Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Overcoming Self Deception

Student Question: How do you deal with the hypocrisy of the ego when you say to yourself that you want to surrender and walk the spiritual path but you don't do it? How do you deal with that situation without starting an internal war?

Meditation: The Moment of Grace – 10.25.15

Excerpt: ”If and when meditation is successfully accomplished it is the result of Grace. It is given, in the same way as in the Old Testament, the manna from heaven was given every morning in the desert; they didn’t have any food in their rucksacks. And they were moving along and couldn’t plant any, and it was a desert where very little was growing, but somehow every morning the manna would appear. In our meditations it is that same faith that the manna from heaven, the Shakti, the lumination, the presence of that inner Other, of that power that is the Real Self, will shine upon us, will grant us a glimpse or a realization of the fullness of the Being that we are that is beyond anything we can think we are. And that Grace comes when there is love.” Recorded during the Lion Heart Koan retreat, on the morning of Sunday, October 25, 2015.

What is Awareness Made Of? – 10.03.15

Excerpt: ”Awareness is all that we know. Whatever seems to occur is only an appearance in Awareness. But what is Awareness made of? Does it have a substance? Is it objective? Awareness cannot be captured by any science because every science must be an appearance in Awareness; and science is a form of knowing, but there is no form of knowing that can know Awareness. Therefore we cannot say that Awareness is made of anything; it has no substance, no essence. And since everything is an appearance in Awareness, and is simply a modification of Awareness, then we cannot say that anything is.” Recorded on the morning of Saturday, October 3, 2015.

Dao Art That – 02.17.14

Excerpt: ”God is the infinitely branching reality of the creativity of life itself. And we who sit under this tree of life, we are life. And we can hear the sound of life, and it is the sound of love. And if we sit watchfully like the animals on the lookout, feeling the energy of God’s love, as Nature Herself, and realizing we are one with that; we are Nature’s tuning forks who transform the bliss of this divine presence into art, into meaning, into poetry, into philosophy, into prayer – into sheer delight. This is our function as part of Nature.” Recorded during The Dao of Love retreat on the morning of Monday, February 17, 2014.

The Alchemy of Love – 08.02.15

Excerpt: “Our beliefs are a defense against love. We live in the head in order to avoid the heart. And by eliminating any hiding place in the head at the level of beliefs, we force ourselves to face the reality of the Self as love - and our surrender is a surrender to love. It is the bringing to an end the fearful flight from love that is the ego’s raison d'etre. And thus we can define meditation and yoga as the practice of the purification and perfection of love. Love is what we are. Love is what God is. Whatever is real is real because it is love.” Recorded during the meditation weekend on Sunday, August 2, 2015.

The Hard Question of Consciousness – 02.06.15

Excerpt: “Why is the world something to us that arises, and that creates not only sensations, which are easily correlated to the five senses, but feelings, intuitions, and all of the subtler aspects of consciousness? Because none of that would be necessary based on simple evolutionary principles in which we could have been simply robots, or zombies . . . and how do we know that everyone else in the world is not a zombie, in other words, seemingly conscious but actually simply a computer program; programmed to respond in given ways that are adaptable but that they have no interior reality, how do we know? And how is it that there is an ‘I’ that can even ask that question? 

Well this Hard Question is in fact the original question that produced the field of yoga; it is nothing other than the question that Ramana insists that we ask which is ‘Who am I?’ ‘what is I-am-ness, being-ness?’” Recorded on the early morning of Friday, February 6, 2015.

International Yoga Day: What is Yoga, Really? – 06.16.15

Excerpt: ”The first important thing to recognize is that yoga cannot be defined. The closest definition I have been able to come to after many years of studying this subject is: yoga is the practice of the Real. However, because we are discussing this in language, which is a representation of the Real, the language is already an avoidance of the subject; and no representation of the Real, can reach the Real. Therefore yoga can only be known but not defined by a real yogi. And the word for Real in in Sanskrit, the original language in which this practice developed, is sat, so we refer to this as Sat Yoga.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, June 16, 2015.

Spiritual Detox – 05.31.15

Excerpt: ”… That’s the poison that we have is our addiction to the imitation self, and to its passions for trying to find a reality through clinging to some other, that also has become an imitation – and to detoxify means to find what is real and to let go of the artificial. It’s really that simple. Because the artificial will kill us; in fact the first artificial ingredient was our identification with the mortal body and thus we took in death, and the fear of death. But also we took in the loneliness that comes with being a body in a world of bodies, because bodies do not love, and bodies are only defence mechanisms to deal with survival. But to live at that level where we’re living to survive, to assure our security, that means that we never live, we’re never fully alive in joy, because we are always governed by these worries, these protective mechanisms…” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, May 31, 2015.

The Greatest Story Never Told – 05.28.15

Excerpt: “Where does the story originate? And what is it that we must face? Is it not the face of God? And is not the face of God the very absence of God that requires us to fill in that absence with a story. But to restore ourselves to the Real requires us to be able to endure the face of God, who is the destroyer of the story, and to endure in that everlasting Emptiness, out of which the Real emerges as royalty – real and royal are the same word. And it is when we have burned away the stories, all the stories . . . what is left is the Real.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, May 28, 2015.