The Torn Page

Student Comment: When you mention magic and the development of souls towards spirituality, what came to mind was the magic of dreams, which gives you messages. And I understand that the message in a dream, coming from the Atman, its goal is to help you on your way. But I do have a problem with the interpretation of the dream because it’s the ego or the conscious mind that’s trying to interpret it.

Dream interpretation has always been an important pillar in spirituality, from the ancient practice of Swapna Yoga, to figures in the Abrahamic religions such as Joseph, who interpreted the dreams of the pharaoh. “But it has been lost in the modern age—or it has been re-found with the agendas of psychoanalysis, etc, that have not fully opened to the spiritual dimension, which is the source of the dream.” So now we have many different types of dream analysis, including Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian, etc, which will all give different and often accurate interpretations, but these methods cannot take the dream to its inner-most meaning. So it is imperative that we have a trusted spiritual guide with whom we can deeply explore both the unconscious mind and the spiritual message of the Atman. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 10, 2009.

Since the advent of quantum physics the idea of matter has disappeared as a possible hypothesis for what the universe is made of. But Shunyamurti, the spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, poses the following question: “Since there is no matter and no space and no time in any true sense, what do we mean by a universe?” But as he explains, “We tend then to fall back on the idea, ‘Well, then it’s consciousness, the whole world is consciousness.’ And it’s true that we talk a lot about consciousness in here, but I have to admit to you tonight that consciousness is also a myth.” This teaching has long been known in every true spiritual tradition. In Christian tradition, Meister Eckhart once admitted, “If you would have the Kernel, you must break the husk,” referring to the esoteric understanding that in order to achieve union with God, one must break through all conceptualizations and preconceived notions that one has about God.

“And the argument usually between two sides of the philosophic coin have been the materialists and the idealists. . . . Well what if both are wrong? Which is what Advaita, Buddhism have been saying all along. . . . So it’s important that we understand that when we are having Sat Yoga what we simply mean is we’re letting go of every mythological construct that we have been pinning an identity to. . . . But these constructs do not exist within any Ultimate Reality, and so you have to keep them going with a great deal of effort. And if you stop, keeping them going, they dissolve. . . . And no terms can describe it then. The Absolute is both nothing and everything but there is nothing and—there is not even a nothing. Even nothing has to be nothinged. And so there, nothing and everything are not opposites. There’s no logical way to grasp any of this. And it’s by the act of surrendering that effort to understand this with logic that the intuitive knowing of it suddenly blasts forth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 5, 2009.

“The spiritual process, traditionally, both East and West, has been referred to as alchemy,” Shunyamurti, spiritual teacher of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reveals. “Alchemy is a metaphor referring to the refinement of the psychic substance itself. . . . During the process of meditation, that is exactly what we are doing: We are extracting pure consciousness out of consciousness that has been bound up in words, in images—particularly in self-images—in fantasies, in oscillations between past and future that never allow you to be present, in anxieties, depressive ideas; all of those kind of psychic enmeshments that create suffering. . . . And so meditation is the essential act of alchemical Self-Liberation.”

And what exactly are we when we are freed from the boundaries of language and self-images? Pure awareness that is luminous. “And actually for the first time we will realize that the awareness itself is love.” Along with the freedom from thoughts we can truly love for the first time “because those false ideas, by the very fact that they have separated us from our true being, causes us to hate ourselves for having trapped ourselves, and hate the other for having projected on us that we’re something that we’re not. And we’re disappointed in ourselves. . . . And when we have let go of all of them, we realize that all we have ever been is this unlimited being—that is in fact the totality of all that is real.”

“And when you’ve tasted the eternity you can come back into this apparent world of time where everybody is chaotic and stressed out because there’s no present, and you can help them deal with it and awaken them to the fact that, ‘Wait, that’s a dream you’re in, a nightmare in fact. Be free.’” So “come out of the trance of time and space and ego and matter, and awaken to the fact that all of this is God. All of this is light. All of this is Eternal Consciousness—Supreme Intelligence playing a game with itself in many forms; infinite forms, each form reflecting one aspect of the infinite beauty, and love, and creativity of the Cosmic Intelligence.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 03, 2009.

Student Question: You’ve described that we live in a dream within a dream within a dream. Could you elaborate on the dream that’s within a dream within a dream, the stages, the Shakti?

“Well first you have the Cosmic Intelligence that dreams up the whole universe,” as Shunyamurti, spiritual guru of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, explains. “And then at the level of our planet. . . .You have the collective dream, which we often refer to as a paradigm.” And through time the paradigm degrades—as it has now to a materialistic, egotistic mindset—and affects everyone in the dream-field. “But then within that collective dream is the third dream of the individual. And each individual creates their own dream out of the material of both the collective dream and the Supreme, Cosmic Dream.” But despite the suffering and insanity of the planetary dream, some souls, because of their karmic trajectory, can maintain their connection to God and return spirituality to the entire planet. “And so periodically, when human consciousness has fallen to a very low level, individuals and communities arise within that to give birth to a new consciousness and a new world.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 3, 2009.

“So there’s a reason why people are hesitant to meditate, and that they’re not interested in meditation. And that’s because,” as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us, “meditation is too much like death.” And death means many things to the ego: detachment, stillness, silence, emptiness, nothingness. And, even worse, “you say to the dead, ‘Rest in peace.’” And the one thing that the ego does not want is peace because it gets its kicks from the vicissitudes of pleasure and pain; the cheap thrills of the egoic notion of “happiness.” To rest in peace is to be free from the most powerful desires and wants.

And, eventually, “we recognize that the desire is a defense against the fear—and it always leads back to the fear, or a vexation, or some kind of suffering—and is never what we really wanted, because what we really wanted was to find the place that is at peace. . . . And what we find then is that meditation is not what the ego thinks, it’s not boring, it’s not a lack of involvement, but it is actually a transcendence that enables us then to return to the world, reborn; the death is not the end.”

And through this death and rebirth we enter back into the world in a state of love, with a willingness to give and help others without any hidden agendas or ulterior motives because “often at the ego level, desire masquerades as love.” But liberation allows one to be free of the desire to be appreciated, to be needed—or any of the various ways that the ego tries to express love—and allows one to show true compassion and love in every act. Recorded the evening of Thursday, October 29, 2009.

“Love without wisdom is inadequate,” as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” But, “Equally, wisdom without love is absolutely futile, and we know so many philosophers who have a great . . . capacity to think, but they can’t love their way out of a paper bag. And thinking alone won’t get you out of the box of the ego; the two must be integrated.” Likewise, there are also two manifestations of love in action. Karma yoga is the essence of love in action, “to act without greed, possessiveness, the desire for some ulterior agenda to be fulfilled by the ego, then that will be able to unravel the ego’s knots and unwillingness to love. The second one is community because it’s not just a matter of ‘What do I do,’ but the real test is can I help form a communion of love with other human beings—cause that’s the ultimate test isn’t it? Can we live together in love?”

Without love, as modern society has proven, things fall apart. But we need wisdom to “recognize that the source of what is unloving in ourselves is the ego. So the first step of wisdom is the realization that ‘I must disidentify from the ego.’ . . . And because we have come to live in a world of representations, of symbols and language—rather than in the feeling and in the essence of our innermost being—we have lost touch with that, and we have deceived ourselves into thinking, ‘Oh I can just talk the game, I don’t have to really walk it.’ So with the wisdom to form the talk, and the love to “Walk the talk,” we can live in harmony with ourselves and with those around us. Recorded the afternoon of Tuesday, October 27, 2009.

As Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us, there are three basic spiritual paths that lie ahead of us: the slow path, the intermediate path, and the fast path. The slow path consists of slowing reproving our ego and making sure that it stays in check. There is the intermediate path where we ask God to get rid of our ego, and there is the fast path    which consists of realizing that you already are That: “I am not the ego. I am not the body. I am not the mind. But I am the Presence, the pure awareness that is an emanation of the Mind of God.”

You are simply the Presence that is witnessing this collective dream take place, and the minute that you get off the throne, you become rooted in linguistic duality from which all suffering takes place. You go down in the mud with the ego. “Clean yourself off of all those muddy ideas. Sit on the throne. Rule in the purity of Divine Presence and the ego will come into order. You don’t have to fight with it.”

“So that’s what we’re doing in meditation: sitting on that throne, which is why it’s called ‘Swaraj,’ the kingdom of the Self.” So sit “in that throne of realization of what it feels like to have gone beyond desire and beyond fear. Beyond any need. Beyond any localization within the world because in that state there’s a realization that the entire world, the entire objectification of consciousness, is within; not without.”  Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 22, 2009.

Student Question: What level of consciousness, or what door did Huxley open?

“Well I won’t judge Aldous Huxley and how many doors he opened, let’s say, but certainly there was a heightened realization,” argues Shunyamurti, the spiritual leader of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “that we’re in a throbbing, luminous, living reality; that what we think of as dead matter is not dead at all. It’s alive in a divine way.”

But, in our materialistic paradigm, and “by de-enchanting the world, by refusing to see it, we have caused that magical dimension of reality to withdraw because the world responds to us: if we treat it as dead, it’ll treat us as dead. . . . And so it’s a rejection of God to choose to have a materialist philosophy. And the whole world has been indoctrinated today into that belief.” Recorded on Tuesday, October 20, 2009.

“We are light,” as Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us. We are not, however, light that comes out of light bulbs or light from the sun; we are Divine Light. Just as there are different dimensions, there are also different levels of light. “But within a human being, if you can penetrate through the shell of the ego, you will find not only the photonic light . . . but you will find the angelic light. And then within that, the Supreme Light. And once that Supreme Light is touched, and its radiance is allowed to move into this phenomenal plane, then everything is different. Everything is seen from the Light of God as the emanation of God.”

“In order for that light to emerge, we must remove the outer covering. And the outer covering is made of language. The language covers over and obscures the silence in which the light is contained and emerges. The silence is the medium of the light. When we cultivate the inner silence then we create a space in which the light can shine.” And that light dissolves all questions and desires into the Supreme Self. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.

Student Question: What is the difference between Pantheism and Panentheism?

“Pantheism is the view that sees God or gods in all things,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The Druids worshiped the gods in the trees, the dryads, or the wood nymphs. . . . Or you could see the one God—in and as nature. But Panentheism is a realization that God is actually transcendent of the natural world, but that the natural world is within the Mind of God.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.