The Torn Page

Excerpt: All our suffering arises from “the I-thought: the thought that I am this or that; I am this body, this personality, this history, this chain of signifiers going off in my mind, language with its narratives, its scenarios and melodramas that create all the suffering. That thought is what splits your mind between the false ego, and the real Self. Separating you from God for as long as you choose ego, and at the same time beginning the life of suffering that is somehow preferable because although it is suffering, it contains the instant gratification of the bodily, sensory, phenomenal plain of the collapsed quantum wave in which free will has been lost and all is determined by that choice to fall into the illusory world and leave the world of bliss, of liberation, of truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 12, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . And that this presence has always been there, it’s not something to attain in some other dimension; it’s here. But it’s here in the dimension that is other to the physical plane that witnesses it, that is the silent awareness that uses the instrument of the senses and the organism. But is a formless incorporeal eternal presence that forgets itself in its own true nature the moment it enters into language.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 5, 2014.

Excerpt: ”At this very moment you are the infinite Self. You are not the body who has a soul, or a spirit or a Self or a connection to the Super-Conscious, no. You are the Super-Conscious, you are the Self Supreme manifesting with a form in this phenomenal plane to make actual the highest potentialities in the mind of God as a reality in this plane. You are the Self. Your nature – right now – not in the future – right now – is total awareness. Your real Self – right now – is divine radiance, luminous intelligence, pristine, pure awareness. And it doesn’t matter if that is clouded by the ego mind, that’s completely irrelevant. All that is relevant is that you know who you are. And stop believing that you are a body, or a mind, a personality, an entity, that’s a precipitate out of the infinite Self; it is not you.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 15, 2014

Excerpt: ”We offer here not a twelve-step program, not even a one-step program. This is the world’s only zero-step program, which makes it the simplest and the hardest, because the mind cannot imagine taking zero steps, and therefore to get there you must realize you’re already there, and that underneath all the chatter of the mind, you are a zero. That’s what the mind is terrified of: discovering that there’s nothing behind it. Buddha discovered there was nothing behind it – he called it ‘Nirvana.’ But for the ego mind – the mind of the chatter – it’s called, ‘anxiety.’ So the first paradox to recognize is that anxiety is just a disguised form of bliss. So if you have a lot of anxiety, you really have a great deal of bliss, so know that it’s a great blessing. Don’t try to get rid of it, but you must recognize it from the right perspective. The perspective is everything.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 8, 2014.

Excerpt: ”It is attained very simply – because we are already That. There is nothing actually to be gained: it is simply returning from a state of false consciousness based on constructs and ideas that we learned within a context of a social system with agendas that were different from that of Truth. And so we are again learning to rest in the Truth of our Being. To realize this Truth . . . let go of all untruth. This means silencing the mind, it means letting go of all concepts, and learning again to be.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 6, 2014.

Spiritual teachings by Shunyamurti, the founder and director of Sat Yoga - a wisdom school, ashram, and the home of a vibrant spiritual community based in Costa Rica.

Excerpt: ”Often we think of Yoga as a spiritual journey, and that we are seekers – but actually it’s the end of the journey; it’s the realization that there is nothing to seek. But the journey of experience through life has concluded with our wisdom, our understanding, that the goal is actually to be: not to become, not to experience, but to return to the original Self that has always been there, but that we have forgotten. So it is simply our willingness to be. In that realization of our beingness comes the recognition that we are already perfect; we are already filled with the Supreme knowledge. We are constituted of the supernal light, the divine light, that is the emanation of God, and the term God refers only to the Self that we have forgotten and projected into some other dimension. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 3, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . This school is dedicated to help you answer those questions. But not to answer them theoretically, because theory is, frankly, empty; talk is cheap. The answer lies in the silence of the heart. The answers emerge when we are at peace, when we have found our center. And many people think ‘Well, yes, but my question is how do I find that center? How do I open the heart?’ But it happens, not actually by making some kind of difficult effort, but simply allowing yourself to be. It’s simply a very radical self-acceptance. But what we have to come to accept is the fact that we don’t really know who we are or have the answers to those questions, at the surface level; they are not in our minds and they are not our in the world. But they are present as that very silence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 27, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Asparsa has two meanings depending on how subtle that you wish to take it. The first meaning means to come out of imprisonment, but the way you get out of imprisonment is by going in – not out; there is no escape out there. The prison is the belief in the out there and the belief that you are a creature with a physical body. That objectification of your own nature and of the nature of reality is the imprisonment. So the way in means to come back into your subjectivity and into the fullness of pure consciousness that is not determined by laws of nature or ideologies or belief systems of any kind or material gratifications or inflictions of pain and suffering.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 13, 2014.

Excerpt: ”The human psyche is extraordinarily complex, and, at the same time, amazingly simple. That’s the first paradox that we have to face in reality . . . . it’s important to be able to think paradoxically and break through illusions that are based on what seem to be contradictory opposites that are both true. So, the mind has a number of different levels to it. Many of us tend to live on the outer most level of the mind and not go too far inward because they either get scared or there is a repressive block to knowing too much; there is some kind of programming that makes certain knowledge forbidden to you, etc. So that first level of the psyche identifies with the physical body. And therefore it is subject to fear of that body’s death or its pain or it’s subject to desire on a bodily level, it’s subject to anger when it doesn't get its bodily needs met, it’s subject to all kinds of hysterical meltdowns, due to the fact that it is identified with a perishable object. So, according to the logic of that level of the mind, it makes sense to be in a fragile and vulnerable state of consciousness and to defend against that vulnerability with all kinds of bravado or evasion or avoidance or of different kinds of personality quirks and strategies in order to not have to put oneself at risk because one feels always that one is at risk in a world that is dangerous. . .” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, March 6, 2014.