The Torn Page

Student Comment: What you said just a minute ago brought up something that I was reading last night about someone saying that what we do here is joy, and we’re without seriousness. And I used to think that this seriousness and lack of joy came from money, but now I’m starting to feel that it comes from something much deeper that can be, as we’ve said before, deadly serious.

Shunyamurti, spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, reminds us that we must learn not to be serious about petty things, and only be serious when it comes to serious matters. “But those serious matters are the matters of bliss, and joy, and love, and beauty.” But in Western industrial society we’ve placed all value on money rather than the things that really matter such as nature and the environment. And “money is a total fiction, but in this capitalist system, it is the only thing that’s real. Nothing else is real. . . . And they’re having anxiety about something that is completely fictional, while not thinking at all about the fact that the entire real world of nature is collapsing because we’re not paying attention to it. It’s an astounding situation that can only be called psychosis at a species level.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.

Student Question: What are angels a manifestation of?

We are all angels, as Shunyamurti, the spiritual leader of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, tells us. And, as we align ourselves more and more with the Divine Will of God, we may be called on to assist others. Whether we aid someone in a physical body, from a higher dimension with a subtle body, or even in a dream is uncertain, but as we recognize ourselves as the Light of God, we will be called upon to help break the chains of others confusion and help them, too, realize their true nature as Light.

What’s more, if we do not “purify the subtle form,” then it will “remain as a wandering spirit, an earth-bound spirit” or the typical “ghosts” that are well known in paranormal investigations. So one must truly practice the art of detachment from the physical plane—and attachment instead to God—so that one may transcend to the angelic and archangelic realms and finally to the realm of God. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 20, 2009.

“Sat Yoga is the process of becoming fully aware of . . . [your] radiance. And then merging into that radiance and realizing the unlimited scope of that radiance,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Sat Yoga meditation is a triple act: an unrestricted act of understanding, an unconditional act of love, and an undefinible act of Being.

The understanding includes “understanding all of reality, including the Self, unrestricted by beliefs, thoughts, language, or images.” The love is a love without limits and barriers; a love that is not attached to an object or signifier. This act of Being is a giving up of the action of Becoming; it is an “absolute commitment to truthfulness and to presence and to open-heartedness that is our liberation.”

“And so, Sat Yoga is a kind of meditation that one will open to only after one is done with all the games and is ready for Truth in the most naked form possible, which is formless. And when one is no longer content with justifying or rationalizing one’s being, and when one is not afraid to face the emptiness and the nothingness behind all the masks, and once we are able to face the inner truth of our True Nature—fearlessly, openly, without distraction—we are liberated.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday October 13, 2009.

Student Question: Usually when I meditate I just let it be what is, but this time I intentionally tried to silence the words, and I spent the whole time working very persistently to make that happen, but the chatter persisted. So what is the technique when you're confronted with all this chatter?

“The purpose of Sat Yoga is union with Sat . . . the Supreme Being,” explains Shunyamurti, the director and founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And this Supreme Being, whether understood personally or impersonally, “is constituted by an infinite intelligence and infinite love. And because of this infinite intelligence in the service of infinite love, our universe exists.” And only the power of love “will free us from the curse of our egoic narcissism—the egocentricity that takes itself to be a god . . .”

So the process of Sat Yoga is an “uncovering that which the ego itself does not want your consciousness to know. . . . And therefore the early stages of the struggle to achieve Self-liberation take the form of a battle with a part of the self that wants to stay in denial, it wants to stay in hatred, it wants to stay in anger, it wants to stay even in despair and meaninglessness rather than to uncover the truth of its being.” But one must persevere and refuse to identify with the ego if one wishes to progress upon the spiritual path, ultimately, to Self-realization.

But the perseverance must also contain a will to learn because phenomenal reality has become so complex, a yogi today must have a wide array of knowledge including quantum physics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, biosemiotics, and communication and information theory. “All of these are essential today to a yogi to understand because they give us a cognitive grasp of the structure and the dynamics of the functioning of this phenomenal plane we call Maya.” And because the human ego has become so complex today, a yogi must become a psychoanalyst. “We must have a grasp of how the unconscious mind works so we can discern that mind in action in others as well as in ourselves and read between the lines and grasp what is an accurate response in every situation.”

And as we grasp that understanding our karma will become more correct and we can redirect the flow of our energy from the lower chakras of unconsciousness, lust, and hatred to that of love, wisdom, and Truth. “And with that wisdom, if we dedicate ourselves to transformation and to union with God so that we are servants of the highest power and love, our lives will truly be fulfilling.” Recorded on the afternoon of October 6, 2009.

Student Question: We need to dissolve our ego to get in touch with our True Self. Is it bad under different circumstances to play roles in order to achieve objectives? For example, if we work in a company or we own a business or we’re doctors or lawyers and we need to act in a certain way to achieve an objective. Is that bad?

“No. As long as you know that it is a role, then you can play the role accurately.” As Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains: “we talk about dissolving the ego or killing the ego. It’s not the ego as a whole that must be killed. It is the censor. . . . There is an intelligence that resides below the threshold of consciousness that is controlling what you are conscious of. And your conscious mind is enslaved to that—that is what must be killed, so your conscious mind is liberated to realize who you truly are.” The censor is a part of the unconscious mind, “And when I say unconscious, I mean that it is conscious, but you are not conscious of it.” This censor operates on the level of phantasy, and tries to protect the conscious mind of traumas that it does not think that the conscious mind can handle. But it also censors information from the Super-conscious mind, “And it causes our actions to be inaccurate because it leaks out and it stains our perceptions of the world. And so this is what must be purified and transformed.”

“And so once all the denial and the falsehood have been killed off in the ego, then the ego realizes that all along it was an expression of the very God that it denied. So that creates a state of self-mastery or self-sovereignty rather than the self-enslavement that the ego is now in to the unconscious censor. . . . You’re achieving liberation from that state [of self-enslavement] so that your Real Self can now fully emerge with all of its potentialities.” And with that liberation, you can truly play your part in the world. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 6, 2009.

Student Question: What is the spiritual significance of déjà vu?

“Because all of this has happened before an infinite number of times because time itself is an illusion,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So déjà vu means that you have seen it all before right? You’ve seen that moment. It’s an experience that “I’ve lived this moment before. I heard that very thing. I said that very thing. Well, yes, this moment is actually an echo in the cycle of eternity.” But, as Shunyamurti explains, this is a very in depth understanding of the universe that can only be understood through meditation and disidentification from linear time. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday October 6, 2009.

Student Question: Why does consciousness congeal into form?

“Because there are many nuances of possibility that cannot be expressed in any other way. And so all the exquisite permutations of possibility require forms in which to be expressed . . . And so if we do not give form to these expressions, then we cannot mount up to higher and higher levels of consciousness. We cannot learn from the form to enter again the formless at the next octave of realization. . . . And so at each cycle, each experience of growth—through failure through death, through a fall, through trauma—that gets expressed in form, enables us to touch into the heart of Being and be renewed and reborn at a higher level of form—more perfect, more beautiful, more expressive of the Ultimate Real—that is God. And so this is the way that human beings attain that perfection; through form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 1, 2009.

“Each of us is like a mirror that’s looking for itself in the mirror. This is the paradox. The mirror itself can never find itself as an object in the mirror,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And all of the exoteric, or popular paths, start out with the basic misunderstanding that you are a person who needs to be saved, rather than simply consciousness itself. But, somehow, “consciousness becomes congealed, reified, around certain objects in the mirror that it likes very much. And then it becomes, through that process of identification, trapped in the mirror of its own projections. And so the act of meditation is to come out of the illusion that we’re in the mirror and to realize that we are the mirror.” And through this realization we can transcend the subject-object dualities and realize the silence, the emptiness, the pure awareness that we are. “But the emptiness is not an emptiness that is other than fullness; the emptiness itself is the all. It is the point of the meeting of nothing and everything.” And it is at this point that one realizes that everything is simply light and awareness, and when one combines these two, “then what had been limited in time and space is realized as eternal and infinite. This is the liberation” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 1, 2009.

“So if we psychoanalyze not the conscious mind and not the unconscious phantasies but the censor itself, we’ll find that there are two complexes that exist side by side in the censor and they’re completely contradictory. One is that of solipsism: the ego doesn’t believe that there really is anyone else, or at least that all the rest are robots, or they don’t matter. . . . And then at the other side of it is the belief in the big Other to which the ego grovels and submits, and it cannot oppose.” This, as Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, explains, is actually the opposite of the enlightened state in which one recognizes that there are many other sentient others, but there is no big Other “because there is God, and God is one without a second. .  . . And so when the enlightened being sees human others, he or she sees only the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 24, 2009.