Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Excerpt: “So a Satsang is an opportunity to experience bliss together,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Bliss is our natural state. It’s the state that we would be in 24/7 if we didn’t obscure it with a cloud of ego noise: chatter, worry, anxieties—all of these that are built on illusions. . . . The problem is today we have imbibed, as an indoctrination, this belief in materialism, that we are just bodies, and all there is, is matter and motion, and there’s no higher power and no wisdom. It’s all chance, random—that whole Darwinian ideology. And we’ve been taken in by it, so that we no longer tend to make the effort to find out for ourselves if there is, actually, a transcendent reality. But if you’re willing to make the effort, you will find that you can penetrate through the box that we call this phenomenal plane, and that there is infinite vastness beyond what we think of as reality. . . . And that’s why yogis recommend leading a simple lifestyle. Don’t create unnecessary complications in your life. Don’t create unnecessary stresses. Life will be stressful anyway, but you can keep it more manageable if you have lost the ego’s need to be seen by as many people as possible, loved by as many people as possible, adored, approved of. And many people have an addictive need to get the approval of as many people as possible. Why? Because they don’t have a sense of self-esteem that’s internal because they don’t know who they are. And if they go even a moment without someone saying, ‘Yes, you’re good,’ people can decompensate; they can collapse. They need to then call somebody on a cell phone who will tell them that they really are good people. . . . And so are we willing to transcend the personal level of the petty world of constant activity for the stillness of the eternal present, as—not an individual separate from others—but the very energy that unites and underlies and permeates all that is? . . . And what’s present is a great laughter of realizing that all along you knew that this is what you are. You didn’t discover this along the way. You always knew it and were hiding it from yourself and now you’re allowing yourself to know that this is what you are, and this is why you are here.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 27, 2011.

Student Comment: It’s become clearer to me tonight, as you’ve been speaking, of the importance of joining a spiritual community, and that it’s the hardest challenge for one to undertake in terms of giving. I was raised in a culture that was still very family-based, a family that will do everything for you. But in a spiritual family, one must break the box of merely biological connection and family values in order to transcend to the next level of maturity and growth in which all are accepted as family.

Excerpt: “Consciousness is energy—but a very different kind of energy than the kind that physicists tend to talk about,” explains Shunyamurti, research scientist at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating: we’re accumulating this most positive, or sattvic, level of the orgone energy, and through that we are producing a transformation of our consciousness, we are creating a power of healing—and many other potential powers that the yogis also studied, which are called siddhis. . . . And so if we focus on meditation as a scientific experiment, and give all of our attention to it—because the energy is accumulated through the payment of attention—and we turn our attention inward and don’t allow any distractions, and don’t allow any lowering of the wavelength through aggressive or negative or depressed or anxious thoughts, but thoughts that are of the highest kind, and then transcending thought altogether into silence—but a silence that is a silence of devotion, of love, of reverence of the sacredness of all that is—that level of silence produces itself a kind of energy field. And then by staying in that energy, and not interrupting the flow of it, it’s as if we open the spigot from the zero-point—from the noumenal level beyond this cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 20, 2011.

Student Question: Something that I’ve been thinking, but haven’t been able to word it, is that, on one level we have swaha, which is like throwing your ego on the flame—pretty much giving, as you mentioned, but in an absolute way. What would be the other side of that? We call it “ego.” We call it “narcissism.” We call it “schizoid.” But I don’t understand that resistance, and I want to get it because I feel that that’s the problem: the refusal to give all.

Student Question: How is giving a part of being in the now?

Student Comment: In your last essay you talk about samadhi, and I wanted to know what the difference is between samadhi and the Ground of Being.

With all the changes we are experiencing, as “reality” is getting stranger and stranger, “it’s important to understand how to meditate, how to shut off the static in the mind to reach the true signal that’s coming from that Supreme Reality that’s trying to guide us, but that we don’t generally pay attention to because we’ve been indoctrinated that It doesn’t exist, and [that] we shouldn’t pay attention to it, it’s only our imagination, and we should only pay attention to what we can establish by the scientific method, etc., etc.,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so, we have to learn to make that shift into a higher dimension of consciousness. And the traditional yogic way of doing that—which is the earliest scientific method—true method of conscious transformation—is through an internalization, a turning around of our conscious energies. And in the meditative state, we do this in a seven stage process that will lead to samadhi.”

“So the first stage is that of pacification: if you want to meditate, you have to pacify your body. . . . enough that we can then go to the second stage, which is pranafication. The body is not basically physical, that’s the illusion. The second level, the more subtle level, is that of prana, which we could call ‘bioelectromagnetic energies,’ that are flowing through the body. And we need to become aware of the prana and get it to flow. . . . And the pranafication will then lead to the third stage, which is a pyramidization: the prana will begin to pyramid upward, the ‘kundalini shakti energy,’ which is even more subtle than the prana, will begin to rise.” This will lead to the fourth stage, which is “pinealization, the activation of the pineal gland.” The activation of the pineal gland, revealing the inner light, will lead to “pontification” in which one can “download, from the Source, information that can be turned into symbolic form, whether in language or images or mathematics or music, whatever is needed for a particular kind of communication . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 13, 2011.

Excerpt: “Each of us is the incarnation of Christ. Or of Buddha, if you prefer; or of Krishna—take your pick, it doesn’t matter, but we’ll use Christ tonight; you’re all of them. But do you realize it? Is that real for you, or is that just an intellectual idea? The process of transformation is taking this from an idea into a realization. . . . The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that history could be divided into three phases. In the ancient world, people sacrificed what was really valuable to them . . . until, finally, Christ said ‘God doesn’t want that, actually. What God wants is you to sacrifice your lower nature. Sacrifice your suffering! Sacrifice your ego itself to God.’ . . . And so in order to escape from this hell realm that we have turned time into and our lives into . . . we must rise to the higher level of the cross where the fullness of God can be re-experienced , re-grasped as our own nature. . . . To do that though, we have to recognize that the scientistic worldview that we inherited since Newton, that claims that the world is mechanistic and that life, ultimately, is on a basis of inanimate matter that can be understood and controlled technologically, etc., and the genes can be manipulated and all of that—this pseudo-mastery and hubris, the arrogance of human ego-consciousness, has to be overcome. And we have to recognize that the entire universe is alive. . . . And in the ancient world (that we think of as superstitious), they were aware that there were actants also that are non-physical. . . . And there are all kinds of entities, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, that actually share this cosmos with us, and some from other dimensions who visit that we don’t tend to see, and angels who come, that, if you are attuned properly, you will be aware of. But the modern scientific mind has poo-poo’d all of that and has caused us to live in a very barren desolate kind of world. But the world is alive with infinite richness and beauty and power and wisdom if we will be willing to tune into it. But it requires a kind of humility. . . . And when we do that, we will discover that the God that was absent and missing . . . or in exile, is right here! God is not absent at all. It’s your ego that has simply veiled the presence of the Supreme Reality from your consciousness. . . . And through this time of trial, the human species will be transformed; it’s a blessing. And a new age can only be brought to life when we have gone through the fire of dissolving the ego and live in the radiance of the Real Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 16, 2010.

“The greatest epic in all history is the Mahabharata. This is the great epic of world history,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. The Mahabharata is about a time when every human is a god—thus the immensity of Hindu deities. These gods represent the entire population of the previous Sat Yuga (the golden age spoken of in every religion). And every religion prophesizes that this kingdom did exist, and that it will return. Recorded on the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, 2009.