Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Student Question: Could you say a little bit more about the levels of freedom and predetermination that you just mentioned?

“At every moment, you have the freedom to will whatever you wish; you can make choices. But do you have the freedom to choose what you wish to choose,” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s a higher logical level. Do you have the freedom to choose who you think you are, that is making those choices?” The ego’s will is a set of predetermined biological and cultural programs. “And yet, at any moment, you are free to transcend the ego, to disidentify from it through an act of radical detachment. And through that act you can free yourself. . . . But you could say that even that act of freeing yourself was determined by the trajectory of your own soul that chose a certain egoic structure that had enough ‘free will’ in it—enough give of the fixations of that determination—that enabled it to escape through a crack in the egoic logic.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.

Student Comment: I would like to learn more about discernment.

“It is the key to escaping from the ego’s event horizon and the illusions that the ego throws up in front of us and cause us to believe that we’re happy when we’re really not, and to believe that somebody else is the cause of problems when we have problems, and to believe that things are irreparable and there’s no way out, and falling into depression or anxiety, etc.,” discerns Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So, Viveka [discernment] is the capacity to discern when your ego is deceiving you from a situation of truth. . . . And at the state of Viveka, or discernment, you realize that it’s not real: your mind is creating illusions—hallucinations, demons—that are imaginary, that are disturbing you. And once you can discern that, you can dissolve those negative forces.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.

Student Question: I have a question about the use of medication with illnesses. There are many philosophies that say that one should not take medication when one is sick because the sickness is a process of natural/karmic purification. But I am very confused as to which is the correct option. Could you please provide some clarity on the topic?

“No, I think that if one can heal one’s sickness, one’s 'dis-ease,' it’s useful and important to do that as an act of love,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the doctor of the soul at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, it’s important to do it without evading what is the meaning of that illness; it is expressing something. And if you only take pills, as in the allopathic method of treatment in which there is no meaning to the disease, then that ultimate disturbance, which is of the soul, will come back in another way; the karma will find a way to hit you. . . . So, it doesn’t mean that we have to continue the suffering, but it does mean that we have an obligation to authentically discover what is the root of that illness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.

Student Question: I’ve never quite understood the meaning of the crucifixion. Could you please explain it a little bit?

“Crucifixion has many levels to it,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It is a crucifixion of duality, but there are many dualities: subject object duality; good and bad duality; desire and fear duality. And we are trapped in the mirage created by that duality. And because we want the illusion of the enjoyments that we think will come from the possession of other people, money, any kind of egoic power, that keeps us trapped—our attachments, our addictions—which all come from a self-image of being an entity. [As] soon as there is an entity, that entity is pinned to the world in which it appears. . . . And the spiritual journey of discipleship is the medicine that gets you off the cross because now, those disciplines pin you to the vertical; they force you to be vertical rather than horizontal. It is a higher ethic; a higher dharma. And it’s that dharma that has the power to pull you out of the morass of the desires and lower fantasies; it’s the only thing that can get you off the cross.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.

“Sri Ramana was often emphatic in saying that meditation is a non-objective process,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But it is also important that we emphasize that neither is meditation a subjective process. . . . And the word ‘subject’ has important ramifications. . . . Subject means ‘under the control of.’ A subject of the king or the queen of England, for example, a political subject; one is subject to various influences. And the ego is, in fact, an objectified subject, or subjectified object, but it is subjected to the objective image of itself and of the world. So to escape those influences, we must transcend subjectivity as well as objectivity.”

And, as it turns out, transcending this subjectivity is the one way to truly help the world out of this “knot” that it has been stuck in, “by meditatively sacrificing the egoic identity back into the foundation—into the ocean of consciousness that is nondual—that transcends first person, second person, third person (of language); it transcends ideas of God; and it also transcends ideas of atheism. It transcends all ideas because ideas, being linguistic forms, are caught in duality. And, the only way out, is through entering into the silence of pure Presence.”

And this “enables us to live joyously again—not with fear, no longer with any phobias, or crippling inhibitions—or need for exhibitions—because there is no ego that’s caught in that trap of either being superior or inferior; having or not having; being or not being. All of those dilemmas that can never be solved through any action we can perform in the world, until we have transcended the world, and return as the avataric vehicle of the Supreme Presence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.

Student Comment: Before you said that memories are all illusion. So what if somebody has this very difficult situation in their life, maybe when they were children or whatever. What about . . .

“How do you know it’s true? How do you know they’re not making up that memory, and it’s just happening now?” asks Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “No matter what you think you remember, you’re memories deceive you. . . . So, what is it that really traumatizes us? It’s a thought that occurs now, in this moment. It has nothing to do with the past. The past never happened. We’re making it all up. Now is all there is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 8, 2010.

“The paradox of the spiritual journey is that, in reality, all of us are already enlightened,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “We are always already liberated because there is only one Real, one Truth, one Beingness. The rest is illusion. . . . But . . . the Supreme Being, in order to enjoy all of the possibilities of experience, all the possible permutations of potentiality, has created Maya, the illusion of separateness.” We have lost the knowledge of our Divine Nature, “and it is a necessary loss of that knowledge that enables us to gain something else. And that something else includes courage and virtue—and the potential of discovering ever more within the realm of potentiality. To make this world . . . into the most beautiful flow of consciousness in action, in harmony—in the realization of unity in the diversity. To bring to the illusion the very power of Truth.”

“And it’s that capacity—to bring the Light into the darkness—that makes one’s illumination even more powerful than it would have been had you not manifested within the cloud of Maya. To light that light in the midst of the darkness, brings a richness to the Real that would not otherwise be there. . . . And now is the moment when we’re against the wall of all the karmic backlash of the putting off of realization . . . [and] we must achieve Liberation for the sake—not only of this individual illusion, but for the whole planetary illusion. And once one thread of that illusion is removed, the whole thing comes apart very easily. So there is no one to be liberated; that’s the meaning of Liberation. It is not that there is an ‘I’ who is in chains and then becomes liberated. It is that there is no separate ‘I.’ There is only the substratum of pure awareness that manifests the forms that appear in the flux of the phenomenal plane. And that consciousness is one with all that is and that ever was or shall be.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.

Student Question: If I understood what you were saying before, we should not be thinking about the past. We should not be paying attention to a moment that is not now. It seems so difficult because we are so used to having a story, right?

“Yes. And that story limits you,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To whatever extent, it gives you a defined identity, and defined goals; it limits your possibilities. And then you don’t have free will. You can choose to will what you want, but you can’t change what you want to want. Freedom only comes when you can want to want something different. . . . But if you are infinite potentiality, then you’re free. And you’re not identified even with the gender of your body or the age of your body or the nationality or—any of the things that limit your possibility. Why not be totally free?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.

Student Comment: I have a question on the fragments of the ego. You said it develops from people imprinting on you, so you get little bits of this and that. So they’re all ultimately unrelated pieces trying to work together.

“Well, you relate them. You make up relations. You try to with whatever power of mind you have; you make up stories,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And you take all those fragments and you make a narrative out of it; you string them all together. But the narrative is a fantasy.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.