The Torn Page

Excerpt:  “I hope that you have all come prepared for intense erotic experiences… have you?  Those of you who were here for the film this week of the sculpture of Santa Teresa by Bernini will remember that here is a question that is open as to whether she is having a chakra four mystical experience or a chakra two orgasmic experience… and the art critics and philosophers and psychoanalysts are actually arguing over this point….  To the psychoanalyst like Lacan naturally it has to be a chakra two experience – there is no chakra four – that is the modern ideology… and this loss of the transcendent dimension has bought about the loss of the realization that our true relationship to God is an erotic one, but it is the Eros of the soul not of the ego….  The soul’s deepest desire is to be ravished by God – this is what we mean by surrender… you are literally abandoning your ego self and asking to be filled by Gods power – presence – love – bliss.  This is the true erotic experience not the other one at chakra two… that is very minor and disappointing… this one is eternal – liberating – it brings salvation, but it is very much an ecstasy.  It is the ecstasy in which you are transported beyond… the experience begins in chakra four but then literally you are carried upward through the three worlds…"  Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 12, 2012.

Excerpt: “As the world situation every day becomes more tamasic, we have to remain immune to the negative vibrations that are all around us that want to affect us and that want to drag us down back into ego consciousness. Because to whatever extent there is still ego within any of us, that ego is becoming more and more rancid every day – that’s really what tamasic means. It’s putrid, it’s decomposing. We’re in the final period of Kali Yuga, when not only the ego but the physical organism itself is losing its capacity to live, to remain healthy, to remain strong, to remain with an immune system that is functioning properly, because the very elements of matter have been defiled. And so it’s very important that Sat Yogis keep a sattvic energy field. Not only for the immunity of our own organism, but for the immunity of the sangha, as a super-organism, or we can be very easily be infected by the tamasic energy and then suddenly our field of love becomes one of conflict, and aggression, or lust, or fear, or simply chaos and confusion, or all at once. And the only way to maintain the coherence of your own energy field and that of the sangha is to remain in inner silence – with your consciousness united with the Source.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, July 9, 2012.

Excerpt: “A yogi is someone who is so sick of his ego that he wants to commit suicide. But he knows that if he does that he will have to face all the karma that he ran away from, in the next life. So it does no good. And so instead of killing the body in suicide he realizes he must commit egocide. Suicide, ‘sui’ comes from the Sanskrit ‘swa’, the real Self; the ego is the false self, the me. In fact the ‘me’ actually stands for ‘M-E,’ Machinic Entity because the ego is a machine, it’s a robot, with an operating system that was created in childhood and robotically repeats the same patterns over and over again – in just a slightly more sophisticated form. And so we have to get rid of this robot somehow. We have to give ourselves a robotomy – which is similar to a lobotomy but slightly different. In the lobotomy you get rid of the higher functioning aspects of the robot, then you are left with the lower ones. Here we want to get rid of the robot entirely so that we can be liberated in life. But to get rid of the ‘me’ requires being willing to cut our link with thoughts – to be in stillness. And the thoughts continue to emerge robotically. But what keeps the robot going, what keeps it fueled is our addiction to those thoughts. The robotic thoughts produce jouissance; they produce a kind of pleasure, an enjoyment, even though that enjoyment is painful. Every ego is sadomasochistic and it produces a kind of enjoyment in the same way that the dog enjoys the taste of its own bleeding gums when it’s chewing on a bone.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 5, 2012.

Excerpt: ”Each of us comes equipped with three levels of consciousness. Unfortunately there is no instruction manual as to how to operate these three. And the society today tells us only about the ego – the primary level – that is required in order to function in this society. But if one lives only from the ego, one is living a very petty, weak, fragile life, focused on very superficial aims; the greed for money or sexual pleasure or some kind of limited power or some kind of fantasy fulfillment that always ends up disappointing one and the ego always ends up depressed and anxious and lost. And the ego consciousness is not good for very much, and it is not intended to do very much, except to get you to adulthood…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 4, 2012.

Excerpt: “The purpose of meditation is to become empowered. You should feel more spiritual power at the end of each meditation than you started with. How many of you feel that? Good. We need a lot of spiritual power to deal with the energy field of the world as it is today. And every day the world becomes more tamasic. And there is a very short time before major world-shattering events will occur. That if we are not strong enough to face them, and have the adequate and accurate response, can be very devastating to our equilibrium. And Sat Yogis are here not just to stay in balance for ourselves but be able to offer peace and balance and strength to others, we have to be able to channel that strength. But to do that, we first have to purify our own unconscious minds. If we are still being overturned by maya, by fantasies, by impulses of the lower chakras and by negative thoughts, negative interactions with others, then we are not able to be of any service to the world. We must complete our self-service, we must complete our own dissolution of the ego to be able to offer as a conduit as a channel the divine energies. So we must get out of the ego mind and we must enter the divine mind. If you’re in the ego mind, you are not of any help to anyone, least of all yourself.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, July 2, 2012.

Excerpt: “In order to be able to have some sense of God’s presence, first of all we have to recognize that what we mean by God, as a starting point, is the highest potential consciousness that you can have. Not the highest possible, the highest potential, because as soon as you say possible then that’s divided into what is possible and what is impossible. But you don’t know what is impossible; you don’t know the limits of potentiality. So we have to assume an infinite potentiality, and that you have that infinite potentiality of altering your state of consciousness to reach that of God consciousness.” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, June 28, 2012.

Student Question: Is it the ego that creates the illusion of growth and/or non-growth?

Student Question: To avoid falling asleep in meditation, I’ve read about a recommendation to do walking meditation instead. What advice do you have?

Student Question: What does it mean spiritually to have an identical twin?

Student Question: If one has superego projections with one’s siblings, can those projections be primary, or will they always secondary to those of the parents?