Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Student Question: These symbols of Ganesha and the mouse, or Shiva and the dwarf, are a little confusing to me because if society has been in a degradation for 5000 years, how were these symbols known so long ago? These ancient mythologies, as Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute, have built into them the known decline of civilization. “It’s there, every culture, that at the end of time, no one would be able to hold on to any of the dharma.” And this is really just “a recognition of the law of entropy,” (the dissipation from the source; the increase of chaos or randomness), “operating at a spiritual level. . . . But this is a process that is happening at a collective level, so we’re seeing the decomposition of society now at a level that has never existed before. And before it took hundreds of years; like the Roman Empire lasted 800 years before it went into degradation. . . . Now you look at the U.S. in only 200 years in how they’ve fallen from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to Bush and Regan . . . Not that it was perfect, because it began way at the end of Kali Yuga, but the fall is more extreme; the drop is more steep.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 22, 2009.

The Sat Yoga Institute recently participated in the 2nd Yoga Festival of Costa Rica held during the weekend of September 19/20 at CENAC (Centro Cultural de Costa Rica). El Instituto Sat Yoga recientemente participó en el 2do Festival de Yoga de Costa Rica celebrado durante el fin de semana del 19 y 20 de setiembre del 2009 en CENAC (Centro Cultural de Costa Rica). The Sat Yoga Sangha had an informative and educational booth during the festival where Sat Yogis attended many Costa Rican visitors and offered them valuable information about the Sat Yoga path to attain liberation from an egocentric limited identity, and achieve absolute union with our True Unlimited Self. La comunidad (sangha) de Sat Yoga tuvo un stand educativo e informativo durante el festival atendido por Sat Yoguis quienes ofrecieron al público costarricense una variedad de información sumamente valiosa sobre el camino de Sat Yoga y cómo lograr liberarnos de una identidad egocéntrica y limitada que produce sufrimiento, y alcanzar la unión absoluta con nuestro Ser Verdadero. Sat Yoga was also invited to offer a meditation class during the first day of the Yoga Festival. Sat Yogini Radha, a teacher and disciple of Sat Yoga, offered a great informative talk entitled ‘Sat Yoga: Union with the Truth of our Being.” Sat Yoga también fue invitado a ofrecer una clase de meditación durante el primer día del festival de yoga. Sat Yogini Radha, una profesora y discípula de Sat Yoga, ofreció un gran charla informativa titulada “Sat Yoga: Unión con nuestro Ser Verdadero”. We have uploaded this wonderful Sat Yoga class by Radha and we hope it offers you deep insights on the importance of learning the arts of self liberation, and attaining a still silent mind, deep inner peace, and union with our blissful higher Self. Hemos subido al internet esta excelente clase de Sat Yoga ofrecida por Radha y esperamos que le ofrezca profundos descubrimientos sobre la importancia de aprender las artes de la auto-liberación, y alcanzar una menta quieta y silenciosa, una paz interior profunda, y una unión con nuestro Ser de Bienaventuranza. You are invited to learn more about Sat Yoga during our monthly Satsangs at our institute located in San Rafael of Escazu. Please call us at (506) 2288-3294 or emal us to info@satyogainstitute.org if you wish to join us. Lo invitamos a aprender más sobre Sat Yoga durante nuestros Satsangs mensuales en nuestro instituto ubicado en San Rafael de Escazú. Por favor llamarnos al (506) 2288-3294 o enviarnos un correo a info@satyogainstitute.org si quisiera participar. Namaste.

Although the phrase, “Who Am I?” thought to be the best mantra by Sri Ramana Maharshi, is indeed one of the most profound mantras in meditation, Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, elucidates “I think sometimes it’s actually more appropriate to ask another question of ourselves: ‘Where Am I?’ Because the real question is where does your mind go. It’s not a question of where the body is, but where is the mind? Where does it go?” With this in mind, Shunyamurti retells the parable of Sri Ramakrishna about two men who make very different decisions for a night of fun and where their minds end up. But, “it’s not where you go physically; it’s where are you really? So there’s another saying in India about where we should be and it’s three words: Satyam, Shivam, Sundaram. And it is said the very inmost core of the soul is most accurately symbolized by those three terms.” Recorded on the evening Thursday, September 17, 2009.

Student Question: I work at a spiritual bookstore, and I always hear people talking about the spiritual path, but they don’t walk their talk. It really frustrates me, and I was just wondering about how do I deal with this? “This is a frustration that everyone feels actually and not just in relation to the spiritual path, but everyone feels that everyone’s doing everything wrong. This is a constant issue for the ego.” But, as Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, reminds us, this is part of our spiritual practice: to be able to be in the face of hypocrisy and retain compassion for the other, like in the Bible verse, “Father forgive them they know not what they do.” So rather than correcting someone, take the opportunity to practice your compassion for them and that will be the greatest lesson that you can teach them. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 15, 2009.

Student Comment: I’m becoming a bit dislodged in the increasing apperception that every encounter is actually a meeting with God, and I think what brings this to mind is that this is beginning to get reflected back to me. So it just makes me think: “Tread lightly. This is now an appointment.” As the end of this age is rapidly approaching, the synchronicity of more and more seemingly “coincidental” events are becoming undeniable. “There are many, many more synchronicities per hour than there ever were in the past. And,” as Shunyamurti, founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us, “it’s no accident that quantum physics has in fact come into existence today, which in a way is telling us the same thing at the physical level.” And, as the grand tapestry comes to fruition, “the pattern is becoming visible at the micro level of each consciousness as a fractal or a hologram of the whole, and we are becoming awakened to that as we reach the understanding of our destiny and of our full potential as beings of consciousness.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 15, 2009.

“There is no ‘I’ entity. That’s the first fact.” But because of people’s belief in this illusion, they go at great lengths to improve their ‘I’ illusion like a Barbie doll. They buy it new clothes, new accessories. But as Shunyamurti, director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, “it’s always more, more, more because the ‘I’ entity isn’t enough. Why isn’t it enough? Because it doesn’t exist in the first place.” But if we could only let go of this illusion of a person, the “phantom of our internal opera,” then we would be able to be free of all of the anxieties that the ego entails. “So what we’re doing in meditation is we’re paying attention. And that’s the thing that the ‘I’ entity doesn’t really want to do. It doesn’t want to pay attention. It wants to be absorbed in its fantasies, but it doesn’t want to pay attention to its own construction of those fantasies. So meditation is paying attention to the way you pay attention. . . . There will be, ultimately, a realization that the ‘I’ is the Absolute space in which it all occurs; not any entity at all.” Recorded on Thursday, September 10, 2009.

Student Question: We talk about the horizontal plane of time and setting these rules and saying these things exist, but if the ghost and the interdimensional beings and the candle don’t exist, then why do we recognize them? It’s a little confusing to me to talk about all these things and define them, but yet they don’t exist, it’s all consciousness.  Recorded Thursday, September 10, 2009.

Student Question: Is Sat Yoga, or does Sat Yoga consider itself, a shamanistic school? And if it does, how does it differentiate from other shamanic schools? “The original shaman is a yogi. There’s no distinction. It’s only later that in different cultures, that take on the use of this term, that there become variations of its meaning.” In this enlightening video, Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains the origin and fall of the great shaman and his role in society as a healer to the pseudo/psychedelic-shamanism of modern Westerners (such as Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna), who “make the mistake of believing that the relative mind is the goal rather than the Absolute mind. . . . But the problem is that the brain’s chemistry regulates the relative mind of the ego system, and indeed it can produce . . . interdimensional perceptions, but it does not reach the larger sphere of the absolute mind.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 8, 2009.

Student Question: I was just curious about Yin and Yang. What does it refer to? Is it just duality, opposites, polarities, male/female? What is it? “Yin and Yang are names within the Taoist tradition of the archetypal structure of phenomenal reality that always exists in a bifurcated form.” This can be likened to the modern example of a computer which works by virtue of a complicated series of zeros and ones (binary code). “And yet it’s infinite,” explains Shunyamurti, founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica.  “And it can become very complex, just as all language can because, in a sense, the entire universe is language; it’s information.” This idea of language—which works by contrast—leads to a development in the mind of a constant sense of lack, of missing the other piece, and the only way that this hole can be filled is the transcendence of the incomplete, ego-identity. Recorded on Tuesday, September 8, 2009.