Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Public Speaking – 05.19.11

Student Question: Can you speak about the fear of speaking in public and that connected to the process of mahavakya?

Facing Anxiety – 05.19.11

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?

Hide-and-Seek – 05.12.11

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.

2012 – 05.12.11

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.

The Censor – 05.05.11

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.

The Sense of Imperfection is a Disease – 05.05.11

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.

Christ the Yogi – 04.30.11

Student Question: Earlier you established some connection between Jesus and his connection to Yoga. Could you go a little more into detail?

Sat Yoga Satsang – April 2011 – 04.30.11

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.

Definition of “Ego” – 04.30.11

Student Question: Can you define “ego” in your own words?