The Torn Page

Student Question: If all there is is consciousness, and in reality nobody’s praying to nobody, then why is it that when you pray, the pray manifests?

“Well, because you don’t realize that,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The ego actually thinks it is a separate body. The ego is alienated from this truth. And so what it is praying for is the realization that it is One with the Supreme Awareness. . . . And the prayer is the act of opening consciousness to its own infinite nature. So ultimately, yes, the prayer is to the Self—but it is from a fragment of the Self that had been walled off from the whole. And it is praying for that wall to be released.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 29, 2010.

“Those who are on a true path of purification and spiritual truthfulness, and a complete striving to reach union with God, are very rare and very special. But your specialness consists in realizing that you’re not special,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And indeed one of the main obstacles on the spiritual path is not allowing one’s ego to reappropriate one’s spirituality. “You cannot be special as a separate ego because your ego is illusory.” And all spiritual communities are based on the understanding that all members “are part of a single Being.”  And thus a spiritual community cannot exist without each member withdrawing his/her projections and searching within for the source of one’s anger, hatred, or envy of another. “But it is an ongoing day-to-day need to nourish each other with love. And that has to be the primal vow of a disciple. If one is not willing to do that, then no matter what other yamas and niyamas one is willing to do—including fasting and living the most ascetic life—it won’t matter because one’s closed heart will prevent one from reaching God because God is pure love.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 27, 2010.

Student Question: In one’s quest for liberation, one requires a spiritual guide; it’s imperative and can’t be overemphasized. But when does it come into a stage when the student no longer requires the guide?

“When the student has internalized the teachings, and has purified the unconscious mind so that his or her own mind no longer deceives him/her,” answers Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute. The initial problem is that the ego is in denial of its own split consciousness, between the conscious and unconscious mind as well as other fragments. And after the guru-disciple relationship, and there is “a realization of the totality, a point is reached when the purification of the individual soul is at such a degree of clarity and purity of perception and accuracy that there is no longer a disturbance or a distortion in the field. And at that point, there is no longer an obstacle internally to the realization of the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.

“Real meditation begins when one is sick of the doing. One is sick of one’s own ego. One is sick of one’s own mind. That’s when it starts,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s only when you’re sick” of all the games you play with yourself, “and you realize that the world is a mirage, that you get serious about meditation. Until then you’re just dabbling at it, playing at it, and you won’t get very far with it because meditation is the most serious thing that one can do. And it means giving up one’s own sense of being a separate individual. . . . And so, the only way to reach that Ultimate State—which is what we are—is through letting go of all that we appear to be, of all that the mind projects, of language itself, of imagery—of everything that is an object in consciousness—until we reach a state of purity of awareness. And in that Presence—when the mind lets go of even believing that what it is present to is occurring in the brain or is occurring in any localized area, in any phenomenal world—one breaks through the final frame in which we have tried to put reality. And then we enter into the infinite.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.

Student Question: Reasoning is the lowest level of intelligence, and that’s what is taught in our educational system. I’m trying to remember what the higher levels of intelligence above reasoning are. I know there’s intuition, but what else?

Higher levels of intelligence become available when “the full buddhi opens,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Not only the lower buddhi of the ego—or rational thought—but the higher buddhi of the archetypal dimension becomes available. The higher buddhi “recognizes that there’s a much higher order that looks like randomness and chance, but has a logic that can only be seen in synchronicities and understood in a larger pattern than the ego can perceive. . . . And so when there’s no longer an egocentric perception, then those larger patterns—and more subtle patterns of reality—become clear.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.

Student Question: There has been a lot of talk recently about Zen riddles, koans, and I was wondering if I could hear one in order to see what my mind would do with it?

“A Zen riddle, to be an accurate Zen riddle, has to be given at the right moment to the right person. It’s not something to toy around with. It is a very deep, sacred instrument for learning,” explains Shunyamurti, the Zen Master of the Sat Yoga Institute. Though Zen schools today have codified and organized koans into a rational, hierarchical structure, they have lost their true Shakti, their transmissible power of awakening. But nevertheless, “one purpose of the koans is to create a situation that is so paradoxical that the rational mind eventually has to give up; it can do nothing with it.” But today we have koans in contemporary science: Gödel’s proof in mathematics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the double-slit experiment in quantum physics, etc. “There’s a limit to our knowledge. Our rational minds cannot know aspects of reality, and the more we try to know, the more the reality changes before our very eyes. . . . That’s a Zen koan, but it’s a Zen koan that reality itself presents. God is the Zen Master who is forcing us to realize that reality is not what our rational minds think it is, and we cannot make sense of it at that level. So we no longer need Zen koans: Life is a Zen koan.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.

Student Question: In many traditions there is a reference to the term "sentient beings," and it appears to me that that’s a very specific term that I don’t think I really understand and I was wondering if you could speak to that?

“It’s difficult to speak to that issue for the simple reason that there are many sentient beings that are not corporeal,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “That’s why here we often use the term actants . . . versus actors. There are many actants in any given situation, which are forces that are operating, some of which are bodiless. . . . But everything is an actant . . . everything that we think of as a thing or an object, even if we think of it as inanimate, is a sentient being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.

Student Comment: I was wondering if the ego itself is a koan, and then I though no, because it has its own logic for everything it does whether that’s conscious or not. So the ego itself isn’t a koan.

“Oh yes it is because the ego is inconsistent,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And part of the reason for transformational sessions is to allow oneself to hear the contradictions inherent in one’s fantasies, desires, and other unconscious melodramas. “And when you realize that and have to laugh at your own ego for being ridiculous . . . you have to let it go.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 22, 2010.

The Indian sage “Sri Aurobindo says that the primary act, central act, that a meditator is performing is an act of aspiration,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “You are aspiring to lift your consciousness. You’re for two things: one is the ascent of consciousness from ego mind to Sat Mind, and at the same time you are invoking the descent, the presence of the Supreme Consciousness, the Supracosmic. One’s own consciousness at an individual level must go from the protomental, the emotional, to the mental, to the supramental, and then it must meet the supracosmic. And it is in that the yogic power is ignited.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 15, 2010.

“There was a great Zen master of the 14th century in Japan, named Bassui, who was asked about fasting and he said, ‘The only real fasting is to refuse to feed on delusion.’ Any other fasting may be helpful for the body, maybe not, but the real key is to transcend delusion,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And, of course, this means fasting from identity itself: “The moment you believe you’re a someone who has something, some treasure, some priceless knowledge—let alone thinking you have some priceless material object or partner or money, or whatever else—any of those are delusional—but even the highest level of subtlety of sophisticated metaphysical conceptualization of reality is pure delusion.” And, your true nature “cannot be seen or known in any way in which the mind tends to conceptualize even the process of knowing. So this is sometimes referred to as a path of Gyana Yoga,” and Gyana is “translated as knowledge, but it is knowledge that is Being. You are That which you Know; you don’t know it conceptually. There is no subject/object separation in that state because both those poles of subject and object are illusions. There is no subject. Any subject is always going to be, simply, a conceptualization. That’s what the ego is, a self-image, or it could be a very sophisticated set of self concepts. So the ego can exist on a spectrum, but all of it is an illusion. . . . So there is no subject, and the object, of course, is simply form that arises within that very same consciousness that thinks it is looking at it. And so all there is, is that which Is. . . . So let’s give ourselves that gift of realizing that there is only one Sat, one Mind, and we are all That, together as a unity, not in separation. And let us not be a mind that is in a state of separation from that ultimate Reality. We are That.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 8, 2010.