Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Student Question: Usually when I meditate I just let it be what is, but this time I intentionally tried to silence the words, and I spent the whole time working very persistently to make that happen, but the chatter persisted. So what is the technique when you're confronted with all this chatter?

“The purpose of Sat Yoga is union with Sat . . . the Supreme Being,” explains Shunyamurti, the director and founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And this Supreme Being, whether understood personally or impersonally, “is constituted by an infinite intelligence and infinite love. And because of this infinite intelligence in the service of infinite love, our universe exists.” And only the power of love “will free us from the curse of our egoic narcissism—the egocentricity that takes itself to be a god . . .”

So the process of Sat Yoga is an “uncovering that which the ego itself does not want your consciousness to know. . . . And therefore the early stages of the struggle to achieve Self-liberation take the form of a battle with a part of the self that wants to stay in denial, it wants to stay in hatred, it wants to stay in anger, it wants to stay even in despair and meaninglessness rather than to uncover the truth of its being.” But one must persevere and refuse to identify with the ego if one wishes to progress upon the spiritual path, ultimately, to Self-realization.

But the perseverance must also contain a will to learn because phenomenal reality has become so complex, a yogi today must have a wide array of knowledge including quantum physics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, biosemiotics, and communication and information theory. “All of these are essential today to a yogi to understand because they give us a cognitive grasp of the structure and the dynamics of the functioning of this phenomenal plane we call Maya.” And because the human ego has become so complex today, a yogi must become a psychoanalyst. “We must have a grasp of how the unconscious mind works so we can discern that mind in action in others as well as in ourselves and read between the lines and grasp what is an accurate response in every situation.”

And as we grasp that understanding our karma will become more correct and we can redirect the flow of our energy from the lower chakras of unconsciousness, lust, and hatred to that of love, wisdom, and Truth. “And with that wisdom, if we dedicate ourselves to transformation and to union with God so that we are servants of the highest power and love, our lives will truly be fulfilling.” Recorded on the afternoon of October 6, 2009.

Student Question: We need to dissolve our ego to get in touch with our True Self. Is it bad under different circumstances to play roles in order to achieve objectives? For example, if we work in a company or we own a business or we’re doctors or lawyers and we need to act in a certain way to achieve an objective. Is that bad? “No. As long as you know that it is a role, then you can play the role accurately.” As Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains: “we talk about dissolving the ego or killing the ego. It’s not the ego as a whole that must be killed. It is the censor. . . . There is an intelligence that resides below the threshold of consciousness that is controlling what you are conscious of. And your conscious mind is enslaved to that—that is what must be killed, so your conscious mind is liberated to realize who you truly are.” The censor is a part of the unconscious mind, “And when I say unconscious, I mean that it is conscious, but you are not conscious of it.” This censor operates on the level of phantasy, and tries to protect the conscious mind of traumas that it does not think that the conscious mind can handle. But it also censors information from the Super-conscious mind, “And it causes our actions to be inaccurate because it leaks out and it stains our perceptions of the world. And so this is what must be purified and transformed.” “And so once all the denial and the falsehood have been killed off in the ego, then the ego realizes that all along it was an expression of the very God that it denied. So that creates a state of self-mastery or self-sovereignty rather than the self-enslavement that the ego is now in to the unconscious censor. . . . You’re achieving liberation from that state [of self-enslavement] so that your Real Self can now fully emerge with all of its potentialities.” And with that liberation, you can truly play your part in the world. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 6, 2009.

Student Question: What is the spiritual significance of déjà vu? “Because all of this has happened before an infinite number of times because time itself is an illusion,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So déjà vu means that you have seen it all before right? You’ve seen that moment. It’s an experience that “I’ve lived this moment before. I heard that very thing. I said that very thing. Well, yes, this moment is actually an echo in the cycle of eternity.” But, as Shunyamurti explains, this is a very in depth understanding of the universe that can only be understood through meditation and disidentification from linear time. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday October 6, 2009.

Student Question: Why does consciousness congeal into form? “Because there are many nuances of possibility that cannot be expressed in any other way. And so all the exquisite permutations of possibility require forms in which to be expressed . . . And so if we do not give form to these expressions, then we cannot mount up to higher and higher levels of consciousness. We cannot learn from the form to enter again the formless at the next octave of realization. . . . And so at each cycle, each experience of growth—through failure through death, through a fall, through trauma—that gets expressed in form, enables us to touch into the heart of Being and be renewed and reborn at a higher level of form—more perfect, more beautiful, more expressive of the Ultimate Real—that is God. And so this is the way that human beings attain that perfection; through form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 1, 2009.

“Each of us is like a mirror that’s looking for itself in the mirror. This is the paradox. The mirror itself can never find itself as an object in the mirror,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And all of the exoteric, or popular paths, start out with the basic misunderstanding that you are a person who needs to be saved, rather than simply consciousness itself. But, somehow, “consciousness becomes congealed, reified, around certain objects in the mirror that it likes very much. And then it becomes, through that process of identification, trapped in the mirror of its own projections. And so the act of meditation is to come out of the illusion that we’re in the mirror and to realize that we are the mirror.” And through this realization we can transcend the subject-object dualities and realize the silence, the emptiness, the pure awareness that we are. “But the emptiness is not an emptiness that is other than fullness; the emptiness itself is the all. It is the point of the meeting of nothing and everything.” And it is at this point that one realizes that everything is simply light and awareness, and when one combines these two, “then what had been limited in time and space is realized as eternal and infinite. This is the liberation” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 1, 2009.

“So if we psychoanalyze not the conscious mind and not the unconscious phantasies but the censor itself, we’ll find that there are two complexes that exist side by side in the censor and they’re completely contradictory. One is that of solipsism: the ego doesn’t believe that there really is anyone else, or at least that all the rest are robots, or they don’t matter. . . . And then at the other side of it is the belief in the big Other to which the ego grovels and submits, and it cannot oppose.” This, as Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, is actually the opposite of the enlightened state in which one recognizes that there are many other sentient others, but there is no big Other “because there is God, and God is one without a second. .  . . And so when the enlightened being sees human others, he or she sees only the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 24, 2009.

“In most mythological systems, there is a theme of the double or the twins, and there are different kinds of twinships. One version is that there are two birds in a tree. One bird is eating the fruits on the tree and the other is just watching. This would be the twinship of the soul and the spirit.” As Shunyamurti, the founder and director of the Sat Yoga Institute, argues, this myth of the twins provides a backdrop or a better understanding of the connection with our phenomenal and noumenal realities. “The problem is that part of the consciousness is identified very strongly with the karmically enmeshed ego-form. . . . The only way out is to disidentify and realize you are not the bird that has eaten of the fruit but the other bird that has never been touched by trauma or any of the karmic enmeshments or identifications that the ego is plagued with.” So, paradoxically, “at the moment when we’re the most cut off from the vastness of the Supreme Self is that moment that we are closest to it in time that the return of eternity into the dimension of time becomes again inevitable and we are in that moment now. . . . This is the moment we have arrived at on this planet. And at the same time it’s the moment in which the doors of our perception can be most opened to cosmic realities that of the merely human plane. . . . So I hope you will all make the choice that will lead to the highest blessings that are possible for consciousness to attain.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 22, 2009.

Student Question: In the last 20 or 30 years of my life I have noticed that humanity is in decline. But my question is why the majority of people do not notice this? Why is it difficult for them to see when there is so much evidence? “It’s not that they cannot see, it’s that they will not see,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Once one has become strongly identified with the ego complex, he/she will not be able to get past the internal censor, which halts the flow of knowledge that does not “suit the ego’s own unconscious agendas.” And as a result of this, the mind is not receiving the full spectrum of knowledge that is available, and is instead living in an egocentric fantasy world. And this has led to a hell realm. But, like the 12-step programs in which someone has to hit bottom before they can see that his/her life is out of control, now the world must hit bottom before it can see that it needs help beyond the power of the human ego. Recorded on Tuesday, September 22, 2009.