Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Student Question: I have two questions which have nothing to do with one another. One of them is that sometimes I find I am in the child’s period of saying “no,” and I am going through everything that I don’t like about society and about people that surround me and about things I have done in the past—everything negative. I feel like I have identified what I don’t want to be. But I have not yet found what I want to be. Is this a normal transition? And the other question is, I know very little about the “Gaia Theory,” and I wanted to ask you if you think that nature has consciousness, and if that has anything to do with the Gaia Theory.

“Yes of course. Everything is consciousness,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Nature is the realization of the omni-centricity of consciousness. All apparent beings are part of a Single Consciousness. That Single Consciousness is not localizable in one particular place. So you could say, Gaia has no ego, but Gaia is beyond ego, not before ego.”

And, in regards to the second question, “Yes, negativity is the basis of consciousness—and this, by the way, is the theory of Hegel. If you read Hegel it’s all about how wonderful negativity is, and we’re not negative enough. . . . . So it is important—but it’s important to be the witness of the no-saying consciousness and not identified with it so that you can raise it to the point where it goes beyond that ‘no,’ into a recognition of its ability to say ‘no’ even to its saying ‘no.’ And once that happens, then it can say yes to all possibilities.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 2010.

“Many people have the misunderstanding that liberated beings become very boring,” provides Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s a very bad misunderstanding because the ego never wants to be boring, and so it always has an excuse: ‘I don’t wanna waste my life sitting in that cave doing nothing. I wanna be active.’ And of course nothing is further from the truth: the more liberated we are, the more creative we are. The more empowered we are in every field that moves us, and we are moved by infinite fields of possibility the more liberated we are.”

“I was reminded recently of one of the great Zen Masters in Japan, a man named Takuan Soho. . . . He was a great poet, artist, calligrapher, philosopher, master of the tea ceremony. Unfortunately he became very popular, and the Shogun called him to the court and that’s where his problems began. He got into politics as well; now this is an interest that we have to be very careful about. But in the court he became a teacher of the great samurai warriors. . . . And he was able to teach them because his mind was so still that he could help to bring a swordsman into that timeless state where he could be aware of what was happening in slow motion and be able to respond with absolute accuracy. And he developed there the concept of the ‘unfettered mind.’ . . . And so he had a number of samurai students who he was teaching the art of swordsmanship to, but through the means of meditation.”

“But this idea of the unfettered mind is a very powerful concept. And the idea is that the mind must not be detained by anything; the mind must remain forever free. It cannot be stopped. . . . And the thing that detains the mind most of all is the ego. The ego is a series of conventionalized thoughts that have an emotional charge. And as soon as we get caught and fixated on any one of those charges—any signifier, any self-image, any pattern, any emotion that’s connected to the ego—we’re lost. . . . And so one must remain in the state where one does not have an ego in order not to have anything that binds the pure awareness and the emergence of the full flowering of our creative potential.”

“So meditation is letting go of that illusion of the existence of a separate entity. And that entity is only an appearance in consciousness, as is the whole world. And if we can let go of that obsession, the entity itself dissolves because it’s only kept alive by our attention that we give to it. Let it go, and there is an unfettered mind. There’s freedom. There’s Liberation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 17, 2010.

“Many people mistakenly believe that entering a spiritual path means taking on a new belief system. This is incorrect,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Instead, what is asked of us is simply to experiment with letting go of our current belief system. And that’s much more difficult. And the reason that it’s difficult [is that] not only is it our comfort zone, but it’s assumptions that we have never questioned about reality, including many assumptions about reality that we don’t even know that we hold. And it’s only in the act of experimenting with letting go that we actually discover what our belief system had been. And that’s when we realize the absurdities and the inconsistencies of the belief system that our consciousness had been stuck in.”

“What’s interesting, is that the more you study the experimental results that the different sages and saints and mystics of the different spiritual traditions have discovered—whether they are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, alchemist, Egyptian hermitists, whatever—it turns out that they discover the same thing: that there is a congruency among those who have made the experiment, carried it through to the end, and what they describe as Ultimate Reality. Now that doesn’t mean that we should believe them. But it does mean that there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that if you will carry out this experiment you will also have a similar result. And the result has been uniformly auspicious, benevolent. [It] has been a transformation of one’s consciousness and character structure to one of benevolence, one of joy, one of love, one of positivity. One of freedom from fear and from anxiety with a greater clarity and wisdom and empowerment. And it has everything going for it; there are no drawbacks to reaching this state of consciousness if indeed it is true.”

“And so the intensity of your desire to discover what you are, ultimately, and the willingness to let go of what you had thought that you were, are the two factors that will determine how quickly the journey is completed. And the more that one is humble, in being willing to admit that ‘I don’t know what reality is,’ and that ‘my present belief system isn’t working beyond a certain point,’ and ‘I am open to learning something new that is so radically different that I can’t conceive of it.’ If one is willing to take that risk into the unknown, then the powers of higher consciousness will draw you magnetically into the source of your Being very easily. . . . So that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating: we’re discovering ‘Who am I when I silence the mind, when I stop diverting, when I let go of all of my paradigms of reality, all of my beliefs—including the belief that I am in a physical body in a material world’—including that one, letting go of everything and returning to the very silent center of awareness, then Liberation is a natural and effortless achievement.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.

Student Comment: It seems like when we close our eyes and start to meditate, we’re focusing on what we call the mind’s “I.” I was wondering, when you have the other consciousness, I’m sure it’s a different sort of feel, and that you’re not experiencing the mind’s “I.” It would have to be different because my mind’s “I” feels like it’s internal.

“Once the ‘I’ is projected into the mind, then it’s refracted into a structure of consciousness that produces arisings of different gestalts, and there’s a subtle shift from moment to moment of one gestalt to another,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But as you retract the consciousness out of the structure of mind, into the pure awareness, then you can see those structures for what they are, and the gap between them. And they no longer create a coherent narrative. And you can begin to feel the global incoherence of what you had taken to be reality: that your reality is an unreality, and there are many inconsistencies, and it’s simply a tissue of concepts. And the gaps between it become more clear than the conceptual forces that push it to create images and feeling states, etc. And then once you have let go of all of that, then there is a nondual perception that’s completely different—that is noumenal, it’s no longer within a phenomenal plane. The world is recognized simply as a projection of the same God consciousness. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.

Student Question: I have a question about the concept of drives. It seems that there is fear and desire and the drive comes from that. But the question that came up when I was meditating was, how do we distinguish what is a drive? It seems like drives create suffering, and that whatever we’re driven to do, we have an attachment to and that’s why there’s suffering.

“The drive comes out of the illusion that one is a separate entity,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Once there is the illusion of an ego, that ego—because it is lost, and it doesn’t know who it is, and it is filled with a terror of its own lack—it is driven to try to fill that lack.” And thus all drives start from the need for security, and all drives build, and are variations, on the security drive. “But the drive is a relatively primitive stage, so beyond the drive is desire per se. When you truly desire something in a conscious way, you are not driven to get it; you know that you can live without it. You want it, but you don’t need it. . . . And then beyond desire, when you get to real love for example, Divine Love, that’s much more subtle. And now you’re not being driven any longer; it’s an opening; it’s a giving. . . . And ultimately—at the highest level of subtlety—even that subject/object differentiation is no longer made. There’s a realization of the Godself in everyone in everything in every moment, and there is no longer any being to be driven.” It’s not a taking at any longer.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.

Excerpt: “I would like to dedicate this Satsang to all the incredible life forms who are now being affected, harmed, and destroyed by the catastrophic ecological disaster taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a disaster the effects of which are inconceivable and immeasurable. And we won’t even have close to a clue for months to come, but it will affect, ultimately, everyone on this planet. There is a single ocean. A single ecosystem. And it’s being massively destroyed at this moment. And it is a symptom of the pathological nature of the human ego in its present form, and a proof of how urgent it is that we transform and transcend the ego at a collective level to ensure that these things will not happen again. . . . And the irony is that here at the moment when human beings feel so all-powerful in their arrogance, never have humans been more powerless. Never have we seen a sight of a ‘superpower’ so impotent to protect its own beaches. Never have we seen a whole world of human organizations—from corporations to national governments to international united nations, governments, all of them—helpless because of a destructive event that took place as a result not only of negligence, corruption, and other human failings, but as part of the inevitable structure of the current situation that we have created through the ego’s own blindness to its own reality. And we must heal that: we have an obligation to heal that before we damage our planet any further. . . . And so we can look at this macrocosmic level and see that this is a symptom of what is going on at every level of life. And that’s the problem: we tend to focus on the most macro insults to our environment . . . and not see that this is the result of millions upon millions of micro events that happen every day in people’s lives at the most intimate levels of connection with one another—and even internally within one’s own mind. . . . The capacity of the Atman, or this naked Presence that is the intelligence behind the cosmos, will arrange things in whatever way is necessary to support the growth of the manifestation of that Cosmic Consciousness to appear here in the phenomenal world itself. And that’s the function of a human being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.

Student Question: When we first started meditating, you were telling us to allow our emotions to be calm and our mind to be still, and my mind wasn’t quite still, and I realized I was feeling a lot. Is there also room in meditation for having those feelings and having those things, and it still being healing?

“Absolutely,” confirms Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “One only reaches silence at the end of a great deal of preparation. This is the state of a very perfected mastery over the ego-mind. . . . The mind isn’t gonna give up and let go until it has been truly mastered by one’s surrendering of all ego identity—including all fear and all desire. And that’s why the . . . disciplines of spiritual practice have been so seriously recommended of followers—or those who seek to reach these higher levels—because you have to retrain your mind to follow a higher center of value. . . . And so if there’s a cognitive sense of liberation from” the entrapments of the mind, “then what will follow is an actual transcendental experience of that: of not being who you thought you were on this plane. And that will raise the vibrational frequency very easily. And the mind will become silent. And it will become silent because something far more fascinating starts to appear—which is Divine Energy. And then all those mundane thoughts become: ‘Well wait a minute. Forget that, this is so much more interesting.’ That’s when things begin to get interesting in the whole spiritual quest.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.

Student Comment: Our role is to act in this world in a way that is in unison with the All, with Nature, with one another, with community. However, as a bus driver, I’m spewing diesel into the air; as a politician, I have to choose between TLC or non-TLC; and as a parent, I have to stay home or go out and party. To function in this world as it’s presented to us is not always a matter of just being One.

“This is a situation which requires a high level of discernment and subtlety, and an ability to work within the systems that are not geared to support an incorruptible integrity but, in fact, to challenge and undermine that at every point. And so it requires a tremendous amount of courage and strength and understanding of which battles to choose, and a knowledge that we have more freedom to move and navigate our way through this world than we pretend we have so that it is possible to find a job that actually is right livelihood, and to be part of movements or communities or activities that do support the growth of healthful nature,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. However, we have to keep in mind that we do have to work in an imperfect world and thus we will undoubtedly make imperfect decisions. “So if we try to be purists of a kind that is unrealistic and unable to live in this world, then, we fail. And so we must indeed be realists but, at the same time, we have to recognize that there is a dimension most people would think is completely nonrealistic that is a supernatural reality that can have effects that are miraculous upon this plane if we are willing to put our wholehearted energies—and synergize with others who actually have that same capacity to visualize the miraculous to change events even in the here and now, both in a microcosmic and macrocosmic level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.

Student Question: In the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi, he says that God has no desire, no will. What did he mean by that?

“Just that: God is beyond desire,” echoes Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, a dream of this cosmos forms in God’s Mind, in the most pristine state where there doesn’t need to be desire because everything is already fulfilled.” And because God’s beauty is infinite, the characters in His dream will “eventually, because they have free will, choose to desire certain things and to create preferences and gradually move out of the state of unity into that of duality. And then slowly, slowly over generations, suffering, ego appears in the world. And then, when it has reached its most degraded form, then the Light has to return and cleanse everything and bring it back to the starting point of the highest purity for the next cycle of time.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 20, 2010.