Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

“We are living in a time of ultimate paradox,” reveals Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. We live in a time when we are, collectively, the greatest distance from God; yet, at the same time, we are also closer to reaching God than we have ever been. This current state of isolation from God has led to much philosophical inquiry. “Thrownness” was the famous notion of Heidegger while for Jaspers it was being “Shipwrecked.” But the underlying point that these philosophers were trying to express was this feeling of isolation, of hopelessness and lostness.

“And that’s the sense out there of Kali Yuga, that the night is getting darker and darker all the time.” And it really seems that way unless we understand that “this modern age is actually an eye blink in a much larger context. And that this moment of darkness is a necessary prelude to an awakening to love once more.” But “the God we’re looking for isn’t going to come from out there somewhere. The God we are looking for is waiting for us to find that source within ourselves.” Recorded the evening of Wednesday, November 18, 2009.

“You know the trick in teaching a spiritual path is that people come from many different backgrounds, they’re at many different levels . . . different phases of their journey. They have different existential concern, different questions, different doubts. And you can’t speak in a way that will reach everyone in a group like this,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. If one speaks at the highest level, then it may appear to many as nonsense or irrelevant. If one speaks at the most basic level then others may perceive no value in the teaching. So when addressing different people, there may arise answers that seem contradictory. This can be well demonstrated in the questions and answers of Ramana Maharshi. And eventually the time will come when conventional answers will not suffice to answer our questions, and then we can “step out of all the boxes and all of the levels of prefabricated answer that any philosophy or religion can give us and discover what is the Truth of our being.” This journey leads to silence, “and then from that silence we realize we’re no longer an individual in the sense of a separate being, but that’s when we realize our universality that can be expressed in a particularized way, but it comes from the Cosmic Mind, it doesn’t come any longer from the individual level of mind. And that’s when we transcend suffering, and illusion, and desire, and fear. And we can truly know who we are, and the nature of God, the nature of this world that we are thrown into, and what the meaning, and purpose, and direction of our lives must be.” But to be able to even reach the silence, there must first be a “healthy psychic structure that will enable you to contain the infinite within the finite.” This is why the Sat Yoga Institute provides a space “in which we can get beyond all of those ego narratives and social demands ‘out there’ that tell you ‘This is not worth doing’ or ‘This is too dangerous’ or ‘This will threaten your house of cards’ or ‘It will make your family hate you and throw you out of the house’ or whatever it is that the superego tells you to justify not going any deeper in the journey, which ultimately comes to a failure of nerve of realizing that you are and have been a stranger to yourself. You don’t know your own potential. You don’t know what’s even in the deepest place of your own heart. . . . And so when the internal conflicts have been dissolved, then the external ones also—which are projections of the internal—will fall away. . . . And so I hope you will all give yourself—as the moth ultimately must—to dive into the flame and realize you, all the time, have been the flame.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 17, 2009.

Student Comment: You said earlier that the psychic space is curved toward liberation, but I actually thought that you were going to say the opposite, that it is curved away from liberation. That the space has been shaped by conditionings so that people don’t want it, and yet now you’re saying that that space has never been touched. “No it’s the superego that curves you away from that,” explains Shunyamurti, spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Using the example of the interference pattern of a dream (between the unconscious mind and the Atman), Shunyamurti explains: “This is why there is such a thing as Karma. It represents that point of shock between the superego’s agenda and the pull of the Supreme Reality.” Shunyamurti further explains that in modern psychology, the intelligence that has created the dream—which is completely different than the intelligence that identifies itself as a character in the dream—has been completely left out of dream interpretation. “Therefore, even the Freudians or the Jungians don’t really touch into the nature of the source of the dream.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 17, 2009.

“All of you have the Buddha-Nature,” reveals Shunyamurti, spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Depending on circumstance and setting, you might also be told you are Shiva, or you have Krishna-consciousness, or Christ-consciousness, or you’re filled with the Ru’ach HaKodesh. “All the traditions are referring to the same Truth.” But we must recognize that EVERYONE has the Buddha-Nature—not just our friends but also our enemies. And we can do that, we will be liberated. But what does having the Buddha-Nature really mean? What the Buddha-Nature means is that “we are empty of any substantial identity. Each of us is a range of potentials. At one moment, yes, we could all be a criminal and at the next moment a saint, the next moment a Buddha. We all have that full range of potential.” But, Shunyamurti mentions, “If I see you as the Buddha, that encourages that side of the potential to emerge. If I see you as a criminal, as unlikable, unlovable, unworthy, then that’s probably what you’ll show me. So do yourself a favor and see the other as the Buddha as well as offering that as a gift to the other. Because the other is empty, just as the Self is empty. But we have the highest potential—all of us. And at any moment, each of us is capable of enlightenment and liberation.” And, along with recognizing everyone’s Buddha-Nature, we must learn to live in the present because “in the present all of us are liberated at this very moment. It’s only when we create thoughts—that are opposed to liberation—that we take it away from ourselves. But it’s here, inherently, at this moment. It’s simply a choice to live in this state and not create obstacles or masks, charades of being anything other than the Buddha. And we can free ourselves now.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 12, 2009.

“There’s a drive that human beings have that’s probably the most important of all the drives that psychologists tend not to focus on or even recognize. It’s a very odd thing to me,” remarks Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “which is the magic drive.” And, as Shunyamurti reminds us, “Everyone has a drive toward magic,” and even “toward being a magician.” But in this day and age we have chosen to externalize magic into the various forms of technology that we have readily available to us. But the problem is that this society is prone toward black magic. “And so the magic that we spend most of the money on in modern culture are the magic that will create shock and awe in warfare. The magic of surveillance of whole societies. The magic that gives power over others.” And these types of “magic” give the ego the idea that it is powerful and is able to manipulate its environment in some way, shape, or form. “And we are now suffering from the effects of the success of these lower kinds of magic that have in fact succeeded in destroying the unity, the love, the harmony, the very basis of life in this natural world.” But the power of the unconscious mind can never be underestimated in its ability to cast its own magic spells. It has in fact cast a magic spell so powerful over the ego that the ego does not even realize that it is entranced. “And once it comes under that spell, then the situation becomes hopeless because the ego can no longer remove itself from the spell that it has put itself under. This is the passion for ignorance that is spoken of by the Buddhists . . . and many other theorists who have attempted to understand why it’s so difficult for people to change even when they come into therapy or they come into some spiritual path. ‘Why does it seem so difficult?’ It’s because the ego is under a magic spell. . . . This is why it’s so important in meditation to quiet the mind. In that state of silence . . . you are not reinforcing the magic spell. And as it weakens then the real magic of the inner light can break through into one’s awareness. . . . And that magic will liberate our awareness from the sense of being a separate entity from the magic that all of this is.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 10, 2009.

Student Comment: When you mention magic and the development of souls towards spirituality, what came to mind was the magic of dreams, which gives you messages. And I understand that the message in a dream, coming from the Atman, its goal is to help you on your way. But I do have a problem with the interpretation of the dream because it’s the ego or the conscious mind that’s trying to interpret it. Dream interpretation has always been an important pillar in spirituality, from the ancient practice of Swapna Yoga, to figures in the Abrahamic religions such as Joseph, who interpreted the dreams of the pharaoh. “But it has been lost in the modern age—or it has been re-found with the agendas of psychoanalysis, etc, that have not fully opened to the spiritual dimension, which is the source of the dream.” So now we have many different types of dream analysis, including Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, etc, which will all give different and often accurate interpretations, but these methods cannot take the dream to its inner-most meaning. So it is imperative that we have a trusted spiritual guide with whom we can deeply explore both the unconscious mind and the spiritual message of the Atman. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 10, 2009.

Since the advent of quantum physics the idea of matter has disappeared as a possible hypothesis for what the universe is made of. But Shunyamurti, the spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, poses the following question: “Since there is no matter and no space and no time in any true sense, what do we mean by a universe?” But as he explains, “We tend then to fall back on the idea, ‘Well, then it’s consciousness, the whole world is consciousness.’ And it’s true that we talk a lot about consciousness in here, but I have to admit to you tonight that consciousness is also a myth.” This teaching has long been known in every true spiritual tradition. In Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart once admitted, “If you would have the Kernel, you must break the husk,” referring to the esoteric understanding that in order to achieve union with God, one must break through all conceptualizations and preconceived notions that one has about God. “And the argument usually between two sides of the philosophic coin have been the materialists and the idealists. . . . Well what if both are wrong? Which is what Advaita, Buddhism have been saying all along. . . . So it’s important that we understand that when we are having Sat Yoga what we simply mean is we’re letting go of every mythological construct that we have been pinning an identity to. . . . But these constructs do not exist within any Ultimate Reality, and so you have to keep them going with a great deal of effort. And if you stop, keeping them going, they dissolve. . . . And no terms can describe it then. The Absolute is both nothing and everything but there is nothing and—there is not even a nothing. Even nothing has to be nothinged. And so there, nothing and everything are not opposites. There’s no logical way to grasp any of this. And it’s by the act of surrendering that effort to understand this with logic that the intuitive knowing of it suddenly blasts forth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 5, 2009.

“The spiritual process, traditionally, both East and West, has been referred to as alchemy,” Shunyamurti, spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reveals. “Alchemy is a metaphor referring to the refinement of the psychic substance itself. . . . During the process of meditation, that is exactly what we are doing: We are extracting pure consciousness out of consciousness that has been bound up in words, in images—particularly in self-images—in fantasies, in oscillations between past and future that never allow you to be present, in anxieties, depressive ideas; all of those kind of psychic enmeshments that create suffering. . . . And so meditation is the essential act of alchemical Self-Liberation.” And what exactly are we when we are freed from the boundaries of language and self-images? Pure awareness that is luminous. “And actually for the first time we will realize that the awareness itself is love.” Along with the freedom from thoughts we can truly love for the first time “because those false ideas, by the very fact that they have separated us from our true being, causes us to hate ourselves for having trapped ourselves, and hate the other for having projected on us that we’re something that we’re not. And we’re disappointed in ourselves. . . . And when we have let go of all of them, we realize that all we have ever been is this unlimited being—that is in fact the totality of all that is real.” “And when you’ve tasted the eternity you can come back into this apparent world of time where everybody is chaotic and stressed out because there’s no present, and you can help them deal with it and awaken them to the fact that, ‘Wait, that’s a dream you’re in, a nightmare in fact. Be free.’” So “come out of the trance of time and space and ego and matter, and awaken to the fact that all of this is God. All of this is light. All of this is Eternal Consciousness—Supreme Intelligence playing a game with itself in many forms; infinite forms, each form reflecting one aspect of the infinite beauty, and love, and creativity of the Cosmic Intelligence.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 03, 2009.

Student Question: You’ve described that we live in a dream within a dream within a dream. Could you elaborate on the dream that’s within a dream within a dream, the stages, the Shakti? “Well first you have the Cosmic Intelligence that dreams up the whole universe,” as Shunyamurti, spiritual guru of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, explains. “And then at the level of our planet. . . .You have the collective dream, which we often refer to as a paradigm.” And through time the paradigm degrades—as it has now to a materialistic, egotistic mindset—and affects everyone in the dream-field. “But then within that collective dream is the third dream of the individual. And each individual creates their own dream out of the material of both the collective dream and the Supreme, Cosmic Dream.” But despite the suffering and insanity of the planetary dream, some souls, because of their karmic trajectory, can maintain their connection to God and return spirituality to the entire planet. “And so periodically, when human consciousness has fallen to a very low level, individuals and communities arise within that to give birth to a new consciousness and a new world.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 3, 2009.