Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Excerpt: “This is a school of magic. Are you all interested in magic? Do you all realize that you are magical beings? Do you? But there is a difference between being a magical being and being a magician. To become a magician you must train your magical potential to be fully actualized. Western civilization can be understood as the sustained effort to repress magic. That’s its whole purpose – to repress white magic; there is plenty of black magic around. For the last 2000 years that has been the main intention of the forces that have been running this civilization, to disenchant the world. Why? Because you can’t control magicians; you can’t control sorcerers; you can’t control great shamans; you can’t control the Magi, so whenever they saw a magus, they would eliminate him. They wanted to eliminate white magic because white magic, when there are enough magicians . . . coming together to create an energy field of divine magic the world can be transformed, and they know that.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 18, 2013.

Excerpt: “So the realization of God begins with the understanding that what we mean by that term is the ultimate, supersensory apperception that you are capable of. It’s not simply extrasensory perception; that psychics do, they can see subtle energies and be aware of things that are happening in the external plane. It’s not simply extrasensory perception. It’s supersensory, it’s beyond the sensual realm – including the subtle level of sensuality – and it is not a perception but an apperception, which means that what is being perceived is the one doing the perceiving; there is no duality in God. And therefore you can never know God as long as you want to be a perceiver of God because God does not exist as an object. The atheists are right, but they are also very wrong because they don’t understand that in the same way you have to cultivate a taste for music like this – and many people in the world would not have said this is beautiful; if you would play some death rock they would have said ‘yeah that’s great!’ or ‘that’s wicked’ or whatever term is now the equivalent of ‘I like it.’ But you need to cultivate a taste for beauty, for goodness, and particularly for the Supreme Beauty and the Supreme Goodness that we’re talking about when we signify the word God or any ultimate reality term that is an equivalent whether Buddha-nature, Nirvana, etc. etc.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, April 11, 2013.

Excerpt: “People think that complexity is a relatively new scientific discipline, and in the modern world it is, but it’s a very ancient concept. And the first full development of that is in the form of the net of Indra. The net of Indra is the most significant concept to come out of Vedic and Buddhistic thought and got explicated most fully on HuaYen Buddhism but it existed long before that. And that is the understanding that reality is not based on closed systems with independent or contesting territories but is a network of interconnecting subsystems within a larger hyper-complex system, in which there is harmony and unity that overlies any sense of difference. And so when we can begin to map the complexity of the ego-system, we rise to the soul level which is a hyper-complex system which is an assemblage of hyper-complex systems that extends overtime because the soul reincarnates and up to the point of understanding an entire cycle of time with all of the complexity of the permutations of time itself. And then you get to the higher level of ultra-complex systems at the level of the Atman. And this is an assemblage of hyper-complex system that includes many different universes, many different independent levels of functioning but that are all part of a harmony at the highest level. And so as we go up to higher and higher of levels of consciousness, what they are, are higher levels of complexity and at the very highest level of infinite complexity you reach absolute simplicity.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, April 4, 2013.

Excerpt: “...And while the Buddhists are accurate in saying ‘yes you need to live in the Two Truths’; there is a conventional reality and Ultimate Reality and for purposes of dealing with conventional reality, keeping your bank account balanced and dealing with people at the phenomenal plane who are in that illusion, you need to be able to deal with it – but you can only deal with it without suffering if you are beyond it in the Ultimate Reality. So the idea of any spiritual path is not to leave the conventional reality behind, but to recognize that even this split between Ultimate Reality and conventional reality, is a convention. And that you don’t believe in it, you free yourself from any ‘naive realism,’ that accepts this world created by the illusion of the ego as real so that you will not suffer from the events in this world or from the ignorance that generalizes to having many consequences, unintended as well as intended, so that you can live in this world as a being of wisdom, a being in peace without neurotic or psychotic suffering, and without even the ordinary suffering that Freud says you cannot get beyond. Pain perhaps won’t end but suffering over whatever seems to be going ‘wrong,’ doesn’t have to be part of one’s world, one’s umwelt. That can be left behind. And that’s the only practical benefit of the spiritual quest, is that you have left that behind and you can act in the world wisely. But always knowing that the one who is acting in the world – to bring peace, order, greater happiness, etc. – is an illusion.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 21, 2013.

Excerpt: “… Because the ego mind is a knot based on the unproven premise that the ‘I’ is the body. And it builds its entire life on that false belief, that ‘I am a body’ and ‘the body is material.’ And it’s upon that premise, false though it be, that remains tenaciously the foundation of the ego, that it will not let go of, that is the cause of all our suffering. Because once there is a body in a physical universe there is fear, there is lack, there is anxiety, there is desire, there is disappointment, there is despair; the whole wheel of egoic life stems from that false belief. And it’s to undo that false belief, not just theoretically but really, which changes our entire psychology and frees us from the torments of ego consciousness. In principle it’s very easy. And it’s easier today because modern science, particularly quantum physics, supports the understanding that the world is not real; the universe is information, and information requires a knower, and the knower is consciousness. So it is no longer even scientifically sustainable to believe ‘I am a body’: ‘I am consciousness’ is the prevailing scientific understanding. “ Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 14, 2013.

Excerpt: “…So this is the problem in most people’s lives, if he’d gotten the dream saying just dig under your own kitchen he probably wouldn’t have listened to it, but it told him to go to Russia; OK, it’s enough of an ordeal maybe there’s truth to it. It’s the need to do something exotic, the need to do something outlandish and to pass through some ordeal that gives something credibility. This path is just too easy because you don’t have to do anything on this path, just be yourself, what could be easier than that? There’s no method, there’s no system, there’s no approach, there’s no drug you have to take, there’s no danger, there’s no side-effects. It’s boring, isn’t it? Just be yourself.

But nobody want to be themselves, they want to be someone else. They want to go on some long exotic journey somewhere, only – always – to discover that what you were looking for was back home, was yourself. You are the Atman, you don’t have to wait for some message to come in an altered state of consciousness. You have altered your own state of consciousness by creating the ego – the ego is an altered state. It’s a state in which you’ve lost touch with your real consciousness; it’s not a higher altered state but a lower one that you chose to identify with. But all you have to recognize is that who you really are in your very natural state, if you’re not too manic depressive, is quiet presence…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 07, 2013.

Excerpt: “We are here to rediscover who we are, what we have forgotten about our deep Self, to dive beneath the surface, beneath body-consciousness, and even deeper than soul-consciousness, to discover the Spirit, the Absolute Self, that always abides eternally, peacefully, blissfully within. This is our divine essence, and we have come together to discover our divine essence, and then to share our divine essence with one another, to create an energy field in which that essence is able to fill everyone with that same power of truth, of love, of joy. And so meditation is not some serious business where you have to be very sober and solemn – it might seem that from outside, but in truth we are here to rediscover that within us which is always joyous. It’s said in every religious tradition that God is love, ultimate love, ultimate bliss, the bliss of overwhelming, overflowing infinite love. Can you imagine that state? Can you imagine living in that, and realizing that that is who you are?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 28, 2013.

Student Question: What is prayer? And what is the meaning of it, and how to pray?

Student Question: What are nightmares? Why is it that nightmares are the dreams that affect me most and that I remember the most?