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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 Jan 24, 2013
Enter the Nothingness with Contentment – 01.24.13
Thursday Jan 24, 2013
Thursday Jan 24, 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.
Thursday Jan 17, 2013
Not Permanent, Not Real – 01.17.13
Thursday Jan 17, 2013
Thursday Jan 17, 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.
Wednesday Jan 16, 2013
Being Stung by the Great WASP – 01.16.13
Wednesday Jan 16, 2013
Wednesday Jan 16, 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.
Thursday Jan 10, 2013
Being the Mystery! – 01.10.13
Thursday Jan 10, 2013
Thursday Jan 10, 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.