The Torn Page

Excerpt: “As you all know the Sat Yoga Institute is a school. It’s not just a place to come to meditate, but to do more than that. And the process begins with the Trivium which is a braid of three different processes that have to happen simultaneously for the process to be effective. It involves Translation, which is a paradigm shift – which is the conceptual understanding of the spiritual path so you will at least be able to explain to yourself why you’re going through this ordeal – because unless you can justify this to your own ego mind, there is no reason to put up with the suffering that it entails. But when there is a clear conceptual understanding of why you’re going through this experience, and what the benefits are, then the ordeal actually becomes very joyous, and not really filled with that much suffering. The transformational dimension of the Trivium is where the suffering is located. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thusday, July 4, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . . But in the spiritual field in India they do talk about four powers that are latent within you that must be remembered in order to realize the freedom that is your true nature. And they talk about this in mythological terms. And often they refer to them as the Power of Rama, the Power of Sita, the Power of Hanuman, the Power of Mrityunjay. You all know these powers because you have them, you use them on a daily basis – but we can go over them since we have to talk about something. The Power of Hanuman. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 13, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . . And so to know the Unknowable Self means to allow yourself to be – without moving, without distraction, without shifting your attention from the Self to any object or any thought, idea, image, emotion – anything that would take you away from the knower – until the very sense of being a knower dissolves in the knowing and there is only this energy that is awareness but without any source and without any object – it is the ground of the field of Being itself. And the reason that the ego mind has difficulty doing this is that it always wants to grasp onto certain attributes that it can objectify. And the awareness has no attributes, all the attributes have been projected into the world, which is a reflection of the Self, but the Self is attributeless, ‘Nirguna’. ‘Emptiness’ in the Buddhist terminology. . . .” Recoded on the evening of Thursday, June 6, 2013.

Excerpt: "... But there is a command, within the ego itself, never to silence the mind, never stop thinking, always got to produce thoughts; if you don't produce you're a failure. And so you got to be willing not to produce anything, but to be. Without putting any demands on yourself, or on anyone else, or giving in to anyone’s demands on you. Create a space of freedom to rediscover who you are without starting from any programming, whether that programming has to do with the gender of the body, or the age, or the nationality, or the religion, or the culture, or any of the other factors that determine the stream of thoughts in the mind – but prior to any thoughts, to when there was pure presence, when you were really aware of being, when the world really had this heightened presence, for you, and everything was new and astonishing. Let's return to that state.

And it's very easy to do because you don't do anything, just be. And if the production wants to happen, just go back with the question ‘What is the I, what is the awareness that is watching or listening to these thoughts being produced?’ And you keep going back to that ground of thoughts that are trying to arise and realize that there is a non-arising presence to whom the thoughts are arising. And then just focus on that non-arising presence. And you will find it's already peaceful, it's already happy, it doesn't need anything, it's not angry, there is no desire, has no fear – it's quite content..." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 30, 2013.

Excerpt: “…And the minute we let go and really relax and forget the ego, or remember that we are not the ego, remember that we are pure potentiality, pure presence, that is inherently without mental activity – it transcends the mind, the real presence of your being, mind is only a tool that is used on limited occasions but otherwise you’re in the silence of Infinite mind, not limited linguistic-based mind. And to live in that Self, is to be free, is to be independent, finally, of all the conditionings and all of the self-limitations. And all of the illusions and the ignorance that come with identifying with a body and an ego mind…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 9, 2013.

Excerpt: “Sat Yoga is the art of living in the state of love. Love is our natural state. But we have become denaturalized by accepting the programming and the conditioning of the ego mind. The ego mind is generally not in a state of love – which is not news to you I can see. It’s usually in a very judgmental state and mostly attacking others for being judgmental – which is the most self-righteous way of being judgmental – but also attacking oneself, feeling negative and lacking and all the games that the ego plays in order to make itself miserable that we know all too well so I won’t belabor that point, because I’m not here to keep you in that state of misery. I would like you to see that that’s not our natural state or our real state, and it was simply an indoctrination into misery because that is how you become adapted to social living and accept the miserable conditions that most people have to live in. But we don’t have to accept that. We can change our world by changing our perception of who we are and what this reality is...” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 2, 2013.

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.