Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

The Necessity of Love – 02.28.13

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.

The Diamond in the Lotus – 02.21.13

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.

Pranayama: Vibration Control – 02.07.13

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.

Enter the Nothingness with Contentment – 01.24.13

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.

Not Permanent, Not Real – 01.17.13

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.

Being Stung by the Great WASP – 01.16.13

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.

Being the Mystery! – 01.10.13

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.

The Pearl of Impermanence – 12.06.12

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.

The Blissful Stillness – 11.29.12

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.