Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Student Comment: In the study group, we were discussing “The Seven Structures of Duality,” and I found myself thinking the phrase, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And it seemed to me that if one had a good intention, that the end would justify the means. But if one’s good intentions are leading to hell . . .

“That’s correct, that’s why there must be a transcendence of that structure, means and ends. When the ego is in stillness, there is no longer any intention,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Ramana Maharshi was once asked a similar question from a professor of religion, a pundit, in India about Nishkama Karma, “and Ramana led him on a walk up the mountain of Arunachala. And along the way, on the trail, they found this stick that was full of thorns and branches, and Ramana just sat down very quietly, found an old leaf, and started polishing the stick. And the pundit who was with him didn’t know what was going on. He just sat and waited. And Ramana sat there for six hours polishing this stick until he got all of the little spines off of it. . . . And when it was done, he got up and started walking. And he had only taken about three steps when this Shepard boy, who lived on the mountain, ran past and was crying, and said he couldn’t capture his sheep because he lost his stick. And Ramana handed him the stick. . . . This was a major teaching for the pundit.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.

“I hope all of you feel at peace in your body and in your mind. That’s the starting point for the spiritual journey,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Indeed, the first mantra, “Om Shanti,” reminds us of this starting point. “This is why Sri Ramana was very intent on repeating an expression from the Bible more than, even from the Vedas or Vedanta, it was a phrase that he was very fond of: ‘Be Still and Know that I am God.’ And, he analyzed it as follows: first you must be still; that’s the prime commandment. And in that stillness, you will realize that the ‘I,’ that you thought you were—the ‘I’ of the ego, the ‘I’ identified with the body, the ‘I’ that thinks to itself, talks to itself—that ‘I’ is not who you are. The real ‘I’ emerges in the stillness, and that ‘I’ is the Absolute.”

“And this is what the act of meditation really is: it is a surrender. It is an act of bhakti, of devotion, in which we sacrifice the luxury of chattering to ourselves and justifying our little ‘I’s existence, and we surrender to the great ‘I’ that is God. And in that stillness, all those other little ‘I’s, those fragments of consciousness, dissolve, they integrate back into the One Self until finally there is nothing left but the One Self. And all the illusory identifications fall away; they have no more purpose.”

“And so in the act of meditation through the silence, which is the sacrifice itself, the flame of consciousness melts away the illusions of Maya, and we are liberated. And the more that we stay in the silence—the stillness—the more the power of God emerges, opens our heart to love, and frees us from the thought patterns and the behavior patterns that had enslaved us to fear, to desire, to hatred, to suffering of all kinds. . . . And so if we meditate in that state—not wanting to get anything for the little ‘I’, but to give the power of the little ‘I’ to the Great Self—then Liberation is achieved.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.

Student Comment: I’ve heard you say before that “language has colonized our minds,” which really helps me clear my head during meditation. I would like to know, however, if language really is a non-corporeal entity, or if I am simply literalizing the metaphor.

“It’s an entity in the sense that it is used by the collective consciousness so that language becomes the carrier of particular messages of any given society,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual and linguistic master of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And those signifiers then take on a life of their own and create patterns of belief about the nature of one’s self, what should be one’s goals, what should be one’s desires and fears. And to the extent that one is entrained into that social link, then one has lost one’s free will into the will created by language—which, once it is internalized, you imagine is your own thought, whereas it is actually a thought placed there. . . . And so it is only by silencing the mind, and cleaning it out . . . that one can discover who one is before the ego was implanted through the naming and the emplacement of fantasy structures . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.

“The journey to spiritual liberation is a rocky journey for everyone,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Along the journey, one recognizes one’s own suffering. And the cause of one’s suffering is linked to an inability to love, and a fear based on the mis-perception of separation from the world, also known as the ego. “But the odd thing is we cherish this very ego that is the cause of our suffering, and we won’t let it die; we think it protects us. Ego death is the goal of every spiritual tradition,” and we are reminded of the Bible which says, “unless a kernel of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” So it is with ego death.

“And yet, how many of us will let that ego die. And we don’t let it die because we are afraid of loneliness. One of the words for ego death in the Ashtanga Yoga tradition, begun by Patanjali, is Kaivalya. . . . And for Patanjali, what this meant was a separation of Purusha from Prakriti, and then Purusha lives in complete solitude; Kaivalya means solitude. You’re all alone. And indeed we are all alone, and we don’t want to face that we’re all alone. And we would rather have a bad object out there, that we can be angry at and think ‘Well, if only it wasn’t for them I’d be OK and loved and alright,’ rather than realizing we are absolutely alone in a world that is our own projection.”

“The irony is that once we allow ourselves to enter into the solitude, we find [that] it’s not a solitude that is an isolation from the world; it’s not a loneliness. It is a unity with all that is. You are alone because there is no other; we are all One. . . . But we must let the mind die in order to know that, and the fear of that keeps the negative thought cycle going on and on. . . . But when we allow that all to settle, we find that the Divine Self is right there, it has been right there all along. . . . It’s on the surface, but we just don’t connect with it out of fear of losing this ego cycle that we think keeps us alive and actually keeps us from truly living.”

“There’s a great tradition in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage called ‘Chud.’. . . What it means is that you cut the self-cherishing of the ego. You cut all your connection to wanting to have this ego which will then give you all your suffering. . . . Then, once they have cut the connection to needing the ego to survive, they will find that under that fear is great joy. . . . So we all have to become Chud Masters here, and cut away the cherishing of the ego which creates the suffering and that cuts us off from the love that we all have within. And we want it to come out and manifest, and to be a gift to all others in the world. And that’s the only thing that will fulfill us.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 1, 2010.

Student Comment: My whole life I’ve felt the need to live an authentic life. So what you said tonight was very poetic for me.

“This is what all of human culture is about,” reminds Shunyamurti, the authentic director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And through time, the different philosophers have given their own spin on that. But that’s been the essential question: ‘How shall I live?’ . . . All of culture, whether at the popular level or the high cultural level, [people] are always asking this question: ‘Do you want to be in the matrix and have a comfortable, inauthentic existence, or do you want to face the adventure of insecurity?’ . . . We have the insecurity of not knowing, not depending on someone to take care of us when it means betraying our values, not depending on cultural values that we know are not authentically true, caving in to the herd and not following our truth and our heart. If you don’t lead that authentic existence, you're lost.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 1, 2010.

“All the sages of every tradition of spiritual realization agree that our true nature is luminous, loveful, joyous, blissful, eternal, non-local Presence. That’s what we are,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. But the ego has made six maneuvers in order to lose itself, and one to refind itself. “There was first a separation from this Source. And then a subtraction from the infinite down to the finite. And then a further contraction down into the individual—a kind of a tunnel vision. And then an introjection of the energies of others in that same state of contraction. And then within that, a fantasy creation—a creation of series of false views of reality. And then a projection of all of that falseness onto the world. That’s the lostness that we have entered into as a result of these six maneuvers.”

“There’s one seventh maneuver left to us, which is recognition: we can begin to recognize the plight that we have put ourselves in through these other six. And then gradually, we can recognize one by one, these which have become veils, or obstacles, to the realization of the infinite, eternal, blissful Self. . . . So the first thing we have to do is to recognize that this ego-consciousness that we start out in . . . is based on these false ideas that were originally introjected—taken in from the world—as children. . . . And we have created out of that a fundamental attitude toward reality which is based on the attitude we believe others have toward us.”

“And so we have to be willing to put that fantasy into parentheses. We have to be willing to say ‘It may not be true’—that’s what we have to first question, that reality. . . . And then by recognizing that you are consciousness, you begin to let go of all of the fixations that you believe are connected to the bodily identity. . . . And that allows us to go deeper inward. And in that going inward, we will begin to encounter the subtler energies that we don’t normally feel. . . . And we’ll begin to actually experience the inner white light that most people don’t encounter except at death. But it’s here—always. And we are that light. And we are the Source of that light.” The mind cannot reach that Source, “but through the letting go—that ultimate letting go of separation from that: the very primal subject/object duality, which was the first separation, can be healed. And in that moment, then we are one with the Source, and the journey is complete.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 24, 2010.

Student Comment: Ever since I was born, I was taught that God was there, that you had to ask God for things, that you had to say thank you, and that He was the doer, not you.

“What you were taught is the exoteric version of religion, which is a dualistic version,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the esoteric teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Ultimately, yes, God is the doer, but are you not that God also, part of that Whole. It’s the mind that is in a state of separation from that, and the mind wants things from that Being rather than wanting salvation from the mind itself, and that is what the Supreme Being offers.” Surrendering to the Self, to God, is the only way to end suffering. “Surrender is the very surrender of the sense of being a separate entity from the Absolute. And in that, all confusion ends.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 24, 2010.

Student Comment: I read something today which said that “everything that is transient is not real.”

“Well, the definition of ‘Real’ is what is in question,” begins Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “For most of the Eastern traditions, the Real is that which is eternal, immutable, and non-changing.” For a Westerner, however, “the Real” is typically understood as the “external,” objective world of common experience. In contrast, for Indians, for example, the “external world” is understood as Mahamaya, the cosmic illusion. “So in that sense, of course, everything within this flux that we call time and space is unreal, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel it very deeply, that it can’t traumatize us, etc. A nightmare is not real, but you can wake up in a sweat over it. . . . And so this Cosmic Dream is given [to] us in the way it is in order to help us achieve the Real, and to begin to grow to levels of wisdom and awareness that transcend even our original Nature so that there is an evolution to ever higher and higher states. So there is a growth that the unreal makes possible to achieve higher Reals.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 24, 2010.

Student Question: Within the context of what he was talking about (meditating at great lengths vs. processing one’s ego), where do sanskaras fit in?

“They are what you have to battle,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute. And the sanskaric desires, “won’t let you stop thinking about them. And the lower three chakras are the main ones that people’s minds are wrapped around. And they are aggression, paranoia, security needs, [and] sexual desires. . . . And then those get projected on particular people, and situations your in, and suddenly you’re thinking about all of that, and you're not meditating on God-consciousness; you’re using that time to focus on ‘Why is this happening to me?’ or ‘How am I gonna get this person in bed?’ or ‘How am I gonna get rid of this enemy?’ and ‘How am I gonna conquer this and that?’ All of these scenarios are much more interesting to the ego than the blissful silence. And so it takes a lot of work to be able to gain such a center that’s detached from all of that—that you can silence the mind in the midst of that, and then burn up all of these sanskaras.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 2010.