Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Paradise is for Evil People – 12.09.10

“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.

Surrender as Metanoetics – 12.02.10

“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.

BE Thyself – 11.18.10

“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.

To Have Your Cake and Eat it Too – 11.11.10

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.

Refueling in the Blissful Self – 10.21.10

“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.

Belief in God – 10.14.10

“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.

The Ego Has Two Types of VD – 09.30.10

“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.

The Self-Referential Ego Paradox: Drama or Dharma? – 09.23.10

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.

The Subtlety of Stillness & Silence – 09.16.10

“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.