Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Fear & Purification – 10.21.10

Student Question: How do I reconcile the understanding of the urge for purification without the perception that I am acting from a place of fear?

“I think it is appropriate to have fear of an impure ego, of an unconscious mind that, through its impurity, could lead you to great suffering. So, not fear in the usual sense, but prudence,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And if one hasn’t worked out the unconscious issues, complexes, phantasies, desires, one’s life will be driven by those—and usually you're driven off a cliff. So, before that happens, the purification is very important. . . . I would say that the first order of business for everyone is purification of the unconscious. And this used to be what education was for. It wasn’t to learn mathematics or geography . . . it was to purify the unconscious mind so you could be a free human being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.

Freedom from Choice – 10.21.10

Student Comment: The way I have always understood free will is that it is not freedom of choice but freedom from choice; freedom from having to be faced with “Should I do this? Should I do that?” Freedom from that, and just living in a way in which you're not making choices, but you’re just flowing.

“You can have it at any moment,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The consciousness doesn’t want to give up the illusion of its freedom. And it thinks it can attain freedom, but it’s always a false freedom, by following one course of action vs. another. So the ego is obsessed with trying to improve its state of freedom, even in the very act of giving up its real freedom. . . . And in its ceaseless striving for freedom, it enslaves itself more and more and more deeply. And the only way to achieve real freedom is letting go of that whole project of striving to achieve it at the ego level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.

The Brain is a Transceiver of Consciousness – 10.14.10

Student Comment: If, when your body passes and dies, your Higher Self and your ego, then, together, find a new host, or a new organism, or they go their separate ways and the ego finds a separate person, and the Higher Self finds something else . . .

“No, it’s not like that, because the Higher Self is not a thing, is not an entity, just as God is not—this whole world is consciousness,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. To give an example, “think of your brain as a transceiver, like a radio: it’s receiving energy waves that it will translate then into thoughts, images, feelings, etc., and operate your body. But, if you're listening to a radio and you turn it on and there’s a man talking, you don’t believe there’s a man actually in that radio, do you? . . . So in the same way, the Real Self is not in the body; it’s not localizable.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.

The Mind Creates the Body? – 10.14.10

Student Question: How does the mind create the body?

“To really understand this requires a very high level of understanding of the nature of reality,” begins Shunyamurti, the research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There is a higher level of reality in which the whole complex of belief systems—of materialism itself—is recognized as an artifact of consciousness. You may believe you're living in an external, physical world, but that belief is happening within your consciousness. This is ‘the matrix.’ And, it’s only when you can recognize that—that the entire world is consciousness, including what you call the body—that there is a conscious power, then, to shift the image of that body, or the code, the digital code, which can shift the analog code.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.

Object Constancy – 10.14.10

Student Question: Could you talk a little bit about object constancy?

“It’s a developmental stage that is talked about in the field of psychology in which, as an infant, when the mother leaves the room, the infant doesn’t lose the sense of her existence and her connection,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So this pattern of not having an internalized object of an unconditionally loving other, which is then usually externalized as a God figure, if there isn’t that constancy, it’s kind of a supplement—which is why religion has always been of psychological importance for stabilizing the ego consciousness. But if that isn’t in there, then one will be liable to states of insecurity and anxiety and fear—phobias—that can also be created out of this. . . . And meditation is one of the best ways to cure it, because if you'll keep the mind silent, and free of mental objects, of any kind, then what becomes constant is the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 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.

Vampirism – 09.30.10

Student Question: Could you please expand more on the concept of vampirism?

“I think the vampire is the dominant archetype today,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s because the ego, in its most negative form, becomes a vampire: it sucks the life energy out of others, but it has nothing to give. And so, life has become vampiric: whole societies are vampiric on other societies. . . . And this same process is true at every level, including the most intimate relationships, which is why they don’t last very long, you know: you suck whatever blood you can get, and the other one doesn’t have any more—you leave and find your next victim. And so relationships have become that kind of pattern. . . . And just as we have an oil shortage, we now have a blood shortage, a love shortage, so that the vampires are dying. And you know the myth of the golden spike, and they hide from the Christ symbol. They die in the face of God-consciousness. So the more that people awaken and allow the vampiric archetype to die, and bring the God archetype back, the more that the whole vampirism of the world will be dissolved, and the New Dawn—you know the vampires have to run away in the dawn and go back into their coffins—the dawn of a new age will end the vampiric ego pattern.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 30, 2010.

Admitting the Need for Help – 09.30.10

Student Comment: So there are some very fragile egos today. Isn’t so logical to realize, “OK, I’m so fragile. The only way out of this is to connect with the Almighty,” because you're so lost anyway, there’s nothing else that’s gonna hold you up but that.

“Well a) they’re afraid to admit consciously that they need an Almighty, [and] b) they don’t believe there is an Almighty there,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it’s not easy for object constancy to develop in the ego today; even God as an object, as an other that you want to connect to, requires a capacity to maintain a persistence of intention. But there’s too much chaos in the mind. And so there’s a momentary desire for that, and then the other chaotic fragments take over and you're back to your next drug. . . . So, it’s a really nasty brew that makes it almost impossible to get out of—except through reaching bottom, that will sometimes help. But these days people take the death drive in such a dramatic way that they would rather suicide than face the need for help.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 30, 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.