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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
Episodes
Thursday Mar 25, 2010
Purification to Liberation - 03.25.10
Thursday Mar 25, 2010
Thursday Mar 25, 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.
Thursday Mar 25, 2010
The Functions Will Remain - 03.25.10
Thursday Mar 25, 2010
Thursday Mar 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.
Monday Mar 22, 2010
A Cognitive Understanding - 03.22.10
Monday Mar 22, 2010
Monday Mar 22, 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.
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
Gift of Love - 03.18.10
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
Thursday Mar 18, 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.
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
The Golden Braid - 03.18.10
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
Thursday Mar 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.
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
The Outer is the Inner - 03.18.10
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
Thursday Mar 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.
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
Divine Insanity - 03.18.10
Thursday Mar 18, 2010
Thursday Mar 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.
Thursday Mar 11, 2010
Purity of Spirit - 03.11.10
Thursday Mar 11, 2010
Thursday Mar 11, 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.
Thursday Mar 11, 2010
High(er) School - 03.11.10
Thursday Mar 11, 2010
Thursday Mar 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.