The Torn Page

Student Comment: I would like to learn more about discernment.

“It is the key to escaping from the ego’s event horizon and the illusions that the ego throws up in front of us and cause us to believe that we’re happy when we’re really not, and to believe that somebody else is the cause of problems when we have problems, and to believe that things are irreparable and there’s no way out, and falling into depression or anxiety, etc.,” discerns Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So, Viveka [discernment] is the capacity to discern when your ego is deceiving you from a situation of truth. . . . And at the state of Viveka, or discernment, you realize that it’s not real: your mind is creating illusions—hallucinations, demons—that are imaginary, that are disturbing you. And once you can discern that, you can dissolve those negative forces.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.

Student Question: I have a question about the use of medication with illnesses. There are many philosophies that say that one should not take medication when one is sick because the sickness is a process of natural/karmic purification. But I am very confused as to which is the correct option. Could you please provide some clarity on the topic?

“No, I think that if one can heal one’s sickness, one’s 'dis-ease,' it’s useful and important to do that as an act of love,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the doctor of the soul at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, it’s important to do it without evading what is the meaning of that illness; it is expressing something. And if you only take pills, as in the allopathic method of treatment in which there is no meaning to the disease, then that ultimate disturbance, which is of the soul, will come back in another way; the karma will find a way to hit you. . . . So, it doesn’t mean that we have to continue the suffering, but it does mean that we have an obligation to authentically discover what is the root of that illness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.

Student Question: I’ve never quite understood the meaning of the crucifixion. Could you please explain it a little bit?

“Crucifixion has many levels to it,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It is a crucifixion of duality, but there are many dualities: subject object duality; good and bad duality; desire and fear duality. And we are trapped in the mirage created by that duality. And because we want the illusion of the enjoyments that we think will come from the possession of other people, money, any kind of egoic power, that keeps us trapped—our attachments, our addictions—which all come from a self-image of being an entity. [As] soon as there is an entity, that entity is pinned to the world in which it appears. . . . And the spiritual journey of discipleship is the medicine that gets you off the cross because now, those disciplines pin you to the vertical; they force you to be vertical rather than horizontal. It is a higher ethic; a higher dharma. And it’s that dharma that has the power to pull you out of the morass of the desires and lower fantasies; it’s the only thing that can get you off the cross.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.

“Sri Ramana was often emphatic in saying that meditation is a non-objective process,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But it is also important that we emphasize that neither is meditation a subjective process. . . . And the word ‘subject’ has important ramifications. . . . Subject means ‘under the control of.’ A subject of the king or the queen of England, for example, a political subject; one is subject to various influences. And the ego is, in fact, an objectified subject, or subjectified object, but it is subjected to the objective image of itself and of the world. So to escape those influences, we must transcend subjectivity as well as objectivity.”

And, as it turns out, transcending this subjectivity is the one way to truly help the world out of this “knot” that it has been stuck in, “by meditatively sacrificing the egoic identity back into the foundation—into the ocean of consciousness that is nondual—that transcends first person, second person, third person (of language); it transcends ideas of God; and it also transcends ideas of atheism. It transcends all ideas because ideas, being linguistic forms, are caught in duality. And, the only way out, is through entering into the silence of pure Presence.”

And this “enables us to live joyously again—not with fear, no longer with any phobias, or crippling inhibitions—or need for exhibitions—because there is no ego that’s caught in that trap of either being superior or inferior; having or not having; being or not being. All of those dilemmas that can never be solved through any action we can perform in the world, until we have transcended the world, and return as the avataric vehicle of the Supreme Presence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.

Student Comment: Before you said that memories are all illusion. So what if somebody has this very difficult situation in their life, maybe when they were children or whatever. What about . . .

“How do you know it’s true? How do you know they’re not making up that memory, and it’s just happening now?” asks Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “No matter what you think you remember, you’re memories deceive you. . . . So, what is it that really traumatizes us? It’s a thought that occurs now, in this moment. It has nothing to do with the past. The past never happened. We’re making it all up. Now is all there is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 8, 2010.

“The paradox of the spiritual journey is that, in reality, all of us are already enlightened,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “We are always already liberated because there is only one Real, one Truth, one Beingness. The rest is illusion. . . . But . . . the Supreme Being, in order to enjoy all of the possibilities of experience, all the possible permutations of potentiality, has created Maya, the illusion of separateness.” We have lost the knowledge of our Divine Nature, “and it is a necessary loss of that knowledge that enables us to gain something else. And that something else includes courage and virtue—and the potential of discovering ever more within the realm of potentiality. To make this world . . . into the most beautiful flow of consciousness in action, in harmony—in the realization of unity in the diversity. To bring to the illusion the very power of Truth.”

“And it’s that capacity—to bring the Light into the darkness—that makes one’s illumination even more powerful than it would have been had you not manifested within the cloud of Maya. To light that light in the midst of the darkness, brings a richness to the Real that would not otherwise be there. . . . And now is the moment when we’re against the wall of all the karmic backlash of the putting off of realization . . . [and] we must achieve Liberation for the sake—not only of this individual illusion, but for the whole planetary illusion. And once one thread of that illusion is removed, the whole thing comes apart very easily. So there is no one to be liberated; that’s the meaning of Liberation. It is not that there is an ‘I’ who is in chains and then becomes liberated. It is that there is no separate ‘I.’ There is only the substratum of pure awareness that manifests the forms that appear in the flux of the phenomenal plane. And that consciousness is one with all that is and that ever was or shall be.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.

Student Question: If I understood what you were saying before, we should not be thinking about the past. We should not be paying attention to a moment that is not now. It seems so difficult because we are so used to having a story, right?

“Yes. And that story limits you,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To whatever extent, it gives you a defined identity, and defined goals; it limits your possibilities. And then you don’t have free will. You can choose to will what you want, but you can’t change what you want to want. Freedom only comes when you can want to want something different. . . . But if you are infinite potentiality, then you’re free. And you’re not identified even with the gender of your body or the age of your body or the nationality or—any of the things that limit your possibility. Why not be totally free?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.

Student Comment: I have a question on the fragments of the ego. You said it develops from people imprinting on you, so you get little bits of this and that. So they’re all ultimately unrelated pieces trying to work together.

“Well, you relate them. You make up relations. You try to with whatever power of mind you have; you make up stories,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And you take all those fragments and you make a narrative out of it; you string them all together. But the narrative is a fantasy.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.

Student Question: When you are sublimating the lower chakras, specifically from one to seven, what exactly are you purifying?

“That’s the core of the ego,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. The ego fears “that it doesn’t really exist, that it’s just a mass of fragmented emotions,” which is reminiscent of the baby’s experience before it gains motor skills. “So chakra one contains that ultimate fear of helplessness.” And that feeling of helplessness is absolutely terrifying. “And so when you get into that core of anxiety, and surrender, even that, to the Supreme Reality, and you can witness it without fear, without anxiety—without needing a body, whether in it’s in good condition or in completely dysfunctional condition—then that surrender allows one to rise to the ultimate bliss.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 5, 2010.

Excerpt: “The silence that we share here is far more important than the words, and the connection that we make. . . . And so, this is a place to talk in a way that people rarely talk together in other contexts. . . . [And] that’s important: that we can think out-of-the-box together in new ways about what life is really about. . . . According to the neurobiologists today, none of you are in this room; you’re actually inside your brain watching a movie about this room. . . . We’re in the matrix; that’s why that movie was so popular. But is that true? . . . now, the most recent discoveries in neurobiology include the understanding of what they call ‘neuroplasticity,’ which means that the brain can repair itself. And it has the capacity to add synapses that didn’t exist before, and to begin to use certain parts of the brain for other purposes when necessary. And to achieve a greater capacity of whatever sort that is asked for by consciousness. So, it’s not the case that it’s a one-way relationship that the brain creates our subjectivity; it’s also the case that our subjectivity creates and re-creates our brain. So there’s free will even at that level; it’s no longer the machine metaphor . . .”

“And so [Sat Yoga’s] think tank is about freedom. But it’s not just to have freedom of having new concepts, it’s about using those concepts to open up our heart. So the think tank turns into a thank tank—we want to be here in a state of gratitude for life. In a state of an ability to love, and to feel the energy of love that supports our existence and our reason for being.” And in order to find a way to help the world, to enter the miraculous states of consciousness, “we have to find those forces that are currently outside consciousness and bring them in. And the ultimate outside—the absolute Other beyond consciousness, the force that produces those archetypal energies that then produce the ego and its conscious ideation—that has traditionally been called God. It’s a scientific concept. It’s a theoretical understanding of the fact that there must be this Ultimate Reality, and we have certain windows that will give us glimpses into it. But is it possible to open ourselves so much, to push the envelope to such an extent that that Ultimate Outside becomes included, and there is no longer a duality of inside and outside?”

“And so we have to return to that original capacity for transdifferentiation if we’re going to heal the world. But we have to start with our own individual consciousness, and use whatever margin of willpower we have to overcome the unconscious censoring mechanisms that keep us from knowing who we are, and from activating the latent potential that we all have to achieve what in the old days was called divinity. But really we can look at as a scientific term that refers to the ultimate state of psycho-spiritual maturity that human beings are capable of: the expansion of consciousness beyond that of this skin-encapsulated ego to encompass the entire world as a unity.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 29, 2010.