Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Excerpt: “There is a story told about Mahatma Gandhi. . . . One day they drove him [Gandhi] out to an insane asylum. . . . He was looking at the inmates, and there was one guy who interested him and he wandered away and sat down in front of this inmate. And the inmate looked up at him and said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m Gandhi.’ The inmate laughed, and he said, ‘You know, they all say that when they first get here. You’ll get over it.’ Gandhi was taken aback. He realized that these were very true words; they hit him in the heart. This was a Mahavakya.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 6, 2011.

(Note: the following teaching was given as an introduction to the film The Buddha)

Excerpt: “As soon as you start talking about Buddhism, you’re no longer talking about Buddhism because, technically and precisely, Buddha’s great insight is that there are no words to describe the Real. . . . So there’s no way of talking about what we’re here to talk about. One can only realize—and the act of realizing it, in an instantaneous—in fact not even instantaneous, but timeless moment of clear intuition of Ultimate Reality . . . called ‘pragya.’ . . . There isn’t a Buddhism; there are many Buddhisms. . . . Some do it as the different turnings of the wheel of the dharma. But you can also divide it into the Hinayana and the Mahayana and the Vajrayana, etc. You can also say there’s the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka which is very different than the Tibetan Buddhism, different than the Ch’an, different than the Japanese Zen, which is different than the other Japanese schools like the Jodo Shinshu, the ‘Pure Land Buddhism’ of the chanting variety. Very different philosophies. Very different practices. Very different spiritual paths that all call themselves Buddhism. . . . In fact, I would say that Buddhism is the world’s first de-ligion; it’s not a religion, it’s a de-ligion. If you know the world religion, it means to re-link. Buddha said ‘there’s no link with anything. That’s all illusion. All you must do is de-link from the illusion and you’re free. But don’t think you’re linking to anybody. You don’t exist! There’s no self.’” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, May 31, 2011.

Excerpt: “When we meditate,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “we are making effort to reach our own natural state of being. It’s odd that you have to make effort to be natural, but this is how far away the human being has come from its own nature. Rather than having a nature any longer, the human being is conditioned by culture. The ego is an artificial construct that’s created and maintained by culture. . . . And we learn the rules of that culture and the intentions that we are supposed to live for, the values we are supposed to live by, and we become entrained by language. And from then on, pure consciousness, in its divine nature, gets filtered through this construct of what Lacan, the psychoanalyst, called ‘signifiers,’ language—master signifiers that determine our identity. And you become the subject of a signifier, of a certain set of words that determine the patterns of your life and the curvature of your emotional space, and that result in the repetition of various kinds of patterns, mostly traumatic, mostly that end in suffering and devastation because we have been alienated from our Nature. . . . That state of peace that will ensue upon the letting go of all the intentions of grasping will bring you into the Heart, into the peace, that will allow you to realize that you’re already enveloped by the divine presence; you're saturated by it. And you are fulfilled in your very essence by that which is—not only within you—but is your own Essence that you had not recognized in that blind effort to seek something externally to fulfill you.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 19, 2011.

Student Question: Can you say something about attention deficit in regards to meditation?

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

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?

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.

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.

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.