The Torn Page

Student Question: Earlier you established some connection between Jesus and his connection to Yoga. Could you go a little more into detail?

Excerpt: “The traditional yogic texts say that a yogic life is built on four pillars, and attending Satsang is one of those. The other three are: simplicity, leading a simple life without excess, without ostentation, without wastage. . . . truthfulness, a yogi is dedicated to being truthful—and more than just truthful in a factual sense, but leading an authentic life. . . . the third one is seva, or service, to lead a life that’s not based on getting as much as you can for yourself, but of giving as much as you can to the world. . . . Now, a Satsang, for those of you who haven’t been to one, the word “Sat” you’ll notice appears a lot in our discourse here, Sat refers to the Supreme Beingness, the truth of what we are when we take away all of the falseness and the mediated and artificial aspects of our self, when we get down to what is natural and eternal in ourselves. And yoga means “yoke,” union. . . . You know we tend to think that that it’s only people out there who sabotage our happiness, but it’s actually we who are responsible for that; we set that up. And once we assume our own responsibility for our happiness, then life begins to get a lot better. . . . And gradually our intellect, our buddhi, becomes clearer and clearer, and we begin to realize the ways that we’d been sabotaging ourselves on subtler and subtler levels until we get to the root of the phantasies that have been motivating us to deny ourselves or to cheat ourselves of our own bliss . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 30, 2011.

Student Question: Can you define “ego” in your own words?

Student Question: So you mentioned the ego and the superego, which are Freudian terms, but where does the id fit into this?

Excerpt: “Sri Ramana Maharshi recognized that all of us are one Self, manifesting as many,” recalls Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And because of this realization of our oneness, of course Ramana had no interest in the [Indian] caste system. . . . The lowest caste [in the Indian caste system] were called the ‘Chandalas,’ which can translate as ‘Untouchables.’ And you should never touch an untouchable; you’d have to go through some extraordinary ritual of purification. And Ramana laughed at that and said this is only a metaphor. The only real Chandala is the ego. That’s what you must never touch. You must never enter ego-consciousness...” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 14, 2011.

Student Question: You’ve talked about “reality” and “The Real,” and I just wanted to know where “The Symbolic” is in relation to those.

Excerpt: “It is between the two. Reality is a hallucination. And once you can grasp that symbolically, you can discover what is the source of that hallucination, or hologram, or matrix, whatever you want to refer to this plane as. And through your symbolic capacity of thinking, and your attention span, you can make your consciousness like a laser beam and focus it with your willpower to break through the illusion of reality, to discover the Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 14, 2011.

Student Question: We often hear here that for thousands of years the celibacy has been undertaken in certain societies. And I’m assuming that that’s referring to the yogic tradition. I’m more familiar with Judaism and Islam, and in cultures built around those traditions—which have lasted for thousands of  years—celibacy has not been practiced, to my knowledge, or if it has then it has been in a very different form. So I get a little confused when I hear that “for thousands of years, this has been done” or “that has been done,” and, at the same time, it’s been practiced for thousands of years in a totally different way. Could you please provide a little clarity on this matter?

Excerpt: “If you study the Jewish tradition, as well as the Islamic tradition, you will find that they actually do encourage celibacy, up to a certain point in one’s life. And one is really not intended to marry until one has gone through the Talmud, for example, and reached a state of having put sexuality in the correct perspective, which is as a way of serving God. It is a mitzvah; it is a commandment. It is not the unbridled urge of the ego. And once one has gained the ego under control, then sexuality operates,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So if you look at those traditions, they are practicing a near-celibacy, particularly for rabbis or mullahs or people who have chosen a path that is spiritual in nature and they, and they aren’t simply giving lip service to their tradition.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Student Question: In one of your essays, you made a distinction between the yoga of Patanjali and of Sat Yoga. You mentioned the Advaita perspective, but you also mentioned that we still need to follow the yamas and niyamas, and I couldn’t quite grasp the difference. So could you explain it a little more?

Excerpt: “Patanjali’s understanding of Reality is dualistic,” begins Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Whereas the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, which is leaning more towards the Advaita position, is about recognizing that subject and object are separate, but then—at a higher level—we want to know what is the source of both of them, and reunite the two, not keep them as separate poles of reality.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Excerpt: “Imagine a scene in a biological laboratory,” begins Shunyamurti, the lead research scientist of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There’s a woman scientist bent over a microscope and gazing at one of those little slides. And the slide has on it a drop of water that’s filled with amoebas. And as she’s gazing in, she sees that these amoebas have a whole world of their own. . . . And at the moment that she’s looking at them, imagine that one of these amoebas somehow, uncannily, becomes aware that it’s being gazed at. And it can’t quite comprehend ‘Who’s looking at me?’ but it knows someone’s looking at it from a dimension beyond its own little world. And let’s imagine that the intensity of its desire to understand the energy it’s feeling causes its mind to actually rise up until this amoeba’s consciousness is united with that of the scientist, and for a moment, it sees itself from her perspective. . . . And at the same time, the scientist realizes that some 84,000 lifetimes ago, she was an amoeba just like that one. And someone gazed at her, and it created this desire that then led to the evolution of her soul through all these different forms until she had become this scientist—now gazing at her own origins. . . . But at that same moment, the scientist realized, ‘But what if I am still being gazed at by a consciousness beyond where I am to the same extent as I am beyond that of the amoeba?’ And her mind suddenly turned within, and, with great intensity of desire, was pulled upward to that higher dimension and realized the Witness consciousness that had been gazing upon her with love. And that consciousness had at one point been a human who had evolved to God consciousness, and there was another union at an even higher level." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Student Comment: If the world is in God’s hands and we can’t control anything—and everything is perfect—then it makes sense to me that there can’t be such a thing as a mistake, or an error, or a mis—anything. Nevertheless, I can’t quite understand this fully.