ego mind and hold your attention at the root of the ‘I’ thought. Not the ‘I’ thought itself, but the root which you feel as the urge to think with the word ‘I’…. Once you fall into thought you have moved from the realm of being into the realm of representation and you become alienated from spirit. First into soul and then into ego…. Remember that this world is only a dream in the mind of God. What is real is the Supreme Being. Don’t let yourself remain locked in lower states of false consciousness, but go directly to the source. This can be achieved easily if you do not let yourself to be deceived by negative thoughts. Hold to the silence and the higher you go the more the divine energy will pull you up and there will be no struggle at all. It will happen automatically as if your mind has become an anti-gravity apparatus, which it is because the mind is light. Let the light take you up into the highest bliss…." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 26, 2012.
Excerpt: "What we learn from Yoga and the science of the extraction of the ultimate essence is that all growth is about the extraction of that which is pure and meaningful from that which is impure and to be rejected.… It is to be extracted from our own consciousness. That is the only way we will ever know God – by extracting out the pure God-presence out of our grosser, impure consciousness. This is what we do in meditation. It’s an extraction process….it is a skill and an art that must be taught, and has been taught, through every culture until our most recent one…. there are really five stages of this process of extraction…" Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 19, 2012.
Excerpt: “In Christianity there is a trinity as we all know. The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. This trinity is an archetype and exists in every religion and every spiritual path although it has many different names in different paths… You’ll find it in Buddhism, you’ll find it in Hinduism, and you’ll find it in Taoism. In the yogic path it is only one of a number of trinity’s however… We could call it the vertical trinity and the equivalent in the yogic tradition is noted by the words Sat – Chit – Ananda…. But you have this power. Erase. Rewrite. That is what is known in religious terms as death and rebirth. That’s all it is. You erase the ego - it’s dead - it’s gone. It won’t be there because it is an artificial structure, if you really whole heartedly want to erase it. The problem is, we love our suffering. We are loyal to it…. Erich Fromm a great psychologist wrote a book called ‘The Fear of Freedom’, and it’s a very important book because what he shows is the reason why there are so many totalitarian governments in the world. So many big brothers that people follow… And it is because they can’t stand freedom… They want someone to tell them what to do….” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 08, 2011.
Excerpt: “Is everyone opened to having Christ Consciousness born within you this evening? It is not difficult to achieve that birth but we do need the recognition that Christ Consciousness is our Real Self. It’s not something alien, it’s not something different, it’s not something strange to us. What’s strange is the ego that we have come to believe that we are and that’s what we must be willing to let go of. What are we letting go? A false self. A structure of consciousness that acts as a filter that prevents us from seeing the world as it really is… And so to take that filter away - to become realized – all we need to do is to silence the ego mind. Period. No more. Silence is the key. When we can silence the mind, which is what meditation is… Contemplation... Then the Christ Consciousness emerges from within us and it comes in the form of an open heart through which pours divine love….” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 08, 2011.
Keywords:
Student Question: I was hoping you could explain to me why it is that every month especially around the full moon it seems that something happens with my energy and if I am not centered I become more susceptible to being pushed and pulled by it?
Student Question: I once heard a psychologist use the term catastrophic fantasy and I am not sure if that is a common term or not, but I was hoping you could explain this a bit more for me?
Student Question: Can you please explain a little bit about the difference between the Divine Love that we teach here in Sat Yoga and the love concept that we have in our society and in movies?
Student Question: Is it possible to be in a state of open heart without being vulnerable?
Excerpt: “In our modern world we have lost the joy of living with nature. We have become so alienated in these cities with their pollution and there artificiality and now even more so with the internet and the media we are several steps removed from the real of life... So an Ashram is a chance to get back to our real values…. Soon enough people will come to realize that food doesn't grow in the supermarkets and they will be surprised to find that there is nothing on the shelves… Only then we will remember that food comes from farms and from people getting their hands dirty in the soil and from milking cows and from living in harmony with nature and following the laws of nature… It is because we have arrogantly tried to deny those and control those - and even genetically modify the products of nature - that we are suffering the karmic blow-back of that arrogance…. So an ashram is a humble effort to come back to our roots…. You have to be very humble to get down on your knees and dig in the garden, and yet that is where the power comes from - and that is where life comes from… So by being willing to be humble and to live humble lives we are becoming empowered again…. Yoga is a science of consciousness, but it is also the art, and the art requires skill to silence the false consciousness of the ego mind in order to receive the energy and the power of the True Self… The Real Self is there, it is within you now it is always there, but we don’t have access to it because the ego mind clouds it over…. So an Ashram is a place to recover that peace - that deep peace which resolves all of the questions and confusions and depressions and anxieties that everyone is plagued with today…” Recorded on the evening of Saturday, September 10, 2011.”
Student Question: I have something that I would like you to clarify please. When you are being silent is it that there is no such thing as silent awareness? Is it rather that when you are in silence you experience awareness. Is that a good way to think about it? This came up because I was contemplating if there is a difference between being silent and being aware, i.e. silent awareness versus just silent nothing.
Student Question: I have noticed that after having spent days at a time in Maya, I become so disgusted with it and am totally exhausted by it, that I don’t even want to bring it up in a session as I am sick of thinking about it. I understand that this is the censor repressing the problem and it is similar to what I experienced in tonight’s class. I have been in Maya for a couple of days and I came to class thinking that I am going to speak to you about it, but then I come and hear an incredible teaching and have a very meaningful meditation and then that Maya kind of dissolves as you realize how ridiculous it was. Now I know that the problem has not been processed and I wonder if it is even real. What should I do?
Student Question: Is there a distinction between raising levels of consciousness and expanding awareness?
Student Question: I am in a situation where my parents want me to do a certain thing and they believe I have to do it. I don’t want to do it just because it is their expectation, although I do believe that it is something worth doing. If I choose not to do it in order to pursue something else, then I am left feeling bad about not doing both something worthwhile and what my parents wanted me to do. In this case the feeling of guilt is created by doing something that I think is more important. What should I do?
Student Question: What is stubbornness, and when it becomes too intense, does the ego then crack?
In the postulant preparation class we studied the Seven Virtual Matriculations. The last one was to realize that we are the oneness which dreams the cosmic dream and that that in itself is a dream, and needs be let go of. I was thinking that if all of these habit’s that we are developing are part of the same cosmic dream, then are these all ways of enjoying it?
Excerpt: "In childhood a process begins that the psychologists call socialization… what it really consists of is the stapling together of the pure awareness that is the self with the belief enforced upon you that you are the body (the identification with the body)… that is controlled by the third element which is language… you are given a name and the name sutures consciousness to the body and from then on people can call you and tell you what to do and that is in societies interest… once you buy into that through your affirmation of that socialization process, you no longer have access to the pure awareness that is your eternal self…." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 08, 2011.
Student Question: I was wondering if everything outside of awareness like fears for example, are forms of intelligence or entities that are seeking expression through awareness, or even us as that awareness?
Student Question: How can I be loyal to myself while the ego’s agendas are still running? How can I make good decisions when it’s coming from an egoic state?
Student Question: Why is it so hard to keep ourselves from thinking when meditating, and what can we do to maintain these small gaps of silence? Is there a practice that can accelerate the process?
Student Question: Is suffering always accompanied by pain, or can you suffer without pain? Do they necessarily go together?
Student Question: In the study group we have been talking about desires as part of a must be logic and I wanted to know if you could expand on that? I found myself using it recently and it feels like you say “no it’s not that it must be; you must want it”. Take for example the case of Liberation: you must want liberation, but it’s not that it must happen.
Excerpt: “Buddhists say that there are three types of desire. The first one, the lowest one, is the desire for pleasure. Then they say that more refined minds realize that what the desire for pleasure really was, is the desire to be, and that that’s the real underlying intention of all the various particular desires and objects of demand and lust… All of those objects that we think cause us pleasure actually do not, but they give us a sense that we are. They give us a sense that we can control something out there “therefore I am”… But of course the object is always a disappointment because you don’t really want that object. It’s not it, and it doesn’t give you the truth of your being, and therefore it is always something that turns into pain rather than pleasure. And so the ego eventually settles for the equation “I am suffering therefore I am”… But that doesn’t do it either because it [the ego] realizes that it is actually suffering because it is not, but it wants to get out of it suffering so the third kind of desire is the desire not to be… This creates a paradox of who is desiring not to be. The very fact of having the desire makes it seem that you are something, and therefore the desire necessarily fails in its effect… All of this is the logic of Buddhism that attempts to provide a way out of the trap of desire, which is ultimately the trap of an illusory sort of being trying to make itself feel real and failing again and again repetitively, but because this being is unreal to start with there is really no reason to find a way out of a trap which is also an illusion…" Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 01, 2011.
Student Question: Recently someone told me that chilies are just pain, or rather that what’s in the chili is not flavor it’s just pain. I have done some study on this and I started tonight’s meditation in a lot of physical pain in one little area of body and then it went away. I know that obviously it’s not really a pain in the body and I even feel that it’s not a pain in the mind, but for whatever it’s not, I don’t understand what pain is?
Student Question: I was wondering if at this center, in regards to the running of it, if it is based upon some kind of divine ethics or some kind of divine ethical framework? What is the logic of the ethical framework for a spiritual community?
Student Question: You said, from what I understand, that cosmic consciousness was not the same as liberation. I used to think that it was the same, but then in the book we read by Walter Russell it said that only Jesus attained cosmic consciousness and oneness with God. It doesn’t seem like that really makes sense because then what about examples like Buddha and Sri Aurobindo?
Student Question: It seems like mathematics, image and language are interdependent. I was thinking of an image which could have a mathematical expression. You can’t talk about mathematics, however, if you don’t have language. I imagine it would be meaningless. I now feel, nevertheless, there is another question: is there a pure mathematics?
Student Question: In your article in Reality Sandwich you talked about how the cutting edge should be ridden in astonishment or something to that effect. I am wondering what the secret is to being in astonishment and having it not be a distraction or some kind of thing in itself that you get wrapped up in. What is the secret to being detached from astonishment and yet still be able to call it astonishment or amazement?
Student Question: Can you please talk about what I would call the "art of replacing yourself?" There is a book that you gave me a long time ago which talks about creating community and it spoke of this. It specifically mentioned the necessity of replacing oneself as one of the final steps of sustainability. Usually the ego wants to be special and hold on to its specialness and be the only one that can do something, which gives it some sort of power. So I was thinking about this and was hoping you could talk about this?
Student Question: Can you say something about the fall of patriarchy. I was under the impression that we are in a capitalist patriarchy right now, but in the study group Radha was speaking of the fall of it?
Student Question: If there is a particular situation or work that the ego dislikes, do you recommend doing that work for purification purposes?
Excerpt: “It’s the mind of the ego that creates all the problems with its chaotic thoughts based on false premises of misunderstanding of reality, producing anxiety and depression and all the other negative emotions and symptoms of suffering…All of that can be cut simply through silencing the mind, but to do that we have to realize that “I am not the mind”…. Silent awareness contains the mind; it contains everything in the universe which is actually mind. All there is, is mind…. But there is a difference between the ego’s little mind and the cosmic mind of God, and then the source of the cosmos - The ultimate noumenon…." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 25, 2011.
Student Question: What do you think about dementia? What is happening to that soul that suddenly doesn’t know who he or she is or where they are? What has happened to that spirit?
Student Question: I am finding that I have an inner conflict when writing emails. For example, my friend just got married and I wrote "I hope you had a nice wedding" or a friend of mine’s father is sick and I write "I hope he gets better," or "I hope you enjoy these photos," or whatever; it is it feels like I am giving them a command. What if they were not supposed to have a nice wedding? What if his father is not supposed to get better? I feel this conflict very strongly and I don’t know what to write or how to approach this?
Student Question: You mentioned that our consciousness constructs our reality and I have been thinking about that lately, but I have been wondering as to the extent of that. For example if I walk by and there are people being disrespectful and causing problems, is that like a reflection? Is every single thing just a projection?
Student Question: What is the relationship between mathematics and logic? Is it that one is a subset of the other? I tend to think that mathematics is more fundamental, or is it that they are just two sides of the same coin? It just seems like mathematics is logic at a very codified and more universal level.
Student Question: Does devotion require total surrendering, because I can see people who are devoted but not totally surrendered to God?
Excerpt: “When we are sitting in silence we are in Holy Communion with the Self within that is recognized as Being reflected as the entire manifest cosmos. And so there is nothing to do just be…. This is a dream and you are the dreamer and so everyone you meet in the dream is an aspect of your Self and so each of us here are reflections of different facets of our own Self…. And so by coming together as a community we discover all those aspects of the inner shadow that we can’t find because it’s repressed but our unconscious turns out to be the world itself and so it is not hidden at all…. And so when we come together in a spiritual community we are doing it in order to learn unconditional love of the Self. Not the individual self but the one Self…. The worship of God is not the worship of an other it is the worship of the Self…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 18, 2011.
Student Question: I believe that the path to enlightenment must start with a personal individual choice. In today’s world it is very difficult to follow that path because even though you have the purpose and the intention if you’re in an environment that is unsupportive, like for example ones family who may ignore the path, it takes you a lot of effort and it is very difficult to get there. So the importance of being in a community like this is that you find like minded people that can reinforce that path. Even though I can understand that we all have geniuses in all of us the challenge is to really believe it. I think about how much other people’s thoughts can influence that, like I could fly but nobody believes I can so I can not. So the question is how much can other people’s beliefs affect us?
Student Question: Do thoughts really become things and how fast is the outcome? Does it depend on how intense the thought is?
Student Question: Does the way that we think of others even when not expressed, have any effect on them?
Student Question: We were talking about the lotus position and you mentioned that sitting in that position can activate sanskaras. I have experienced this kind of thing in meditation and realized that even though my whole body would be still, I would continue to move my eyes when they are closed. When I am able to keep my eyes still it seems to be a whole different thing. Could you speak about that because it seems like there is a connection between eyes moving and a chattering mind?
Student Question: I have these beautiful images coming up in meditation and although I feel peaceful, I wonder if these images are appearing as a distraction to pull me away from the stillness?
Student Question: In your teaching you mentioned that the ego had characteristics such as greed, hatred and selfishness embedded in it. When I think of the word embedded it makes me think of something that is set in stone; it’s not moving. So then I thought, “what’s the point of wasting any time trying to fix the ego?” Is it even possible to fix? I know it’s kind of a literal thing. It kind of makes sense to steer around it and go straight for the Self. So is the idea of fixing the ego even worth the time?
Student Question: What is pain and its purpose or meaning, and is pain always the same as suffering? What is the difference?
Student Question: Do you have any advice to help me mediate longer when my mind wanders off?
Excerpt: “The idea of Christian perfection was the perfection of one’s love for God….We don’t care whether you believe in duality or nonduality here, the point is let the love which ultimately is nonduality isn’t it, isn’t love union? Whether it achieves an actual ontological dissolution on the boundaries between the soul and God is irrelevant, but the experience that you will have if you allow yourself to sit with that intention of dissolving in love with God and it’s sincere, as the first commandment in the old testament says, ‘love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy might’. If you will do that and with that consistency of attention that is focused within, not on an imaginary God on a cloud somewhere, but within as the Self, you will break through the duality and enter into a state of grace...” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 11, 2011.
Student Question: I had a question about projections. We talk about projections a lot. In thinking about the question I came to some conclusions but I wanted to run if by you just for validation. Let’s say for example we have a new employee at work and this guy drinks and cusses and swears and everything else, but it is not necessarily projecting if you can see this behavior happening. It seems that this is all feedback information for you, which you kind of have to accept. The other night in one of the lessons you said that people change everyday so you don’t have to store anything. The next day when you see him you treat him the same way without any projections and just respond in whatever is appropriate for that person on that day. So the conclusion was that fine they can act however they want to but you are just holding your space and not projecting and that is all you have to do?
Student Question: Do you think that once we leave this experience on earth that we will ever have any recollection of it or when our soul moves to other realms will this just be another lost layer in the unconscious that we won’t be able to remember?
Student Question: What do you think the significance is of the world being able to observe the death of societies in different places versus in times when there wasn’t technology and people in different countries and continents who were unaware on this physical level of what was happening in other places?
Student Question: You mentioned that often a lot of people’s unconscious urges manifest themselves in close relationships and families and what not. It makes me think of a friend that I guess I would say is caught up in his egoic existence and around a lot of family issues and a lot of family pressure to do certain things and to be a certain way. Now just for the background this individual was raised with Buddhist beliefs so he has some leanings that way but still is totally immersed in the egoic existence right now. Now my question is, to what extent can a friend help someone like that out of the spiral and the problems he is in. Are there really ways to help someone who is not ready to make that move?
Student Question: I was thinking about the violence that has occurred just most recently in England and we have studied the archetype of the apocalypse. Is this a manifestation of that? We talked about archetypes having their own energy and drawing people into it to act in a certain way. Is that what is occurring?
Student Question: Could you give me some tips on overcoming fear while in meditation, or I guess more along the lines of reaching deeper states of meditative experience?
Excerpt: “So the good news is that we don’t have to wait until we leave the body to attain liberation, we can do it here and now….So it is important to recognize that what we mean by the self and by self inquiry, is not seeking an image or a concept of the self; not seeking an object of any kind…but leaving behind all levels of objectification and conceptualization....And what we discover when the mind has been completely stilled and emptied of thought and emptied of the continuing flow of images and the flow of memories or the flow of emotions. When you have attained the witness state in which there is simply purified silent awareness….And so there is within each of you that core of being that is deathless and birthless and that cannot be given a form…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 4, 2011.
Student Question: During the retreat you taught about the five obstacles which the Bhagavad Gita speaks of but specifically regarding the fifth one, Ahankar. One translation of that is self- centeredness. What recommendations could you give to towards healing this obstacle?
Student Question: We were just now in the study group studying the “MILAGRO” theory and I was wondering about the “MIL” and what we were studying at the retreat about how Prakriti and Purusha get together or would you say this is the stage of the MIL, or am I confused or can you talk about it?
In this one, I would reword the question a little: “Student Question: You talked earlier about disidentifying, with I guess anything ultimately, and just going into the silence as the answer to disidentifying. I am frequently finding myself wanting to convince the unconscious fragments instead of going into the silence. I feel like I end up avoiding that or ignoring it. How can I get past that?”
Student question: During the retreat you spoke about the Merkabah. I was wondering if you can explain a little bit more about what is the Merkabah?
Student Question: I have been thinking a lot about not doing, not trying to silence the mind or trying to do this or that. I can see that, or from what I think I have learned is that it will maybe seemingly get us closer to what we are trying to do but won’t get us there because it is an act of doing. Tonight you mentioned dissolving any thoughts or any sense of understandings of the ego or language or anything. So I was trying to figure out, I was trying to use language and figure out, if you’re not doing something, what would be the opposite of that? Not doing implies doing in some way and then maybe being is maybe a better word but it’s just a word that I’m trying to ask for that maybe it will help me understand the concept of dissolving because even dissolving implies something?
Student Question: I know this is not related to what we are talking of this moment, but I still have a lot of enigmas and unanswered questions. Although I keep informed of some of these matters I still make the same question that Einstein made when he said that, “does it mean that if I am not looking at the moon, the moon is not there”? Well that’s something that still bothers me inside of my head and I don’t have an answer for that. And questions like who was watching at the moment of the big bang? But there is something that happened one day here and I mentioned something related with Paleontology and evolution and I heard you very decided and very sure, affirm that the way Paleontology has presented things is not correct. Even today if you see any analysis that they present to you at schools with the Carbon-14 dating, they can say when it was that people were living and you can see a path, although I don’t want to use the word evolution. What are your thoughts on that?
Excerpt: “There is one sentence that sums up the essence of every spiritual path and it seems very simple, and yet to live it is the most difficult thing in the world. . . . ‘I am not the doer.’ The ‘I’ does nothing. The ‘I’ is only a witness and yet how hard it is for us to give up the illusion of doership. Isn’t that strange? So the question is how do we get out of this illusion that I am the doer? In the Bhagavad-Gita it says very clearly that the first step is not to be attached to the fruit of your actions, not to be attached to the results. . . . And so perhaps one of the first stages is the realization that we can’t control reality. . . . So it requires disidentifying from both the bodily organism and the mind. The mind may continue to think but you are not the mind. . . . And when we are realizing that we are not the body or the mind, the other benefit is that if the body and the mind have any dis-ease or if there is any pain or discomfort in the body, it doesn’t pertain to us. You can witness it but you don’t take it on, you don’t identify with it and so it doesn’t disturb your peace.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 26, 2011.
Excerpt: “The ancient yogis had a realization that Indra, the Supreme Intelligence, had a net that is the universe. And at each focal point of the net, each cross, each place where the threads met, was a jewel, a diamond. And each jewel in the net of Indra reflected every other jewel; the entire net was reflected in each gem. And the net is infinitely large, with an infinite number of these diamonds. And each of these jewels is perfect. And it reflects the perfection of all beings, all diamonds . . . all manifestations of the One Self that appears as this infinite multiplicity. But the net unifies all of us. And in the minds of each of us is the entirety of the All, the Absolute. And every other diamond that is reflected in your consciousness is a reflection of your own perfect beingness. But each diamond is slightly different than the next; they are all unique. Each shines with a slightly different color, different facets, different shape, different and unique beauty, and yet the beauty is perfect in each one.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 21, 2011.
Excerpt: “Each and every one of you here is already a perfect Buddha. Do you know that? When we meditate, what we are doing is simply letting go of our forgetfulness of that minor fact. And when we begin to remember that minor fact, our life transforms forever. And we gain the courage to live from our heart instead of out of fear and a need to conform, to be approved of by others, to follow the conventional way of living to get some sense of identity and approval, because once you realize that you are the perfect Buddha, then whatever you choose to do comes out of the perfection of wisdom. . . . Why lose your bliss when, in fact, for the perfect Buddha, who is functioning through the body, nothing ever goes wrong? This is a perfect universe. And you can trust that because you’re the perfect Buddha. And your being here as a perfect Buddha is essential to the perfection of this universe. You are a necessary ingredient to make this world function. So never forget your essential importance.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 14, 2011.
Excerpt: “The mind is called ‘the realm of representation,’ re-presentation. But I have often thought [that] this is a very false word in itself. It should be the re-absentation, because what language does is make you absent again from your Real Self. . . . And it is that absentation from the Self that has to be healed by returning to the Source, silence, the zero-point. . . . That’s the point of power. It’s not the vacuum of space but the vacuum of our minds when there is silence that we penetrate into the noumenal realm of our essence. . . . And when we silence the mind and enter the zero-point, that is the power point; that is the jyoti bindu, the point of light from which all that is emanates.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 7, 2011.
Excerpt: “You know in India, all of the religions of India, they say that it’s not a matter of original sin, like the Western religions tend to focus on, it’s just a matter of not knowing, not realizing that you are God. You’ve forgotten. But all you have to do is remember it, and come out of the veil of ignorance, and the Truth is revealed. It’s right there! . . . You just have to drop the false belief that you are an ego. . . . We’re all one. And when we reach that center, we realize that the center that we are is not the individual. It doesn’t pertain to a single organism; it is cosmic consciousness. And then you begin to realize, “Wow, we are all one Self. We are all one field of consciousness that’s infinite. . . . So Yoga is the most ancient science of how to achieve higher states of consciousness so that you can live in that empowerment that can effect the most beautiful changes, transformations, of our phenomenal world, which is the gift of God.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 23, 2011.
Excerpt: “In the ancient world it was the governing principle, the understanding that the more surrendered you are to God, and thus the more useful you are as an instrument of God, then the better would be your destiny because God will make use of those who are surrendered to being instruments and vehicles and mediums of the Divine Work. And those who are too busy with their own egos—either with their with their pleasures or with their neurotic suffering—and who tune out the presence of God, then will have a destiny in which God tunes out their presence as well. And all of the religious traditions are based on this understanding. So in a way, you do have control of your destiny in the sense that the deeper and more profound is your surrender to God, the more complete, the more constant, the more continual—and the more pure your sacrifice of the ego, which is the act of surrender—then the greater will be the ultimate destiny of your soul. And so it is in your control. But the control lies in the surrender of control.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 16, 2011.
Excerpt: “We can see the Christian Trinity in many ways in both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. . . . In the Ramayana, it is Rama, God the Father, and Sita, who is the soul/the Holy Spirit, who goes into exile at some point, captured by the demonic forces. And then you have the Son, Hanuman, who is a monkey god. Very odd, why would they choose a monkey god to represent the Son? And it’s because the human being in the state of ego-consciousness is a monkey: its monkey mind is always chattering, its interests are mainly in food and sex, and it is wild and will not come under discipline. So the monkey is a wonderful metaphor. And yet this monkey, Hanuman, becomes divine. . . . It is said that God stands for G.O.D.: Generation, Operation, Destruction. . . . And we are now at a point where our current world cannot be sustained any longer because of the lack of love.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 9, 2011.
Excerpt: “There is a story told about Mahatma Gandhi. . . . One day they drove him [Gandhi] out to an insane asylum. . . . He was looking at the inmates, and there was one guy who interested him and he wandered away and sat down in front of this inmate. And the inmate looked up at him and said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m Gandhi.’ The inmate laughed, and he said, ‘You know, they all say that when they first get here. You’ll get over it.’ Gandhi was taken aback. He realized that these were very true words; they hit him in the heart. This was a Mahavakya.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 6, 2011.
(Note: the following teaching was given as an introduction to the film The Buddha)
Excerpt: “As soon as you start talking about Buddhism, you’re no longer talking about Buddhism because, technically and precisely, Buddha’s great insight is that there are no words to describe the Real. . . . So there’s no way of talking about what we’re here to talk about. One can only realize—and the act of realizing it, in an instantaneous—in fact not even instantaneous, but timeless moment of clear intuition of Ultimate Reality . . . called ‘pragya.’ . . . There isn’t a Buddhism; there are many Buddhisms. . . . Some do it as the different turnings of the wheel of the dharma. But you can also divide it into the Hinayana and the Mahayana and the Vajrayana, etc. You can also say there’s the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka which is very different than the Tibetan Buddhism, different than the Ch’an, different than the Japanese Zen, which is different than the other Japanese schools like the Jodo Shinshu, the ‘Pure Land Buddhism’ of the chanting variety. Very different philosophies. Very different practices. Very different spiritual paths that all call themselves Buddhism. . . . In fact, I would say that Buddhism is the world’s first de-ligion; it’s not a religion, it’s a de-ligion. If you know the world religion, it means to re-link. Buddha said ‘there’s no link with anything. That’s all illusion. All you must do is de-link from the illusion and you’re free. But don’t think you’re linking to anybody. You don’t exist! There’s no self.’” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, May 31, 2011.
Excerpt: “When we meditate,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “we are making effort to reach our own natural state of being. It’s odd that you have to make effort to be natural, but this is how far away the human being has come from its own nature. Rather than having a nature any longer, the human being is conditioned by culture. The ego is an artificial construct that’s created and maintained by culture. . . . And we learn the rules of that culture and the intentions that we are supposed to live for, the values we are supposed to live by, and we become entrained by language. And from then on, pure consciousness, in its divine nature, gets filtered through this construct of what Lacan, the psychoanalyst, called ‘signifiers,’ language—master signifiers that determine our identity. And you become the subject of a signifier, of a certain set of words that determine the patterns of your life and the curvature of your emotional space, and that result in the repetition of various kinds of patterns, mostly traumatic, mostly that end in suffering and devastation because we have been alienated from our Nature. . . . That state of peace that will ensue upon the letting go of all the intentions of grasping will bring you into the Heart, into the peace, that will allow you to realize that you’re already enveloped by the divine presence; you're saturated by it. And you are fulfilled in your very essence by that which is—not only within you—but is your own Essence that you had not recognized in that blind effort to seek something externally to fulfill you.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 19, 2011.
Student Question: Can you say something about attention deficit in regards to meditation?
Student Question: Can you speak about the fear of speaking in public and that connected to the process of mahavakya?
Student Question: When you give up a prop, the anxiety is immediate. You can’t wait even a minute to deal with it. So what do you do to remedy that?
Excerpt: “How many of you are here to achieve union with God?” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Well that’s good because it’s very easy to do. You’ve picked the right goal. And the reason it’s easy to accomplish is that God is your own innermost Self. . . . So God is that absence which makes everything present. And the only reason that God manifests as absence is [because] we have abandoned God into that which God has made present. And then we have taken the miracle of what has been made present for granted and forgotten that we are in fact emanations of the same God that we are sometimes searching for and sometimes glad that we have lost, and that we hope has lost track of us. And then in other times we’re very anxious that God may have lost track of us. And it is this game that the ego plays of hide-and-seek with God that creates all of the suffering and torment and longing, nostalgia, agony, and ultimately the ecstasy of existence." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 12, 2011.
Student Question: I’m really fascinated in the topic of 2012, but I don’t know a lot about it. I wanted to know if you could just give me a general sense of what’s going to happen.
Student Comment: I always feel I’m forgetting things, and I’ve noticed this with my friends too. For example, one friend always tells me that she wants to remember the very sweet things that her boyfriend tells her but can’t. One would think that you should be able to remember important things, but I find I’m always forgetting things and then I have anxiety because I can’t remember.
Excerpt: “‘The sense of imperfection is a disease and the sole source of every misery,’” reads Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So the truth is that we are all perfect, purnam. We are not imperfect. This is the illusion, the imperfection. But the illusion of imperfection comes with the belief that we are entities. [It] comes with the belief that consciousness is a manifestation of an organism, a body. And as long as your consciousness is identified with the body, through which it’s operating, there will be, of course, a sense of imperfection. And so that’s the illusion. And that knot has to be cut.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 5, 2011.
Student Question: Earlier you established some connection between Jesus and his connection to Yoga. Could you go a little more into detail?
Excerpt: “The traditional yogic texts say that a yogic life is built on four pillars, and attending Satsang is one of those. The other three are: simplicity, leading a simple life without excess, without ostentation, without wastage. . . . truthfulness, a yogi is dedicated to being truthful—and more than just truthful in a factual sense, but leading an authentic life. . . . the third one is seva, or service, to lead a life that’s not based on getting as much as you can for yourself, but of giving as much as you can to the world. . . . Now, a Satsang, for those of you who haven’t been to one, the word “Sat” you’ll notice appears a lot in our discourse here, Sat refers to the Supreme Beingness, the truth of what we are when we take away all of the falseness and the mediated and artificial aspects of our self, when we get down to what is natural and eternal in ourselves. And yoga means “yoke,” union. . . . You know we tend to think that that it’s only people out there who sabotage our happiness, but it’s actually we who are responsible for that; we set that up. And once we assume our own responsibility for our happiness, then life begins to get a lot better. . . . And gradually our intellect, our buddhi, becomes clearer and clearer, and we begin to realize the ways that we’d been sabotaging ourselves on subtler and subtler levels until we get to the root of the phantasies that have been motivating us to deny ourselves or to cheat ourselves of our own bliss . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 30, 2011.
Student Question: So you mentioned the ego and the superego, which are Freudian terms, but where does the id fit into this?
Excerpt: “Sri Ramana Maharshi recognized that all of us are one Self, manifesting as many,” recalls Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And because of this realization of our oneness, of course Ramana had no interest in the [Indian] caste system. . . . The lowest caste [in the Indian caste system] were called the ‘Chandalas,’ which can translate as ‘Untouchables.’ And you should never touch an untouchable; you’d have to go through some extraordinary ritual of purification. And Ramana laughed at that and said this is only a metaphor. The only real Chandala is the ego. That’s what you must never touch. You must never enter ego-consciousness...” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 14, 2011.
Student Question: You’ve talked about “reality” and “The Real,” and I just wanted to know where “The Symbolic” is in relation to those.
Excerpt: “It is between the two. Reality is a hallucination. And once you can grasp that symbolically, you can discover what is the source of that hallucination, or hologram, or matrix, whatever you want to refer to this plane as. And through your symbolic capacity of thinking, and your attention span, you can make your consciousness like a laser beam and focus it with your willpower to break through the illusion of reality, to discover the Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 14, 2011.
Student Question: We often hear here that for thousands of years the celibacy has been undertaken in certain societies. And I’m assuming that that’s referring to the yogic tradition. I’m more familiar with Judaism and Islam, and in cultures built around those traditions—which have lasted for thousands of years—celibacy has not been practiced, to my knowledge, or if it has then it has been in a very different form. So I get a little confused when I hear that “for thousands of years, this has been done” or “that has been done,” and, at the same time, it’s been practiced for thousands of years in a totally different way. Could you please provide a little clarity on this matter?
Excerpt: “If you study the Jewish tradition, as well as the Islamic tradition, you will find that they actually do encourage celibacy, up to a certain point in one’s life. And one is really not intended to marry until one has gone through the Talmud, for example, and reached a state of having put sexuality in the correct perspective, which is as a way of serving God. It is a mitzvah; it is a commandment. It is not the unbridled urge of the ego. And once one has gained the ego under control, then sexuality operates,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So if you look at those traditions, they are practicing a near-celibacy, particularly for rabbis or mullahs or people who have chosen a path that is spiritual in nature and they, and they aren’t simply giving lip service to their tradition.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.
Student Question: In one of your essays, you made a distinction between the yoga of Patanjali and of Sat Yoga. You mentioned the Advaita perspective, but you also mentioned that we still need to follow the yamas and niyamas, and I couldn’t quite grasp the difference. So could you explain it a little more?
Excerpt: “Patanjali’s understanding of Reality is dualistic,” begins Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Whereas the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, which is leaning more towards the Advaita position, is about recognizing that subject and object are separate, but then—at a higher level—we want to know what is the source of both of them, and reunite the two, not keep them as separate poles of reality.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.
Excerpt: “Imagine a scene in a biological laboratory,” begins Shunyamurti, the lead research scientist of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There’s a woman scientist bent over a microscope and gazing at one of those little slides. And the slide has on it a drop of water that’s filled with amoebas. And as she’s gazing in, she sees that these amoebas have a whole world of their own. . . . And at the moment that she’s looking at them, imagine that one of these amoebas somehow, uncannily, becomes aware that it’s being gazed at. And it can’t quite comprehend ‘Who’s looking at me?’ but it knows someone’s looking at it from a dimension beyond its own little world. And let’s imagine that the intensity of its desire to understand the energy it’s feeling causes its mind to actually rise up until this amoeba’s consciousness is united with that of the scientist, and for a moment, it sees itself from her perspective. . . . And at the same time, the scientist realizes that some 84,000 lifetimes ago, she was an amoeba just like that one. And someone gazed at her, and it created this desire that then led to the evolution of her soul through all these different forms until she had become this scientist—now gazing at her own origins. . . . But at that same moment, the scientist realized, ‘But what if I am still being gazed at by a consciousness beyond where I am to the same extent as I am beyond that of the amoeba?’ And her mind suddenly turned within, and, with great intensity of desire, was pulled upward to that higher dimension and realized the Witness consciousness that had been gazing upon her with love. And that consciousness had at one point been a human who had evolved to God consciousness, and there was another union at an even higher level." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.
Student Comment: If the world is in God’s hands and we can’t control anything—and everything is perfect—then it makes sense to me that there can’t be such a thing as a mistake, or an error, or a mis—anything. Nevertheless, I can’t quite understand this fully.
Student Question: Something you said earlier reminded me of one of your teachings when you said that the reason that atheists don’t believe in God, but that’s only because they’re not capable of loving. So how can they achieve union with God if they don’t believe in a supreme being?
Student Question: I wanted to know if you could elaborate a little bit more on the difference between sanskaras and past lives because I mentioned to a student here that it might be interesting to study my past lives, but what for? What purpose would it serve in accelerating my growth? And it was mentioned that it is actually more correct to say that sanskaras reincarnate rather than saying that we have past lives.
Excerpt: “The Real is a limit concept,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “because it does not occur in reality; It is that which contains reality and makes reality possible. But it does not appear within reality. [It’s] very similar to this film, The Matrix, in which ‘reality,’ the matrix, is unreality—it is illusion—and the real is beyond it. . . . So we want to bring our consciousness from the ‘reality,’ that is in fact Maya, or illusion, to the Real. Where is the Real? Well, it is beyond, but not beyond in a spatial sense—because all the concepts that we use to understand the so-called ‘reality,’ are unreal in terms of the Absolute Real. . . . But it’s very difficult to let go of these concepts, as we know. And even more difficult to let go of the belief in entities. And Sri Ramana says that this is the ultimate key to liberation. And of course the prime entity that we have to stop believing in is the ‘me’, the ego, the false self. . . . And so we have to give up our addiction to conceptualization, to constant thinking. It’s the thinking in the mind that supports the illusion of the ego; you feel real as long as you're able to justify your existence by talking to yourself. . . . So that’s what we’re doing in meditation, is we’re cutting that addiction to dispersing our energies out into the world, justifying our existence with our minds, seeking images and emotions that support the egoic fantasies, and entering into the silence—that is a death; it is the death of the ego—but the opening to eternal life, in the Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, march 17, 2011.
Student Question: As you mentioned in your teaching, we need to have a strong determination in order to reach the higher chakras. In therapy we talk a lot about materialization of things by repeating mantras, for example. Can we cause this determination to be made without discovering the causes and roots of suffering? Could you just say, “I’m determined to stay in the present,” instead?
Student Question: I was wondering, what is the nature of the ego? Does it come from human nature?
Excerpt: “Each of you is a divine jewel of radiant consciousness and eternal perfection,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The difficulty that gets in our way is that the ego-mind does not live in reality; it lives in its theory of reality. It lives trapped in a belief system. In fact, these days it’s even worse than that: it lives trapped in a number of different, conflicting belief systems. . . . And the information overload, and the lack of structure—the lack of social values that make any sense—make it very difficult to return to the wholeness and empowerment of the Real Self. But nonetheless the truth remains: that this divine jewel of light is what you are.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 3, 2011.
Excerpt: “The Supreme Reality that we are all seeking is absolutely simple. And all we really need is to abide in that simplicity, which is our true nature,” teaches Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Everyone’s looking for a good investment, a safe investment. And so my suggestion to you all is that you invest in God. It’s the only sure investment. And what is most sure is that the more you invest, the greater are the returns on your investment. So in the ordinary capitalist world, they say get a basket of investments so you hedge your bets. But, actually, because investing in the Supreme Being is a sure thing, it doesn’t pay to hedge your bets; it pays to invest—fully—in the Godself. But what kind of investment are we talking about? It’s not about money. It’s investing your love, your attention, your energy, your time—your focus on realizing the presence of God within you. . . . And so there are many many levels of consciousness through which we can rise if we are willing to let go of the lower. And this is a principle of spiritual progress: if you want to rise, you must let go of what you’re holding onto at the lower level. And this is what people are unwilling to do. They want a guarantee first that they’ll get the higher before they let go of the lower rung, and so they never get there; they get paralyzed. And this is where faith comes in. The faith of taking the risk of jumping into the abyss, the unknowable, the mystery of not knowing who you are. That’s what being fully alive means. That’s the thrill of existence, is the not knowing, when you push the envelope—and even push yourself out of the envelope—to discover the formless, infinite Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 24, 2011.
Student Question: The wisdom that you offer helps to clarify any confusion I have regarding philosophy. But when I hear you mentioning Lacan or Freud, I encounter a lot of difficulty trying to match this wisdom to the concepts that they use. To me that’s complicated. Nevertheless, I see that there’s an intention to create bridges which give some validity to that knowledge, in Western psychology or philosophy.
Excerpt: “Meditation is simply abiding in the Self,” teaches Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Abiding in Brahman means bramacharya, that is the original state of purity. It’s the same as the kaivalya state that we have talked about before where the Purusha has extracted Itself from Prakriti. There’s no more interest in matter, in sensuality; desire falls away naturally. You’re repressing it, or suppressing it, it’s just not there because you are already all that is, what is there to desire? What is there to fear? . . . It is that level of consciousness in which one graduates from this phenomenal plane, this school in which we learn what is right and wrong, what creates suffering and what creates joy and bliss. And the ultimate bliss comes simply from abiding as the formless, eternal Presence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 17, 2011.
Student Question: Tonight in the study group we were studying chakra two, and that chakra two energies must come into consciousness and not be repressed. So how are these energies brought into consciousness? Does one have to engage in a sexual act in order to bring these energies into consciousness?
Excerpt: “There’s an old joke, I’m sure everyone knows it. . . . It was a joke about an academic scholar in the Vatican who was trying to understand the roots of apostolic celibacy, and he went to the original writings that were then copied by the scribes, and he found that one scribe made a mistake, he dropped out an ‘r,’ it was supposed to be celebrate!” recounts Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so the celebration was, originally, a coming together of those who were celibate, in solitude, in their inner solitude. . . . And only those who have realized the solitude of Self, and are no longer co-dependent on others, and don’t have voices in their minds that are attacking them, or causing them to have distorted self-images, etc., are truly free to celebrate, because everyone else is suffering and in agony. . . . But in any case, this was the original meaning of it, and the first celebration was of that Liberation from the ego that is co-dependent on others, both externally and internally. And so when we meditate, it is in order to silence all those voices in the mind, and to dwell in the solitude of Pure Consciousness. And that solitude is blissful. And it’s cause for celebration.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 10, 2011.
Student Question: In the book that we have been discussing, Ashram Dharma, the author mentions the importance of the guru for maintaining the energy field of the ashram. In ashrams in which the guru has passed on, or if the guru has several ashrams, how does his energy permeate the ashram, or does it?
Excerpt: “The true guru is within. And each of us must take responsibility for manifesting the guru. The guru is not an external person. The external person, who is often referred to as the guru, is simply the one who has the job to remind you that the guru is within,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s like the conductor of an orchestra: the conductor doesn’t make any music, but just points to the others who make all the music. So there’s nothing special about the guru, except to hold that space of Emptiness . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 9, 2011.
Student Question: Could you speak a little bit about duty? We are given, by the culture, definitions of what a good mother or a good daughter, etc., is. But then we have karma, in which we are karmically indebted to the families that we are born into. How do we ascertain what our true duties are to our family and to God?
Excerpt: Each of us, at one level, is a separate individual cut off from each other by our own thoughts, in a bubble of our own concerns, phantasies, desires, drives, fears, anxieties, etc. . . . And yet at another level—a more important level—we are all one,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the only friend, ally, that will not abandon us in this moment is the Supreme Being. And through that alignment, we can create, on this horizontal plane, relationships that we can also trust because we can see and meet and recognize other beings who are also in that state of unconditional love and integrity. . . . So that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating. And by meditating together, we’re offering each other the gift of that divine energy.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 3, 2011.
Student Comment: I was wondering if you could explain a little bit—especially to those who are coming for the first time and are about to become parents or have small children—how the community could help in their spiritual evolution.
Excerpt: “So a Satsang is an opportunity to experience bliss together,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Bliss is our natural state. It’s the state that we would be in 24/7 if we didn’t obscure it with a cloud of ego noise: chatter, worry, anxieties—all of these that are built on illusions. . . . The problem is today we have imbibed, as an indoctrination, this belief in materialism, that we are just bodies, and all there is, is matter and motion, and there’s no higher power and no wisdom. It’s all chance, random—that whole Darwinian ideology. And we’ve been taken in by it, so that we no longer tend to make the effort to find out for ourselves if there is, actually, a transcendent reality. But if you’re willing to make the effort, you will find that you can penetrate through the box that we call this phenomenal plane, and that there is infinite vastness beyond what we think of as reality. . . . And that’s why yogis recommend leading a simple lifestyle. Don’t create unnecessary complications in your life. Don’t create unnecessary stresses. Life will be stressful anyway, but you can keep it more manageable if you have lost the ego’s need to be seen by as many people as possible, loved by as many people as possible, adored, approved of. And many people have an addictive need to get the approval of as many people as possible. Why? Because they don’t have a sense of self-esteem that’s internal because they don’t know who they are. And if they go even a moment without someone saying, ‘Yes, you’re good,’ people can decompensate; they can collapse. They need to then call somebody on a cell phone who will tell them that they really are good people. . . . And so are we willing to transcend the personal level of the petty world of constant activity for the stillness of the eternal present, as—not an individual separate from others—but the very energy that unites and underlies and permeates all that is? . . . And what’s present is a great laughter of realizing that all along you knew that this is what you are. You didn’t discover this along the way. You always knew it and were hiding it from yourself and now you’re allowing yourself to know that this is what you are, and this is why you are here.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 27, 2011.
Student Comment: It’s become clearer to me tonight, as you’ve been speaking, of the importance of joining a spiritual community, and that it’s the hardest challenge for one to undertake in terms of giving. I was raised in a culture that was still very family-based, a family that will do everything for you. But in a spiritual family, one must break the box of merely biological connection and family values in order to transcend to the next level of maturity and growth in which all are accepted as family.
Excerpt: “Consciousness is energy—but a very different kind of energy than the kind that physicists tend to talk about,” explains Shunyamurti, research scientist at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating: we’re accumulating this most positive, or sattvic, level of the orgone energy, and through that we are producing a transformation of our consciousness, we are creating a power of healing—and many other potential powers that the yogis also studied, which are called siddhis. . . . And so if we focus on meditation as a scientific experiment, and give all of our attention to it—because the energy is accumulated through the payment of attention—and we turn our attention inward and don’t allow any distractions, and don’t allow any lowering of the wavelength through aggressive or negative or depressed or anxious thoughts, but thoughts that are of the highest kind, and then transcending thought altogether into silence—but a silence that is a silence of devotion, of love, of reverence of the sacredness of all that is—that level of silence produces itself a kind of energy field. And then by staying in that energy, and not interrupting the flow of it, it’s as if we open the spigot from the zero-point—from the noumenal level beyond this cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 20, 2011.
Student Question: Something that I’ve been thinking, but haven’t been able to word it, is that, on one level we have swaha, which is like throwing your ego on the flame—pretty much giving, as you mentioned, but in an absolute way. What would be the other side of that? We call it “ego.” We call it “narcissism.” We call it “schizoid.” But I don’t understand that resistance, and I want to get it because I feel that that’s the problem: the refusal to give all.
Student Comment: In your last essay you talk about samadhi, and I wanted to know what the difference is between samadhi and the Ground of Being.
With all the changes we are experiencing, as “reality” is getting stranger and stranger, “it’s important to understand how to meditate, how to shut off the static in the mind to reach the true signal that’s coming from that Supreme Reality that’s trying to guide us, but that we don’t generally pay attention to because we’ve been indoctrinated that It doesn’t exist, and [that] we shouldn’t pay attention to it, it’s only our imagination, and we should only pay attention to what we can establish by the scientific method, etc., etc.,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so, we have to learn to make that shift into a higher dimension of consciousness. And the traditional yogic way of doing that—which is the earliest scientific method—true method of conscious transformation—is through an internalization, a turning around of our conscious energies. And in the meditative state, we do this in a seven stage process that will lead to samadhi.”
“So the first stage is that of pacification: if you want to meditate, you have to pacify your body. . . . enough that we can then go to the second stage, which is pranafication. The body is not basically physical, that’s the illusion. The second level, the more subtle level, is that of prana, which we could call ‘bioelectromagnetic energies,’ that are flowing through the body. And we need to become aware of the prana and get it to flow. . . . And the pranafication will then lead to the third stage, which is a pyramidization: the prana will begin to pyramid upward, the ‘kundalini shakti energy,’ which is even more subtle than the prana, will begin to rise.” This will lead to the fourth stage, which is “pinealization, the activation of the pineal gland.” The activation of the pineal gland, revealing the inner light, will lead to “pontification” in which one can “download, from the Source, information that can be turned into symbolic form, whether in language or images or mathematics or music, whatever is needed for a particular kind of communication . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 13, 2011.
Excerpt: “Each of us is the incarnation of Christ. Or of Buddha, if you prefer; or of Krishna—take your pick, it doesn’t matter, but we’ll use Christ tonight; you’re all of them. But do you realize it? Is that real for you, or is that just an intellectual idea? The process of transformation is taking this from an idea into a realization. . . . The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that history could be divided into three phases. In the ancient world, people sacrificed what was really valuable to them . . . until, finally, Christ said ‘God doesn’t want that, actually. What God wants is you to sacrifice your lower nature. Sacrifice your suffering! Sacrifice your ego itself to God.’ . . . And so in order to escape from this hell realm that we have turned time into and our lives into . . . we must rise to the higher level of the cross where the fullness of God can be re-experienced , re-grasped as our own nature. . . . To do that though, we have to recognize that the scientistic worldview that we inherited since Newton, that claims that the world is mechanistic and that life, ultimately, is on a basis of inanimate matter that can be understood and controlled technologically, etc., and the genes can be manipulated and all of that—this pseudo-mastery and hubris, the arrogance of human ego-consciousness, has to be overcome. And we have to recognize that the entire universe is alive. . . . And in the ancient world (that we think of as superstitious), they were aware that there were actants also that are non-physical. . . . And there are all kinds of entities, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, that actually share this cosmos with us, and some from other dimensions who visit that we don’t tend to see, and angels who come, that, if you are attuned properly, you will be aware of. But the modern scientific mind has poo-poo’d all of that and has caused us to live in a very barren desolate kind of world. But the world is alive with infinite richness and beauty and power and wisdom if we will be willing to tune into it. But it requires a kind of humility. . . . And when we do that, we will discover that the God that was absent and missing . . . or in exile, is right here! God is not absent at all. It’s your ego that has simply veiled the presence of the Supreme Reality from your consciousness. . . . And through this time of trial, the human species will be transformed; it’s a blessing. And a new age can only be brought to life when we have gone through the fire of dissolving the ego and live in the radiance of the Real Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 16, 2010.
“The greatest epic in all history is the Mahabharata. This is the great epic of world history,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. The Mahabharata is about a time when every human is a god—thus the immensity of Hindu deities. These gods represent the entire population of the previous Sat Yuga (the golden age spoken of in every religion). And every religion prophesizes that this kingdom did exist, and that it will return. Recorded on the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, 2009.
“In the spiritual traditions of the East—and in fact universally, in the esoteric traditions, which includes Sat Yoga—a spiritual teacher is not one who makes any claim to goodness, or special closeness to God,” remarks Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But it is only a matter of having become bored with one’s ego narratives,” whether those be of righteous indignation, victimhood and depression, superiority/inferiority, etc. “When one throws those away and lives in silence—a silence that is a surrender to the Real, to what is True, behind all of those narratives . . . then one is approaching Liberation.”
“St. Augustine, who is of course a very orthodox-approved Catholic saint, made a very interesting comment in one of his books. He says, ‘Whenever you touch God, you’re touching the devil.’ And in one of the books of Shinran . . . he said that the Pure Land, which is paradise, Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, is for evil people. . . . Why is that? . . . Because the narrative that one tells oneself is almost always to put oneself in the position of the ‘good guy’ with the white hat, who’s been exploited and taken advantage of and misunderstood, etc., etc. And it’s that narrative that has to get very boring, and has to be recognized as a fabrication that has no validity.”
“And so in this act of meditation we’re letting go of the narratives. We’re letting go of the walls we’ve put up around our heart and the attacks and the defenses and the rationalizations for why it’s impossible to be free and to live life responsibly, facing reality on its own terms without trying to have it one’s own way. And it’s that that frees one to let go of the anger and the anxiety and the depression and all of that. Nothing else will do it; there’s no other medicine, really. But letting go of the whole narrative. And we don’t like to do that because, of course, yes, we’d like to get rid of the vexation, but we want to keep the jouissance. We like the anger and the justification. And we like the feeling like we’re the good guys and all of that. Nonduality means you give up this sense of good vs. evil, negative vs. positive, me vs. the other. There is no ‘me.’ There is no other. But it’s only when the mind is quiet that we can recognize that, and be free.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.
Student Question: I’m still contemplating this koan that I have been given, that “God does not know the ego.” I think some light is starting come through on this topic, but I wanted to check it with you. I think that I’m looking at this from a dualistic standpoint, but this must be a nondual understanding. Is that right?
“Yes,” answers Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “That’s why in Christianity it is said that you cannot get to the Father except through the Son.” However, this does not mean that Christ is the only teacher through which one can reach God, but through any spiritual teacher “who can be an intermediary and know the ego from the place of Emptiness. . . . So it is a relationship with a being who is not in the place of ego and so there’s not a reflection back of one ego to another, and therefore a power struggle—cause there’s always paranoia when two egos meet: ‘Who’s gonna be on top?’ . . . And it’s only when at least one party to the dyad isn’t playing that game that the game itself falls, and then you can be known as you truly are, but don’t know yourself to be yet, that same Emptiness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.
Student Question: What is this “Impossible Witness” that you talk about?
“It is simply the agent of the ‘master narrative’ that holds the ego’s reality in place, without which, you’d feel a major disorientation,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Any kind of an ideological statement that can’t be backed up with true scientific reason—not scientism, but scientific reason—is an impossible witness. Today science itself promotes an impossible witness and has become a religion: it thinks it knows what happened before the big bang. It doesn’t, of course. . . . But those things are just purely speculation to maintain an orientation in reality because otherwise reality becomes a trip: we realize we have no control over it and no sense at all of what is going on, or what reality really is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday December 9, 2010.
Student Question: You say that whatever adjective that goes after the “I am” is wrong. So what do you think about those affirmations in which you say “I am the Light,” etc. Where is the mistake there?
“They’re good antidotes against negative thoughts,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, ultimately, as long as we remain attached to words, then we are in the image of that rather than the reality of it. . . . So we want to be free from language, and from any other form of representation so that we can experience the Supreme Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.
Student Comment: Sometimes people say that the more attention you give to something, the more chance that it will have of manifesting. And we were talking about the state of the world, and how the military is doing this or that, and I feel that, sometimes, I put too much pressure on myself about not speaking of these types of things because of the amount of denial . . .
“These are often difficult issues to face, that do not have solutions within ego-consciousness which is based on the loyalty to the kind of values that we have been trained to uphold,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute of Costa Rica. “And the vertical dharma has always been threatened by its inherent disloyalty to all worldly values.” The Buddha, for example, left his duty as a prince and ruler, as well as his family, to achieve enlightenment. “He did everything wrong, the ultimate sin, I mean the guy must have been riddled with guilt for all of this. And anybody in those days would have said to Buddha, ‘You’re wrong. Go back. Sit on that throne. Take care of your family. You created them, this is your karma.’ . . . But when he saw that all of the consequences of karma, of acting in a conventionally good way, led to more suffering, and would lead to more war, and would lead to egoic enmeshment rather than liberation—and when he saw that being a good person was the ultimate evil, from this higher position, and that he had to transcend these dualities in order to find himself, then he went on a path that was absolutely lonely and alone—that no one understood; absolutely no one in his world ‘got’ what he was doing. . . . And he entered a dimension and a logic and a understanding of reality that no one would validate for him, or could. And it was in that absolute uniqueness and aloneness—and wrongness from the perspective of the world—that he found the Ultimate Reality.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.
“In Japan, during the last couple of years of World War II, the intelligentsia of Japan knew that they were going to lose the war,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And there was a Japanese philosopher . . . named Tanabe Hajime, who was tormented by the fact that he could not express himself in public. His whole life was about truth and expressing the truth, and serving the people. And he wanted to write articles and give lectures about how to deal with the trauma that Japan was going to face with the destruction of their empire and their way of life. And he was not allowed to say anything. And he became more and more anguished by this situation. And he didn’t know what to do.”
And gradually he began to feel he was totally useless as a philosopher, he was a failure, he was a failure as a human being, and he had a complete meltdown. . . . And in that state of utter internal collapse, something extraordinary happened to him: his consciousness was translated to a higher dimension. In Japan they actually have a word for that called ‘zange.’ It is when the mind is brought to a level of ‘metanoetics’ . . . to a level of consciousness beyond the mind, beyond the realm of representation, beyond concepts.”
“And in that state, he felt the presence of what he called the ‘Other-power’ . . . which he, being Japanese and in that culture, named as Amida Buddha, the Buddha of infinite light and infinite life. And it was that. If he was Indian, he might have called it Shiva. If he was Christian, he might have called this Christ-consciousness; it doesn’t matter. But it was a flow of Divine Energy through him in that state of collapse in which he was totally surrendered to this higher power that was now coming to him.”
“But the real message of this story, to me, is that regardless of what state of consciousness you’re in, you cannot reach the ultimate Ground and Source of empowerment and strength from the plane of the ego; you must be in a state of surrender. And that the Real, that will give you the strength to deal with impossibly difficult situations and challenges, comes from a place beyond the mind. . . . And it’s the faith in that—the opening of that inner portal to the transcendent dimension within, of the Divine—that will bring the fulfillment of your own life. And from the Emptiness, you will experience a fullness that you have never imagined possible.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.
Student Comment: Earlier we were discussing rites of passage, and it appeared to me that the military had something to do with that. And I wanted to know what your opinion was of that.
“It used to function as a rite of passage, when there was still chivalry, and when warfare was hand-to-hand combat and bravery, and the other martial virtues of manhood, in particular, were developed. But that was a long time ago,” answers Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Now . . . it’s a video game. And somebody in Nebraska is firing a drone at somebody in Pakistan. They’re not in any danger; there’s no bravery involved. There’s no sense of the reality of facing an opponent that a samurai or someone else would have. And the rules of combat based on an ethic of recognition of the sacredness of one’s task. All of that. That was the culture of Japan, and in the Middle Ages, the culture of chivalry, has been lost.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.
Student Question: In the chakra map, we tend to move within the first three chakras. And in understanding how and why we do it, we become able to use the higher ones. But is it more balanced to move within all seven, or to be within the higher ones?
“The higher chakras are sublimated versions of the lower chakras,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the lower chakras, when you are in and operating from them, they lead to suffering. And they are operated as defenses against anxiety that end up leading to very inaccurate forms of karma. And at the higher chakras, one has unveiled the Real Self that is transcendent of the individual organism, or ego-based identity, and is therefore no longer acting from egocentric—or even anthropocentric—motivations, but can act in harmony with the whole cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.
Student Question: What is the difference between guilt and paranoia?
“They exist at two different assemblage points: guilt is at the disillusionment point, paranoia is at the dispossession point,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Guilt is based upon an identity that has been established in a very strong and healthy way within the ego that takes its motivation from a lineage of symbolic signifiers of tradition and ideals and higher meaning. And that enables an individual, who carries that burden, to operate responsibly and with integrity in the world to fulfill their duty. Whereas paranoia does not have any of those characteristics, and it is more based on the terror that someone will take away its sensory enjoyments and its capacity to act in freedom and will impinge on its sense of autonomy and self-empowerment. And the more paranoid one is, the more [one] will project that the world is filled with enemies who want to destroy one. But this is not, then, an ethical way of responding to the other as an equal, but seeing the other in a demonized form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.
Student Question: When you were talking about the trauma that Japan faced in the war, I was realizing that I couldn’t really relate because I feel I’ve never identified with a nation or a culture, and I couldn’t imagine feeling trauma over my country losing a war.
“It wasn’t just losing a war; it was losing their culture,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the whole of modern history is the destruction of one culture after another by the dominant globalizing culture of capitalism.”
For the Japanese, however, the loss in the war had “profound effects, at that moment, because they were in denial. And it was that forcible coming out of denial, with the sudden dropping of bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that literally left the population speechless. That was shock and awe in the true sense. And not only Japan, but I think the entire world has not yet recovered from that."
They [the Japanese] were in denial of this event happening, you mean the destruction in the war? Or were you referring to a different kind of destruction?
“Of the fact that they were losing; it was inconceivable that they could lose. Just as it’s inconceivable now to many people that the present system can fall. You have people who think, ‘Ah, this will go on forever.’ People can more easily imagine the destruction of the world by an asteroid than the fall of global capitalism. It’s inconceivable and it’s not discussable.”
But this is not the end, “and we have to become very strong, and filled with the inspiration of what is going to be born through this trauma, ‘cause it’s a blessing, ultimately; everything is a blessing if it’s understood in its true significance.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.
Student Question: This is a two-part question: 1) How would you define humility, and 2) How does one go about becoming humble?
“One short answer is the word itself: hum-ble. ‘Bal’ is Sanskrit for power. ‘Hum’ comes from the same word as ‘humus.’ To be exhumed, comes from the soil, the earth, the root, the foundation. So it is the power of the very foundation of our being,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it is the opposite of trying to have the pseudo-power created by an artificial superstructure of prestige, position, intelligence, money—any of the artificial ways people try to get power in the world; this [humility], is the power of the earth itself. . . . And right now the whole meaning of this moment in history is that all the false powers are falling: the economic powers, the political powers, the powers that rule from egoistic positions, are collapsing. And the only true power that will survive and stand is the power of the Divine Light that will again be visible in the world. But to have that power, to be the embodiment of the power, means to surrender all of the other powers of trying to be somebody who stands out in the world, and to return to the Source.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.
“In meditation, what we are doing is simply returning to the recognition of the essence. And that essence—because that essence is indescribable—creates difficulties for the intellectualizing mind to grasp. And that’s what makes something that is actually extremely simple to seem very difficult,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And the ego created its identity by grasping to landmarks: people, places, things, etc. But it has become so enmeshed in all of its support lines that it is unable to get free, and it becomes “a spider trapped in its own web. And so we want to get out of the web. And we can only do that by realizing that we are the weavers of that web.”
“In the West, the Platonic dictum of ‘Know Thyself’ has been the basic maxim of intellectual development. But the problem is: the self cannot know the Self. It would require two selves, one to know the other, and there is only one. And so because we demand to know the Self, we create another, false self. But that one needs to know itself and it creates yet another, and then yet another, and then yet another. . . . And so you cannot know yourself intellectually, in the sense that you can know mathematics or you can know a painting or a person or something objective; you can only be the Self. And you can only be when you let go of trying to know.”
“And then you discover what the Self really is. And the Self in Its pure form, when It’s not holding onto and identifying itself by that which it holds onto, is Emptiness: empty awareness. The awareness is cognizant; there is an Intelligence. But when turns inward to know Itself, there is nothing there; there is no-thing. There is only awareness that is formless. And that awareness that is formless, because it is Nothing, is nothing special. That’s what’s horrifying to the ego, which strives day and night to be something special in the eyes of the other. But it’s very special to give up that need to be special. And that’s what brings one to the sacred core of one’s being. And one discovers there another kind of specialness, a specialness to the Supreme Being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.
Student Comment: It seems the goal of one’s life is to be what you want to be but not because anyone else wants you to be that, right? For example, if you are planning on having a relationship, you should be in the relationship because you want to love someone, not because you want someone to love you.
“Well,” begins Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “the state you're describing is a very rare state. There’s nearly always an unconscious agenda. That’s why we talk here about the ‘I’ of the statement, the statement we make to ourselves and to other people, and then the ‘I’ of the one who is enunciating that statement that usually has another agenda that is implicit within that statement. . . . Most people use words in order to not communicate with the other, in order to create miscommunication that will favor oneself.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.
There are three registers of consciousness that have been understood throughout the history of religion: the Atman (or Spirit), the soul, and the ego. The Atman is the purest level of consciousness, but as the entropic process of Maya takes effect, consciousness becomes diffuse and eventually more and more fragmented—as we see epitomized in the postmodern ego. “I use the analogy sometimes of a cake,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the Atman is an uncut cake, whereas the soul is a cake that’s still whole, but it’s been cut into slices, but it’s all there. And then when you get to the ego level, there’s only one slice left, and it’s your slice, and you're gonna hold on to it. . . . And then life becomes a war rather than a whole, as the cake was originally, in which we are not only able to enjoy it—we can have our cake and eat it—but because we are the cake.” This example can be compared to the Christian forms of love: agape, philia, and eros.
But now the forces of eros, or desire, rule the world, and the ego is in its most fragmented and demonic state. And the world’s religions have not specialized in dealing with this aspect of ego-consciousness. And this fragmentation, this decadence, has been best documented in the writers of the modern era, who have noted this uncertainty that is inherent in all egos. “And the only way out is in. And so although we say that, yes, in meditation you reach bliss, but you have to go through the sadness first, of letting the ego die. And that’s what is unbearable to most people.” But, as Shunyamurti reminds us, it is still better to kill off the ego in this bardo state rather than to have it ripped to shreds by the wrathful deities at the time of death.
And the internal demons that we project onto the world “can only be defeated through meditation. They can only be defeated by being willing to abide in the Self and draw in all of those fragments into the center, into the core, and fuse them back into the oneness that they are.” And by abiding in the Self, “you will realize that the bliss that you were seeking out in the world is coming through your very consciousness, and flowing through the very pores of your body into the world, and that the whole world is also a divine dwelling place of God’s Love and Presence. And that’s the only way that we can transform the world.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.
Student Comment: You wrote an essay this week on love and wisdom and the need for the two to be combined. And I wanted to know if you could expand a little on this “wise-love.”
“Love is your true nature,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the ego defends against love . . . [and] it doesn’t feel safe loving in a loveless world. And so it puts its own love in the dungeon and tries to forget it’s there. And lives with as thick a skin as it can produce. But the thicker the skin, the more that affects the intelligence, and our ability to think also becomes thickened and more dense and more incapable of maintaining a very active state of intellectual creativity; all those defenses wear down that capacity.” But once the repressed, unbearable elements of one’s ego have been purified, “then the kundalini, which is simply a channel of love, rises, opens the heart, opens the mind, and flows out into the universe and you become one with the universe; you realize there are no boundaries. And all of this is love, but right now in a hidden form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.
Student Question: I’m meditating more now, and I’ve been using two different strategies: either trying to stop all thoughts that come up and staying in a state of intense concentration, or staying in the observer position, although I easily fall out of it. Which is a better strategy?
“It’s different for each one because everyone has different karma,” begins Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, the ‘vasanas,’ the tendencies to externalize and to keep the mind busy, running away from one’s core of silent awareness, is a tendency that can be defeated by consistent return to the center. And it just has to be a habit that becomes more important, more powerful, and then the other habit will be extinguished.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.
Student Question: You mentioned today about being able to throw everything into the flame. What is the relationship between throwing the individual ego into the Flame, the Supreme Reality, and throwing into the Flame as a community as well?
“Well you can’t have a community until its members throw the ego into the Flame,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual leader of the Sat Yoga Spiritual Community. The ego is always in defiance of any law—either lower or higher. And so the ego must be humbled, it must come to recognize that it does not have autonomy over the world, others—or even itself. “And this cannot be legislated, no State can enforce this—not even a religion can enforce this—it has to be done by oneself.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.
Student Question: As one grows in the many levels of love, one also comes to discover the many levels of the mind, which can be very strange, like visiting another planet or something. And though they may not be altogether unpleasant, they can still be very disconcerting because they are unfamiliar. How does one overcome that in meditation?
“If you meditate long enough, you’ll realize you’re not a person at all,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “You are pure consciousness that has no limits. And that is interconnected with all that is. And it’s only in that state that you can really tolerate all of these phenomena that otherwise make you think you’ve gone mad.” This world is a school, and if you go about learning in a natural way—through your meditation practice—then you will be given only what you are ready to handle, though you will be pushed to your limits. And you can’t truly begin this type of higher education until you have fully individuated from your family, your friends—and all of your identity markers. “And you have the absolute right and duty to do that. If you are truly honoring your parents, you do that by growing beyond them and then being able to help them to grow, not by staying a little child. And the deep secret of every ego is [that] in the unconscious everyone’s still a child, refusing to grow up.” Recorded on the evening on Thursday, November 11, 2010.
Excerpt: “It’s time to learn how to be in silence,” offers Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “I don’t think it would be appropriate for this evening to just be an evening of words. The time for words, even the most beautiful words, is passing. The time for gathering knowledge, the time for trying to understand what’s going on in this world, intellectually, is passing. It’s now the time to be, to experience, from within, from the deepest place, the realization of the meaning of all of this, but not from a place of theory or belief system. We’re long past the ability of our conscious minds to grasp what’s going on.”
And at the end of each lifetime, despite what we may have accomplished in terms of worldly success, we will all have to face our own conscience and face whether or not we have “fulfilled our mission, lived up to our potential, lived an authentic life. Or did we give in to the lie? Did we betray our Spirit? Did we follow the easy path? Did we listen to what our parents told us instead of our heart? . . . And how many have the courage to break away from the socially permissible paradigm and be different from the world in order to find a truth that you won’t find on CNN or in the other media? Do we have that courage? . . . And it’s only when we have found our inner center and we are connected to the Cosmic Self, beyond the individual self, that we can find within us a source of strength and of peace and of love and of empowerment—and courage—to face this unknown world that we’re now in.”
“And we can’t do this through simply theoretical means; we have to practice it. And this is where things start to go wrong for people, and they say, ‘Well I don’t have time. I’m too busy,’ or ‘I can’t meditate! My mind doesn’t stop.’ And rather than training the mind and realizing that you are inherently the master over your mind, if you want to stop it, you have that power. It’s a God-given power. It’s our birthright! But we don’t take it because we’re too fragmented. . . . Our egos are too filled with contradictory desires and agendas and fears to be able to have a consistent practice of anything, not just meditation, but almost anything in life.”
“So the problem is this: within all these egons that we have, all these little psychological fragments, there isn’t a fragment of a liberated being. . . . And that means you have to create an ego fragment that believes that it is spiritual. . . . And the idea is: if you don’t feel like you're holy and pure and liberated and a saint or a sage, now—pretend you are! And don’t think, ‘Oh that’s dishonest,’ because by pretending you’re actually creating an ego fragment that believes it, that is acting it out, and that acting becomes more and more authentic the more that you put on the act, until it is actually second nature. And the point is you’re already an actor; you’re already pretending to be somebody that you aren’t. Your ego is an imposter. But why be an imposter of a sinner and a loser and somebody who is an addict or depressed, or whatever you're pretending to be, instead of pretending to be the great sage, saint, liberator, avatar . . . and why not be that that God’s Will wishes you to be anyway—as long as you're pretending in any case? And the point is that you're pretending to be something you really are; that’s the great joke of it.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 28, 2010.
Student Question: In your book you make reference to a wave of light that’s going to affect the ego, against its volition. Could you please expand on that a little bit?
“Well, it’s against the volition of the ego in the sense that the ego is in resistance to God,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the more you create a part of yourself that actually chooses this, then the more that that comes in as a beautiful, blissful energy that you welcome, and it won’t be anything threatening. If you’ve ever read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, they talk about the spirit going into different bardo states. The first states are beautiful, it’s the White Light, and then it’s the lovely deities that give you flowers and wonderful foods and nectar. . . . But then if you fall to lower bardo states, then you get the wrathful deities. And they come and they cut you open and destroy the ego in a very brutal way. So it depends on what you choose: we can learn through bliss or we can learn through suffering.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 28, 2010.
“So what are we doing when we meditate?” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To put it in the simplest terms, we are connecting our surface consciousness with our inmost center of our being.” And that surface consciousness, the main object of which is the ego, can handle the day-to-day tasks and demands of life very well. “But that’s not your Real Self. It’s a vehicle that we need to create. But we also need to know that it’s not us. It’s good to have a car that is four wheel drive and can take you anywhere, but you need to be able to get out of that car. Once you drive to a beautiful place, if you stay in the car and don’t get out and enjoy the scenery, then what was the purpose of the trip? So, most of you have a very well-adapted ego; it works well to deal with the world. But it doesn’t nourish you. And it’s usually running on empty because we haven’t gotten out of the car to fill it up with new fuel. So we need to get out of the car and go back into the core of our being from time to time.”
And as we refuel ourselves in meditation, we reach encounter the state of shanti which in Sanskrit means both peace and silence. But beyond the state of shanti, in deeper states of meditation, one reaches a state of indescribably blissful love. “And if you stay longer in the silent center, then you’ll go even beyond this love that has no object—it’s not just love for one’s own body, but it’s a love that becomes universal—but you will also reach a point where you realize that the center that you are is the center that is everywhere; it’s not just localizable in what you thought of as your physical body—that that center is everywhere and nowhere. And because it is everywhere, there is a love for all that is, and yet because it is nowhere, there is complete detachment and non-enmeshment from anything or anyone, and therefore freedom. And so there’s a realization of what freedom actually feels like; the Ultimate Freedom.”
“And just by sitting in the silent center,” the prison of the ego collapses, “and you see reality with new eyes. And that’s probably one of the main benefits of meditation. And you realize that what you had seen as finite, limited, impossible to solve, is easily solved because it is all infinite. So all we have to do is sit in that center; we don’t have to fight with it. . . . Once you disidentify from the mind and realize it’s not your mind at all, it’s just an implanted stream of consciousness, and you disidentify from it, it will stop; it needs an audience to keep going, and once you don’t care about it, it will stop.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.
Student Question: How do I reconcile the understanding of the urge for purification without the perception that I am acting from a place of fear?
“I think it is appropriate to have fear of an impure ego, of an unconscious mind that, through its impurity, could lead you to great suffering. So, not fear in the usual sense, but prudence,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And if one hasn’t worked out the unconscious issues, complexes, phantasies, desires, one’s life will be driven by those—and usually you're driven off a cliff. So, before that happens, the purification is very important. . . . I would say that the first order of business for everyone is purification of the unconscious. And this used to be what education was for. It wasn’t to learn mathematics or geography . . . it was to purify the unconscious mind so you could be a free human being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.
Student Comment: The way I have always understood free will is that it is not freedom of choice but freedom from choice; freedom from having to be faced with “Should I do this? Should I do that?” Freedom from that, and just living in a way in which you're not making choices, but you’re just flowing.
“You can have it at any moment,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The consciousness doesn’t want to give up the illusion of its freedom. And it thinks it can attain freedom, but it’s always a false freedom, by following one course of action vs. another. So the ego is obsessed with trying to improve its state of freedom, even in the very act of giving up its real freedom. . . . And in its ceaseless striving for freedom, it enslaves itself more and more and more deeply. And the only way to achieve real freedom is letting go of that whole project of striving to achieve it at the ego level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.
Student Comment: If, when your body passes and dies, your Higher Self and your ego, then, together, find a new host, or a new organism, or they go their separate ways and the ego finds a separate person, and the Higher Self finds something else . . .
“No, it’s not like that, because the Higher Self is not a thing, is not an entity, just as God is not—this whole world is consciousness,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. To give an example, “think of your brain as a transceiver, like a radio: it’s receiving energy waves that it will translate then into thoughts, images, feelings, etc., and operate your body. But, if you're listening to a radio and you turn it on and there’s a man talking, you don’t believe there’s a man actually in that radio, do you? . . . So in the same way, the Real Self is not in the body; it’s not localizable.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.
Student Question: How does the mind create the body?
“To really understand this requires a very high level of understanding of the nature of reality,” begins Shunyamurti, the research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There is a higher level of reality in which the whole complex of belief systems—of materialism itself—is recognized as an artifact of consciousness. You may believe you're living in an external, physical world, but that belief is happening within your consciousness. This is ‘the matrix.’ And, it’s only when you can recognize that—that the entire world is consciousness, including what you call the body—that there is a conscious power, then, to shift the image of that body, or the code, the digital code, which can shift the analog code.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.
Student Question: Could you talk a little bit about object constancy?
“It’s a developmental stage that is talked about in the field of psychology in which, as an infant, when the mother leaves the room, the infant doesn’t lose the sense of her existence and her connection,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So this pattern of not having an internalized object of an unconditionally loving other, which is then usually externalized as a God figure, if there isn’t that constancy, it’s kind of a supplement—which is why religion has always been of psychological importance for stabilizing the ego consciousness. But if that isn’t in there, then one will be liable to states of insecurity and anxiety and fear—phobias—that can also be created out of this. . . . And meditation is one of the best ways to cure it, because if you'll keep the mind silent, and free of mental objects, of any kind, then what becomes constant is the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.
“Despite the fact that the lights can get very bright sometimes, and the darkness can get very dark in one’s life, reality is not black or white, and that’s one of the difficulties that people have in handling reality, they want things to be clear: this or that. And it’s not that way,” maintains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. One striking example is the belief in God. On the one hand, someone who has an imaginarized belief in God as a person or entity is unlikely to drop that belief of God as Divine Object (or Subject) in favor of the realization of Emptiness. On the other hand, you have people in a very dense egoic consciousness who can’t believe in a spiritual reality of being, or a higher dimensional intelligence, or anything of the sort, at all—let alone God. “And I’ve worked with many people over the years who can’t, although they say they don’t, they actually can’t. And when you analyze more deeply what the issue is, you find out that not only can’t the person believe in God, but the person cannot believe in love. And that’s really the issue.”
And at the center of one’s self is a sense of lack of love that he or she has repressed. So one will try to project love outwards and implement various strategies to allay this sense of lack by seeking love in an external form. But, alas, this is a fruitless feat of exhaustion as love does not exist outside of one’s Self, and all this aversion to confronting the sense of lack within one’s self will keep one on the constant treadmill of fear and desire. “And so, we’re in a time in which there is an eclipse, and an exile, from the real of love—and the real of everything that God symbolizes ‘out there,’ but that we cannot find ‘in here,’ and we must learn to integrate it by finding it within.”
So one needs to establish a point of reference, in which to be able to realize the real of love, that is not outside of oneself in the world, or within the narcissistic, fragmented ego. And, “this third point, that has to be at right angles to both the world and the ego, has been traditionally referred to as ‘God.’ But what we mean by that is a higher level of being than the ego represents; It is the supreme level of being.” And it doesn’t matter if the signifier “God” is anathema to one because “it is that level of consciousness that’s not localizable as a person in an organism; it’s not in time or space.” And until one reaches that point of reference, “which is the Heart, Sri Ramana used to call it the Heart, you are in a state of a search that cannot be understood; it’s a nameless search. But it’s a search for the Self. And everyone’s in the search for the Self, even though they don’t know it, until they have found this point of the Heart. And that’s what we’re doing in meditation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.
Student Question: Could you please expand more on the concept of vampirism?
“I think the vampire is the dominant archetype today,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s because the ego, in its most negative form, becomes a vampire: it sucks the life energy out of others, but it has nothing to give. And so, life has become vampiric: whole societies are vampiric on other societies. . . . And this same process is true at every level, including the most intimate relationships, which is why they don’t last very long, you know: you suck whatever blood you can get, and the other one doesn’t have any more—you leave and find your next victim. And so relationships have become that kind of pattern. . . . And just as we have an oil shortage, we now have a blood shortage, a love shortage, so that the vampires are dying. And you know the myth of the golden spike, and they hide from the Christ symbol. They die in the face of God-consciousness. So the more that people awaken and allow the vampiric archetype to die, and bring the God archetype back, the more that the whole vampirism of the world will be dissolved, and the New Dawn—you know the vampires have to run away in the dawn and go back into their coffins—the dawn of a new age will end the vampiric ego pattern.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 30, 2010.
Student Comment: So there are some very fragile egos today. Isn’t so logical to realize, “OK, I’m so fragile. The only way out of this is to connect with the Almighty,” because you're so lost anyway, there’s nothing else that’s gonna hold you up but that.
“Well a) they’re afraid to admit consciously that they need an Almighty, [and] b) they don’t believe there is an Almighty there,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it’s not easy for object constancy to develop in the ego today; even God as an object, as an other that you want to connect to, requires a capacity to maintain a persistence of intention. But there’s too much chaos in the mind. And so there’s a momentary desire for that, and then the other chaotic fragments take over and you're back to your next drug. . . . So, it’s a really nasty brew that makes it almost impossible to get out of—except through reaching bottom, that will sometimes help. But these days people take the death drive in such a dramatic way that they would rather suicide than face the need for help.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 30, 2010.
“We could say that the ego is a veneereal disease,” diagnoses Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “because it’s a veneer over this vast soul consciousness which, in turn, sits upon an even vaster transfinite Atman consciousness. But this little veneer, that is in a state of dis-ease, prevents us from realizing this infinitude of our being. . . . So another metaphor for our condition in egoic consciousness would be a kind of veterinary disease. . . . Think of an elephant, elephants often in India represent the Atman. . . . So, you're an elephant, but there’s a flea in your ear. And this flea is a talking flea, and it’s talking to itself about its problems. And fleas have a lot of problems. They’re always fleeing and biting, and they're always worried that they're gonna get crushed, and they have an inferiority complex and they try to compensate for it, etc. But, anyway, the flea is talking in the ear of the elephant, and the elephant mistakenly believes that it’s its own thoughts in its mind cause it’s happening inside its head, so it must be these flea thoughts. And instead of having proper elephant thoughts, it’s having these little flea thoughts.”
“And so, you’re out of touch with reality because you're listening to these flea thoughts. But they are not your own thoughts; they are not your mind. So the problem is you can’t trust what you think is your own mind because it’s the mind of a flea. It’s not the mind of the Atman. And once you realize that, then the flea’s game is over; you knock it out, and it’s gone, and you’re liberated. It’s a very simple process. But first you’ve gotta realize that it is the thoughts of a flea, and not your own, that are disturbing you. . . . That’s all we’re doing when we’re meditating, is getting rid of the flea. And then we realize we are already divine, supreme—filled with love, filled with bliss, filled with joy and wisdom and clarity. Without those disturbing flea thoughts, our original nature emerges. And we realize that we didn’t need to be on some spiritual quest at all, we just needed to realize that we had already completed that quest. We are already the Atman that we are searching for.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 30, 2010.
Student Comment: You spoke earlier of dissatisfaction, which reminded me of something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I listened to a talk with a prominent spiritual figure, and he spoke about heaven and hell. He said that heaven is like being doomed to eternal famility, or familiarity. He went on to say that there’s no need to create in the absence of discontent, and that heaven is an upgrade of the illusion and hell is a downgrade. I’m just curious of what you have to say about that.
“God did not create out of discontent; this world doesn’t exist because of discontent,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But once egos are put into the world, the egos have discontent because an ego is not real and therefore it feels lacking inside. And that discontent causes it to do something, or find someone, to make it feel whole and real. But nothing it does can take away that discontent.” And, in actuality, heaven is not really the goal of any religion. “What the religions teach is liberation. And that liberation is the liberation from both heaven and hell. Both of them are illusions, and, ultimately, any heaven you create will become hell. . . . But as long as one is in the ego, one is constantly going to try to find one’s heaven . . . and flee from some hellish condition that is actually an internal definition, and so you can’t run away from yourself cause you're taking yourself with you wherever you go and the hellishness will be re-created. . . . So the whole fabric of society is decomposing because of this, and, at the same time, it creates the possibility of returning to the Real Self, that is transcendent of desire.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 23, 2010.
Meditation is paradoxical. All meditations is, is an attempt to stop trying to do anything. “How can you create a technique for not trying to do anything?” asks Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “If you do, then the very technique defeats the effort of not making any effort.” This is akin to the problem of self-reference which “has become a very big business, actually, since Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel. . . . Basically it comes down to the ‘liar’s paradox,’ you know, the guy from Crete who says ‘I’m lying.’ Is he telling the truth when he’s saying he’s lying? Well, if he’s telling the truth, he isn’t lying.” And, at the same time, if he’s lying then he’s telling the truth. “Anyway, you can go around and round forever in this, and this is basically all the ego is: it’s basically a voice in your head attacking you, and then you defend yourself against that voice. It’s two voices of self-reference, but they’re both delusional.”
“And the problem is that the ego doesn’t exist, except as the self-reference of one voice referring to another—both of which are in the same mind. And without the two voices attacking one another, of course, there is no mind, because the existence of the mind, as an illusion, is created by the fact that there are voices. And so if there were a modern-day Descartes, he would probably start out with: ‘I attack myself, therefore I am.’ . . . And, you’re either caught up in the drama, or you escape into the dharma. Those are the two options: dharma and drama. If your dharma is mellow, you won’t be in a melodrama. But to have a mellow dharma means you have to accept the fact that there’s nothing to gain. Not from anything: not from meditation, not from any other thing you would do to improve yourself. You can’t be improved on. Which in a way is a good thing isn’t it? You're already the Buddha-nature. You're already enlightened. You already have God inside of you. You are already That. This is what all the traditions teach. But ‘no no no. I’ve got to create a cloud in front of this realization and then try to blow away the cloud.’”
“But, the extraordinary thing is that when you have finally let go of this game of chasing your own tail, that’s when the bliss actually emerges from within. And that’s why this simple act of not doing anything, which drops all of these veils of illusion away, allows you to enter into the Source of your being, the Sat, which is already magical and miraculous and astonishing, without having to do anything, without having to become anything, without having to be anybody—by letting go of that desire to try to be somebody and do something and achieve something—that’s when you discover the reality, the Supreme Reality, of what you are.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 23, 2010.
Student Question: Based on the studies and the scientific books that we’re been reading lately, such as Signs of Meaning in the Universe by Jesper Hoffmeyer, what would you say the relationship is between biology and quantum physics?
“Well, they’re two different aspects. They deal at different levels of scale with the same phenomenon,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the scientific and spiritual research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. You start with a photon, which has absolute freedom, but then once you move “into the realm of molecules and of organisms, then the amount of freedom is less.” However, following Arthur Young’s “reflexive arc,” freedom is regained in man. “But then even the mind becomes determined, as the ego does, and there has to be a consciousness beyond the ego that can observe and use the ego as a basis to transcend.” So we must now make a quantum—or evolutionary—leap “to go beyond biology. We went from physics to . . . chemistry . . . and then to biology, and now we have to move from biology to Spirit.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 23, 2010.
Student Question: I would like to hear more about what is meant by the divine birth in the heart.
The divine birth is an archetype. One can remember the story of the birth of Christ, the Immaculate Conception, or the birth of the Buddha from his mother’s side, symbolic of the birth into divine love at the heart chakra. “It is our birthright to experience the divine birth,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “but most of us turn down the opportunity for that because we’re so attached to the ego. It’s as if the larva, the caterpillar, refuses to become the butterfly because it’s still too attached to munching those leaves and growing fat and crawling on the earth, and it doesn’t know the joy of flying as the butterfly. . . . But the divine birth, once it happens, once we are willing to dissolve the ego shell so that the birth can happen, is, initially, a birth of love, a birth of openness to the world again, a birth of wonderment, of aliveness.” It is a birth that brings the light into a world of darkness that can be shared with all. “Because the birth is not an individual birth; it’s not the birth of another level of ego. It is the birth of God, the infinite, the Universal Self, that moves through a particular organism but is not identified with it. And so it is the birth, again, of the realization that we are all one, and we are all co-creating this dream together and that we have all arranged to arrive at this moment.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Question: I’ve been reading that technology—if used the right way—would enable a world in which money is not necessary, and that there would be no war because money would not exist. So I was wondering if that would be like Sat Yuga.
“Yes, of course. And, yes, money is a fiction that is used as a mechanism of control,” adds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the money system is collapsing as well because the money system requires trust. . . . And it only lasts, as any Ponzi scheme does, as long as people have confidence. And now that that’s been lost, the game is collapsing. . . . And that’s when real wealth, again, will be able to emerge into consciousness because money is fictional wealth; it’s a representation of wealth. . . . But there will be no need for money when there is true love again among human beings. And love for the earth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Question: When we saw the film on Ramana Maharshi, he talked about tapas, which is profound perception, and I wanted to ask you what exactly is profound perception? And he also talked about the mind turning inward. Can you explain that?
Tapas is “making the mind very subtle so that you perceive that source from which thoughts arise,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And Ramana was very clear that all thoughts begin with the ‘I’ thought, and they’re related to the ‘I.’ And that ‘I’ always wants something, or is reacting to something. And once you get into that reaction, then all of the associations and conditionings, that have attached to the ‘I’ since childhood, glom onto it and create predetermined circuits of thought. But if you’ll go back to the source of the ‘I,’ prior to the linguistic expression of the ‘I,’ but the certainty of being Sat—it is that certainty, rather than language or representation of the ‘I,’ but the sense that is indubitable of beingness—and stay there, that’s Tapas.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Question: Our relationship with technology has been novel in the past few centuries, but particularly in the last decades. And a friend of mine who was having knee surgery commented to me the other day how glad he was that he lives in the 21st century. Another person I encountered was captivated by her technology and what it can do. Does technology play a positive role because it seems that technology is also at the forefront of destroying the world?
“Well it’s the use of technology at the service of the ego rather than at the service of the Divine Self that is the problem,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so it is actually the lack of the highest possible technology, because we have externalized everything, because we think of ourselves as machines that have created a technology in our own image, in the image of the ego, that involves internal combustion engines, because we’re all combusting, exploding inside from our own ego conflicts—all of this is mirrored in the external world. . . . So in every way now we have seen that we have passed our peak, and this culture is dying because we haven’t reached a high enough level of psycho-technology to transcend the ego.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
“Yoga is about subtlety,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “In the olden days, in the ancient culture, subtlety was a central concept. And in those days, if you had a map of all of Asia and Europe, and even other parts of the world, you would recognize that there was a single culture, a culture of yoga, that was the same whether you were in ancient Greece, or you were in Persia, or you were in China, or you were in India. And whether you went with a Taoist yogi, or a Buddhist yogi, or a Greek yogi, the concepts were the same.” And the essence of that teaching is “just be still. Silence the chattering mind so you can pay attention to the more subtle levels of the mind.”
“The great yogi Empedocles, about 2500 years ago in Greece, was very famous for saying ‘even silence is a veil over the silence’ because the real silence only begins when there is no sense of a self trying to be silent; that already creates a shell around the real nucleus of the nucleus. As the great Muslim yogi Ibn Arabi used to say, ‘the self of the self, as we go deeper and deeper within, through the ego, deeper into the soul and into the Spirit, we reach levels of silence that are not only free of concepts, but they're free of duality, they’re free of the very structures that have been opposed on reality.’ As Immanuel Kant discovered in his philosophical meditations, ‘space and time are simply structures of consciousness.’ Go deeper than those structures, and you enter the realm of eternity.”
“So it is in this level of the deepest silence that we become liberated from the chain of consciousness that locks one idea after another after another, and through those associations predetermines where we will get to. If we want freedom from those predetermined cycles of thought, then we must reach a level of consciousness that is prior to any identification with thought; any identification—or even use—of language. And it is in that state that we will receive inspiration,” which will come, not in language, but in light and in an intuitive knowing. “But a knowing that is realized as our being. There will no longer be an ‘I’ who knows something about that. There will be a realization of the unity of subject and object, of seer and seen. And that unity is the expression of love.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Question: Why is competition so prevalent in this society?
“Because the ego’s an imitation: you become who you are by imitating others,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But deep down, you know you’re just an imitation, and an imitation is a phony. And so you hate the one you’ve imitated. Now, the only reason you imitated them was because you loved them, and desired them, and thought they were great. But once you have become their imitation, then you wanna kill them so they no longer exist to take away your sense that you're the real one, because whenever they appear, they’re a threat, now, to you. . . . So, the ego is always terrified that it’s an impostor. And, therefore, it has to be unique, and it has to be superior to the other or it can collapse easily into non-entityhood.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Comment: In my darkest moments, I was faced with the fact that I hated the other’s aliveness. I feel like it’s one of the things that, if there’s going to be love and compassion for the other, has to be overcome. I don’t know if it’s just the terror of seeing how dead one is inside that makes it so threatening when somebody else is alive, and maybe this isn’t as universal as I think, and that’s why I’m asking.
“Well, it’s one way that it shows up. I think every ego envies, at an unconscious level, and hates people who it believes are happy. And especially if it’s a kind of happiness that is closed to them,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And it’s universal “that you pick a shadow figure to dehumanize because you believe that they are enjoying something you can’t enjoy. . . . So it’s universal in terms of the envy, but the way it shows up is different. But every ego is in a state of competitiveness with every other ego. And that competitiveness creates a negative sense that is almost continuous . . . so that everyone’s comparing themselves to the other.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Question: The agencies of evil and greed operate around the world openly and freely because there is no retribution. Such arrogance. Is there retribution to be paid, or do they get away with murder?
“No. There is ultimate justice in the universe,” assures Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The law of karma reaches everywhere, but it’s not immediate. And in part, the reason why it cannot be immediate in this time period is that everyone participates in that evil to some extent, and therefore everyone deserves to suffer. And so the evil is the payment for evil. No one wants to live in an evil world, but no one’s willing to become good. And so it is the collective karma of the populations of the world that put up with evil in the society and the government—in whatever structures have been created that are accessories both before and after the fact. And it is our awakening from this internalized evil that is necessary if we’re going to change the world and bring about the kind of retribution you’re talking about. . . . And the weak point in what prevents this full balance from being re-achieved is that there hasn’t become yet a critical mass of beings who have transcended the ego. When that happens, then the world will deserve to be restored to the Garden of Eden state that we have destroyed.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Question: In this transition of becoming porous—so you can perceive the miraculous—won’t that porosity also permit whatever residues that remain to boil up to the surface?
“The more of this work you do, and the more serious you take it, the more you flush out the repressed unconscious traumas, resistances, egocentricity, narcissism—all of the very core, dirty truth—the hidden truth of the ego—it gets revealed. And that’s when the going gets tough, and you need to have an energy field of love that will unconditionally accept you when you feel miserable and unworthy of even being on a path like this,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s why it’s so important that we have a stable community that recognizes the shadow work, and that valorizes it, and that doesn’t stigmatize anyone for going through some negative period when the cloud of Maya is over their heads and you can’t even see them cause it’s so thick, but you still see the light through the cloud. . . . And we have to prepare ourselves, and each other, for the difficulty of facing the shadow—and defeating it, as a spiritual warrior.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
Student Question: When you’re in Maya can you realize God? And then also, is Maya created for you to get back to God?
“Yes you can only see God when you're in Maya. And you can only see Maya when you're in God, this is true. Maya and God are two poles of the same ultimate reality,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it is given [to] us so that we can—by understanding it—get the juice out of it, the nectar, the divine nectar that is contained within every suffering, within every negative situation there is some gem of wisdom that we can extract from it and grow into greater God-consciousness. So rather than simply get negative about the negative, become a scientist seeking what is the hidden jewel, what is the hidden divine nectar that I can take out of this apparent disaster, and realize that it is a great blessing?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 9, 2010.
“We are all beings of bliss. Do you experience that? Bliss is our natural state,” provides Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But once the Self, that is blissful, mis-identifies Itself with the physical organism and with the ego image, the ego complex, you could say, then It loses Its bliss. . . . So have you ever bought a new car, and soon after you drive it off of the lot it gets dented? And suddenly this new car that felt very heavenly, that made you feel wonderful because you bought the car you really wanted, and everything was perfect—the first dent takes all of that away. . . . So all of us are living with that: we go from an ‘I’ to an ‘I’-dentity; the ‘I’ gets dented. And once we have an identity, then we are filled with [a] sense of hurt cause when you're dented, you're hurt, and you don’t feel perfect; you feel defective. You feel used. And even abused. And so most of us are riding around in these vehicles, these car-bodies, creating karma, and feeling more and more abused, and more hurt—and more like we’re lost and don’t even know why we’re in the car or where we’re going, or what this whole journey is all about. And as long as we’re in the car we can’t figure it out. And as long as we’re identified with the car, we can’t get out of the car.”
“And so Sri Ramana, who is one of our inspirations in Sat Yoga, always says that the first question has to be ‘Who am I?’ and to realize that the ‘I’ is not the body and it’s not the mind and it’s not the ego and it’s not the self-image—and it’s not any of the things that you have attached yourself to in order to anchor yourself in an i-dentity. And that’s all that we have to do is to let go of that and to abide in the Self, to rest in the ‘I’ prior to the dent. . . . And so it is necessary to rest, just as you do in deep sleep, to rest in presence, without the fear of the death of your identity. And know that in that peacefulness, there is release—and it will be eternal release if you allow it—into a vast state of presence in which the fear of death will be completely dissolved. And the fear of life. And then, this world becomes a heaven.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 9, 2010.
Excerpt: “As you all know, I’m sure, it goes quite against the grain of this time period to be building a monastery. . . . [and] spiritual retreats of the old type are falling away, losing their credibility, their integrity, the interest of people in leading a life devoted to contemplation of God, and a life of what has been called ‘blessed simplicity.’ And yet—because of all of that, and because of the hyperactivity of the modern world, and the disappointment that we all have come to feel about the projects of the modern age, and of science itself, as having led to a dead end, and to the destruction of our ecosystem, and to the un-sustainability of the modern way of life—there is a new interest—there’s a new wave of interest in creating spiritual communities in the world. But somehow we have to put the old wine into a new bottle that makes it attractive to the modern mind.”
“So our approach here is very secular, and it’s open to anyone from any spiritual background. And we don’t focus on whatever name you have for the Ultimate Reality because it’s beyond any name or any dogma or any creed. It’s a matter of realization. And that realization can only happen when the mind is in silence. And so that’s why meditation is the central act that forms the core of a spiritual life.” Someone once asked the great twentieth century sage Ramana Maharshi what the best way to achieve liberation was, and he replied “one-pointedness.” “The problem is that most people can’t do it; most people who sit to meditate have a very hard time silencing the mind. It seems to me that before we learn one-pointedness, we have to master two-pointedness . . .”
“And when we create an ashram, we are creating an entangled energy field that is like a metaphor used in ancient India called ‘The net of Indra’ where there’s this wonderful net that is the whole universe, and that at the corner of each point where the nettings meet, there’s a pearl, a beautiful jewel, that reflects every other jewel within itself—it’s really the holographic paradigm before that word existed. And it was recognized that that indeed is the structure of the universe: that each one of us is a microcosm that contains the entire universe and every being within it. And if will be in our meditative core, we will realize that oneness with all beings, and there will be no more conflicts, no more antagonisms, no more alienation.”
“And so an ashram is simply that practice, and the fulfillment of the desire to live a life with other beings who want to also live in openness, not in defensiveness, and to share the beauty of life at the highest level with one another. . . . And that act is the most revolutionary act that you can perform. And it will bring you in connection with all the other beings—the great sages and saints who are here on the earth today, the avatars, who are working secretly, silently together to create such a new world.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 2, 2010.
Student Comment: When you mentioned the “Hundredth Yogi Effect,” or critical mass, I remembered all of the other spiritual traditions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, etc., which all had great expectations to transform the world as well. I agree that the problem of the world today is a spiritual problem, but I have noticed that there is a continual falling away of spiritual movements, and I wanted to know why this is.
“The spiritual traditions that are now dying . . . were formed at what’s called the ‘Axial Age.’ They were what sustained humanity as the human ego became darker and denser and more materialistic,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And there has been a fall. ‘The Fall of Man’ is a true concept. And these religions were to maintain the Light in the darkness, but they all recognized that the darkness was increasing. . . . And this was understood: that we would come to such a climax, you could say, of the situation on earth in which the souls would reach their lowest point of entropy, but it would be at that point when we would awaken. And because of the realization of what we have done to the planet, we would reclaim our spiritual birthright and overcome the forces of darkness and bring about a new age. . . . But we have to bring this about; we can’t wait for a messiah or a Buddha to come. We have to be the avatars who bring this about; we must take responsibility for this.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 2, 2010.
Student Question: In school today we were learning about how to teach kids to read. And in one particular model, the first phrase that you teach the kids is that reading is thinking. I heard that and, I don’t know why, but it really rubbed me the wrong way. Is that true, that reading is thinking?
“Well, it depends on what thinking is,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Reading is entering into the mind of another being, of another consciousness.” So a better question is not “Do you read?” but “Who do you read?” “Literally, reading is an act of altering your state of consciousness. That’s what it is, it’s a drug. And if you read something very powerful, it can bring you into chakra seven.” However, today, reading has fallen into “this horizontal mastery of some skill sets on the physical plane. That’s not what reading is about at all. It’s the ladder to Heaven.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.
“One of the bhajans that was playing during our preliminary meditation was sung by Lata Mangeskar, a very famous early Bollywood singer when it was still relatively pure, and they were singing mantras. And the first mantra was ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram.’ And this translates as ‘the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.’ And the aim of meditation,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the Good, True, and Beautiful spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “is to find that in yourself which is eternally True, supremely Good, and infinitely Beautiful. And what’s important is that you have faith that you have that within you that corresponds to those attributes. Everyone does.”
However, to deal with the world, we created an ego structure. “And once we created that ego structure, it veiled the truth of our being. It veiled our radiance. And it veiled our goodness.” But the veiling was an illusion. And we have never been anything but the Satyam Shivam Sundaram. “And so all we’re doing in meditation is remembering that: that ‘I am That.’ Not the ego with its history and its shameful episodes and its failures and its losses and its depressions and anxieties—not that; that’s an artificial, false self. But the self that I am—the ‘I am that I am’ that is talked about in the Bible—that self, that ultimate Self that you are is already the radiant goodness of true being. And all we have to do is stop running away from the Self. . . . And if we will accept these three powers of Truth, and of Goodness, and of radiant Beauty, we will overcome the shadow within and the shadows without. And we can bring a world of light, a world of beauty, a world of goodness back into manifestation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.
Student Comment: During the teaching, you talked about how the ego is formed early on. So I was wondering how it forms. It has to come from somewhere.
“Humans are like monkeys; we imitate the other. And so the infant takes in the mirroring from the parents—the mother, primarily—and begins to express that back, and that creates the first structure. It’s called the ‘Mirror Stage,’” delineates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And then more and more elements get added and built around that, and as the child is called certain things . . . negative and positive signifiers, they get attached to the identity, and the structure builds according to the clues that the child picks up from the parents as to the role they want the child to play.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.
“I wish you all a wholehearted welcome,” offers Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s important because there’s very little that happens in the world these days that is wholehearted.” The contemporary ego structure is hyper-fragmented. It can’t love. It can’t trust. It is paralyzed by “the fear of letting go of those beloved defense mechanisms” that cause us all of our suffering. And it has developed all of these defense mechanisms to deal with a very decadent, and even demonic, culture. And if we can put down all of the ego’s defense mechanisms, all of its narratives, and make a wholehearted effort to “dive into the silence,” then we will find “the salvation of our being. That’s where we put out the fire of suffering, and we are healed by the waters of life.”
“But the world doesn’t value, any longer, this opportunity to dive deeply into the inner silence. It values busyness and distraction and continual production—activity—in which we lose our soul in the outer crust of our consciousness.” Ironically, the Self is actually “closer to us than our own minds,” but it has been “obscured by the thoughts and the chaos of negative feelings—of lostness, of terror, of fear, of anguish. But that consciousness that contains all of that—no matter what it is. That consciousness that is the ground and the support and the substratum of whatever arises in our minds and our hearts—that is pure and soothing. And if we enter into that silence, we will be healed. To whatever extent we are willing to dissolve that ball of suffering in the silent space of the Self, we will be whole; we will be made whole by the very consciousness that we’ve been running away from.”
“And then we discover—we come back from that silence with a new meaning, with a new understanding—a new intelligence that grasps the world without its coating in the conditionings of the past upon which the ego-mind is based. We find a new freedom to be reborn from that silence. And we are reborn . . . [as a] free, reborn spirit that is able to—now, without those preconditions and stories that limit and prevent us from seeing the world as it truly is—now, we can really find what is our heart’s desire and live it out, fully, wholeheartedly—no longer split—because we’re no longer deceiving ourselves, hiding from ourselves—running away—but wholeheartedly jump into life fully, passionately, wisely—and achieve the ultimate potential of which we are capable.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.
Student Question: Could you please expand on the gestalt diagram (see below) that was pictured in the book we’re reading in our Prema-culture class, Signs of Meaning in the Universe?
The issue “goes back to Gestalt Psychology. And the Gestaltists realized that our perception is always in the form of a foreground and a background,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “We tend to focus on the foreground, and the background drops out. . . . But whatever we choose as foreground is indeed a construct, and is culturally created—most of the objects that we perceive, we perceive because we have linguistic concepts that delineate those objects for us. And if we didn’t have such constructs embedded in language and cultural values, etc., we would see the world very differently because, in fact, everything is connected.”
“But then there is the next question of, well, ‘Who is perceiving both the foreground and the background?’ The perceiver is not on the paper; the perceiver is never an object. So there is a third level that is always beyond any understanding you have of reality, because the one who has that understanding does not appear in the reality; you are always beyond it. And so the self—when you begin to then incorporate it into your understanding of reality, whatever it is you understand of the self and add that in . . . there remains then another observer. . . . You will never be able to capture the self in any definition or construct or understanding. Because whatever you capture, that ‘you,’ is beyond.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.
Student Question: There are two gates upon arriving at the Sat Yoga Ashram, previously known as the North Gate and the South Gate. Now they’re Shiva Gate and Vishnu Gate. Could you please describe the two entrances to the ashram?
“Vishnu and Shiva are two archetypes,” reveals Shunyamurti, the archetypal leader of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “They are part of one of the Hindu Trinities” of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—the Creator, the Sustainer, and the Destroyer. “And so, there are people whose personalities tend toward the archetype of Vishnu, which is that archetype that chooses the life in duality, the expression of the greatest joy and celebration of a life that is devoted to the service of God. . . . And when one attunes to the archetype of Shiva, one is directly dissolving that egoic separation between the self and God. And one is living in the ultimate union of the two. So by the destruction of the ego, the Godself is incarnated as the Self, not as a separate being that one loves, adores—or is angry at for failing to give one the job or the life situation that one wanted. But the principle of Shaivite consciousness is that of dissolving all of the narratives of the ego into the silence of the Absolute.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.
Student Comment: The “pressure chamber” that you’ve always talked about all of the sudden came to my mind. Is this something that can last throughout one’s entire spiritual journey, like the “dark night of the soul?” There is this constant feeling that—because there is so much to learn and so much to discipline—one never leaves the pressure chamber until the end: Chakra Seven or death.
“Well, remember: if you put carbon under enough pressure it becomes a diamond. So that’s how the soul is transformed,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The more pressure that you’re under, the quicker the transformation will happen. And it can’t be done without pressure. And that’s why the whole world is now under tremendous pressure—and why there are no solutions of any ordinary kind: it’s forcing us to recognize that there is a non-ordinary reality that we must enter if we’re going to solve the problems that the world has.”
“And every spiritual tradition has always recognized that you have to create a pressure chamber for those who are on the path. Discipleship is a pressure chamber. . . . There is a self-discipline that is required. You know even if you join AA, or any of these twelve-step groups, they’ll tell you, “Come every day!”—not just once a week—every day to a meeting, to put yourself under the pressure of hearing information that your ego doesn’t want to hear so that you can overcome the addictive processes of the lower chakra behavior patterns and cut their power to enact themselves. . . . And so it is that forcible creation of creativity itself, within the mind, and the brain, that will enable you to burst through into a higher level of consciousness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.
Student Question: What is a koan?
“A koan is a voluntary way of putting your mind under pressure,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But life itself is a koan. And it’s because people can’t solve the riddle of their own life that they enter into a spiritual path. And we sit down and meditate and think about it. And, in the effort to solve that riddle, we will break through into our own liberation. But, no one can escape the fact that they are in an incoherent level of life when they’re in the ego, and they find themselves doing things they don’t really want to do, and they haven’t a clue why they’re doing it. . . . And so that riddle—if you become focused on it enough—will cause you to reach such a level of perplexity and frustration, that you’ll focus on solving it, and there will be a breakthrough to higher consciousness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.
Student Question: Could you say a little bit more about the levels of freedom and predetermination that you just mentioned?
“At every moment, you have the freedom to will whatever you wish; you can make choices. But do you have the freedom to choose what you wish to choose,” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s a higher logical level. Do you have the freedom to choose who you think you are, that is making those choices?” The ego’s will is a set of predetermined biological and cultural programs. “And yet, at any moment, you are free to transcend the ego, to disidentify from it through an act of radical detachment. And through that act you can free yourself. . . . But you could say that even that act of freeing yourself was determined by the trajectory of your own soul that chose a certain egoic structure that had enough ‘free will’ in it—enough give of the fixations of that determination—that enabled it to escape through a crack in the egoic logic.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.
Student Comment: I would like to learn more about discernment.
“It is the key to escaping from the ego’s event horizon and the illusions that the ego throws up in front of us and cause us to believe that we’re happy when we’re really not, and to believe that somebody else is the cause of problems when we have problems, and to believe that things are irreparable and there’s no way out, and falling into depression or anxiety, etc.,” discerns Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So, Viveka [discernment] is the capacity to discern when your ego is deceiving you from a situation of truth. . . . And at the state of Viveka, or discernment, you realize that it’s not real: your mind is creating illusions—hallucinations, demons—that are imaginary, that are disturbing you. And once you can discern that, you can dissolve those negative forces.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.
Student Question: I have a question about the use of medication with illnesses. There are many philosophies that say that one should not take medication when one is sick because the sickness is a process of natural/karmic purification. But I am very confused as to which is the correct option. Could you please provide some clarity on the topic?
“No, I think that if one can heal one’s sickness, one’s 'dis-ease,' it’s useful and important to do that as an act of love,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the doctor of the soul at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, it’s important to do it without evading what is the meaning of that illness; it is expressing something. And if you only take pills, as in the allopathic method of treatment in which there is no meaning to the disease, then that ultimate disturbance, which is of the soul, will come back in another way; the karma will find a way to hit you. . . . So, it doesn’t mean that we have to continue the suffering, but it does mean that we have an obligation to authentically discover what is the root of that illness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.
Student Question: I’ve never quite understood the meaning of the crucifixion. Could you please explain it a little bit?
“Crucifixion has many levels to it,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It is a crucifixion of duality, but there are many dualities: subject object duality; good and bad duality; desire and fear duality. And we are trapped in the mirage created by that duality. And because we want the illusion of the enjoyments that we think will come from the possession of other people, money, any kind of egoic power, that keeps us trapped—our attachments, our addictions—which all come from a self-image of being an entity. [As] soon as there is an entity, that entity is pinned to the world in which it appears. . . . And the spiritual journey of discipleship is the medicine that gets you off the cross because now, those disciplines pin you to the vertical; they force you to be vertical rather than horizontal. It is a higher ethic; a higher dharma. And it’s that dharma that has the power to pull you out of the morass of the desires and lower fantasies; it’s the only thing that can get you off the cross.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.
“Sri Ramana was often emphatic in saying that meditation is a non-objective process,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But it is also important that we emphasize that neither is meditation a subjective process. . . . And the word ‘subject’ has important ramifications. . . . Subject means ‘under the control of.’ A subject of the king or the queen of England, for example, a political subject; one is subject to various influences. And the ego is, in fact, an objectified subject, or subjectified object, but it is subjected to the objective image of itself and of the world. So to escape those influences, we must transcend subjectivity as well as objectivity.”
And, as it turns out, transcending this subjectivity is the one way to truly help the world out of this “knot” that it has been stuck in, “by meditatively sacrificing the egoic identity back into the foundation—into the ocean of consciousness that is nondual—that transcends first person, second person, third person (of language); it transcends ideas of God; and it also transcends ideas of atheism. It transcends all ideas because ideas, being linguistic forms, are caught in duality. And, the only way out, is through entering into the silence of pure Presence.”
And this “enables us to live joyously again—not with fear, no longer with any phobias, or crippling inhibitions—or need for exhibitions—because there is no ego that’s caught in that trap of either being superior or inferior; having or not having; being or not being. All of those dilemmas that can never be solved through any action we can perform in the world, until we have transcended the world, and return as the avataric vehicle of the Supreme Presence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.
Student Comment: Before you said that memories are all illusion. So what if somebody has this very difficult situation in their life, maybe when they were children or whatever. What about . . .
“How do you know it’s true? How do you know they’re not making up that memory, and it’s just happening now?” asks Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “No matter what you think you remember, you’re memories deceive you. . . . So, what is it that really traumatizes us? It’s a thought that occurs now, in this moment. It has nothing to do with the past. The past never happened. We’re making it all up. Now is all there is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 8, 2010.
“The paradox of the spiritual journey is that, in reality, all of us are already enlightened,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “We are always already liberated because there is only one Real, one Truth, one Beingness. The rest is illusion. . . . But . . . the Supreme Being, in order to enjoy all of the possibilities of experience, all the possible permutations of potentiality, has created Maya, the illusion of separateness.” We have lost the knowledge of our Divine Nature, “and it is a necessary loss of that knowledge that enables us to gain something else. And that something else includes courage and virtue—and the potential of discovering ever more within the realm of potentiality. To make this world . . . into the most beautiful flow of consciousness in action, in harmony—in the realization of unity in the diversity. To bring to the illusion the very power of Truth.”
“And it’s that capacity—to bring the Light into the darkness—that makes one’s illumination even more powerful than it would have been had you not manifested within the cloud of Maya. To light that light in the midst of the darkness, brings a richness to the Real that would not otherwise be there. . . . And now is the moment when we’re against the wall of all the karmic backlash of the putting off of realization . . . [and] we must achieve Liberation for the sake—not only of this individual illusion, but for the whole planetary illusion. And once one thread of that illusion is removed, the whole thing comes apart very easily. So there is no one to be liberated; that’s the meaning of Liberation. It is not that there is an ‘I’ who is in chains and then becomes liberated. It is that there is no separate ‘I.’ There is only the substratum of pure awareness that manifests the forms that appear in the flux of the phenomenal plane. And that consciousness is one with all that is and that ever was or shall be.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.
Student Question: If I understood what you were saying before, we should not be thinking about the past. We should not be paying attention to a moment that is not now. It seems so difficult because we are so used to having a story, right?
“Yes. And that story limits you,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To whatever extent, it gives you a defined identity, and defined goals; it limits your possibilities. And then you don’t have free will. You can choose to will what you want, but you can’t change what you want to want. Freedom only comes when you can want to want something different. . . . But if you are infinite potentiality, then you’re free. And you’re not identified even with the gender of your body or the age of your body or the nationality or—any of the things that limit your possibility. Why not be totally free?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.
Student Comment: I have a question on the fragments of the ego. You said it develops from people imprinting on you, so you get little bits of this and that. So they’re all ultimately unrelated pieces trying to work together.
“Well, you relate them. You make up relations. You try to with whatever power of mind you have; you make up stories,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And you take all those fragments and you make a narrative out of it; you string them all together. But the narrative is a fantasy.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.
Student Question: When you are sublimating the lower chakras, specifically from one to seven, what exactly are you purifying?
“That’s the core of the ego,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. The ego fears “that it doesn’t really exist, that it’s just a mass of fragmented emotions,” which is reminiscent of the baby’s experience before it gains motor skills. “So chakra one contains that ultimate fear of helplessness.” And that feeling of helplessness is absolutely terrifying. “And so when you get into that core of anxiety, and surrender, even that, to the Supreme Reality, and you can witness it without fear, without anxiety—without needing a body, whether in it’s in good condition or in completely dysfunctional condition—then that surrender allows one to rise to the ultimate bliss.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.
Excerpt: “The silence that we share here is far more important than the words, and the connection that we make. . . . And so, this is a place to talk in a way that people rarely talk together in other contexts. . . . [And] that’s important: that we can think out-of-the-box together in new ways about what life is really about. . . . According to the neurobiologists today, none of you are in this room; you’re actually inside your brain watching a movie about this room. . . . We’re in the matrix; that’s why that movie was so popular. But is that true? . . . now, the most recent discoveries in neurobiology include the understanding of what they call ‘neuroplasticity,’ which means that the brain can repair itself. And it has the capacity to add synapses that didn’t exist before, and to begin to use certain parts of the brain for other purposes when necessary. And to achieve a greater capacity of whatever sort that is asked for by consciousness. So, it’s not the case that it’s a one-way relationship that the brain creates our subjectivity; it’s also the case that our subjectivity creates and re-creates our brain. So there’s free will even at that level; it’s no longer the machine metaphor . . .”
“And so [Sat Yoga’s] think tank is about freedom. But it’s not just to have freedom of having new concepts, it’s about using those concepts to open up our heart. So the think tank turns into a thank tank—we want to be here in a state of gratitude for life. In a state of an ability to love, and to feel the energy of love that supports our existence and our reason for being.” And in order to find a way to help the world, to enter the miraculous states of consciousness, “we have to find those forces that are currently outside consciousness and bring them in. And the ultimate outside—the absolute Other beyond consciousness, the force that produces those archetypal energies that then produce the ego and its conscious ideation—that has traditionally been called God. It’s a scientific concept. It’s a theoretical understanding of the fact that there must be this Ultimate Reality, and we have certain windows that will give us glimpses into it. But is it possible to open ourselves so much, to push the envelope to such an extent that that Ultimate Outside becomes included, and there is no longer a duality of inside and outside?”
“And so we have to return to that original capacity for transdifferentiation if we’re going to heal the world. But we have to start with our own individual consciousness, and use whatever margin of willpower we have to overcome the unconscious censoring mechanisms that keep us from knowing who we are, and from activating the latent potential that we all have to achieve what in the old days was called divinity. But really we can look at as a scientific term that refers to the ultimate state of psycho-spiritual maturity that human beings are capable of: the expansion of consciousness beyond that of this skin-encapsulated ego to encompass the entire world as a unity.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 29, 2010.
Student Question: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the differences between being in the now, the present, during meditation vs. when you’re going about doing errands and other activities in the world.
“In the field of yoga, these two different possibilities of what you can achieve in the sitting meditation and what you can achieve in the daily life meditation are referred to on the one hand as nirvikalpa samadhi, and on the other hand as sahaja nirvikalpa samadhi,” maintains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “In sitting meditation, you can reach such a state where the ego completely dissolves, and there is a realization of, not only the oneness of all things, but of the presence of the past and the future; one enters the eternal now. . . . The greatest yogis say that that’s not enough. We want to be able to be in a state in which the mind is silent and we experience that eternal now even while we’re walking around and working and doing whatever we need to do in our daily tasks.” And once one is in that state, “then life is just joyous because you are seeing the Absolute in everyone.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 29, 2010.
“Sat Yoga,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica,” is the science of becoming an avatar,” a realized incarnation of the Supreme Being in the phenomenal plane. Becoming an avatar is the greatest blessing that one can bestow upon the world, the most compassionate act that one can commit. But, as the saying goes, “with great power comes great responsibility,” and, therefore, not everyone may be ready to make this transformation; this act of surrender to God. “So first of all, everyone must ask themselves the question, ‘Do I want to be an avatar? Am I ready to undertake that incredible transfiguration?’ and ‘Am I prepared to do what it takes to achieve the reality of being an avatar, not just lip service?”
Entering avatar-consciousness means giving up ego-consciousness, the false sense of autonomy and separation from the world. It’s very simple, but not easy. “And as we know, there’s a huge struggle against the externalizing tendency of the egoic mind. And this is why we have used the metaphor of the salmon swimming upstream against the outward flow of the mind, until we get to the Source. . . . And these tendencies of the mind to flow outward, to externalize, to try to grab onto experience—to possess, to dominate, to get the jouissance of the entity, of the physical body—are what must be overcome through wisdom, not through fighting, not through creating another internal struggle . . .”
Every egoic connection must be severed. Everything must be surrendered to God. “And then, the descent into the body—purely for service—the bodhisattva ideal, is clearly recognized as the only motive for living. And when there are no other conflicting motives, then the flow of generosity of spirit, emerging out of inner silence, out of complete emptiness, is one’s natural state. . . . And then there is love.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 27, 2010.
“We have come together to meditate. But why? What do we wish to achieve through meditation,” asks Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. We wish to achieve liberation from the ego—and specifically from the lowest, imaginary part of the ego—for whom life is a constant oscillation between desire and suffering. All satisfaction, a mirage. “The mirages create suffering because they create false expectations and delusions. And embedded in them is fear because the ego is alienated from its true nature. And its true nature—the True Nature of your being—is of course one with all that is, and therefore there is no fear and no desire because you already are, and have, everything you need within.”
And although Sri Ramana Maharshi himself once said that meditation could not bring about liberation, he was referring to meditation on an object. Nonetheless, Sri Ramana was a strong advocate of the practice of “Atma-vichara” or self-enquiry. “Atma-vichara means to realize who you are, beyond the ego. Beyond the mind. And so you cannot use the mind for that purpose. And you cannot assume the ego is the one who is meditating; that assumption has to be deconstructed. The meditation is an experience of pure awareness. . . . And so it’s this shift that enables one to be free. To be free of what? To be free of the ego’s insecurities.”
So we don’t want to become “spiritual materialists,” and build an ego around reaching high states in meditation. “We want to dissolve the ego. . . . But the ego is always looking for things to build up its self-esteem, its sense of empowerment in the world, without realizing that this is actually working against its true empowerment that only comes from dissolving the need to have a mask, an attainment—even a style. . . . All of those things create a self-image. And then we work to support that self-image. And that self-image is the very thing that veils the Real Self from us.”
“And immediately when you answer the question ‘Who am I that is behind the mind?’ there will be a state of peace. . . . and a sense of energy that is beautiful energy, it’s divine energy. It’s love. And it is there, within you, and it wants to emerge. And when you allow that to happen, you will find that you’re free of the neediness and the aggressiveness and the defensiveness. . . . You will have realized that the Self you are needs no defenses, it needs no style—it needs no mask. . . . And this is what enables life to then blossom and flourish in a completely new octave that the ego can never reach.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 22, 2010.
Student Question: It was mentioned in the study group that the ego moves through different assemblage points. Can you maybe describe more about how the ego moves through these different points?
“An assemblage point is an organizing principle around which the ego operates,” delineates Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The first one is about security issues,” and the ego wants to cling to anything that will give it “a sense of security in the world—but it doesn’t actually . . . know how to enjoy them. . . . And then at the next level, it’s more of aggression, and anger, and revenge for having lost the nest, the womb of the mother. And then at the next one, finally there’s a relationship of reciprocity that becomes possible with others. Love finally becomes possible, but it still has this quid pro quo. . . . And so at each assemblage point, there’s more freedom, there’s more generosity, there’s more attraction to Spirit, to Love, to Light, to giving, to feeling one with nature. . . . So the great willpower that we need is to get past the lower assemblage points, and then the higher ones take us effortlessly to bliss.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 22, 2010.
Student Question: Do you always sit in compassion in your field—the people and places with which you associate yourself—or would you go onto another field and say, “Well I just want to experience something different?”
“Well,” answers Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “you’ll be guided as to the field you're in. And most people don’t have very much choice.” But, “as you develop, spiritually, more doors will open; you’ll be aware that there are more options, and you’ll be more drawn towards a Sangha, a community of people who are resonating at a higher level, so that you can have relationships that are more fulfilling, more enhancing.” But it doesn’t mean that you have to become a doormat. “So the actions you take may not look like they are in ahimsa, they may not always have the look that one would expect, but you will act spontaneously when you’re in touch with the source in a way that is accurate.” Recorded on Thursday, July 22, 2010.
“Each of us must be responsible for our own liberation. It’s not something that an other can do for you,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But, paradoxically, “Liberation is not an attainment. . . . The reason that it’s not an attainment, is that Liberation actually requires losing something. The problem is we’ve already attained something too much; we’ve attained a false identity. That’s what gets in the way of our bliss. . . . So it’s not that we have to get something, but we have to let go of something. And yet it’s the thing that we’re most proud of, this ego that we’ve constructed. It’s our doll. It’s our great idol that we worship. And who can let go of that, ‘What will I be if I let go of that?’”
“And it’s this anxiety of being nothing if I let go of the mask. And being vulnerable—because you could also use the metaphor of saying the ego’s like a tank, like one of these war machines: it’s full of armor to protect itself against attacks; it’s got a cannon mouth right in the middle; it’s got all kinds of little holes for machine guns; it can run on these tracks in any terrain; it’s really tough—it can put up with all kinds of nastiness and give back all that it gets. The problem is that it can’t fly. It can’t accomplish joy; you don’t go out for a joy ride in a tank. It’s only geared for war, and it forces you to see life as a war.”
“So if we want to get out of the tank and start to fly, then we have to become like a UFO. Except in this case it’s a UFS: we have to become an Unidentified Flying Subject, not an object. And we become unidentified when we stop identifying with the ego. And then we’re free and we can fly, and we don’t have any more need for defense mechanisms cause there’s nothing to defend, nothing to protect, once we are unidentified.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 15, 2010.
Student Comment: In the study group, we were discussing “The Seven Structures of Duality,” and I found myself thinking the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And it seemed to me that if one had a good intention, that the end would justify the means. But if one’s good intentions are leading to hell . . .
“That’s correct, that’s why there must be a transcendence of that structure, means and ends. When the ego is in stillness, there is no longer any intention,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Ramana Maharshi was once asked a similar question from a professor of religion, a pundit, in India about Nishkama Karma, “and Ramana led him on a walk up the mountain of Arunachala. And along the way, on the trail, they found this stick that was full of thorns and branches, and Ramana just sat down very quietly, found an old leaf, and started polishing the stick. And the pundit who was with him didn’t know what was going on. He just sat and waited. And Ramana sat there for six hours polishing this stick until he got all of the little spines off of it. . . . And when it was done, he got up and started walking. And he had only taken about three steps when this Shepard boy, who lived on the mountain, ran past and was crying, and said he couldn’t capture his sheep because he lost his stick. And Ramana handed him the stick. . . . This was a major teaching for the pundit.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.
“I hope all of you feel at peace in your body and in your mind. That’s the starting point for the spiritual journey,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Indeed, the first mantra, “Om Shanti,” reminds us of this starting point. “This is why Sri Ramana was very intent on repeating an expression from the Bible more than, even from the Vedas or Vedanta, it was a phrase that he was very fond of: ‘Be Still and Know that I am God.’ And, he analyzed it as follows: first you must be still; that’s the prime commandment. And in that stillness, you will realize that the ‘I,’ that you thought you were—the ‘I’ of the ego, the ‘I’ identified with the body, the ‘I’ that thinks to itself, talks to itself—that ‘I’ is not who you are. The real ‘I’ emerges in the stillness, and that ‘I’ is the Absolute.”
“And this is what the act of meditation really is: it is a surrender. It is an act of bhakti, of devotion, in which we sacrifice the luxury of chattering to ourselves and justifying our little ‘I’s existence, and we surrender to the great ‘I’ that is God. And in that stillness, all those other little ‘I’s, those fragments of consciousness, dissolve, they integrate back into the One Self until finally there is nothing left but the One Self. And all the illusory identifications fall away; they have no more purpose.”
“And so in the act of meditation through the silence, which is the sacrifice itself, the flame of consciousness melts away the illusions of Maya, and we are liberated. And the more that we stay in the silence—the stillness—the more the power of God emerges, opens our heart to love, and frees us from the thought patterns and the behavior patterns that had enslaved us to fear, to desire, to hatred, to suffering of all kinds. . . . And so if we meditate in that state—not wanting to get anything for the little ‘I’, but to give the power of the little ‘I’ to the Great Self—then Liberation is achieved.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.
Student Comment: I’ve heard you say before that “language has colonized our minds,” which really helps me clear my head during meditation. I would like to know, however, if language really is a non-corporeal entity, or if I am simply literalizing the metaphor.
“It’s an entity in the sense that it is used by the collective consciousness so that language becomes the carrier of particular messages of any given society,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual and linguistic master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And those signifiers then take on a life of their own and create patterns of belief about the nature of one’s self, what should be one’s goals, what should be one’s desires and fears. And to the extent that one is entrained into that social link, then one has lost one’s free will into the will created by language—which, once it is internalized, you imagine is your own thought, whereas it is actually a thought placed there. . . . And so it is only by silencing the mind, and cleaning it out . . . that one can discover who one is before the ego was implanted through the naming and the emplacement of fantasy structures . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.
“The journey to spiritual liberation is a rocky journey for everyone,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Along the journey, one recognizes one’s own suffering. And the cause of one’s suffering is linked to an inability to love, and a fear based on the mis-perception of separation from the world, also known as the ego. “But the odd thing is we cherish this very ego that is the cause of our suffering, and we won’t let it die; we think it protects us. Ego death is the goal of every spiritual tradition,” and we are reminded of the Bible which says, “unless a kernel of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” So it is with ego death.
“And yet, how many of us will let that ego die. And we don’t let it die because we are afraid of loneliness. One of the words for ego death in the Ashtanga Yoga tradition, begun by Patanjali, is Kaivalya. . . . And for Patanjali, what this meant was a separation of Purusha from Prakriti, and then Purusha lives in complete solitude; Kaivalya means solitude. You’re all alone. And indeed we are all alone, and we don’t want to face that we’re all alone. And we would rather have a bad object out there, that we can be angry at and think ‘Well, if only it wasn’t for them I’d be OK and loved and alright,’ rather than realizing we are absolutely alone in a world that is our own projection.”
“The irony is that once we allow ourselves to enter into the solitude, we find [that] it’s not a solitude that is an isolation from the world; it’s not a loneliness. It is a unity with all that is. You are alone because there is no other; we are all One. . . . But we must let the mind die in order to know that, and the fear of that keeps the negative thought cycle going on and on. . . . But when we allow that all to settle, we find that the Divine Self is right there, it has been right there all along. . . . It’s on the surface, but we just don’t connect with it out of fear of losing this ego cycle that we think keeps us alive and actually keeps us from truly living.”
“There’s a great tradition in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage called ‘Chud.’. . . What it means is that you cut the self-cherishing of the ego. You cut all your connection to wanting to have this ego which will then give you all your suffering. . . . Then, once they have cut the connection to needing the ego to survive, they will find that under that fear is great joy. . . . So we all have to become Chud Masters here, and cut away the cherishing of the ego which creates the suffering and that cuts us off from the love that we all have within. And we want it to come out and manifest, and to be a gift to all others in the world. And that’s the only thing that will fulfill us.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 1, 2010.
Student Comment: My whole life I’ve felt the need to live an authentic life. So what you said tonight was very poetic for me.
“This is what all of human culture is about,” reminds Shunyamurti, the authentic director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And through time, the different philosophers have given their own spin on that. But that’s been the essential question: ‘How shall I live?’ . . . All of culture, whether at the popular level or the high cultural level, [people] are always asking this question: ‘Do you want to be in the matrix and have a comfortable, inauthentic existence, or do you want to face the adventure of insecurity?’ . . . We have the insecurity of not knowing, not depending on someone to take care of us when it means betraying our values, not depending on cultural values that we know are not authentically true, caving in to the herd and not following our truth and our heart. If you don’t lead that authentic existence, you're lost.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 1, 2010.
“All the sages of every tradition of spiritual realization agree that our true nature is luminous, loveful, joyous, blissful, eternal, non-local Presence. That’s what we are,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But the ego has made six maneuvers in order to lose itself, and one to refind itself. “There was first a separation from this Source. And then a subtraction from the infinite down to the finite. And then a further contraction down into the individual—a kind of a tunnel vision. And then an introjection of the energies of others in that same state of contraction. And then within that, a fantasy creation—a creation of series of false views of reality. And then a projection of all of that falseness onto the world. That’s the lostness that we have entered into as a result of these six maneuvers.”
“There’s one seventh maneuver left to us, which is recognition: we can begin to recognize the plight that we have put ourselves in through these other six. And then gradually, we can recognize one by one, these which have become veils, or obstacles, to the realization of the infinite, eternal, blissful Self. . . . So the first thing we have to do is to recognize that this ego-consciousness that we start out in . . . is based on these false ideas that were originally introjected—taken in from the world—as children. . . . And we have created out of that a fundamental attitude toward reality which is based on the attitude we believe others have toward us.”
“And so we have to be willing to put that fantasy into parentheses. We have to be willing to say ‘It may not be true’—that’s what we have to first question, that reality. . . . And then by recognizing that you are consciousness, you begin to let go of all of the fixations that you believe are connected to the bodily identity. . . . And that allows us to go deeper inward. And in that going inward, we will begin to encounter the subtler energies that we don’t normally feel. . . . And we’ll begin to actually experience the inner white light that most people don’t encounter except at death. But it’s here—always. And we are that light. And we are the Source of that light.” The mind cannot reach that Source, “but through the letting go—that ultimate letting go of separation from that: the very primal subject/object duality, which was the first separation, can be healed. And in that moment, then we are one with the Source, and the journey is complete.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 24, 2010.
Student Comment: Ever since I was born, I was taught that God was there, that you had to ask God for things, that you had to say thank you, and that He was the doer, not you.
“What you were taught is the exoteric version of religion, which is a dualistic version,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the esoteric teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Ultimately, yes, God is the doer, but are you not that God also, part of that Whole. It’s the mind that is in a state of separation from that, and the mind wants things from that Being rather than wanting salvation from the mind itself, and that is what the Supreme Being offers.” Surrendering to the Self, to God, is the only way to end suffering. “Surrender is the very surrender of the sense of being a separate entity from the Absolute. And in that, all confusion ends.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 24, 2010.
Student Comment: I read something today which said that “everything that is transient is not real.”
“Well, the definition of ‘Real’ is what is in question,” begins Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “For most of the Eastern traditions, the Real is that which is eternal, immutable, and non-changing.” For a Westerner, however, “the Real” is typically understood as the “external,” objective world of common experience. In contrast, for Indians, for example, the “external world” is understood as Mahamaya, the cosmic illusion. “So in that sense, of course, everything within this flux that we call time and space is unreal, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel it very deeply, that it can’t traumatize us, etc. A nightmare is not real, but you can wake up in a sweat over it. . . . And so this Cosmic Dream is given [to] us in the way it is in order to help us achieve the Real, and to begin to grow to levels of wisdom and awareness that transcend even our original Nature so that there is an evolution to ever higher and higher states. So there is a growth that the unreal makes possible to achieve higher Reals.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 24, 2010.
Student Question: Within the context of what he was talking about (meditating at great lengths vs. processing one’s ego), where do sanskaras fit in?
“They are what you have to battle,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute. And the sanskaric desires, “won’t let you stop thinking about them. And the lower three chakras are the main ones that people’s minds are wrapped around. And they are aggression, paranoia, security needs, [and] sexual desires. . . . And then those get projected on particular people, and situations your in, and suddenly you’re thinking about all of that, and you're not meditating on God-consciousness; you’re using that time to focus on ‘Why is this happening to me?’ or ‘How am I gonna get this person in bed?’ or ‘How am I gonna get rid of this enemy?’ and ‘How am I gonna conquer this and that?’ All of these scenarios are much more interesting to the ego than the blissful silence. And so it takes a lot of work to be able to gain such a center that’s detached from all of that—that you can silence the mind in the midst of that, and then burn up all of these sanskaras.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 2010.
Student Question: I have two questions which have nothing to do with one another. One of them is that sometimes I find I am in the child’s period of saying “no,” and I am going through everything that I don’t like about society and about people that surround me and about things I have done in the past—everything negative. I feel like I have identified what I don’t want to be. But I have not yet found what I want to be. Is this a normal transition? And the other question is, I know very little about the “Gaia Theory,” and I wanted to ask you if you think that nature has consciousness, and if that has anything to do with the Gaia Theory.
“Yes of course. Everything is consciousness,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Nature is the realization of the omni-centricity of consciousness. All apparent beings are part of a Single Consciousness. That Single Consciousness is not localizable in one particular place. So you could say, Gaia has no ego, but Gaia is beyond ego, not before ego.”
And, in regards to the second question, “Yes, negativity is the basis of consciousness—and this, by the way, is the theory of Hegel. If you read Hegel it’s all about how wonderful negativity is, and we’re not negative enough. . . . . So it is important—but it’s important to be the witness of the no-saying consciousness and not identified with it so that you can raise it to the point where it goes beyond that ‘no,’ into a recognition of its ability to say ‘no’ even to its saying ‘no.’ And once that happens, then it can say yes to all possibilities.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 2010.
“Many people have the misunderstanding that liberated beings become very boring,” provides Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s a very bad misunderstanding because the ego never wants to be boring, and so it always has an excuse: ‘I don’t wanna waste my life sitting in that cave doing nothing. I wanna be active.’ And of course nothing is further from the truth: the more liberated we are, the more creative we are. The more empowered we are in every field that moves us, and we are moved by infinite fields of possibility the more liberated we are.”
“I was reminded recently of one of the great Zen Masters in Japan, a man named Takuan Soho. . . . He was a great poet, artist, calligrapher, philosopher, master of the tea ceremony. Unfortunately he became very popular, and the Shogun called him to the court and that’s where his problems began. He got into politics as well; now this is an interest that we have to be very careful about. But in the court he became a teacher of the great samurai warriors. . . . And he was able to teach them because his mind was so still that he could help to bring a swordsman into that timeless state where he could be aware of what was happening in slow motion and be able to respond with absolute accuracy. And he developed there the concept of the ‘unfettered mind.’ . . . And so he had a number of samurai students who he was teaching the art of swordsmanship to, but through the means of meditation.”
“But this idea of the unfettered mind is a very powerful concept. And the idea is that the mind must not be detained by anything; the mind must remain forever free. It cannot be stopped. . . . And the thing that detains the mind most of all is the ego. The ego is a series of conventionalized thoughts that have an emotional charge. And as soon as we get caught and fixated on any one of those charges—any signifier, any self-image, any pattern, any emotion that’s connected to the ego—we’re lost. . . . And so one must remain in the state where one does not have an ego in order not to have anything that binds the pure awareness and the emergence of the full flowering of our creative potential.”
“So meditation is letting go of that illusion of the existence of a separate entity. And that entity is only an appearance in consciousness, as is the whole world. And if we can let go of that obsession, the entity itself dissolves because it’s only kept alive by our attention that we give to it. Let it go, and there is an unfettered mind. There’s freedom. There’s Liberation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 2010.
“Many people mistakenly believe that entering a spiritual path means taking on a new belief system. This is incorrect,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Instead, what is asked of us is simply to experiment with letting go of our current belief system. And that’s much more difficult. And the reason that it’s difficult [is that] not only is it our comfort zone, but it’s assumptions that we have never questioned about reality, including many assumptions about reality that we don’t even know that we hold. And it’s only in the act of experimenting with letting go that we actually discover what our belief system had been. And that’s when we realize the absurdities and the inconsistencies of the belief system that our consciousness had been stuck in.”
“What’s interesting, is that the more you study the experimental results that the different sages and saints and mystics of the different spiritual traditions have discovered—whether they are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, alchemist, Egyptian hermitists, whatever—it turns out that they discover the same thing: that there is a congruency among those who have made the experiment, carried it through to the end, and what they describe as Ultimate Reality. Now that doesn’t mean that we should believe them. But it does mean that there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that if you will carry out this experiment you will also have a similar result. And the result has been uniformly auspicious, benevolent. [It] has been a transformation of one’s consciousness and character structure to one of benevolence, one of joy, one of love, one of positivity. One of freedom from fear and from anxiety with a greater clarity and wisdom and empowerment. And it has everything going for it; there are no drawbacks to reaching this state of consciousness if indeed it is true.”
“And so the intensity of your desire to discover what you are, ultimately, and the willingness to let go of what you had thought that you were, are the two factors that will determine how quickly the journey is completed. And the more that one is humble, in being willing to admit that ‘I don’t know what reality is,’ and that ‘my present belief system isn’t working beyond a certain point,’ and ‘I am open to learning something new that is so radically different that I can’t conceive of it.’ If one is willing to take that risk into the unknown, then the powers of higher consciousness will draw you magnetically into the source of your Being very easily. . . . So that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating: we’re discovering ‘Who am I when I silence the mind, when I stop diverting, when I let go of all of my paradigms of reality, all of my beliefs—including the belief that I am in a physical body in a material world’—including that one, letting go of everything and returning to the very silent center of awareness, then Liberation is a natural and effortless achievement.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.
Student Comment: It seems like when we close our eyes and start to meditate, we’re focusing on what we call the mind’s “I.” I was wondering, when you have the other consciousness, I’m sure it’s a different sort of feel, and that you’re not experiencing the mind’s “I.” It would have to be different because my mind’s “I” feels like it’s internal.
“Once the ‘I’ is projected into the mind, then it’s refracted into a structure of consciousness that produces arisings of different gestalts, and there’s a subtle shift from moment to moment of one gestalt to another,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But as you retract the consciousness out of the structure of mind, into the pure awareness, then you can see those structures for what they are, and the gap between them. And they no longer create a coherent narrative. And you can begin to feel the global incoherence of what you had taken to be reality: that your reality is an unreality, and there are many inconsistencies, and it’s simply a tissue of concepts. And the gaps between it become more clear than the conceptual forces that push it to create images and feeling states, etc. And then once you have let go of all of that, then there is a nondual perception that’s completely different—that is noumenal, it’s no longer within a phenomenal plane. The world is recognized simply as a projection of the same God consciousness. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.
Student Question: I have a question about the concept of drives. It seems that there is fear and desire and the drive comes from that. But the question that came up when I was meditating was, how do we distinguish what is a drive? It seems like drives create suffering, and that whatever we’re driven to do, we have an attachment to and that’s why there’s suffering.
“The drive comes out of the illusion that one is a separate entity,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Once there is the illusion of an ego, that ego—because it is lost, and it doesn’t know who it is, and it is filled with a terror of its own lack—it is driven to try to fill that lack.” And thus all drives start from the need for security, and all drives build, and are variations, on the security drive. “But the drive is a relatively primitive stage, so beyond the drive is desire per se. When you truly desire something in a conscious way, you are not driven to get it; you know that you can live without it. You want it, but you don’t need it. . . . And then beyond desire, when you get to real love for example, Divine Love, that’s much more subtle. And now you’re not being driven any longer; it’s an opening; it’s a giving. . . . And ultimately—at the highest level of subtlety—even that subject/object differentiation is no longer made. There’s a realization of the Godself in everyone in everything in every moment, and there is no longer any being to be driven.” It’s not a taking at any longer.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.
Excerpt: “I would like to dedicate this Satsang to all the incredible life forms who are now being affected, harmed, and destroyed by the catastrophic ecological disaster taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a disaster the effects of which are inconceivable and immeasurable. And we won’t even have close to a clue for months to come, but it will affect, ultimately, everyone on this planet. There is a single ocean. A single ecosystem. And it’s being massively destroyed at this moment. And it is a symptom of the pathological nature of the human ego in its present form, and a proof of how urgent it is that we transform and transcend the ego at a collective level to ensure that these things will not happen again. . . . And the irony is that here at the moment when human beings feel so all-powerful in their arrogance, never have humans been more powerless. Never have we seen a sight of a ‘superpower’ so impotent to protect its own beaches. Never have we seen a whole world of human organizations—from corporations to national governments to international united nations, governments, all of them—helpless because of a destructive event that took place as a result not only of negligence, corruption, and other human failings, but as part of the inevitable structure of the current situation that we have created through the ego’s own blindness to its own reality. And we must heal that: we have an obligation to heal that before we damage our planet any further. . . . And so we can look at this macrocosmic level and see that this is a symptom of what is going on at every level of life. And that’s the problem: we tend to focus on the most macro insults to our environment . . . and not see that this is the result of millions upon millions of micro events that happen every day in people’s lives at the most intimate levels of connection with one another—and even internally within one’s own mind. . . . The capacity of the Atman, or this naked Presence that is the intelligence behind the cosmos, will arrange things in whatever way is necessary to support the growth of the manifestation of that Cosmic Consciousness to appear here in the phenomenal world itself. And that’s the function of a human being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.
Student Question: When we first started meditating, you were telling us to allow our emotions to be calm and our mind to be still, and my mind wasn’t quite still, and I realized I was feeling a lot. Is there also room in meditation for having those feelings and having those things, and it still being healing?
“Absolutely,” confirms Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “One only reaches silence at the end of a great deal of preparation. This is the state of a very perfected mastery over the ego-mind. . . . The mind isn’t gonna give up and let go until it has been truly mastered by one’s surrendering of all ego identity—including all fear and all desire. And that’s why the . . . disciplines of spiritual practice have been so seriously recommended of followers—or those who seek to reach these higher levels—because you have to retrain your mind to follow a higher center of value. . . . And so if there’s a cognitive sense of liberation from” the entrapments of the mind, “then what will follow is an actual transcendental experience of that: of not being who you thought you were on this plane. And that will raise the vibrational frequency very easily. And the mind will become silent. And it will become silent because something far more fascinating starts to appear—which is Divine Energy. And then all those mundane thoughts become: ‘Well wait a minute. Forget that, this is so much more interesting.’ That’s when things begin to get interesting in the whole spiritual quest.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.
Student Comment: Our role is to act in this world in a way that is in unison with the All, with Nature, with one another, with community. However, as a bus driver, I’m spewing diesel into the air; as a politician, I have to choose between TLC or non-TLC; and as a parent, I have to stay home or go out and party. To function in this world as it’s presented to us is not always a matter of just being One.
“This is a situation which requires a high level of discernment and subtlety, and an ability to work within the systems that are not geared to support an incorruptible integrity but, in fact, to challenge and undermine that at every point. And so it requires a tremendous amount of courage and strength and understanding of which battles to choose, and a knowledge that we have more freedom to move and navigate our way through this world than we pretend we have so that it is possible to find a job that actually is right livelihood, and to be part of movements or communities or activities that do support the growth of healthful nature,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. However, we have to keep in mind that we do have to work in an imperfect world and thus we will undoubtedly make imperfect decisions. “So if we try to be purists of a kind that is unrealistic and unable to live in this world, then, we fail. And so we must indeed be realists but, at the same time, we have to recognize that there is a dimension most people would think is completely nonrealistic that is a supernatural reality that can have effects that are miraculous upon this plane if we are willing to put our wholehearted energies—and synergize with others who actually have that same capacity to visualize the miraculous to change events even in the here and now, both in a microcosmic and macrocosmic level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.
Student Question: In the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, he says that God has no desire, no will. What did he mean by that?
“Just that: God is beyond desire,” echoes Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, a dream of this cosmos forms in God’s Mind, in the most pristine state where there doesn’t need to be desire because everything is already fulfilled.” And because God’s beauty is infinite, the characters in His dream will “eventually, because they have free will, choose to desire certain things and to create preferences and gradually move out of the state of unity into that of duality. And then slowly, slowly over generations, suffering, ego appears in the world. And then, when it has reached its most degraded form, then the Light has to return and cleanse everything and bring it back to the starting point of the highest purity for the next cycle of time.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 20, 2010.
Student Question: Some people say that “love is the door to suffering.” So what happens to the ego when you are in love?
“If you mean the romantic illusion that people mistakenly give the term ‘love’ to, then, of course, that’s a door to suffering, because it is always based on a projection and a fantasy,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And eventually the parties involved realize this, but “can’t let it go because of the fear of the emptiness and the lack that is what caused” them to get together in the first place. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 20, 2010.
Student Question: Would it be true to say that Karma is a pattern that’s produced by the ego?
“It’s the result of the Karmic patterns,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And if we can see and understand the destiny—in time—of those patterns, we will let them go immediately. The problem is we don’t see the effects that the particular patterns are going to have on our life. . . . And when we are able to understand the inevitability of the Karmic consequences of particular, polluted patterns, we will purify them. And that’s why the purification of the soul is so essential. Not only on an individual level, but on the whole level of the projections we have on other beings in the world—because any negative projection we have on anyone or any corporate entity, any kind of entity, those projections create Karmic consequences. So we want to liberate all beings—that’s the act of being a bodhisattva, by being in that state of compassionate love for the highest resolution of Karma.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 20, 2010.
Student Question: When I find myself in a “dark night of the soul,” I find that there can be a range of positions, emotions, etc., such as martyrdom or masochism, and one can really act out and cry, or, the other extreme, repeat to oneself that one is light and that there is no reason or no entity behind the suffering. But, having in mind the risk of suppression of emotions, where does one draw the line?
“Suppression is not a risk. Repression is a risk,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And “the repression has already happened. Suppression is an important tool: you see, you can’t surrender a mind that you don’t control. So first we have to control our mind; we have to be able to contain the egoic feelings. And they are based on fantasies, unrealities: you’re not a victim. None of that is true. You’re suffering is an illusion. And so of course we want to suppress that. Why should we suffer? Why should we allow those negative feelings that are based on unrealities emerge and poison our lives or those of others?” But, at the same time, we must work constantly on getting to the feelings that are repressed, in order to be truly free of them. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 20, 2010.
“Recently, an online student asked . . . ‘What is really meant by surrender to God?’ And to answer that question we have to really see the three elements of it: what do we mean by surrender; what do we mean by God; and what exactly are we surrendering to God?” argues Shunyamurti, the spiritual master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And that’s what meditation really is: surrender to God. It is letting go of one’s sense of alienation. It is an offering of oneself. It is freeing oneself of any sense of separation.
“And so then the question is, ‘What do we mean by God?’ because in Advaita philosophy God is not an Other. And so, we are surrendering to the Self—to the Self that, in principle, we already are.” However, we have lost contact with the Self because of “the defense mechanisms that we created—that we call ‘ego’—that have been used to alienate ourselves from other individuals, from other people. And those same defense mechanisms, of necessity, alienate us from the Self and from the Supreme Self that is within our individual self.”
“And so the surrender requires an internal letting go of one’s defenses against a power and a feeling of love—a current of energy in fact—that is overwhelming to the ego. It’s letting go of our evasion of the presence, the intelligence, and the power of the Self. That will overwhelm the ego and dissolve it in the flow of that Divine Love.”
So we must have a burning desire for union with God, and, at the same time, let go of all of the lesser desires that have distracted us from the constant remembrance of the Supreme Self. And this means a letting go of the mind itself. “And this requires what is called Shradha, or faith: there has to be a sufficient amount of faith that in the letting go of the ego you will find something infinitely greater, more valuable than that which you are letting go of.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 20, 2010.
“Sat Yoga is Noetic Science,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Noetic Science is the science of knowing. Sat Yoga is the most ancient science of knowing. . . . But it is the science of knowing the knower. The science of self-awareness. Self-consciousness. That which particularizes the human being and makes us different from other beings on this planet: that capacity for awareness becoming aware of itself.” But in order to get to that state, “we must be willing to let go of everything we think we know; everything we’ve been taught—including everything we’ve been taught here. Let it all go. Know absolutely nothing. And it’s in that—the tabula rasa, when you erase the whole blackboard—that only the knower remains. . . . This is freedom: swatantria. This is the ultimate goal of yoga: to be free of all of the straightjackets that your mind has put you in. All the pigeonholes. All the preconceived thoughts and the regurgitated ideas that come from other people, all the invalid things you learned in all the schools that you suffered through. All of those things that you depended upon to give you a sense of existence and worthiness and reality. Go beyond all of that and find the Absolute Source. . . . And when one wishes that level of freedom, then one realizes the ultimate paradox: that there is really nothing you need to be free from. There is no one who even needs to be liberated. That even that was part of the matrix. And then there is great joy and great bliss.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 13, 2010.
Student Question: In my experience, I’ve seen that one can interpret a situation in many different ways, and sometimes it seems that I can interpret a situation in an infinite number of ways. Is that freedom, or is that still part of the ego?
“No, freedom is when you don’t bother interpreting it anymore,” remarks Shunyamurti the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “All discourses are false. All interpretations are wrong because every concept, if you look at it deep enough, it flows into the other. Good and evil are the same. Every philosopher who has reached Ultimate Reality recognizes that: form is emptiness. Good is bad even. . . . All of these distinctions we make are part of duality. And so any discourse that you create is always leaving out a shadow that is its opposite that is actually embedded in it; it is its own essence.” “So the truth is that there is no . . . Truth?” “There is no Truth—but don’t take that as a truth!” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 13, 2010.
Student Question: Does the Creation not have duality inherent in it?
“Yes that’s right,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, but “that duality is a unity. The nothingness and the fullness, the form and the emptiness (as the Buddhists say), Samsara and Nirvana—they are the same; they are not a duality. It only seems like a duality from within the ego. And that’s why the ego cannot function very well in the duality, because it does not see it clearly, and it has this paranoid perspective on it. Once you transcend it, you will live in the world without suffering.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 13, 2010.
Student Question: Is the ego the one that creates duality?
“Well the ego is a creation in duality,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it is structured as a multiplicity; it’s even more than a duality.” The average person must create a number of different masks and sub-personalities to deal with the larger society. So, paradoxically, one has to establish a strong and stable ego before one is able to transcend it. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 13, 2010.
Student Question: Some people say that when you are meditating, and you go out-of-body, that there are good entities—or bad entities—that can possess you. Is that true?
“No, not if you’re meditating the way we do. We’re not saying to leave the body; we’re saying to simply leave the superficial mind that is chattering,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. The real danger is more the demons that are in your unconscious mind rather than any external entities. “But anxieties may come up that have been held down, but if you remain the observer of it, and actually offer it to the source of your Being, you will dissolve it. So it’s more an opportunity than a danger.” So if you can remain the in the position of the detached observer, then you will be much safer than you would in a fragmented, or normal, state of consciousness. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 13, 2010.
Student Comment: One thing I remember that helped me free myself from my parents was remembering that it is my karmic responsibility to let them go, and that I hurt their karma if I cling to them or play the roles that they need me to play in order to fill up the lack that they can’t see.
“Exactly. It’s our responsibility not to fill the lack in the parents, or in any other—so that they will feel the pain of that lack and fill it with God,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “If you try to fill it, then you keep them unhealthy. You act as a crutch that keeps them from being able to truly find their Real Self.” And by being bound to the biological family this keeps us unable to help the larger families. “And we have to recognize that the world family needs our help now. . . . Don’t think that the biological family is the only family you belong to; it’s only the practice family from which we come so that the real families can emerge.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 6, 2010.
Student Question: We talk a lot about blessings, and sending blessings, but I’m always puzzled by, what exactly is a blessing?
“The entire universe is consciousness,” maintains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so what a blessing is, is the highest benevolent wave of conscious energy that is sent out so that consciousness that had been frozen in some form, that is a state that is alienated from its True Nature—as the very consciousness of God—will be restored to its awareness of its True Nature, and be able to thereby re-attain bliss, health, peace—all of the virtues and qualities of God-consciousness in its pure state.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 6, 2010.
“At the exoteric level there is an apparent difference between Bhakti Yoga and Gyana Yoga,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Bhakti Yoga can be thought of as devotional worship to God or to a symbol of God. “But in Gyana Yoga, it is still worship, but it is worship with the third eye. It is worship with the clear mind that understands the truth of the nature of reality.” And to truly perform Bhakti Yoga, we must create a circuit, a positive charge that attracts a negative charge. The mind must become negative—it must empty itself out of all thoughts—so that it can be attracted to the “All-Positive pull” of God. And “through this energy circuit, you will be able to download the Divine Love. And when the body-mind is filled with love, then you need nothing more. All of the desire for the lower jouissance—the lower pleasure that brings suffering—will dissolve easily because once you are fulfilled, desire becomes superfluous . . . because all you have—and all you are—has been fulfilled by the Presence of God, which is everything, and the Source of all that is Good.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 6, 2010.
Excerpt: “Our real job is to become more and more conscious at every moment of who we really are. And letting go of the superficial identifications we have with name and form; with the biological level of life; even with the biographical level of life; even with the intellectual and conceptual level of life, until we reach the Source. And in that state there are no longer any questions. There are no longer philosophical arguments about the nature of Reality. We realize that there aren’t many different religions in the world, but that all the different paths are simply different terminologies for achieving the ultimate oneness. And we can let go of the intellectual hair-splitting, and the attempt to differentiate ourselves and our belief systems and positions from other people, and all the other egoic games that we play even at a subtle level. And most of all, we are then able to open our hearts fully. . . . And once we reach that understanding then there’s no more competitiveness, there’s no more one-upmanship, there’s no more envy, no more greed, no more trying to hold on to what one individual has, but to share because the great gift is really in sharing and giving, not in holding on. And once we learn that then we discover that we can give—not only from a personal center and personal assets, but we become a vehicle, a medium in which the gifts of the Cosmic Self can be given through this mind and body. . . . And the key to achieving this is simply to desire. To Be. To truly Be. This is why we recall Hamlet’s great question in Shakespeare’s play: ‘To be or not to be.’ That is the question, but it can’t be answered in words. It can only be answered through the act of Being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 2010.
Student Question: What if we want to pursue a spiritual journey but we’re not quite ready to release the material possessions, or the work that we find creativity and joy in?
“Well the ego knows nothing other than that,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Thus, the ego hedges its bets, and keeps running on the—at least familiar—treadmill of pain and pleasure. But trading in the lower pleasures for the higher ones does not mean that you’re giving up your life. “It means that that life will now be used for even higher creativity; even higher joy.” Of course, “in the beginning, it’s very difficult to understand that; it can’t be grasped by the mind. But if you desire to know that higher bliss then, if you pray for that, if you talk to the Supreme One about that, then it will be granted: to have the taste of that higher joy that will enable you to let go of the lower that is holding you back—and also producing suffering. . . . And all of the lower pleasures do that. And this is why the great sages of every tradition like the Buddha and Christ and all the other teachers have recommended letting go of those. But it has to be done naturally and wholeheartedly with a realization of what you are getting, not only of what you are losing, so that there is no looking back.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 2010.
Student Question: The other day you said that detachment was love. When a person achieves that, and is that, every moment of every day, but, still, is out there in the world, how does one deal with the perception of others, and how they may take your detachment?
“We are living in a sea of projections: everyone is projecting on everyone else. And most of those projections today are negative ones,” maintains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it’s only if one is in a state of emptiness—one is not an ego form for those projections to stick to—that they will move through you, and you will be able to respond with compassion, and with love, and to be able to teach. Now not everyone will actually want to be taught, and that’s OK too. And as Jesus said, ‘you don’t need to throw your pearls before swine,’ and you don’t need to come out in public as a yogi or as a spiritual being. Those who have eyes to see will see. And so in that state . . . one will gradually attract to oneself those who are truly interested. And one can then help to guide them more toward the light.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 2010.
Student Comment: This is my first time and I wanted clarity, or some tips, with meditation. I noticed that during the meditation, I had some bodily sensations and visualizations, and I could get into it, but then it would stop; my mind would turn back on. So I just wanted some tips. I noticed when I repeated what you said in the guided meditation, it would bring me back into quiet state.
“Yes, in the beginning, the consciousness is identified with the mind that uses language. Language is an object in the mind, but we are addicted to language,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s through language that we create this grid of what reality is, and so we’re very reluctant to let go of words. And because the mind hasn’t been trained, it’s wild, and it’ll bring up thoughts that you have no desire to listen to, but they’ll be there anyway. . . . You will eventually reach the point where the mind will not interfere, and the only thoughts that come will be either thoughts that are divine inspirations, or thoughts that are required for the sustenance of your life.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 2010.
Student Question: If all there is is consciousness, and in reality nobody’s praying to nobody, then why is it that when you pray, the pray manifests?
“Well, because you don’t realize that,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The ego actually thinks it is a separate body. The ego is alienated from this truth. And so what it is praying for is the realization that it is One with the Supreme Awareness. . . . And the prayer is the act of opening consciousness to its own infinite nature. So ultimately, yes, the prayer is to the Self—but it is from a fragment of the Self that had been walled off from the whole. And it is praying for that wall to be released.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 2010.
“Those who are on a true path of purification and spiritual truthfulness, and a complete striving to reach union with God, are very rare and very special. But your specialness consists in realizing that you’re not special,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And indeed one of the main obstacles on the spiritual path is not allowing one’s ego to reappropriate one’s spirituality. “You cannot be special as a separate ego because your ego is illusory.” And all spiritual communities are based on the understanding that all members “are part of a single Being.” And thus a spiritual community cannot exist without each member withdrawing his/her projections and searching within for the source of one’s anger, hatred, or envy of another. “But it is an ongoing day-to-day need to nourish each other with love. And that has to be the primal vow of a disciple. If one is not willing to do that, then no matter what other yamas and niyamas one is willing to do—including fasting and living the most ascetic life—it won’t matter because one’s closed heart will prevent one from reaching God because God is pure love.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 27, 2010.
Student Question: In one’s quest for liberation, one requires a spiritual guide; it’s imperative and can’t be overemphasized. But when does it come into a stage when the student no longer requires the guide?
“When the student has internalized the teachings, and has purified the unconscious mind so that his or her own mind no longer deceives him/her,” answers Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute. The initial problem is that the ego is in denial of its own split consciousness, between the conscious and unconscious mind as well as other fragments. And after the guru-disciple relationship, and there is “a realization of the totality, a point is reached when the purification of the individual soul is at such a degree of clarity and purity of perception and accuracy that there is no longer a disturbance or a distortion in the field. And at that point, there is no longer an obstacle internally to the realization of the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.
“Real meditation begins when one is sick of the doing. One is sick of one’s own ego. One is sick of one’s own mind. That’s when it starts,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s only when you’re sick” of all the games you play with yourself, “and you realize that the world is a mirage, that you get serious about meditation. Until then you’re just dabbling at it, playing at it, and you won’t get very far with it because meditation is the most serious thing that one can do. And it means giving up one’s own sense of being a separate individual. . . . And so, the only way to reach that Ultimate State—which is what we are—is through letting go of all that we appear to be, of all that the mind projects, of language itself, of imagery—of everything that is an object in consciousness—until we reach a state of purity of awareness. And in that Presence—when the mind lets go of even believing that what it is present to is occurring in the brain or is occurring in any localized area, in any phenomenal world—one breaks through the final frame in which we have tried to put reality. And then we enter into the infinite.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.
Student Question: Reasoning is the lowest level of intelligence, and that’s what is taught in our educational system. I’m trying to remember what the higher levels of intelligence above reasoning are. I know there’s intuition, but what else?
Higher levels of intelligence become available when “the full buddhi opens,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Not only the lower buddhi of the ego—or rational thought—but the higher buddhi of the archetypal dimension becomes available. The higher buddhi “recognizes that there’s a much higher order that looks like randomness and chance, but has a logic that can only be seen in synchronicities and understood in a larger pattern than the ego can perceive. . . . And so when there’s no longer an egocentric perception, then those larger patterns—and more subtle patterns of reality—become clear.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.
Student Question: There has been a lot of talk recently about Zen riddles, koans, and I was wondering if I could hear one in order to see what my mind would do with it?
“A Zen riddle, to be an accurate Zen riddle, has to be given at the right moment to the right person. It’s not something to toy around with. It is a very deep, sacred instrument for learning,” explains Shunyamurti, the Zen Master of the Sat Yoga Institute. Though Zen schools today have codified and organized koans into a rational, hierarchical structure, they have lost their true Shakti, their transmissible power of awakening. But nevertheless, “one purpose of the koans is to create a situation that is so paradoxical that the rational mind eventually has to give up; it can do nothing with it.” But today we have koans in contemporary science: Gödel’s proof in mathematics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the double-slit experiment in quantum physics, etc. “There’s a limit to our knowledge. Our rational minds cannot know aspects of reality, and the more we try to know, the more the reality changes before our very eyes. . . . That’s a Zen koan, but it’s a Zen koan that reality itself presents. God is the Zen Master who is forcing us to realize that reality is not what our rational minds think it is, and we cannot make sense of it at that level. So we no longer need Zen koans: Life is a Zen koan.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.
Student Question: In many traditions there is a reference to the term "sentient beings," and it appears to me that that’s a very specific term that I don’t think I really understand and I was wondering if you could speak to that?
“It’s difficult to speak to that issue for the simple reason that there are many sentient beings that are not corporeal,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “That’s why here we often use the term actants . . . versus actors. There are many actants in any given situation, which are forces that are operating, some of which are bodiless. . . . But everything is an actant . . . everything that we think of as a thing or an object, even if we think of it as inanimate, is a sentient being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.
Student Comment: I was wondering if the ego itself is a koan, and then I though no, because it has its own logic for everything it does whether that’s conscious or not. So the ego itself isn’t a koan.
“Oh yes it is because the ego is inconsistent,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And part of the reason for transformational sessions is to allow oneself to hear the contradictions inherent in one’s fantasies, desires, and other unconscious melodramas. “And when you realize that and have to laugh at your own ego for being ridiculous . . . you have to let it go.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.
The Indian sage “Sri Aurobindo says that the primary act, central act, that a meditator is performing is an act of aspiration,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “You are aspiring to lift your consciousness. You’re for two things: one is the ascent of consciousness from ego mind to Sat Mind, and at the same time you are invoking the descent, the presence of the Supreme Consciousness, the Supracosmic. One’s own consciousness at an individual level must go from the protomental, the emotional, to the mental, to the supramental, and then it must meet the supracosmic. And it is in that the yogic power is ignited.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 15, 2010.
“There was a great Zen master of the 14th century in Japan, named Bassui, who was asked about fasting and he said, ‘The only real fasting is to refuse to feed on delusion.’ Any other fasting may be helpful for the body, maybe not, but the real key is to transcend delusion,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And, of course, this means fasting from identity itself: “The moment you believe you’re a someone who has something, some treasure, some priceless knowledge—let alone thinking you have some priceless material object or partner or money, or whatever else—any of those are delusional—but even the highest level of subtlety of sophisticated metaphysical conceptualization of reality is pure delusion.” And, your true nature “cannot be seen or known in any way in which the mind tends to conceptualize even the process of knowing. So this is sometimes referred to as a path of Gyana Yoga,” and Gyana is “translated as knowledge, but it is knowledge that is Being. You are That which you Know; you don’t know it conceptually. There is no subject/object separation in that state because both those poles of subject and object are illusions. There is no subject. Any subject is always going to be, simply, a conceptualization. That’s what the ego is, a self-image, or it could be a very sophisticated set of self concepts. So the ego can exist on a spectrum, but all of it is an illusion. . . . So there is no subject, and the object, of course, is simply form that arises within that very same consciousness that thinks it is looking at it. And so all there is, is that which Is. . . . So let’s give ourselves that gift of realizing that there is only one Sat, one Mind, and we are all That, together as a unity, not in separation. And let us not be a mind that is in a state of separation from that ultimate Reality. We are That.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 8, 2010.
“Sri Ramana was often asked, ‘Where is the Heart?’ and sometimes he’d point to the right side of the chest . . . but then he would always say, ‘I had to tell them something. They needed to know a physical location. The Heart isn’t in the body. And the world doesn’t really exist.’ And when he found a mature seeker, he would say, ‘The world is ajata,’ which means it’s unborn. It doesn’t exist. It was never created. . . . Relax all of your worries about the world, and just simply allow the love to emerge in the fullness of the glory of your being. . . . And then you will see that you are everywhere, you’re not in the body. You’re non-localized. You are the Cosmic Mind Itself, simply having taken form as the Christian metaphor: God became man so that man could realize he is God. And we are each in that position of the Christ, realizing the truth of our being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 8, 2010.
Student Question: There are a lot of things going through my mind right now so I’m going to try to make sense. I have, through native understanding, the notion that one day the Great Eagle will swoop down and take everything that’s been gleaned from this human experience, from this earth experience, and then who knows what. And I’m trying to understand my relationship to whatever it is that’s trying to understand Itself through consciousness. Is it lacking something by creating all of us and this?
“Well, first of all, know that you are the Great Eagle, and this is all a game that the Eagle plays,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. It’s just a game. “You play hide-and-seek and the one who is hiding isn’t really lost, and the one who is seeking isn’t really seeking. It’s play on both sides. So the one who is hiding is not lacked by the other. And when that is recognized, then even the hide-and-seek you're playing with yourself—or with the Great Eagle—is only a game for enjoyment.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 8, 2010.
Student Question: We talk about the chakras as levels of consciousness. Is there also an energetic kundalini within the body? Do the chakras manifest at different points in the body?
“It is more that the body is within the chakra than that the chakra is within the body,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Nevertheless there are symbolic links with different parts of the body, chakra two being linked with the sexual organs is an example, but the entire body becomes activated in order to fulfill that chakra. The chakras can also be linked individually to certain parts of the body that have to do with unconscious phantasies which are particular to each person. “But it takes a lot of sensitivity to be able to deduce from the symptom, the logic of the unconscious structure.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 8, 2010.
Student Question: What is behind the fear of the unknown when you are trying to be flexible but you can’t, or you’re trying to be spontaneous and you’re caught in planning? Or when you’re meditating and your mind won’t stop chattering and it’s hard to free yourself?
“You see, as a child, you’re natural state is to love the unknown,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But you get commands, originally intended for safety, to fear the world. And this is alright so long as one can let go of these irrational fears and paranoia that no longer serves one as an adult. “And that’s what ego death is really about: the ego that was created in childhood must die so the Real Self can now emerge and all the glory and the power that is our True Self—and the love! And that will come out as soon as you let go of that.” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, April 6, 2010.
“One of the differences between ego-mind and Sat Mind, is that ego-mind tends to be rigid whereas Sat Mind is flexible,” maintains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The tree that bends in the wind will survive whereas the rigid structure will collapse.” And because “we’re living in a time of radical uncertainty, our flexibility has to become radical.” And therefore we can no longer depend on plans stored away in the back of our minds for riches, vacations—any fantasies that we have about the future or any system that we have built our lives upon—but we must be able to adapt to anything that our environment throws at us. Our movement must not be “based on some plan that was developed in the past,” but rather “on an accurate assessment—and an intuitive knowing of what is the right way to proceed in any given moment—that serves the whole, and is no longer based on egocentricity or on trying to achieve some very fixed point, but to be able to flower around the obstacles, to flow around the rocks as water does in a stream, and to always be able to keep the ultimate compass of true north present, but know that there are many ways for the river to wind to the sea and not to be stuck in a single channel.” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, April 6, 2010.
Excerpt: “This is a school in which one can attain happiness, but only if you’re willing to Realize the Truth of your Being. The truth of who you’re not that you think you are now, and the truth of who you really are, which transcends your ability to even conceive of the vast, unlimited nature of your True Self. And so we have to be very open-minded, as well as open-hearted, to take in the information and the energy that will raise our vibrational frequency and our consciousness to perceive the unlimited nature of what we are. . . . And all of this purification ultimately leads to a palpable recognition that we are not a physical, separate individual in a world of other individuals, but that we are part of the One Supreme Consciousness that is the creative force and the Ground of the entire universe. And that’s when life becomes really interesting. That’s when you become a player of the cosmic game, not of the ego game any longer. And we become co-creators with God. We become conduits and vehicles of that higher wisdom that wants to bring peace back to the earth that the human ego is destroying. It wants to bring back stability. . . . And the climate change, and all of the other changes that we are facing that are a karmic result of our malpractice of human existence because we have been in a false consciousness. We have to heal ourselves and heal our planet that we have injured. . . . And then we will graduate from this school and really begin to get the more advanced teachings from within that will guide us to the last stages of liberation from this plane.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 25, 2010.
Student Question: In this spiritual path, does one separate from the ego and see it as a witness or does it just dissolve? And if it remains, then what is our relationship to the ego? When I am in the Real Self, does the ego remain or does the ego fall away?
“The ego, really, is a set of functions OK? It is a set of capacities that the psyche or soul has. But then those functions get covered over by belief systems and complexes and personalities,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And the functions of the ego—thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting—will remain. “So, in that sense, an ego remains. But it is not an ego that identifies as those functions. And it realizes those functions are a conduit of the Supreme Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 25, 2010.
Student Question: You mentioned earlier acquiring an understanding for how our egos operate—the games, the defense mechanisms, etc. Does one really need to understand all of this?
“It helps a lot for the modern Western intellect,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But it was not always necessary. One can even see this in the story of Nisargadatta Maharaj. However, in modern culture, no one will believe a holy scripture or a guru, so “you better understand it for yourself that this makes rational sense. Once you have understood this in a deep way so that you can refute your ego’s own self-deceptions, then you can liberate yourself.” Recorded on the evening of Monday, March 22, 2010.
Student Question: Earlier you mentioned that one needs to cultivate this love for one’s Real Self. So what are some ways of cultivating that?
Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, provides that “if you recognize the qualities and the powers that are given to you by God—if you are open to receiving them—the siddhis, the very gift of life itself,” then one can recognize that “All of this is a gift” of love from the Creator. “It was an act of infinite love to create this universe. This was not a necessity on God’s part. This was a gift so that we could grow toward God-consciousness—and it’s perfect! It’s an absolutely perfect universe. We think it’s not but it’s our own karma that makes it seem imperfect. . . . It is the seeing it in the flesh, the recognition that love is reality” that makes us want to know the Source of all love. “We are beings of love. Our very essence is love. But we live in this shell that originally we created to protect that essence, then we lost sight of the fact that it was in there and we live in the shell. But the shell is not the purpose of life, and we must break through the shell and be released again. And once we realize that, that itself will be the act of love that liberates us.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 18, 2010.
“There is a Golden Braid that’s well known in esoteric tradition. It’s a beautiful metaphor,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And when this Golden Braid is complete, and completely braided, it makes the achievement of Liberation very, very easy. But most of us have only one or two of the strands of this three-stranded braid.” And these strands begin to develop as the ego-mind begins to mature and its care spreads beyond itself. “And so the first strand is that of Love: love for the Supreme Self.” But, that love is not enough. And so the next strand is “an intense desire to know the Real Self.” And, “the third essential strand of the braid is dispassion, detachment from the worldly pleasures. . . . And when you’re freed from those anchors, then the Love—and the desire to know—will draw you up into the innermost core of Being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 18, 2010.
Student Question: I’m still struggling with being able to discern what is my jouissance, or what I need to give up or not give up, and tonight you said something along the lines of: it’s not about giving up the activity, it’s about giving up the signifier of identity. Could you maybe expand on that or give an example?
“Shankara’s great teaching that revolutionized the Indian spiritual approach was that ‘All we have to renounce is the ego.’ You don’t have to have any external renunciation,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And ever since then, theologians have been arguing about the difference between outer renunciation and inner renunciation. But it turns out they’re the same because the ego, although it’s inner, takes its signifiers of identity from the outer world. So the truth is the outer is the inner. And until you recognize that—that it is the outer activities and jouissances—which are forms of suffering that we like to interpret as pleasure but they create more pain than pleasure—as our markers, and that keeps the entire tissue of thoughts and actions and feeling states in a relatively homeostatic ‘stuckness.’ And by letting go of the outer, we are able to let go of the inner, and the more we let go of the inner, the more we let go of the outer.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 18, 2010.
Student Question: Do people who are becoming crazy realize they are becoming crazy?
“Often yes but not necessarily,” answers Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But, “This can happen in so many different ways because the world is crazy. We’re living in a psychotic world. So very often one is attempting to escape from that into a kind of sanity that looks like craziness. And it becomes craziness because one loses touch with the fact that we need to be able to appear crazy—or normal, which is the same thing—in order to be able to function in this world and make it work for us.” But there is a higher insanity, and “in a way that’s what an ashram is: it’s an insane asylum for people who are crazy in a higher way and want permission to go completely mad without anybody telling them they have to be normal.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 18, 2010.
“One of the synonyms for yoga is purity,” explains Shunyamurti, the Spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “A yogi is someone who is dedicated to a life that is absolutely pure.” But there are various levels of purity. There is purity of diet, purity of lifestyle, words, and even purity of mind, “but then beyond that, the purity of spirit, the purity in which one’s attention is always directed to the ultimate source of purity: to the Godself within.” Shunyamurti emphasizes that “That God presence is always there, but the impure mind never pays attention to it—it runs away from it in fact—because of guilt and shame and a sense of inadequacy and lack that it’s always seeking to fill by possessing something or someone in the physical world, and those actions are impure because they’re based on the lie of the ego. The ego itself is impurity. It’s a false self.”
But, “when the mind is silent, and abides with the Source, the Supreme Beingness within, with the Ultimate Mystery, the Absolute—that is present, but can only be apperceived when the mind is pure and silent, that is when enlightenment, liberation, Self-realization are achieved.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 11, 2010.
Student Question: Once we have purified, what would keep us from falling into this trap—again—of ego-being, of being an ego?
“Wisdom,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Once one has graduated from school, you generally don’t fall into the trap of going through the same school again.” And therefore one wishes to continue one’s education rather than repeating the same lessons over and over again. And, Shunyamurti adds, there are many schools higher and more interesting than the one we are stuck in now. And “it gets much more exciting, more blissful. You see most people think it’s boring: “I don’t want to leave the ego behind because, what, silence, you know. What is that?” But it opens up into the most fascinating higher dimensions. . . . But until you touch the Mind of God—and recognize that it is possible to have a far higher intelligence than we are now operating from—that idea won’t even dawn.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 11, 2010.
Student Question: The other day I was watching a satsang of Ramesh Balsekar on the internet, and he was giving the explanation of Advaita, the manifestation of consciousness through the bodily organism, etc., etc. And he always emphasizes that there is predestination, that Realization happens to one bodily organism no matter what you do or not. And then on the other hand, I have these Buddhists talking about practices and merits. What do you think about that? And, also, there are many gurus from the Advaita tradition who will laugh at you and say, "Practice what? You already are that. You don’t need to practice anything in order to realize that. You don’t need to do anything." So what is the middle way?
“You have to practice intensively non-practice,” unveils Shunyamurti, the spiritual guru of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And although it is true that there is predestination, there is also free will. It may be predestined that you will decide to practice whereas someone else won’t. But that will only happen because you have chosen out of your free will.” And, in regards to spiritual practice, “as long as there is a false belief that you are that ego, then that ego better practice realizing that it’s not!” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 11, 2010.
Student Question: I was wondering how the ego evolved in the very beginning: so from the first person who had an ego.
“Humans didn’t have egos at first. It was a later cultural development,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Although it would take an entire lecture or even seminar to understand this, Shunyamurti briefly details the entropy process that affects the human spirit in which human consciousness becomes identified with an ego and a body image, and the potential return to our previous spiritual stature. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 11, 2010.
“You are all sacred beings,” says Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Shunyamurti further elucidates, “There are profane beings and there are sacred beings. The word ‘profane,’ comes from pro fana—before the temple; it’s those who stand outside the temple. And then those who enter the temple, become sacred beings.” And only by entering the “holiest of holies,” the most sacred temple, the realm of the Real Self, may we complete our inward journey. “We are in the temple because we know that the only way out of the suffering of the profane world is to enter into the sacred dimension of our being.”
“And so at the first level, yes, the body is our temple. And then there is another level where we realize the mind is our temple, the personality, the ego. But we have to go deeper within, beyond those levels, and let the personal levels of our being drop away in order to get to the transpersonal nucleus, the core, the Self of our Self. And to reach that Supreme Self requires the most intense purity and intensity of desire.” This is meditation. “And if we have that desire to find out the ultimate truth of who we are, and to achieve union with the Supreme Self that is within us, that is our essence, then that will be given.”
“And so until there has been a disconnect from the profane identity, and a complete reunion with the sacred identity—that is ultimately in union already with the Supreme Being because you are That. Until you are ready to live in the truth of That realization, then there will continue to be suffering and vacillation, and oscillation, and a lack of peace. But the moment that that desire is wholehearted, literally the doors of the temple will open. . . . So let us meditate with the intention that now is the eternal moment for the moth to dive into the Supreme Flame and melt into the infinite, eternal Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 4, 2010.
Excerpt: “Every meeting that we have is a Satsang. Sangha means a gathering; a community. And Sat refers to the ground of being, our essence, our deepest truth of who we are. And so we gather to touch into our Sat, our most deep level of being, to taste what Self-realization is about, and then to transmit it, to share it with others, and to learn to live from that place of centeredness, and strength, and authenticity, and love, and clarity, and wisdom, and the capacity for sharing, for reciprocity and mutuality in relationships so that we can be a blessing to the world. . . . if we can live in the Real, we will live in a state of oneness with all beings, and with the ability to be harmonious, to cooperate, and to offer the highest wisdom that we can download from that source that will be able to inspire us with greater creativity than the false self can manifest in an egoic life. . . .And so this is the human destiny: that we return to this highest level of our potential. And the path to do that is really very simple, but not easy. It’s not easy because it takes courage. It means looking within, and seeing what is not authentic within, and processing it out; purifying the soul; eliminating those obstacles that separate your conscious mind from the Divine Self within you.” Recorded on the Thursday, February 25, 2010.
Student Question: Could you please explain—or highlight—the difference between the Sat Yoga approach and the traditional Buddhist approach?
“Well what we study here are all the spiritual traditions, and what you will find is that they are structurally identical,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Buddhism and Christianity, believe it or not, are identical at the esoteric level, the Gnostic level of Christianity in which God and the soul are one. So ultimately it is the realization that there is a state of nonduality; we are not separate beings. That is only apparent, but it is not real.” And, as Shunyamurti concludes, “it’s the same path; the path is not different.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 25, 2010.
“You know the happiest moments in peoples lives are actually when they’re sound asleep; because there’s no thoughts. And when you’re in deep sleep, there’s perfect rest, and your soul is actually touching the innermost light. And you recharge,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And what we’re doing in a state of meditation is simply being in deep sleep while we’re fully awake. That’s all we’re doing. . . . So if we’ll give our self the opportunity to simply be present, many extraordinary mysteries will unfold; mysteries about yourself; insights will come spontaneously; and there will be personality changes that will happen effortlessly as anxiety falls away naturally in the silence. . . . So, be a scientist. Allow yourself to explore without trying to achieve anything in particular, but just to discover who you are.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 18, 2010.
Student Question: I understand that in a path of spiritual development, such as Sat Yoga, we must be able to overcome anger, but I wonder, how one can truly achieve this when there is so much human stupidity. Today we were at the beach joining an expedition of Canadian environmentalists who are studying the effects of all the garbage that we are dumping daily into the oceans. We are constantly working with the press, but I sometimes feel so lost because I want to continue helping but I realize that even if this message reaches the people, their ignorance remains and they continue acting in the worst possible way. Corruption is also very much involved in all this, as well as a general indifference and human stupidity, which are causing the loss of not only life on earth but also in our oceans—and I ask myself: how does one avoid feeling anger?
“Have a sense of humor. You have to laugh at it, at human stupidity,” provides Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Humans are becoming more and more stupid by the day. . . . It’s destiny. It’s the end of the world. . . . Nobody’s getting smarter . . . and more corrupt. And less caring. That’s the way of entropy of the human soul. But, those who recognize that will grow.” And by bringing awareness into the issue, and raising our consciousness, we will be able to participate in the birth of a new world. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 18, 2010.
Student Question: So you can get to chakra seven in life but can you also get to it in death?
“No,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “because the last thought you have as you die and leave the body will determine which bardo state you go into. So if that wasn’t already liberated, then you won’t be able to hold onto the Mother Light when you leave the body.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 18, 2010.
Student Question: Today in the study group we discussed how the more you go into the chakras, there is a loss of the sense of identity. So why, if there is a loss of identity, does the person not awaken if he/she is in any of the chakras? And the other question is that, you mentioned that a person can awaken any time, but how does that work in relation to the chakra map? If a person is in the lower three chakras, can that person awaken at any moment?
“The awakening is the shift to the higher chakra,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It is possible, but it requires the desire to do so. That’s what’s missing.” It is not difficult to reach liberation “cause it’s our natural state. The truth is we’re already there, but it’s covered over by these other veils.” And to answer the other question, Shunyamurti explains that a chakra is not an ego state; there is no identity in the chakra, but there is an “assemblage point” in between two chakras where we structure our lives. We gravitate towards the chakras because “most people don’t like having a sense of ego because there are burdens . . . so people want to get out of the egoic state. Now, they could go to chakra seven, just as easily as they go to chakra one, two, or three, but in this culture we’ve been trained, ‘have a glass of beer,’ instead of meditate and reach bliss. Or have a sexual encounter in which you lose yourself temporarily, or have become berserk, become enraged, that’s always enjoyable to most people. . . . The problem is that all of the lower three chakras have negative consequences, and when you do come back into the assemblage point you think, ‘Oh my God what did I just do?’ and then you’ve created more negative karma that you have to work out.” And, as Shunyamurti reminds us, “You can choose any of them. It’s not as if one is really more difficult than the other, it’s only a matter of where you want to dive in.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 18, 2010.
There are no techniques for meditation because all we’re doing in meditation is simply being, and there is nothing simpler than that. “And what the ancient yogis, and sages of all spiritual traditions have taught, is that the essence of our being is bliss,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There is a phrase called Sat Chit Ananda. That’s the closest we can describe our essential Being. Ultimately it’s indescribable—it’s beyond any concepts—but the closest we can come is that, and this is true in all the different religions, it’s the equivalent of the Trinity in Christianity: our Being, our awareness, intelligence, and the joy, the unlimited bliss of love. Love in its true sense: of the unity, the oneness of all things, all beings, the cosmos, the mind of God. All of it is One, and we are That, that’s why it’s blissful, because we are not separated from That.” And instead of accessing that bliss, we chatter; we choose to suffer.
And the reason that we choose to suffer is because “it justifies and it gives a sense of reality to that which is unreal. The ego is only a fictional structure. It’s a story—not even a story that we invented but one that was given to us by parents, teachers, society. We took it from all kinds of places and we put it together and we said ‘OK this is who I am. This is my story and my signature is this particular way that I suffer, this particular pattern, and I’m proud of it, and it gives me a sense that I really exist.’ And that’s why we hold onto it because it maintains that illusion.” So to rid ourselves of that suffering, we must disidentify “with the organism or from any localizable entity. We want to return to that state. It doesn’t mean we’re going to lose the capacity to play our role, but we will be able then to realize we are not that role and then modify the role in ways that it no longer suits us, we can change it.” And this is the purpose of meditation. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 11, 2010.
“We are beings of consciousness,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And yet we have forgotten what consciousness is in our pure form because our minds have been colonized by language.” And as Shunyamurti further elucidates, language is not a neutral means of communication because it comes attached to culture and other temporal, ethical, etc., limitations. “And, because we are embedded in language, we are alienated from the source of our True Being. And then once we are occupied by language—like a city is occupied by a foreign army—then that occupation force takes over and achieves its agenda using our mind and our organism.” And likewise the acquisition of language brings a kind of power to manipulate others as well as our environment. “And it turns out that when our minds are freed from the stream of consciousness we actually reach an ocean of consciousness more powerful than that stream. Our intelligence actually grows. And then we can come back from that silence with an ability to use language now rather than be used by it. . . . And so it is a great exploration that is possible once we weigh anchor and let go of language as our base. And then we are free to explore levels of reality that we could never know as long as we are hooked into the phenomenal plane and its linguistic manipulation." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 4, 2010.
Student Question: A question came up in the study group tonight about illegitimate authority. And my question is, didn’t it used to be the father’s role to represent God rather than having to seek an elder or shaman, or did they work in community differently? How exactly did it work?
Well, as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, admits, “the father—as a symbolic function—has been lost,” which reflects the degradation of society as a whole. “But in the ancient tradition, the father was considered the first guru. The father would take you away from the mother and introduce into the men’s group.” He “would then take the son to the second guru that would be the shaman, who would then take the son on a higher journey. . . . So for males, that was the way. And the father was the link to the higher levels of knowledge.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 4, 2010.
Coming together in a Satsang, or spiritual gathering, “creates a womb of love in which to bathe, in which to let go of the stresses that we have to deal with ‘out there’ in that world of non-love, of competition and anger and brutality,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the more we create a close-knit community of love, the more this becomes a refuge. And that’s what is important to the soul of each of us; we need a refuge. Everyone needs a place to be able to come and know that they’re accepted without judgment. Where they can sit and let go of everything.”
“And so we have to find the way to achieve the inner refuge. And that means we have to let go of the mind itself because the mind is where the problems lie. And we are attached to the mind because we identify with the body. As long as consciousness is identified with the physical organism, then the mind, with all of its defense mechanisms that are intended to protect that organism against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, will have to remain rigid and always on alert—and always thinking, manipulating, strategizing—to defend itself. But when we can let go of the mind—first at the ego level and then even at the soul level—then we can finally be at peace in our spirit, our Atman. That’s the only true refuge." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 21, 2010.
Excerpt: “Human nature is a variable; it’s not a constant. It changes through the ages,” argues Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And right now we’re in a time when the human ego structure is morphing at an accelerated rate into a very distorted and negative, nihilistic, and fragmented form.” And, as a result, the collective sphere is also getting more and more chaotic and unpredictable. “And so anyone who is sane feels mad in this world because the collective normality is madness; madness of a particularly paranoid kind.” And along with the paranoia, come other egocentric mind states such as desire, “the fantasy of wishful thinking that ‘Oh, if I’m only with that person then everything is gonna be fine. That person will rescue me from my despair’ or whatever. Or ‘That money,’ or ‘That car,’ or that whatever. And the projection of desire—as well as of fear—begins to operate, as well as the false duty of the karma that exists at the disillusionment point that, ‘OK, if I only get a good job and get my parents to approve of my life or society to approve of me, then I’ll be fine, and I’ll be stabilized.’ But of course none of that works either because it’s not coming from the True Self, it’s coming from a desire to please the other. . . . So we have to be constantly alert to when the ego-mind is fooling you and taking you off center. And that requires then a practice of meditation that is very intense, very constant, so that the chatter of the mind is overcome, and the silent presence of the Divine Light and Love is what is the operative power that is emanating through you. And it’s only through a surrender to God—internally—and then activating that externally through behaviors that link one in the highest way to service, communal action, harmonious, loving, compassionate, beingness in the world that will keep our souls pure, and therefore to function according to an inner compass that is accurately calibrated to true north of God-consciousness.” Recorded on the evening of Monday, January 11, 2010.
In 2009 we have experienced a lull, perhaps not in terms of economic crises, but in terms of acts of God. In the coming year we will bear witness to much more devastating events, but must remain detached and continue our work towards ego transcendence. This coming year for us must “involve two important advances. We must attain true authenticity” to be able to live in the True Self at all times. “And then secondly to be able to respond to these cataclysms with peace, with serenity—even with joy. And to transmit that joy. . . . we have the ability to remember that we are beings of light. That we are immaterial, incorporeal, nontemporal, nonhuman, nonlimited. And beings that dwell in the realm of the miraculous for whom this entire world is a dream that can be re-dreamed. That we are not stuck in some situation that is defined by the collective Other, or by history, or by any other force. That God is ultimate freedom and that by existing in that union with God we are free of the necessity of karmic consequences that would otherwise hold us enslaved. And to use that freedom and that power—in the service of God—in order to free not only our own self . . . but to free all beings who are lost in those false identifications that are bringing them into suffering.” Recorded on the evening of December 31, 2009.
Student Comment: I can see that with the New Year, and subsequent times we have coming up, how I have to be part of the flow of it, and how I must release myself from this identity to allow myself to be part of the flow because things will happen that will bring us to our knees. And I must realize that I do not have to be so caught up with the mourning to be able to see it for what it is. And I must have faith that the designer has designed perfection
“This is a year that will bring great anxiety if we have not overcome the identity with the body, which is perishable. Because the things that will happen will go to the very root of our existence, and we must be ready to let go of the body if we are called upon it—but to know that the body is not essential to our being,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But who we are can never be captured in any form or pattern. So don’t let yourself be captured by a limited level of your existence that is only temporary and cannot offer the fulfillment of your being; cannot fully offer joy.”
So we want to go beyond anything that has come into human history hitherto, no matter how brilliant it may seem. “They are all very limited expressions of consciousness and we want to go beyond all of those to something absolutely new; to a way of being and knowing that has never existed before. We must allow the absolutely new to enter into our consciousness. . . . And then patterns of consciousness that are trans-individual, trans-cosmic can then emerge in a consciousness that is now vast and unlimited, no longer local, and no longer identified with a small energy field, but identified with the field of the whole cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 31, 2009.
Student Question: Earlier you were talking about the individual unconscious, the collective unconscious, and the planetary unconscious, and I was just wondering what role the planetary unconscious plays in this change? Is it even aware of this happening?
“Well of course. This is the consciousness of Nature,” answers Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so yes, the planetary unconscious is a force that is operating at every moment in very subtle ways, in all of the things that happen to us that affect our karma. . . . But, it’s only when we have surrendered to the Supreme Consciousness that contains the planetary, as well as the cosmic and the trans-cosmic, that then there is an alignment of all of these different levels. But the entire universe is consciousness, and that consciousness operates at every level—just as there is a consciousness of every cell in your body, and it is operating in alignment with all of those different levels also.” But the story of Kali Yuga is the story of separation and multiplicity; the time of individual egos denying their connection to the whole. “And so unless we transcend the ego—and realize our identity never had anything to do with the ego—then we cannot unite with Nature and with the power that is transcendent of Nature. And then we can, once we have done that, we can bring that power of God into the nature of our own bodies, and through us, the nature of the world will be reborn and revived by that recognition of unity and harmony and love that is a palpable energy that will flow through us once we have let go of the resistance of the ego.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 31, 2009.
Student Comment: Most of the time we’ve been dealing with matters of the inner transformation, the imperience, and I fully resonate with that. But today you’ve mostly discussed topics about manifestations of transformation in the external world, and I must admit that something in me reacts to that and goes, “Why now?” or “How can one be so certain of something like this?” I don’t know how to deal with that reaction in me because I relate that to the many instances where such things have been said and have not happened.
“It’s true that this prediction has been made since the beginning of Kali Yuga, and that every religion of Kali Yuga is based on the knowledge that we are heading downward in a path that will lead to the end of this age and the end of this cycle of time,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But, nevertheless, “what we can see is that we have now reached the exhaustion of Kali Yuga—that was talked about two thousand years ago. We can now see that it has reached its point of no return.”
“If you don’t want to look at it, and don’t care to believe in that, you’re free not to. But then you may be taken by surprise and wonder, ‘What’s going on here? All the earthquakes, all the volcanoes, all of the phenomenal climate change activities that are raising the sea level.’ All of the extraordinary phenomenon that are going on, you won’t be able to make sense of unless you see the pattern that is being enacted. . . . And so the purpose of understanding this is to remain in peace as we go through these events.”
And, “by having that understanding, you will know that God is working in very subtle ways to help those who wish to be midwives of the bringing in of the new age [and] that there are ways in which we can help if we choose to be vehicles of that work. . . . So knowing these things ahead of time will enable us to act ahead of time. . . . So it’s important to know in that level what’s going on so that we make correct decisions; otherwise we won’t realize the importance of creating a transformational community before it’s too late.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 31, 2009.
Student Question: You said that we have to stop asking questions that would be impediments to our growth. What kind of questions would be impediments to our growth?
“Well the question of the ego that says, ‘Why is it so hard? How can I do this? I don’t know how.’ All of those questions that create a sense of helplessness and hopelessness that don’t really have answers. But they are not true questions,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. These are questions are asked by a false self who cannot find answers and cannot find God, “because to the ego, God can only be imagined as another entity that’s in resistance to the world, or wants to dominate the world, or wants to manipulate us in some way. And so everybody hates that God—but that is not the real God. But the ego cannot imagine a God that is neither a dictator, or some negligent clockmaker, or some being who started this whole thing and then abandoned us . . . and doesn’t give a damn. That’s not the reality of God, but the ego cannot imagine that we are all within God that is supporting us; that is the very love that keeps life going, and is the intelligence that directs life at every level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 31, 2009.
Student Comment: From watching this movie on fractals, the recurring theme that hits me is this idea of self-similarity. It really interests me, and I’d like to know more about it.
“It’s true that in every moment you are similar to the way you were in the last moment. But you are also different. And this is the key point. If you are in fact different from every past moment, and you’re going to be different in the next moment, then you are not who you are now. You are in fact the difference itself. . . . The human essence is not form but the difference between one form and the next. Between one iteration and the next. And because you are difference, difference has no form. And that difference cannot be predicted. It is freedom. . . . And that’s why it’s possible—in any moment—to become enlightened. . . . just by realizing that what you are is difference itself. . . . Therefore you can change your life, utterly, at any moment; you have that freedom. It’s only our fear—of using that freedom—that keeps us stuck. Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, December 22, 2009.
Student Comment: From watching this movie tonight on fractal geometry, I was amazed with the mathematical patterns. But with synchronicities, which are also patterns, I feel a stronger message—a call to action.
“I think it has to be taken as a message at a slightly different level but at the level, let’s say, of DNA within a cell, which is operating at the same principles, that is a call to the actual molecules and organelles within the cells to operate in a certain way. And they follow that message. So on the level of human consciousness, there is a call from the intelligence of the designer of the universe for us to act in a certain way if we would listen to that.” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, December 22, 2009.
“In these days before Christmas is a time to be incubating the Christ-self within us Who must be born,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the ceremony of the birthing of one’s Godself and the death of the ego was always recognized as the most sacred of all days, and the entire year leads up to this moment. . . . But to do that, to give birth to the Christ-self, we must surrender the ego-self. We must empty out the mind of all residue of ego in order to be a pure vehicle for the Supreme Intelligence, the Supreme Love. To fill and to emanate and to be shared. Those are the gifts under the Christmas tree. It is the gift of the divine virtues that we can role model and transmit and appreciate in the other.”
“So I hope you will give yourself the gift of being the gift that brings that empowerment to all of us and as a model to the entire world because this is the moment when the world is in its darkest days; this earth has never seen darker days than the ones we are in now. And these are the days in which we must give birth to the light. And we can’t say somebody else will do it. We have to take responsibility for doing it. You know the Christmas tree is filled with lights. It is a festival of lights; but we must be those lights.”
“And so I wish you all every blessing on achieving that—and doing it now because it takes so much time to purify the soul that if we wait, if we waste even one day and say, ‘I’ll start tomorrow,’ or ‘I’ll start after my vacation,’ or I’ll start whenever, the time won’t be there. There’s no more margin. It has to be done now and ceaselessly; an ongoing purification of the self has to be the regimen that organizes our lives. . . . we pay the price of the ego, and what we gain is the priceless union with the Source of all being.” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, December 22, 2009.
Student Question: What are the differences among the Pre-modern, Modern, and Postmodern man?
In the Pre-modern man, “we have a consciousness in which there is a true cosmos: God is at the center, it is like a mandala, and then there is an order, there’s a beauty, a pattern, which was referred to in the Middle Ages as the great chain of being. . . . And then in the Modern Era, the center of the mandala drops off, and there is a sense, ‘Well there actually is no God.’ . . . And so the Modern Age is the loss of God and the beginning of humanism. . . . And then in the Postmodern Age—particularly in the 20th century—we have even man dropping out. Nietzsche said ‘God is dead.’ But the Postmodern said that man is also dead. There is no man. Man is a construct. In fact, what men are, are simply fragments.” Recorded on the evening of Monday, December 21, 2009.
Student Question: You talked earlier about the purification of the soul, but I am confused with the term soul because in Buddhism they don’t use soul. So what is being purified?
“It’s the continuity of sanskaras that create the illusion of an entity. So soul does not really exist. It’s part of Maya, but it’s apparent existence can create plenty of trouble for you. And so it must be purified until there is no longer the sense of being an entity, but one is simply identified as the entirety of the whole of the process that this creation is, not as some separate part.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 17, 2009.
Student Question: In one of the books we’re reading, it talks about the devouring of the mother needs to be cut in a way by the Law. And I’m just curious about that devouring. What does that mean, and what does that have to do with desire?
“You don’t want to be devoured. You want the other to desire to devour you, and then you say ‘No thanks.’ And that’s how the ego gains its sense of superiority; it is the rejecting of the other. And that’s why everyone’s heart has a stake in it because everyone has been disappointed in love. The other has lured them and then rejected them. And that’s the most painful situation in the world.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 17, 2009.
Student Question: There was a term you used in the seminar last week that I’m not familiar with. Maybe you could elaborate, the Elohim?
“Elohim is a plural word, and it means the elevated ones, the gods. . . . There are many deep secrets in the understanding of the Elohim because the Jews and Christians tend to overlook the fact that it’s a plural verb, or simply treat it as the multiple sides of the One God, but in fact it means also the fact that the world was filled with gods. . . . And so the Elohim represent the essence of our own selves in unison. So, there is a time, this is that moment in which the Elohim return.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 17, 2009.
“Many people are seeking techniques for meditation,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And in my experience the use of techniques is an avoidance of the real issue that meditation is about.” The only true technique in meditation is the purification of the heart. The purity of the heart is really the love for God, and then, meditation is effortless. And the true state of surrender to God, of love for God, is martyrdom. “We have to understand that martyrdom is not the same as victimhood,” although today the two are confused. “Martyrdom is the refusal to be a victim. . . . Martyrdom is the willingness to live life fully, authentically in the midst of non-love, in the midst of adversity, in the midst of not being recognized. It is that courage that enables one’s ego to die—at every moment—so that the light can be born within one. . . . And it is only when we’re willing to be martyrs in the phenomenal plane that then we will have the reward of the mystical union with God because it is that very karma yoga action that purifies the soul.” So “in the meditative state we must touch into that part within us that is pure, that is inherently always, eternally pure. . . . and we must go into that essence and rest in that place because that is the place where we are already one with God. Nothing needs to be achieved and therefore, no technique is necessary.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 17, 2009.
Student Question: In the seminar last weekend you said that archetypes are the ones that are running history and our lives. Can you give a little more information on that?
“Well at a certain moment in history there was a choice made, not at a conscious but at a super-conscious level . . . within not only the human species but within the realm of all the actants—no longer to support the dharma. And the dharma then—at an archetypal level—recognized that it must go into exile. And the world was then run by false powers,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And it is only through the archetypes—not through any individual ego—that the dharma will return. And it is at this moment in history—when all love seems to have disappeared from the planet—that it must and will return. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 15, 2009.
Student Question: You were saying that this is a time when all the myths have to gather together to create a new myth. Can you say a little more about that?
“Well for one thing all the religions are exhausted now,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. They can no longer provide the energy of spiritual transmission. And what’s worse, scandals permeate all the world religions now to the point of collective distrust. “And there’s a negative charge now on religion instead of a positive aura of reverence. Now people assume it’s hypocritical, or ‘What do they want? How are they gonna exploit me?’ and people have great fear of it, and with good reason.”
“And the cynicism that’s built into the modern ideology of materialism and scientism makes a lot of people think that religion is automatically anti-reason, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific. None of this is true.” But, nonetheless, we have reached a point culturally in which the most brilliant and avant-garde thinkers are moving further and further away from religion. So where is higher spiritual knowledge going to come from? “We have to create new passageways for Spirit to be able to enter the world. And so this can only be done at an individual level at this point until enough individuals come together to create new kinds of spiritual communities that are not dependent on the belief systems, credos, institutionalizations of the lineages that have become exhausted.” Recorded on the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, 2009.
Student Comment: So just to clarify, the sexuation trauma has been the central trauma and that we’ve sought—through chakra two—the perfect love relationship to heal it, for the past two thousand years. So, essentially, it has been the trauma of the second half of Kali Yuga.
“Once the identity became based on the body instead of based on Spirit; that’s the shift that happens in Kali Yuga. Before Kali Yuga, you are a Spirit who has a soul and a body, that’s in Treta [Yuga]. In Dwapar Yuga, you’re a soul that has a Spirit and a body. Then in Kali Yuga, you’re a body that in the beginning has a soul and Spirit, but then only has a soul, and then eventually you're only a body. That’s the way we are now and it has been for the last several hundred years, at least in the West where there’s a total materialism. . . . Once Spirit, which is the source of love, has been cut off, and the soul, which is the depth dimension of the human being has been cut off, then you're just a surface ego. And what do you have to give?” Recorded on the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, 2009.
Excerpts: “Understand that pure Presence is your natural state. It is only that we have been in exile from our own Presence. We have been lost in the labyrinth of the mind. . . . So, by becoming Present, we are letting go of our preconceptions and our illusions about the world that keep us in a state of dissatisfaction and in flight from the present moment. . . . And so we invite the Self back into the space by creating a true, sacred space in our own mind. . . . Now we must surrender the house of the mind to the Holy Spirit and—in that way—we become the vehicles of Spirit. We become the Elohim: the many who incarnate the One. And this produces then a new order within the physical plane. A New Order of the Ages, Novus Ordo Seclorum.”
“This is the same story. It’s told in every culture. It’s told in many different ways with many different names. . . . But it’s our story, it’s not the story of someone who lived in India. It’s not the story of someone who lived in Palestine. It’s not the story of even a man. The story of the Virgin Mary is the same story in female form, or Ishtar, or Isis. The story is told in the same way for man, woman, even animal. For all creatures there is that same movement: exile and then return and the restoration.” Recorded on the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, 2009.
“Many of you are practicing the supreme renunciation,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The supreme renunciation is to renounce the realization of your oneness with God. It’s the most painful ascetic practice one can undertake. . . . And so it’s very easy to attain liberation because all you’re doing is letting go of renunciation . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 10, 2009.
“What is the difficulty in awakening?” poses Shunyamurti, the spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The problem is this: The ego is a PDF file. PDF meaning, Projections, Decisions, and Fixations. And it developed in that order. There was a pure consciousness—without identification—and your parents projected on it. . . . And then you took on a decision to accept those projections, or modify them somewhat, or do something with them—but you made a decision based on those projections. And then that decision got repressed into the unconscious and became a fixation.”
Then, reveals Shunyamurti, “Once it became repressed you could no longer change it because your thinking capacity would begin with those projections and decisions as the basis of your thought. And so the ego—whoever you believe yourself to be—is the product of that logic—and that ego cannot change itself.” And liberation, or awakening, though the ultimate cure cannot be achieved because the ego bases itself on an inferiority complex: “I’m unworthy, therefore I exist. This is the new Cartesian signifier.”
“So unless your desire comes out of love of life—that comes out of the realization that you are a being of light, an emanation of God—not an unworthy ego that’s got to prove itself and improve itself and go through all these processes of self-flagellation. Only if it comes out of that inner most Source that is unlimited—and that is not personal, it’s not individual. It is the Self that flows through you. . . . And our faith in realizing that ‘That is what I am, not what anyone told me. Not whatever is on that PDF file, but what is at the source of pure consciousness. Then I am liberated.’” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 08, 2009.
Student Comment: I always get this sense that there’s this core Ahankar, “I.” And what the “I” wants is “a better life, nicer things, less problems.” But it doesn’t want to dissolve itself. That’s what’s so radical. In the end, when push comes to shove, it’s like, “I wanna forget these certain things that my mom did, but I mean I love my mom. I’m not going to let go of my mom in that she’s a mom, and she gave birth to me.” Those kind of ultimate ego boundaries are to me what’s so difficult.
“The Buddha, to become Buddha, had to leave his family,” recalls Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “He left his role as the prince who would have become the king. He left the dharma. He left all of that to become Buddha so that he could then come back and offer them a path to enlightenment.” And although we don’t literally have to leave our family or karmic responsibilities, “There’s an internal identification that does have to be let go of so that our Godself can then be present for them.”
“In classical India, there were four goals of life: Artha, Kama, Dharma, and Moksha.” Artha meaning monetary wealth, Kama meaning sensual pleasures, Dharma meaning ethical and social responsibility, and Moksha meaning the desire for liberation. “But when Buddha came he said ‘That’s nonsense. Forget Artha, Kama, and Dharma. Go directly for Moksha. ‘It doesn’t make sense wasting your life in those early kinds of desires because they’ll ensnare you.’” So, if you have the opportunity, go for the Moksha. Go for the Supreme Liberation. Recorded the afternoon of Tuesday, December 8, 2009.
“Sri Ramana Maharshi has said that the Real Self is the state in which the word ‘I’ does not arise; not even implicitly as a concept. This might seem like a paradox,” argues Shunyamurti, the spiritual founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “How can it be a self if there’s no I? But when the I arises, the Real is split open,” into subject/object, I/you (i.e. duality). And this journey into binary opposition is sustained by the use of language. Language may have its benefits when it comes to communication—and thus sciences, logic, etc—but it can not exist in the Real. “So the Real cannot actually be graphed by science or logic or any system of thought. So every system of thought comes to a point where it no longer serves us. . . . What the yogis have discovered is . . . no system of understanding can grasp Reality. The only way to grasp the Real is to realize that you are the Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 3, 2009.
Student Question: Is it possible for a true leader to emerge within today’s world? I feel like we have to come to a place like this—where we exclude the world out there—in order to cut through our own Maya and the Maya of others, and the society at large.
“We don’t exclude the world. We invite the world, and we want to become a model of a functioning community that can act in ways that are true and authentic,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “All historians who have studied this subject recognize that civilizations have life spans. They’re born, they have a Golden Age, they expand on the basis of the wisdom of the founding fathers and mothers, etc . . . and it becomes more and more corrupted as they gain more profit. The ego appropriates everything. Pretty soon they become like those they originally rebelled against, and their freedom now turns into a self-enslavement and an enslavement of others. They become so corrupt that they cannot survive, and they gradually die.”
“Today we’re at the point of the death of a global civilization. And the system is too corrupted and sick to allow a leader, like the kind that you hypothetically mentioned, to survive. . . . And so we are at a time now in which the fall cannot be prevented . . .but now we’re at a point that—because it is global and planet-wide—and because it is not only political, but it is also ecological . . . it has to be resolved in a far more radical way than could be done in any ordinary, conventional mindset. And this requires a quantum leap in our understanding of the nature of reality as being very than our ego minds have presented it to us as. And that requires a transcendence of the ego and a downloading of Cosmic Intelligence. And nothing short of that is going to help.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 1, 2009.
Student Question: We were reading an essay yesterday about the spiritual path and this point one reaches when one has the knowing and understanding that every action has immeasurable consequences. Can you elaborate on these immeasurable consequences?
“The world is one whole,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Everyone is interconnected. And this entanglement “even transcends what we think of the universe.” So anything that happens in any galaxy, in any culture—even in the unconscious mind—“will have an effect on the whole. . . . We are all connected.” And the more we are dedicated to the spiritual path, the more powerful are the effects we can have on the world. “And we have that ability to set the whole world on fire again with spiritual love and bliss if we’re willing to do it all the way, not just halfway.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 1, 2009.
There is a paradoxical statement in the Vedas that says, “God shall be worshiped by none but God,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual leader of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “You’re not allowed, and you cannot worship God unless you realize you are God. That is what real worship of God means, that you realize the Godhood, otherwise it’s not true worship.” And when we realize that we are gods and goddesses, “And we realize what that means is not, ‘Oh the ego is a god over others.’ No, but one has surrendered the ego to the true God-consciousness. Then we are free to see each other in a state of unconditional love.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 1, 2009.
“Today we are here to give thanks to the Source of our Being,” says Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. We give thanks to the harvest. “We give thanks for the fact that nature . . . provides for us the food whereby we can continue our lives.” And we must also give thanks for the community—whose cooperation allows the harvest to take place. So today we give thanks to the community, nature, and the Source from which all thanks spring.
And despite the narcissism of the ego—and our false identification with it—we must give thanks “for the fact that our nature has been created by God in such a way that we have the capacity to achieve liberation.” Which is really the greatest blessing of all. “So why not accept the offer our divine nature makes to us . . . and achieve liberation, and then offer that to others. And then we’ll have a world of thankfulness.” Recorded on the afternoon of Thursday, November 26, 2009.
“The odd thing,” as Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, observes, “is that people want more than anything to be seen, and yet they’re terrified of being seen because they’re afraid of what will be seen. And there’s so much we want to hide, and yet we have hidden from ourselves that which is best in us.” As Shunyamurti reminds us, our true nature is Satchitananda: Being, Awareness, and Bliss. “But we have somehow generally cut ourselves off from that.” And in exchange, we have accepted a false self-image given to us by the unconscious minds of our parents and later by society as a whole.
But “each human organism is simply a portal for the one Cosmic Mind to flow through. And so each of us is That. We are the source of all power, all beauty, all love—everything that we’re looking for in the outer world, we actually are that. And because the world—being a dream—has the structure of a mirage, you can’t find it out there because what you will always find out there will be the shadow again that you took in as an identity that then gets projected onto the other.”
And this shadow, this idea of something “out there” that will complete us comes from a sense of lack. “Lack gets installed with the ego. It’s part of the ego. The ego has the structure of a doughnut; there’s always a hole in the middle. And it’s always looking to fill that. . . . And the only way out of that, again, is to be free of the vulnerability of the ego that is protected by the shells of defense mechanisms, and be willing to stand naked in Reality, beyond the ego identity. Beyond the known. Beyond any certainties that our mind can provide. And be fully present to the Real.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 24, 2009.
“There’s a field called transpersonal psychology that’s popular these days. But,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute, “it’s kind of a misnomer because psychology deals with the personal. When you really get transpersonal, you are also transpsychological. . . . There is that which is trans or metapsychological within us—that’s what we call the spiritual.” And the first mistake that many people make on the spiritual path is identifying with the personal rather than the transpersonal. The personal/psychological realm is a labyrinth but “you can transcend that whole dimension of your being if you’re willing to disidentify from the person.”
Shunyamurti explains that it’s similar to watching “a movie that you really like, and you identify with the character. When you’re watching that movie, you're not in your seat in the theater anymore, you're in the screen. You’ve identified with the character. And you're going through what the character is going through, and you're feeling all the anxiety, you know, ‘Will the villain defeat the hero?’ or whatever is going on. And yet, the moment the film becomes boring, you're back in your seat, and you’re saying, “Wow that’s a lousy film,” and you're out of it. All you gotta do is realize your ego’s a lousy film.” It’s as simple as that. “And the moment you realize, ‘I don’t need to do that anymore. I’m free. I’m done.’ Then you're out.”
“That’s what all the spiritual paths are about. It all comes down to that. You can read a million books, but it all boils down to that very simple thing: You are that, just stop believing in anything else—and silence the mind that continues the labyrinth and this merry-go-round of suffering that you're on—and the moment you do that you’re free. So that’s all we’re doing in meditation, is liberating ourselves from an illusion that was never real in the first place.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 19, 2009.
“We are living in a time of ultimate paradox,” reveals Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. We live in a time when we are, collectively, the greatest distance from God; yet, at the same time, we are also closer to reaching God than we have ever been. This current state of isolation from God has led to much philosophical inquiry. “Thrownness” was the famous notion of Heidegger while for Jaspers it was being “Shipwrecked.” But the underlying point that these philosophers were trying to express was this feeling of isolation, of hopelessness and lostness.
“And that’s the sense out there of Kali Yuga, that the night is getting darker and darker all the time.” And it really seems that way unless we understand that “this modern age is actually an eye blink in a much larger context. And that this moment of darkness is a necessary prelude to an awakening to love once more.” But “the God we’re looking for isn’t going to come from out there somewhere. The God we are looking for is waiting for us to find that source within ourselves.” Recorded the evening of Wednesday, November 18, 2009.
“You know the trick in teaching a spiritual path is that people come from many different backgrounds, they’re at many different levels . . . different phases of their journey. They have different existential concern, different questions, different doubts. And you can’t speak in a way that will reach everyone in a group like this,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. If one speaks at the highest level, then it may appear to many as nonsense or irrelevant. If one speaks at the most basic level then others may perceive no value in the teaching. So when addressing different people, there may arise answers that seem contradictory. This can be well demonstrated in the questions and answers of Ramana Maharshi.
And eventually the time will come when conventional answers will not suffice to answer our questions, and then we can “step out of all the boxes and all of the levels of prefabricated answer that any philosophy or religion can give us and discover what is the Truth of our being.” This journey leads to silence, “and then from that silence we realize we’re no longer an individual in the sense of a separate being, but that’s when we realize our universality that can be expressed in a particularized way, but it comes from the Cosmic Mind, it doesn’t come any longer from the individual level of mind. And that’s when we transcend suffering, and illusion, and desire, and fear. And we can truly know who we are, and the nature of God, the nature of this world that we are thrown into, and what the meaning, and purpose, and direction of our lives must be.”
But to be able to even reach the silence, there must first be a “healthy psychic structure that will enable you to contain the infinite within the finite.” This is why the Sat Yoga Institute provides a space “in which we can get beyond all of those ego narratives and social demands ‘out there’ that tell you ‘This is not worth doing’ or ‘This is too dangerous’ or ‘This will threaten your house of cards’ or ‘It will make your family hate you and throw you out of the house’ or whatever it is that the superego tells you to justify not going any deeper in the journey, which ultimately comes to a failure of nerve of realizing that you are and have been a stranger to yourself. You don’t know your own potential. You don’t know what’s even in the deepest place of your own heart. . . . And so when the internal conflicts have been dissolved, then the external ones also—which are projections of the internal—will fall away. . . . And so I hope you will all give yourself—as the moth ultimately must—to dive into the flame and realize you, all the time, have been the flame.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 17, 2009.
Student Comment: You said earlier that the psychic space is curved toward liberation, but I actually thought that you were going to say the opposite, that it is curved away from liberation. That the space has been shaped by conditionings so that people don’t want it, and yet now you’re saying that that space has never been touched.
“No it’s the superego that curves you away from that,” explains Shunyamurti, spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Using the example of the interference pattern of a dream (between the unconscious mind and the Atman), Shunyamurti explains: “This is why there is such a thing as Karma. It represents that point of shock between the superego’s agenda and the pull of the Supreme Reality.” Shunyamurti further explains that in modern psychology, the intelligence that has created the dream—which is completely different than the intelligence that identifies itself as a character in the dream—has been completely left out of dream interpretation. “Therefore, even the Freudians or the Jungians don’t really touch into the nature of the source of the dream.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 17, 2009.
“All of you have the Buddha-Nature,” reveals Shunyamurti, spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Depending on circumstance and setting, you might also be told you are Shiva, or you have Krishna-consciousness, or Christ-consciousness, or you’re filled with the Ru’ach HaKodesh. “All the traditions are referring to the same Truth.” But we must recognize that EVERYONE has the Buddha-Nature—not just our friends but also our enemies. And we can do that, we will be liberated. But what does having the Buddha-Nature really mean? What the Buddha-Nature means is that “we are empty of any substantial identity. Each of us is a range of potentials. At one moment, yes, we could all be a criminal and at the next moment a saint, the next moment a Buddha. We all have that full range of potential.”
But, Shunyamurti mentions, “If I see you as the Buddha, that encourages that side of the potential to emerge. If I see you as a criminal, as unlikable, unlovable, unworthy, then that’s probably what you’ll show me. So do yourself a favor and see the other as the Buddha as well as offering that as a gift to the other. Because the other is empty, just as the Self is empty. But we have the highest potential—all of us. And at any moment, each of us is capable of enlightenment and liberation.”
And, along with recognizing everyone’s Buddha-Nature, we must learn to live in the present because “in the present all of us are liberated at this very moment. It’s only when we create thoughts—that are opposed to liberation—that we take it away from ourselves. But it’s here, inherently, at this moment. It’s simply a choice to live in this state and not create obstacles or masks, charades of being anything other than the Buddha. And we can free ourselves now.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 12, 2009.
“There’s a drive that human beings have that’s probably the most important of all the drives that psychologists tend not to focus on or even recognize. It’s a very odd thing to me,” remarks Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “which is the magic drive.” And, as Shunyamurti reminds us, “Everyone has a drive toward magic,” and even “toward being a magician.” But in this day and age we have chosen to externalize magic into the various forms of technology that we have readily available to us. But the problem is that this society is prone toward black magic. “And so the magic that we spend most of the money on in modern culture are the magic that will create shock and awe in warfare. The magic of surveillance of whole societies. The magic that gives power over others.” And these types of “magic” give the ego the idea that it is powerful and is able to manipulate its environment in some way, shape, or form. “And we are now suffering from the effects of the success of these lower kinds of magic that have in fact succeeded in destroying the unity, the love, the harmony, the very basis of life in this natural world.”
But the power of the unconscious mind can never be underestimated in its ability to cast its own magic spells. It has in fact cast a magic spell so powerful over the ego that the ego does not even realize that it is entranced. “And once it comes under that spell, then the situation becomes hopeless because the ego can no longer remove itself from the spell that it has put itself under. This is the passion for ignorance that is spoken of by the Buddhists . . . and many other theorists who have attempted to understand why it’s so difficult for people to change even when they come into therapy or they come into some spiritual path. ‘Why does it seem so difficult?’ It’s because the ego is under a magic spell. . . . This is why it’s so important in meditation to quiet the mind. In that state of silence . . . you are not reinforcing the magic spell. And as it weakens then the real magic of the inner light can break through into one’s awareness. . . . And that magic will liberate our awareness from the sense of being a separate entity from the magic that all of this is.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 10, 2009.
Student Comment: When you mention magic and the development of souls towards spirituality, what came to mind was the magic of dreams, which gives you messages. And I understand that the message in a dream, coming from the Atman, its goal is to help you on your way. But I do have a problem with the interpretation of the dream because it’s the ego or the conscious mind that’s trying to interpret it.
Dream interpretation has always been an important pillar in spirituality, from the ancient practice of Swapna Yoga, to figures in the Abrahamic religions such as Joseph, who interpreted the dreams of the pharaoh. “But it has been lost in the modern age—or it has been re-found with the agendas of psychoanalysis, etc, that have not fully opened to the spiritual dimension, which is the source of the dream.” So now we have many different types of dream analysis, including Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, etc, which will all give different and often accurate interpretations, but these methods cannot take the dream to its inner-most meaning. So it is imperative that we have a trusted spiritual guide with whom we can deeply explore both the unconscious mind and the spiritual message of the Atman. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 10, 2009.
Since the advent of quantum physics the idea of matter has disappeared as a possible hypothesis for what the universe is made of. But Shunyamurti, the spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, poses the following question: “Since there is no matter and no space and no time in any true sense, what do we mean by a universe?” But as he explains, “We tend then to fall back on the idea, ‘Well, then it’s consciousness, the whole world is consciousness.’ And it’s true that we talk a lot about consciousness in here, but I have to admit to you tonight that consciousness is also a myth.” This teaching has long been known in every true spiritual tradition. In Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart once admitted, “If you would have the Kernel, you must break the husk,” referring to the esoteric understanding that in order to achieve union with God, one must break through all conceptualizations and preconceived notions that one has about God.
“And the argument usually between two sides of the philosophic coin have been the materialists and the idealists. . . . Well what if both are wrong? Which is what Advaita, Buddhism have been saying all along. . . . So it’s important that we understand that when we are having Sat Yoga what we simply mean is we’re letting go of every mythological construct that we have been pinning an identity to. . . . But these constructs do not exist within any Ultimate Reality, and so you have to keep them going with a great deal of effort. And if you stop, keeping them going, they dissolve. . . . And no terms can describe it then. The Absolute is both nothing and everything but there is nothing and—there is not even a nothing. Even nothing has to be nothinged. And so there, nothing and everything are not opposites. There’s no logical way to grasp any of this. And it’s by the act of surrendering that effort to understand this with logic that the intuitive knowing of it suddenly blasts forth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 5, 2009.
“The spiritual process, traditionally, both East and West, has been referred to as alchemy,” Shunyamurti, spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reveals. “Alchemy is a metaphor referring to the refinement of the psychic substance itself. . . . During the process of meditation, that is exactly what we are doing: We are extracting pure consciousness out of consciousness that has been bound up in words, in images—particularly in self-images—in fantasies, in oscillations between past and future that never allow you to be present, in anxieties, depressive ideas; all of those kind of psychic enmeshments that create suffering. . . . And so meditation is the essential act of alchemical Self-Liberation.”
And what exactly are we when we are freed from the boundaries of language and self-images? Pure awareness that is luminous. “And actually for the first time we will realize that the awareness itself is love.” Along with the freedom from thoughts we can truly love for the first time “because those false ideas, by the very fact that they have separated us from our true being, causes us to hate ourselves for having trapped ourselves, and hate the other for having projected on us that we’re something that we’re not. And we’re disappointed in ourselves. . . . And when we have let go of all of them, we realize that all we have ever been is this unlimited being—that is in fact the totality of all that is real.”
“And when you’ve tasted the eternity you can come back into this apparent world of time where everybody is chaotic and stressed out because there’s no present, and you can help them deal with it and awaken them to the fact that, ‘Wait, that’s a dream you’re in, a nightmare in fact. Be free.’” So “come out of the trance of time and space and ego and matter, and awaken to the fact that all of this is God. All of this is light. All of this is Eternal Consciousness—Supreme Intelligence playing a game with itself in many forms; infinite forms, each form reflecting one aspect of the infinite beauty, and love, and creativity of the Cosmic Intelligence.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 03, 2009.
Student Question: You’ve described that we live in a dream within a dream within a dream. Could you elaborate on the dream that’s within a dream within a dream, the stages, the Shakti?
“Well first you have the Cosmic Intelligence that dreams up the whole universe,” as Shunyamurti, spiritual guru of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, explains. “And then at the level of our planet. . . .You have the collective dream, which we often refer to as a paradigm.” And through time the paradigm degrades—as it has now to a materialistic, egotistic mindset—and affects everyone in the dream-field. “But then within that collective dream is the third dream of the individual. And each individual creates their own dream out of the material of both the collective dream and the Supreme, Cosmic Dream.” But despite the suffering and insanity of the planetary dream, some souls, because of their karmic trajectory, can maintain their connection to God and return spirituality to the entire planet. “And so periodically, when human consciousness has fallen to a very low level, individuals and communities arise within that to give birth to a new consciousness and a new world.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 3, 2009.
“So there’s a reason why people are hesitant to meditate, and that they’re not interested in meditation. And that’s because,” as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us, “meditation is too much like death.” And death means many things to the ego: detachment, stillness, silence, emptiness, nothingness. And, even worse, “you say to the dead, ‘Rest in peace.’” And the one thing that the ego does not want is peace because it gets its kicks from the vicissitudes of pleasure and pain; the cheap thrills of the egoic notion of “happiness.” To rest in peace is to be free from the most powerful desires and wants.
And, eventually, “we recognize that the desire is a defense against the fear—and it always leads back to the fear, or a vexation, or some kind of suffering—and is never what we really wanted, because what we really wanted was to find the place that is at peace. . . . And what we find then is that meditation is not what the ego thinks, it’s not boring, it’s not a lack of involvement, but it is actually a transcendence that enables us then to return to the world, reborn; the death is not the end.”
And through this death and rebirth we enter back into the world in a state of love, with a willingness to give and help others without any hidden agendas or ulterior motives because “often at the ego level, desire masquerades as love.” But liberation allows one to be free of the desire to be appreciated, to be needed—or any of the various ways that the ego tries to express love—and allows one to show true compassion and love in every act. Recorded the evening of Thursday, October 29, 2009.
“Love without wisdom is inadequate,” as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” But, “Equally, wisdom without love is absolutely futile, and we know so many philosophers who have a great . . . capacity to think, but they can’t love their way out of a paper bag. And thinking alone won’t get you out of the box of the ego; the two must be integrated.” Likewise, there are also two manifestations of love in action. Karma yoga is the essence of love in action, “to act without greed, possessiveness, the desire for some ulterior agenda to be fulfilled by the ego, then that will be able to unravel the ego’s knots and unwillingness to love. The second one is community because it’s not just a matter of ‘What do I do,’ but the real test is can I help form a communion of love with other human beings—cause that’s the ultimate test isn’t it? Can we live together in love?”
Without love, as modern society has proven, things fall apart. But we need wisdom to “recognize that the source of what is unloving in ourselves is the ego. So the first step of wisdom is the realization that ‘I must disidentify from the ego.’ . . . And because we have come to live in a world of representations, of symbols and language—rather than in the feeling and in the essence of our innermost being—we have lost touch with that, and we have deceived ourselves into thinking, ‘Oh I can just talk the game, I don’t have to really walk it.’ So with the wisdom to form the talk, and the love to “Walk the talk,” we can live in harmony with ourselves and with those around us. Recorded the afternoon of Tuesday, October 27, 2009.
As Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us, there are three basic spiritual paths that lie ahead of us: the slow path, the intermediate path, and the fast path. The slow path consists of slowing reproving our ego and making sure that it stays in check. There is the intermediate path where we ask God to get rid of our ego, and there is the fast path which consists of realizing that you already are That: “I am not the ego. I am not the body. I am not the mind. But I am the Presence, the pure awareness that is an emanation of the Mind of God.”
You are simply the Presence that is witnessing this collective dream take place, and the minute that you get off the throne, you become rooted in linguistic duality from which all suffering takes place. You go down in the mud with the ego. “Clean yourself off of all those muddy ideas. Sit on the throne. Rule in the purity of Divine Presence and the ego will come into order. You don’t have to fight with it.”
“So that’s what we’re doing in meditation: sitting on that throne, which is why it’s called ‘Swaraj,’ the kingdom of the Self.” So sit “in that throne of realization of what it feels like to have gone beyond desire and beyond fear. Beyond any need. Beyond any localization within the world because in that state there’s a realization that the entire world, the entire objectification of consciousness, is within; not without.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 22, 2009.
Student Question: What level of consciousness, or what door did Huxley open?
“Well I won’t judge Aldous Huxley and how many doors he opened, let’s say, but certainly there was a heightened realization,” argues Shunyamurti, the spiritual leader of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “that we’re in a throbbing, luminous, living reality; that what we think of as dead matter is not dead at all. It’s alive in a divine way.”
But, in our materialistic paradigm, and “by de-enchanting the world, by refusing to see it, we have caused that magical dimension of reality to withdraw because the world responds to us: if we treat it as dead, it’ll treat us as dead. . . . And so it’s a rejection of God to choose to have a materialist philosophy. And the whole world has been indoctrinated today into that belief.” Recorded on Tuesday, October 20, 2009.
“We are light,” as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us. We are not, however, light that comes out of light bulbs or light from the sun; we are Divine Light. Just as there are different dimensions, there are also different levels of light. “But within a human being, if you can penetrate through the shell of the ego, you will find not only the photonic light . . . but you will find the angelic light. And then within that, the Supreme Light. And once that Supreme Light is touched, and its radiance is allowed to move into this phenomenal plane, then everything is different. Everything is seen from the Light of God as the emanation of God.”
“In order for that light to emerge, we must remove the outer covering. And the outer covering is made of language. The language covers over and obscures the silence in which the light is contained and emerges. The silence is the medium of the light. When we cultivate the inner silence then we create a space in which the light can shine.” And that light dissolves all questions and desires into the Supreme Self. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.
Student Question: What is the difference between Pantheism and Panentheism?
“Pantheism is the view that sees God or gods in all things,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The Druids worshiped the gods in the trees, the dryads, or the wood nymphs. . . . Or you could see the one God—in and as nature. But Panentheism is a realization that God is actually transcendent of the natural world, but that the natural world is within the Mind of God.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.
Student Comment: What you said just a minute ago brought up something that I was reading last night about someone saying that what we do here is joy, and we’re without seriousness. And I used to think that this seriousness and lack of joy came from money, but now I’m starting to feel that it comes from something much deeper that can be, as we’ve said before, deadly serious.
Shunyamurti, spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us that we must learn not to be serious about petty things, and only be serious when it comes to serious matters. “But those serious matters are the matters of bliss, and joy, and love, and beauty.” But in Western industrial society we’ve placed all value on money rather than the things that really matter such as nature and the environment. And “money is a total fiction, but in this capitalist system, it is the only thing that’s real. Nothing else is real. . . . And they’re having anxiety about something that is completely fictional, while not thinking at all about the fact that the entire real world of nature is collapsing because we’re not paying attention to it. It’s an astounding situation that can only be called psychosis at a species level.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.
Student Question: What are angels a manifestation of?
We are all angels, as Shunyamurti, the spiritual leader of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, tells us. And, as we align ourselves more and more with the Divine Will of God, we may be called on to assist others. Whether we aid someone in a physical body, from a higher dimension with a subtle body, or even in a dream is uncertain, but as we recognize ourselves as the Light of God, we will be called upon to help break the chains of others confusion and help them, too, realize their true nature as Light.
What’s more, if we do not “purify the subtle form,” then it will “remain as a wandering spirit, an earth-bound spirit” or the typical “ghosts” that are well known in paranormal investigations. So one must truly practice the art of detachment from the physical plane—and attachment instead to God—so that one may transcend to the angelic and archangelic realms and finally to the realm of God. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.
“Sat Yoga is the process of becoming fully aware of . . . [your] radiance. And then merging into that radiance and realizing the unlimited scope of that radiance,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Sat Yoga meditation is a triple act: an unrestricted act of understanding, an unconditional act of love, and an undefinible act of Being.
The understanding includes “understanding all of reality, including the Self, unrestricted by beliefs, thoughts, language, or images.” The love is a love without limits and barriers; a love that is not attached to an object or signifier. This act of Being is a giving up of the action of Becoming; it is an “absolute commitment to truthfulness and to presence and to open-heartedness that is our liberation.”
“And so, Sat Yoga is a kind of meditation that one will open to only after one is done with all the games and is ready for Truth in the most naked form possible, which is formless. And when one is no longer content with justifying or rationalizing one’s being, and when one is not afraid to face the emptiness and the nothingness behind all the masks, and once we are able to face the inner truth of our True Nature—fearlessly, openly, without distraction—we are liberated.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday October 13, 2009.
Student Question: Usually when I meditate I just let it be what is, but this time I intentionally tried to silence the words, and I spent the whole time working very persistently to make that happen, but the chatter persisted. So what is the technique when you're confronted with all this chatter?
“The purpose of Sat Yoga is union with Sat . . . the Supreme Being,” explains Shunyamurti, the director and founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And this Supreme Being, whether understood personally or impersonally, “is constituted by an infinite intelligence and infinite love. And because of this infinite intelligence in the service of infinite love, our universe exists.” And only the power of love “will free us from the curse of our egoic narcissism—the egocentricity that takes itself to be a god . . .”
So the process of Sat Yoga is an “uncovering that which the ego itself does not want your consciousness to know. . . . And therefore the early stages of the struggle to achieve Self-liberation take the form of a battle with a part of the self that wants to stay in denial, it wants to stay in hatred, it wants to stay in anger, it wants to stay even in despair and meaninglessness rather than to uncover the truth of its being.” But one must persevere and refuse to identify with the ego if one wishes to progress upon the spiritual path, ultimately, to Self-realization.
But the perseverance must also contain a will to learn because phenomenal reality has become so complex, a yogi today must have a wide array of knowledge including quantum physics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, biosemiotics, and communication and information theory. “All of these are essential today to a yogi to understand because they give us a cognitive grasp of the structure and the dynamics of the functioning of this phenomenal plane we call Maya.” And because the human ego has become so complex today, a yogi must become a psychoanalyst. “We must have a grasp of how the unconscious mind works so we can discern that mind in action in others as well as in ourselves and read between the lines and grasp what is an accurate response in every situation.”
And as we grasp that understanding our karma will become more correct and we can redirect the flow of our energy from the lower chakras of unconsciousness, lust, and hatred to that of love, wisdom, and Truth. “And with that wisdom, if we dedicate ourselves to transformation and to union with God so that we are servants of the highest power and love, our lives will truly be fulfilling.” Recorded on the afternoon of October 6, 2009.
Student Question: We need to dissolve our ego to get in touch with our True Self. Is it bad under different circumstances to play roles in order to achieve objectives? For example, if we work in a company or we own a business or we’re doctors or lawyers and we need to act in a certain way to achieve an objective. Is that bad?
“No. As long as you know that it is a role, then you can play the role accurately.” As Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains: “we talk about dissolving the ego or killing the ego. It’s not the ego as a whole that must be killed. It is the censor. . . . There is an intelligence that resides below the threshold of consciousness that is controlling what you are conscious of. And your conscious mind is enslaved to that—that is what must be killed, so your conscious mind is liberated to realize who you truly are.” The censor is a part of the unconscious mind, “And when I say unconscious, I mean that it is conscious, but you are not conscious of it.” This censor operates on the level of phantasy, and tries to protect the conscious mind of traumas that it does not think that the conscious mind can handle. But it also censors information from the Super-conscious mind, “And it causes our actions to be inaccurate because it leaks out and it stains our perceptions of the world. And so this is what must be purified and transformed.”
“And so once all the denial and the falsehood have been killed off in the ego, then the ego realizes that all along it was an expression of the very God that it denied. So that creates a state of self-mastery or self-sovereignty rather than the self-enslavement that the ego is now in to the unconscious censor. . . . You’re achieving liberation from that state [of self-enslavement] so that your Real Self can now fully emerge with all of its potentialities.” And with that liberation, you can truly play your part in the world. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 6, 2009.
Student Question: What is the spiritual significance of déjà vu?
“Because all of this has happened before an infinite number of times because time itself is an illusion,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So déjà vu means that you have seen it all before right? You’ve seen that moment. It’s an experience that “I’ve lived this moment before. I heard that very thing. I said that very thing. Well, yes, this moment is actually an echo in the cycle of eternity.” But, as Shunyamurti explains, this is a very in depth understanding of the universe that can only be understood through meditation and disidentification from linear time. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday October 6, 2009.
Student Question: Why does consciousness congeal into form?
“Because there are many nuances of possibility that cannot be expressed in any other way. And so all the exquisite permutations of possibility require forms in which to be expressed . . . And so if we do not give form to these expressions, then we cannot mount up to higher and higher levels of consciousness. We cannot learn from the form to enter again the formless at the next octave of realization. . . . And so at each cycle, each experience of growth—through failure through death, through a fall, through trauma—that gets expressed in form, enables us to touch into the heart of Being and be renewed and reborn at a higher level of form—more perfect, more beautiful, more expressive of the Ultimate Real—that is God. And so this is the way that human beings attain that perfection; through form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 1, 2009.
“Each of us is like a mirror that’s looking for itself in the mirror. This is the paradox. The mirror itself can never find itself as an object in the mirror,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And all of the exoteric, or popular paths, start out with the basic misunderstanding that you are a person who needs to be saved, rather than simply consciousness itself. But, somehow, “consciousness becomes congealed, reified, around certain objects in the mirror that it likes very much. And then it becomes, through that process of identification, trapped in the mirror of its own projections. And so the act of meditation is to come out of the illusion that we’re in the mirror and to realize that we are the mirror.” And through this realization we can transcend the subject-object dualities and realize the silence, the emptiness, the pure awareness that we are. “But the emptiness is not an emptiness that is other than fullness; the emptiness itself is the all. It is the point of the meeting of nothing and everything.” And it is at this point that one realizes that everything is simply light and awareness, and when one combines these two, “then what had been limited in time and space is realized as eternal and infinite. This is the liberation” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 1, 2009.
“So if we psychoanalyze not the conscious mind and not the unconscious phantasies but the censor itself, we’ll find that there are two complexes that exist side by side in the censor and they’re completely contradictory. One is that of solipsism: the ego doesn’t believe that there really is anyone else, or at least that all the rest are robots, or they don’t matter. . . . And then at the other side of it is the belief in the big Other to which the ego grovels and submits, and it cannot oppose.” This, as Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, is actually the opposite of the enlightened state in which one recognizes that there are many other sentient others, but there is no big Other “because there is God, and God is one without a second. . . . And so when the enlightened being sees human others, he or she sees only the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 24, 2009.
“In most mythological systems, there is a theme of the double or the twins, and there are different kinds of twinships. One version is that there are two birds in a tree. One bird is eating the fruits on the tree and the other is just watching. This would be the twinship of the soul and the spirit.” As Shunyamurti, the founder and director of the Sat Yoga Institute, argues, this myth of the twins provides a backdrop or a better understanding of the connection with our phenomenal and noumenal realities. “The problem is that part of the consciousness is identified very strongly with the karmically enmeshed ego-form. . . . The only way out is to disidentify and realize you are not the bird that has eaten of the fruit but the other bird that has never been touched by trauma or any of the karmic enmeshments or identifications that the ego is plagued with.”
So, paradoxically, “at the moment when we’re the most cut off from the vastness of the Supreme Self is that moment that we are closest to it in time that the return of eternity into the dimension of time becomes again inevitable and we are in that moment now. . . . This is the moment we have arrived at on this planet. And at the same time it’s the moment in which the doors of our perception can be most opened to cosmic realities that of the merely human plane. . . . So I hope you will all make the choice that will lead to the highest blessings that are possible for consciousness to attain.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 22, 2009.
Student Question: In the last 20 or 30 years of my life I have noticed that humanity is in decline. But my question is why the majority of people do not notice this? Why is it difficult for them to see when there is so much evidence?
“It’s not that they cannot see, it’s that they will not see,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Once one has become strongly identified with the ego complex, he/she will not be able to get past the internal censor, which halts the flow of knowledge that does not “suit the ego’s own unconscious agendas.” And as a result of this, the mind is not receiving the full spectrum of knowledge that is available, and is instead living in an egocentric fantasy world. And this has led to a hell realm. But, like the 12-step programs in which someone has to hit bottom before they can see that his/her life is out of control, now the world must hit bottom before it can see that it needs help beyond the power of the human ego. Recorded on Tuesday, September 22, 2009.
Student Question: These symbols of Ganesha and the mouse, or Shiva and the dwarf, are a little confusing to me because if society has been in a degradation for 5000 years, how were these symbols known so long ago?
These ancient mythologies, as Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute, have built into them the known decline of civilization. “It’s there, every culture, that at the end of time, no one would be able to hold on to any of the dharma.” And this is really just “a recognition of the law of entropy,” (the dissipation from the source; the increase of chaos or randomness), “operating at a spiritual level. . . . But this is a process that is happening at a collective level, so we’re seeing the decomposition of society now at a level that has never existed before. And before it took hundreds of years; like the Roman Empire lasted 800 years before it went into degradation. . . . Now you look at the U.S. in only 200 years in how they’ve fallen from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to Bush and Regan . . . Not that it was perfect, because it began way at the end of Kali Yuga, but the fall is more extreme; the drop is more steep.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 22, 2009.
The Sat Yoga Institute recently participated in the 2nd Yoga Festival of Costa Rica held during the weekend of September 19/20 at CENAC (Centro Cultural de Costa Rica).
El Instituto Sat Yoga recientemente participó en el 2do Festival de Yoga de Costa Rica celebrado durante el fin de semana del 19 y 20 de setiembre del 2009 en CENAC (Centro Cultural de Costa Rica).
The Sat Yoga Sangha had an informative and educational booth during the festival where Sat Yogis attended many Costa Rican visitors and offered them valuable information about the Sat Yoga path to attain liberation from an egocentric limited identity, and achieve absolute union with our True Unlimited Self.
La comunidad (sangha) de Sat Yoga tuvo un stand educativo e informativo durante el festival atendido por Sat Yoguis quienes ofrecieron al público costarricense una variedad de información sumamente valiosa sobre el camino de Sat Yoga y cómo lograr liberarnos de una identidad egocéntrica y limitada que produce sufrimiento, y alcanzar la unión absoluta con nuestro Ser Verdadero.
Sat Yoga was also invited to offer a meditation class during the first day of the Yoga Festival. Sat Yogini Radha, a teacher and disciple of Sat Yoga, offered a great informative talk entitled ‘Sat Yoga: Union with the Truth of our Being.”
Sat Yoga también fue invitado a ofrecer una clase de meditación durante el primer día del festival de yoga. Sat Yogini Radha, una profesora y discípula de Sat Yoga, ofreció un gran charla informativa titulada “Sat Yoga: Unión con nuestro Ser Verdadero”.
We have uploaded this wonderful Sat Yoga class by Radha and we hope it offers you deep insights on the importance of learning the arts of self liberation, and attaining a still silent mind, deep inner peace, and union with our blissful higher Self.
Hemos subido al internet esta excelente clase de Sat Yoga ofrecida por Radha y esperamos que le ofrezca profundos descubrimientos sobre la importancia de aprender las artes de la auto-liberación, y alcanzar una menta quieta y silenciosa, una paz interior profunda, y una unión con nuestro Ser de Bienaventuranza.
You are invited to learn more about Sat Yoga during our monthly Satsangs at our institute located in San Rafael of Escazu. Please call us at (506) 2288-3294 or emal us to info@satyogainstitute.org if you wish to join us.
Lo invitamos a aprender más sobre Sat Yoga durante nuestros Satsangs mensuales en nuestro instituto ubicado en San Rafael de Escazú. Por favor llamarnos al (506) 2288-3294 o enviarnos un correo a info@satyogainstitute.org si quisiera participar.
Namaste.
Although the phrase, “Who Am I?” thought to be the best mantra by Sri Ramana Maharshi, is indeed one of the most profound mantras in meditation, Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, elucidates “I think sometimes it’s actually more appropriate to ask another question of ourselves: ‘Where Am I?’ Because the real question is where does your mind go. It’s not a question of where the body is, but where is the mind? Where does it go?”
With this in mind, Shunyamurti retells the parable of Sri Ramakrishna about two men who make very different decisions for a night of fun and where their minds end up. But, “it’s not where you go physically; it’s where are you really? So there’s another saying in India about where we should be and it’s three words: Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram. And it is said the very inmost core of the soul is most accurately symbolized by those three terms.” Recorded on the evening Thursday, September 17, 2009.
Student Question: I work at a spiritual bookstore, and I always hear people talking about the spiritual path, but they don’t walk their talk. It really frustrates me, and I was just wondering about how do I deal with this?
“This is a frustration that everyone feels actually and not just in relation to the spiritual path, but everyone feels that everyone’s doing everything wrong. This is a constant issue for the ego.” But, as Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, reminds us, this is part of our spiritual practice: to be able to be in the face of hypocrisy and retain compassion for the other, like in the Bible verse, “Father forgive them they know not what they do.” So rather than correcting someone, take the opportunity to practice your compassion for them and that will be the greatest lesson that you can teach them. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 15, 2009.
Student Comment: I’m becoming a bit dislodged in the increasing apperception that every encounter is actually a meeting with God, and I think what brings this to mind is that this is beginning to get reflected back to me. So it just makes me think: “Tread lightly. This is now an appointment.”
As the end of this age is rapidly approaching, the synchronicity of more and more seemingly “coincidental” events are becoming undeniable. “There are many, many more synchronicities per hour than there ever were in the past. And,” as Shunyamurti, founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us, “it’s no accident that quantum physics has in fact come into existence today, which in a way is telling us the same thing at the physical level.” And, as the grand tapestry comes to fruition, “the pattern is becoming visible at the micro level of each consciousness as a fractal or a hologram of the whole, and we are becoming awakened to that as we reach the understanding of our destiny and of our full potential as beings of consciousness.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 15, 2009.
“There is no ‘I’ entity. That’s the first fact.” But because of people’s belief in this illusion, they go at great lengths to improve their ‘I’ illusion like a Barbie doll. They buy it new clothes, new accessories. But as Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, “it’s always more, more, more because the ‘I’ entity isn’t enough. Why isn’t it enough? Because it doesn’t exist in the first place.” But if we could only let go of this illusion of a person, the “phantom of our internal opera,” then we would be able to be free of all of the anxieties that the ego entails.
“So what we’re doing in meditation is we’re paying attention. And that’s the thing that the ‘I’ entity doesn’t really want to do. It doesn’t want to pay attention. It wants to be absorbed in its fantasies, but it doesn’t want to pay attention to its own construction of those fantasies. So meditation is paying attention to the way you pay attention. . . . There will be, ultimately, a realization that the ‘I’ is the Absolute space in which it all occurs; not any entity at all.” Recorded on Thursday, September 10, 2009.
Student Question: We talk about the horizontal plane of time and setting these rules and saying these things exist, but if the ghost and the interdimensional beings and the candle don’t exist, then why do we recognize them? It’s a little confusing to me to talk about all these things and define them, but yet they don’t exist, it’s all consciousness. Recorded Thursday, September 10, 2009.
Student Question: Is Sat Yoga, or does Sat Yoga consider itself, a shamanistic school? And if it does, how does it differentiate from other shamanic schools?
“The original shaman is a yogi. There’s no distinction. It’s only later that in different cultures, that take on the use of this term, that there become variations of its meaning.”
In this enlightening video, Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains the origin and fall of the great shaman and his role in society as a healer to the pseudo/psychedelic-shamanism of modern Westerners (such as Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna), who “make the mistake of believing that the relative mind is the goal rather than the Absolute mind. . . . But the problem is that the brain’s chemistry regulates the relative mind of the ego system, and indeed it can produce . . . interdimensional perceptions, but it does not reach the larger sphere of the absolute mind.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 8, 2009.
Student Question: I was just curious about Yin and Yang. What does it refer to? Is it just duality, opposites, polarities, male/female? What is it?
“Yin and Yang are names within the Taoist tradition of the archetypal structure of phenomenal reality that always exists in a bifurcated form.” This can be likened to the modern example of a computer which works by virtue of a complicated series of zeros and ones (binary code). “And yet it’s infinite,” explains Shunyamurti, founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it can become very complex, just as all language can because, in a sense, the entire universe is language; it’s information.” This idea of language—which works by contrast—leads to a development in the mind of a constant sense of lack, of missing the other piece, and the only way that this hole can be filled is the transcendence of the incomplete, ego-identity. Recorded on Tuesday, September 8, 2009.
Student Comment: I’ve been reading about the afterlife and what, potentially, is there in this great cosmic, astral plane. And it seems like what we’re learning here, with the ascension of the ego, in the physical plane, the third dimensional plane, is similar to what is there in the astral world as far as how the existence might be with souls that are in the non-physical world.
“We’re in the afterlife right now,” as Shunyamurti, the director and founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, explains, “You think this is a physical world but this is no more physical than any other astral plane.” And as the ego is transcended, this “physical plane” becomes quite different “and the more layers of illusion get dissolved, the more this world becomes realized as the Kingdom of Heaven, an astral plane that is far more beautiful than the one that you think you're in right now.” What we perceive with our senses is nothing more than the veils of Maya, the cosmic illusion. “The very idea of physicality is an illusion.” Just as when you are in a dream, the dream feels very real; thus is the nature of Maya. And as the ego dissolves and consciousness rises, the world becomes a much more interesting place. Recorded on the Evening of Thursday, September 3, 2009.
Meditation is the removing of impurities. And these impurities are best summarized in the Bhagavad-Gita, in which they are referred to as: Kama, Krodha, Lobha, Moha, and Ahankar. Kama refers to desire and it is usually specified as sexual desire or lust. Krodha means anger. Lobha is greed. Moha is attachment, “which is another kind of greed, but it’s a holding on to other people” and even the thought of people. Ahankar means “I am the doer—‘I’ the ego. So it is egocentricity; nowadays it would be referred to as narcissism.” And, as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, “all of these are expressions of an underlying issue, which is anxiety.” This anxiety all stems from the understanding, known by the ego but hidden from the conscious mind, that it is an illusion. The only cure for this anxiety, to cleanse these impurities, is the complete surrender to the Supreme Being. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 01, 2009.
“Meditation is often called the opening of the third ‘I.’” But believing that the third “I” is actually supposed to be an eye is a misunderstanding. It is not some vestigial organ in the forehead. It is not even the pineal gland. The first “I” is, to borrow a term from Jacques Lacan, the “I” of the statement, which is known in India as the “monkey mind.” The second “I,” the “little guy behind the curtain,” is known as the “I” of the annunciation; the “I” that you're not even aware of; the one who is sending the thoughts into your head that you identify with. “The first ‘I’ is an illusion. The second ‘I’ is a ghost. And so the salvation only comes when we surrender to the third ‘I.’ And the third ‘I,’ fortunately, is the ‘I’ of Shiva. The ‘I’ of God within.” So only when “God is allied with the conscious mind,” can we have true freedom. True bliss. True love. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 27, 2009.
This podcast is a response to the following question: What is your view on the concept of free will vs. predetermination?
The question of free will has been a central issue since the beginning of philosophical discourse. Are we responsible for our actions or are they predetermined? But, as Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains from the perspective of yoga, “A yogi is someone who desires to extricate themselves from the illusion of agency, of being a creature of will, whether free or unfree.” And that “The doing of the organism and the thinking of the mind have nothing to do with the Self. The very idea of predetermination implies time and linearity, but because that is also an illusion, you cannot speak of pre-determination.” The Eternal Presence is non-temporal and therefore cannot be thought of as either before or after. And, paradoxically, “the only freedom is through the surrender of the desire for an individual sense of power.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 25, 2009.
“When you look in a mirror, you are what doesn’t show up in the mirror.” But, according to Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, “the problem for the ego is that it wants to show up in the mirror” because if it doesn’t, then how can it define itself? How can it prove that it is real?
“In India, one of the metaphor’s for God is . . . ‘The Ocean of Consciousness.’” This metaphor is meant to convey that God is limitless. But the ego instead chooses to objectify itself, choosing a body floating in the ocean, rather than the ocean itself. And this limits us to becoming very powerless creatures who imagine themselves as individuals moving through time and space, rather than the infinite, eternal consciousness that we are. “But the consciousness, the oceanic consciousness, that even conceives of that, that is the very possibility of a world appearing to us, never appears in that world, just as when you’re in a dream the mind that’s dreaming up that dream doesn’t appear in the dream.” It is this unity that allows us to love, “because love is the realization we are all floating in this ocean of consciousness and that ultimately we are all waves of the same ocean.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 20, 2009.
In Kali Yuga, humanity "has fallen to the level of monkeys. All most humans today are interested in is sex and food; and a little violence thrown in when they can get away with it." But, as in the story of Rama and Sita, only now does humanity have the potential to transform back into its godlike nature. Therefore, it is now imperative that humanity call upon Rama and return to God-consciousness in order to retrieve its beloved Sita, or soul, and restore order to the world. Recorded on the evening of Wednesday, August 19, 2009.
Student Comment: From my parents and everyone I grew up with I used to get, “Sex is the most beautiful thing, and overeating is the most beautiful thing, and money and cars and beaches and vacations and drinking. It’s the best thing. And do it!”
While the superego used to manipulate mankind in a puritanical way, in recent generations there has been a shift from “You can’t do this and that. You have to save. Early to bed and early to rise,” to “No no enjoy. Spend it all. Watch pornography. There’s no limits.” To walk the spiritual path takes great courage to break away from the current ideology of the collective hedonistic lifestyle and to make a stand for what is right. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 18, 2009.
Student Question: If God wants us to return and break through the egoic identity, then why does it seem so difficult? Is it really not that difficult to be aware of the God-conscious? Why is the ego there, and the censor, and all of these things that make it seem so difficult if we’re supposed to learn that it’s there?
Although as Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, reminds us, it’s really not that difficult to break through to God-consciousness. But nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that human psychology is not static but variable. “Human psychology is in the most darkness than it ever has been.” And, as a result, all of the collective systems, the social, the political, the economic, “support the ego and the censor and do not allow any Truth to come in.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 18, 2009.
Student Question: Ultimately there has to be a transcendence of the thought that there is anyone there; the concept that there is anyone aware of this. Is that right?
Not only are we someone, we are “the One.” But we are not, nevertheless, someone as an ego identity. We are the Universal Intelligence. The Supreme Self. And because of our limited ego-minds, we cannot even hope to comprehend the vastness of our transfinite nature, at least not when we still categorize reality in language. But when we let go of language, one of the more subtle, but powerful, attachments, then we can start to understand our Supreme Nature. Language limits us because it is finite thought. “And we’re so attached to finite thought because it’s what gives us the illusion of power over events. . . . But it doesn’t allow us to access infinite thought.” When we can keep the mind silent for long enough, we can start to download realizations; the famous, enlightening “Aha!” moments of legends such as Aurobindo or Spinoza when unfathomable amounts of information enter the mind in one instant. And this is available to anyone who has the dedication to completely silence the mind. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 18, 2009.
“The very idea of private property is a fairly recent one.” At one time, whether it was Native American tribes or even the commonwealths of England, property was distributed amongst the people. But, as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, reminds us, “Now we have a situation where one percent of the population owns about 90 percent of the property of the world, and everyone is deprived of it. And this is why you have revolutions and terrorism and all of that. There is a basic unfairness in the way that the goods of the universe are distributed today because of greed; it has absolutely corrupted the minds of people.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 18, 2009.
The Nataraj, or the iconographic, dancing Shiva, is a well known symbol in Indian mythology. However, this symbol of the four-armed Shiva is often taken literally rather than metaphorically. It depicts Lord Shiva dancing atop the head of a dwarf, the dwarf representing the ego and Shiva representing God-consciousness. And as Shunyamurti, the founder and director of the Sat Yoga Institute, reminds us: "If we choose to identify with the dwarf, then we're going to be in pain; we're going to be in suffering. If only for the fact that God is dancing on our head giving us a headache."
So why not choose Shiva and move past the suffering of the ego and straight into God-consciousness. The choice is up to you. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 13, 2009.
We live in an age that "valorizes the doing rather than the being." Now more than ever, in this age of crises and chaos, do we need a solution to our numerous problems: societal, economical, political, etc. And this, explains Shunyamurti, the founder and director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, lies paradoxically in our ability to rest. We can no longer externalize that which will save us but instead must rest in the heart, in order to heal this world. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 6, 2009.
Mind expanding teaching by Shunyamurti, the founder and spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, about the the four renunciations that one must take on the spiritual path. Thursday evening, July 30, 2009.
"The spiritual path, in whatever culture or religion it is found, is a path of renunciation. But the meaning of renunciation is understood differently in different paths in which the religious discourse is addressed to beings at different assemblage points, or different levels of consciousness. And the understanding of the meaning of renunciation is most clearly and fully articulated within the context of Indian philosophy."
Spiritual knowledge regarding ego attachment through performance anxiety as answered by Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, on the evening of Thursday, July 30, 2009.
Student Question:
There are some times during the day when you have to perform, like when the singer stands up in front of the crowd. And sometimes you're aware that your ego is making you feel like, “You can’t do this. You're nervous. You're gonna start shaking or something.”
And sometimes I excel, and I surpass and perform. But other times it’s not that successful, and it makes me feel bad. But I know that if I prepare myself with meditation, or other practices, it’s more probable that I will excel. So how could you be more prepared?
Moving teaching by Shunyamurti, the founder and spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, about the ego's fears and misunderstandings about death. Afternoon of Tuesday, July 28, 2009.
"Namaste. Meditation is the process of making friends with death. The ego is the enemy of death; it's afraid of death. And it experiences death as an event horizon; as an event which ends its existence. But the yogi recognizes that death is not an event but a passage to a state of eternal life that transcends the duality of life and death."
This podcast is a response to the following question on the afternoon of Tuesday, July 28, 2009:
I have a question regarding childhood education, of all of us. We have all received an education by our fathers and mothers, which has in a way strengthened our ego. I, as a mother, raised my children by saying to them, “Yes you can; you are intelligent; you will succeed!” because the child needs this to enter to school, in society, and this is what forms the ego. But what happens to that child if we don´t communicate this message of self-confidence to it, at the moment that it has to enter in society?
If I would have a child today, how should I raise it? If the child suffers from insecurity or shyness, and one begins to create this atmosphere around it so it feels safe, so that it can grow securely, but if one does not do this, if one does not strengthen its ego, how can the child enter and function in society?
Spiritual and expanding teaching of Shunyamurti, the founder and spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, the evening of Thursday, July 23, 2009.
Excerpt: “Namaste. The good news, the eternally good news is that, God, the Supreme Being, the Intelligence that is the creative power responsible for the entire universe, lives within you; at the very center of your being dwells the Supreme Self. Do you realize that? Do you recognize the implications of that fact?”
Spiritual and wisdom teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday afternoon (June 30, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Excerpt: “And so you have to ask yourself, do you want that freedom or not, you may not [Shunyamurti is refering to the freedom of Self-Realization]. But, it is the only way to release all the huntings, all the suffering, all the misery, all the tendencies and conditionings. There aren´t any half-measures, nothing else is going to do. Even the best drugs will wear off and you are back in the same mysery. This is the only way out.
Once you have come to recognize that, that there is no other solution than Self-Realization, then it doesn´t make sense anymore to put it off to the future.”
Spiritual and wisdom teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (June 25, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Excerpt: “The human soul is plagued by four major issues: Human egoic love can be characterized by frigidity; and the human egoic mind by stupidity; and the soul with impotence; and it is all set in a frame of obstinacy, refusal to let go of these characteristics. In fact, an inability to let go of a kind of petrifaction of our capacity to be - so how do we break through this?
In the ancient world the primary Goddess, who in Greece was named Sophia, was the antidote to all of this, because Sophia is the Goddess of wisdom, and of love, a non-frigid love, a love of total divine generosity, openness, flowingness, and potency; all powerful, and yet light; spontaneous, free, freed even to fly onto other dimensions, other worlds beyond this physical plane. Where is Sophia? Where has She gone?”
Spiritual and wisdom teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (June 18, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Excerpt: “Namaste. This is a room of divine beings. All of us are emanations of the divine light and the oneness of the Supreme Love. But the ego plays hide and seek with the light and that love, and eventually it is lost more often than it is found. And so if we are going to get out of this game of lost and found we have to do something that the sufis call dhikr or shikr, which is remembrance of God.”
Spiritual and wisdom teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday afternoon (June 02, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Excerpt: “For the moth to actually dive into the flame and dissolve it is the end of the moth, so most moths circle around it, they get burned a little bit but then they go back. It is a rare moth who will finally dive all the way in…
And then there is love, but there is love not coming from any object of desire. The love comes from diving into the flame itself, the Real, not the imaginary projection; and it cannot come from another human being, it can only come from the ultimate Source that is the true essence of what all is.”
Spiritual and wisdom teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (May 28, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Spiritual and wisdom teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (May 21, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Excerpt:
“An ability to remain unshakable when things happen that create anxiety and fear and confusion in others, we can remain a pillar of strength. And that is more and more important these days, as the world is shaking, both literally and figuratively, and people are feeling more and more groundless in their lives. And it is important to make it a very conscious part of our meditative practice to cultivate the power of unshakable stillness, steadiness, that does not waver, and that does not yield to fear or confusion. And that power, once it has been cultivated to a certain extent becomes just simply a natural attribute of our character and acts without any conscious intention needed, it simply becomes second nature. It is actually our original nature but it got repressed when the ego began to develop.”
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday morning (May 19, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Excerpt:
"The difficult in explaining all this, that relates to the field of Self realization, is that the mind tends to understand everything from within the paradigm of subject/object duality, and that is the very obstacle to the Self realization we wish to achieve; and that paradigm, which is illusory, structures language itself. So the very categories of thought by which we attempt to understand ourselves prevent that understanding from occuring. This is the double-bind on the symbolic level."
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday morning (May 19, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
Why do the majority of people chose the easier or lower path of separation from a greater consciousness rather than the higher path of God-realization?
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Spiritual dharma teaching offered by Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. This meditation class was recorded the morning of Tuesday May 12 of 2009 by Sat Yogas Volunteer Staff.
Student Question: What is the meaning of Brahmacharya? How is Brahmacharya practiced within the path of Sat Yoga?
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday Night (April 30, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
Does an individual who has no separation between the unconscious and the conscious mind have dreams?
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday Night (April 30, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday Night (April 30, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
Is the goal at the Sat Yoga Institute to teach about the spirit?
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday Night (April 30, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
Is the idea to let go to the point where you are not scared of death?
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday Night (April 30, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
Should one put limits on one's service considering it might injure ones practice?
Satsang gathering guided by Shunyamurti - recorded the evening of Monday, April 27, 2009. Part 2.
Satsang gathering guided by Shunyamurti - recorded the evening of Monday, April 27, 2009. Part 1.
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (April 23rdth, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Excerpt:
“In the egoic level there is a saying that you can´t give what you don´t have, but yogis turn it around. A yogi would not say that. For a yogi, you can only give what you don´t have, and that is the only thing worth giving. It is what you can never have, but it is what you are…”
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday morning (April 21, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
I feel instead of being more humble I feel my ego is growing. I need some words to help me with my ego.
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday Morning (April 21, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Questions:
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A student commented that she was confused about the dual nature of certainty and doubt. Does this dual nature inevitably arise throughout our daily life regardless of selfless efforts?
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In my life I have always strived to be of service for the planet and friends and family. Yet I feel my efforts and the response I receive from others are never enough and my joy becomes disillusioned and ends up in pain. So my question is this, is life always supposed to be lived with this anomaly between giving and suffering?
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday morning (April 21, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
I am aware of how important gratitude is on a spiritual path but I don't quite understand the power of it and how it can help us and how we can incorporate it.
Spiritual Teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday Evening (4/21/2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Student Question:
What should my involvement be and at what level in doing karma yoga? How can I practice karma yoga in a flow state with out models or the ego?
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (April 16th, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Tuesday morning (April 14th, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
A student begins the class by asking Shunyamurti to please explain the meaning of the great spiritual teaching: To Be In This World, But Not Of It.
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (March 26th, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Satsang gathering guided by Shunyamurti - recorded the evening of Monday, March 23, 2009.
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (March 19th, 2009) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.
Long awaited answer to the question: "What is the difference between the soul and the Atman?" by Shunyamurti, founder and research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. This audio is filled with useful information and sheds light on the confusion that sometimes arises between the soul and the Atman. Recorded Tuesday, March 17, 2009.
Spiritual teaching of Shunyamurti recorded on Thursday evening (March 12) at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.