Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

“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.

Student Question: I’m still contemplating this koan that I have been given, that “God does not know the ego.” I think some light is starting come through on this topic, but I wanted to check it with you. I think that I’m looking at this from a dualistic standpoint, but this must be a nondual understanding. Is that right?

“Yes,” answers Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “That’s why in Christianity it is said that you cannot get to the Father except through the Son.” However, this does not mean that Christ is the only teacher through which one can reach God, but through any spiritual teacher “who can be an intermediary and know the ego from the place of Emptiness. . . . So it is a relationship with a being who is not in the place of ego and so there’s not a reflection back of one ego to another, and therefore a power struggle—cause there’s always paranoia when two egos meet: ‘Who’s gonna be on top?’ . . . And it’s only when at least one party to the dyad isn’t playing that game that the game itself falls, and then you can be known as you truly are, but don’t know yourself to be yet, that same Emptiness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.

Student Question: What is this “Impossible Witness” that you talk about?

“It is simply the agent of the ‘master narrative’ that holds the ego’s reality in place, without which, you’d feel a major disorientation,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Any kind of an ideological statement that can’t be backed up with true scientific reason—not scientism, but scientific reason—is an impossible witness. Today science itself promotes an impossible witness and has become a religion: it thinks it knows what happened before the big bang. It doesn’t, of course. . . . But those things are just purely speculation to maintain an orientation in reality because otherwise reality becomes a trip: we realize we have no control over it and no sense at all of what is going on, or what reality really is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday December 9, 2010.

Student Question: You say that whatever adjective that goes after the “I am” is wrong. So what do you think about those affirmations in which you say “I am the Light,” etc. Where is the mistake there?

“They’re good antidotes against negative thoughts,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, ultimately, as long as we remain attached to words, then we are in the image of that rather than the reality of it. . . . So we want to be free from language, and from any other form of representation so that we can experience the Supreme Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.

Student Comment: Sometimes people say that the more attention you give to something, the more chance that it will have of manifesting. And we were talking about the state of the world, and how the military is doing this or that, and I feel that, sometimes, I put too much pressure on myself about not speaking of these types of things because of the amount of denial . . .

“These are often difficult issues to face, that do not have solutions within ego-consciousness which is based on the loyalty to the kind of values that we have been trained to uphold,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute of Costa Rica. “And the vertical dharma has always been threatened by its inherent disloyalty to all worldly values.” The Buddha, for example, left his duty as a prince and ruler, as well as his family, to achieve enlightenment. “He did everything wrong, the ultimate sin, I mean the guy must have been riddled with guilt for all of this. And anybody in those days would have said to Buddha, ‘You’re wrong. Go back. Sit on that throne. Take care of your family. You created them, this is your karma.’ . . . But when he saw that all of the consequences of karma, of acting in a conventionally good way, led to more suffering, and would lead to more war, and would lead to egoic enmeshment rather than liberation—and when he saw that being a good person was the ultimate evil, from this higher position, and that he had to transcend these dualities in order to find himself, then he went on a path that was absolutely lonely and alone—that no one understood; absolutely no one in his world ‘got’ what he was doing. . . . And he entered a dimension and a logic and a understanding of reality that no one would validate for him, or could. And it was in that absolute uniqueness and aloneness—and wrongness from the perspective of the world—that he found the Ultimate Reality.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

“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.

Student Comment: Earlier we were discussing rites of passage, and it appeared to me that the military had something to do with that. And I wanted to know what your opinion was of that.

“It used to function as a rite of passage, when there was still chivalry, and when warfare was hand-to-hand combat and bravery, and the other martial virtues of manhood, in particular, were developed. But that was a long time ago,” answers Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Now . . . it’s a video game. And somebody in Nebraska is firing a drone at somebody in Pakistan. They’re not in any danger; there’s no bravery involved. There’s no sense of the reality of facing an opponent that a samurai or someone else would have. And the rules of combat based on an ethic of recognition of the sacredness of one’s task. All of that. That was the culture of Japan, and in the Middle Ages, the culture of chivalry, has been lost.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Question: In the chakra map, we tend to move within the first three chakras. And in understanding how and why we do it, we become able to use the higher ones. But is it more balanced to move within all seven, or to be within the higher ones?

“The higher chakras are sublimated versions of the lower chakras,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the lower chakras, when you are in and operating from them, they lead to suffering. And they are operated as defenses against anxiety that end up leading to very inaccurate forms of karma. And at the higher chakras, one has unveiled the Real Self that is transcendent of the individual organism, or ego-based identity, and is therefore no longer acting from egocentric—or even anthropocentric—motivations, but can act in harmony with the whole cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Question: What is the difference between guilt and paranoia?

“They exist at two different assemblage points: guilt is at the disillusionment point, paranoia is at the dispossession point,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Guilt is based upon an identity that has been established in a very strong and healthy way within the ego that takes its motivation from a lineage of symbolic signifiers of tradition and ideals and higher meaning. And that enables an individual, who carries that burden, to operate responsibly and with integrity in the world to fulfill their duty. Whereas paranoia does not have any of those characteristics, and it is more based on the terror that someone will take away its sensory enjoyments and its capacity to act in freedom and will impinge on its sense of autonomy and self-empowerment. And the more paranoid one is, the more [one] will project that the world is filled with enemies who want to destroy one. But this is not, then, an ethical way of responding to the other as an equal, but seeing the other in a demonized form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.