Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Excerpt: ”Sat Yoga is a science – it’s the most ancient science in the history of humanity; it’s the science of consciousness. . . . The science that seeks to understand: what is the true extent of the human potential? How far can we grow beyond the normal ego-consciousness that limits our lives to a melodrama of suffering . . . is there a way to grow beyond the traumas that have limited our scope, our ability to even understand the mind of God?” 

“As every scientist will tell you: to practice science you need a laboratory. And the proper laboratory for the science of consciousness is called an ‘ashram. . . ’” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 11, 2014.

Excerpt: “Meditation is inward prayer. To understand this in depth we need to understand . . . inwardness. Every religion bifurcates into two basic forms which have been referred to exoteric religion and esoteric religion. The exoteric – the outer religion – is the religion that is delivered to those who are mentally immature; for children, for those who still need to believe in Santa Claus or some equivalent, for those who require a concrete imaginary image of God and of a way of living that is ethical that can only be delivered in very concrete ways. . . . But at the level of esoteric religion, the inner religion, for those who are philosophically mature, for those who seek Truth that is beyond fact, we can call it ‘Hyper-Truth’ if you wish, in which it’s beside the point whether anyone named Jesus walked the earth because the reality of Jesus is beyond the question of the fact. The reality of Christ is here and now, not a historical question.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 4, 2014.

Excerpt: “Once again we enter upon a timelessness – but this time because we are out of time; and the only way forward will be for those who are out of time. Time as we know it is coming to an end. But time as we know it is only history and now begins Godstory. But Godstory is a moment that is timeless and of changeless solitude, a time in which the Real is recognized as the immutable, the supernal and sempiternal Light that underlies and pervades all of the illusion called time.” Recorded during the Gratitude and Goodness retreat, on the morning of Thursday, November 27, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Everything on the plane of matter is a code. The job of the human intelligence is to break that code. When you have cracked the code you will be able to achieve freedom. But you must be able to crack the code of everything; that’s how the light gets in. And that’s why it’s important to understand and study the religions of the world, but all of the religions, it’s not that one is true and the others are false; they are all true, and they are all false. They are false if they are misunderstood – just as you are false when you misunderstand yourself. This is why the film The Matrix is still the most important cultural achievement of the postmodern period because it pours the wine into a bottle that can be related to by this computerized culture. So the first step that everyone has to take is to swallow the red pill. . .” Recorded during the Gratitude & Goodness retreat, on the morning of Monday, November 24, 2014.

Excerpt: “Meditation is the easiest thing in the world and the hardest. It’s the easiest because it doesn’t require doing anything; and it’s the hardest because it doesn't require doing anything – because the ego always wants to do something. And what meditation is, is the freedom from doing. It is the act that is a non-act that is that is simply stopping the running away from your Self – because we run away though thinking, through chattering to ourselves. We run away from the present into some past experience that we’re reliving or rehearsing a future one, or having an emotional reaction about what we wished we had said to someone, or didn’t say, or feeling angry at what they said, or in some way dealing with some other who is not present, and not being with the Self. It is this constant act of running away that simply must be renounced, and that’s all meditation is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 13, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . And therefore it is the transcendence of language, of thought, that is the essence of the first step in meditation, the opening up of the psyche to Pure Presence that is focused on the Source of Being, but without trying to grasp it conceptually; that is focused with devotion and with love for the ultimate mystery – that one must be very humble and careful not to believe one already knows just because you’ve read a lot of sacred texts or you’ve heard various gurus speak or you know that you’re supposed to believe that all is one or God is all that is or whatever is the current ideology, because none of that is true – because no set of words can capture the Truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 6, 2014.

Excerpt: “The two doctrines of most importance and usefulness in the East are those of Advaita and Advaya. The Advaita doctrine says that the Supreme Real cannot be understood by a mind trapped in duality – which is a mind that uses ordinary language to understand things because language defines each term in terms of an opposite term: we learn what hot means in terms of cold; we learn up in terms of down; we learn being in terms of nothingness etc. But God cannot be defined or characterized or in any way described or pointed at through language that is caught in this dualistic level of description. God is beyond both being and nothingness. . . . And so the Advaya doctrine, which is the one mostly offered in the Buddhist traditions, is that we cannot speak about God at all. And therefore what you can not speak about as Ludwig Wittgenstein came to understand himself (he’s one of the fathers of postmodern Western philosophy), what you cannot speak about, pass over in silence. And it is that silence that is at the heart of the spiritual traditions of both East and West.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 30, 2014.

Excerpt: “In the ancient world it was recognized that there was a bifurcation of the Real between being and appearance. Anything that appears in the world therefore is not; appearance means illusion. What has being does not appear in the world. But it has flipped completely in the postmodern period in which only that which appears seems real to the postmodern ego, and anything which can’t be grabbed onto is not real. This is the complete opposite of the way that every philosophical tradition for the last five thousand years – including the Western tradition – has understood being. That which has real being does not appear as an object in the world. It is the Source, the objects are the shadow of being, the reflection. But being itself is that which sends that shadow, it is the light, but when the light hits the mirage of the physical plane and we have appearances, that is a step removed from the Source: it has no being; it is a flux. And its reality must be interpreted by the human consciousness which is given the power to discern between that which is Real and that which is illusion. It’s based on using that discernment accurately that we live a life of purity and empowerment, but when we chose the illusion over the Real, that is what is called in Christianity the ‘original sin.’” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 23, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . And once that simple shift has been made then consciousness lets go of its contraction and realizes itself as infinitely vast, timeless, fearless – and completely empowered to play one’s role in the dream with heroic courage, with infinite creative potential, and with generosity and love; with all the virtues and all the siddhis that yoga speaks about, because your true nature is divine. But you’ve traded the divine powers for the ego’s anxiety. And all that needs to be done is to reclaim that original nature that is unlimited and that is fearless, and completely un-contracted.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, September 2, 2013.