Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Student Comment: It seems the goal of one’s life is to be what you want to be but not because anyone else wants you to be that, right? For example, if you are planning on having a relationship, you should be in the relationship because you want to love someone, not because you want someone to love you. “Well,” begins Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “the state you're describing is a very rare state. There’s nearly always an unconscious agenda. That’s why we talk here about the ‘I’ of the statement, the statement we make to ourselves and to other people, and then the ‘I’ of the one who is enunciating that statement that usually has another agenda that is implicit within that statement. . . . Most people use words in order to not communicate with the other, in order to create miscommunication that will favor oneself.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.

There are three registers of consciousness that have been understood throughout the history of religion: the Atman (or Spirit), the soul, and the ego. The Atman is the purest level of consciousness, but as the entropic process of Maya takes effect, consciousness becomes diffuse and eventually more and more fragmented—as we see epitomized in the postmodern ego. “I use the analogy sometimes of a cake,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the Atman is an uncut cake, whereas the soul is a cake that’s still whole, but it’s been cut into slices, but it’s all there. And then when you get to the ego level, there’s only one slice left, and it’s your slice, and you're gonna hold on to it. . . . And then life becomes a war rather than a whole, as the cake was originally, in which we are not only able to enjoy it—we can have our cake and eat it—but because we are the cake.” This example can be compared to the Christian forms of love: agape, philia, and eros. But now the forces

Student Comment: You wrote an essay this week on love and wisdom and the need for the two to be combined. And I wanted to know if you could expand a little on this “wise-love.” “Love is your true nature,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the ego defends against love . . . [and] it doesn’t feel safe loving in a loveless world. And so it puts its own love in the dungeon and tries to forget it’s there. And lives with as thick a skin as it can produce. But the thicker the skin, the more that affects the intelligence, and our ability to think also becomes thickened and more dense and more incapable of maintaining a very active state of intellectual creativity; all those defenses wear down that capacity.” But once the repressed, unbearable elements of one’s ego have been purified, “then the kundalini, which is simply a channel of love, rises, opens the heart, opens the mind, and flows out into the universe and you become one with the universe; you realize th

Student Question: I’m meditating more now, and I’ve been using two different strategies: either trying to stop all thoughts that come up and staying in a state of intense concentration, or staying in the observer position, although I easily fall out of it. Which is a better strategy? “It’s different for each one because everyone has different karma,” begins Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, the ‘vasanas,’ the tendencies to externalize and to keep the mind busy, running away from one’s core of silent awareness, is a tendency that can be defeated by consistent return to the center. And it just has to be a habit that becomes more important, more powerful, and then the other habit will be extinguished.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.

Student Question: You mentioned today about being able to throw everything into the flame. What is the relationship between throwing the individual ego into the Flame, the Supreme Reality, and throwing into the Flame as a community as well? “Well you can’t have a community until its members throw the ego into the Flame,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual leader of the Sat Yoga Spiritual Community. The ego is always in defiance of any law—either lower or higher. And so the ego must be humbled, it must come to recognize that it does not have autonomy over the world, others—or even itself. “And this cannot be legislated, no State can enforce this—not even a religion can enforce this—it has to be done by oneself.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.

Student Question: As one grows in the many levels of love, one also comes to discover the many levels of the mind, which can be very strange, like visiting another planet or something. And though they may not be altogether unpleasant, they can still be very disconcerting because they are unfamiliar. How does one overcome that in meditation? “If you meditate long enough, you’ll realize you’re not a person at all,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “You are pure consciousness that has no limits. And that is interconnected with all that is. And it’s only in that state that you can really tolerate all of these phenomena that otherwise make you think you’ve gone mad.” This world is a school, and if you go about learning in a natural way—through your meditation practice—then you will be given only what you are ready to handle, though you will be pushed to your limits. And you can’t truly begin this type of higher education until you have fully individuated from you

Excerpt: “It’s time to learn how to be in silence,” offers Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “I don’t think it would be appropriate for this evening to just be an evening of words. The time for words, even the most beautiful words, is passing. The time for gathering knowledge, the time for trying to understand what’s going on in this world, intellectually, is passing. It’s now the time to be, to experience, from within, from the deepest place, the realization of the meaning of all of this, but not from a place of theory or belief system. We’re long past the ability of our conscious minds to grasp what’s going on.” And at the end of each lifetime, despite what we may have accomplished in terms of worldly success, we will all have to face our own conscience and face whether or not we have “fulfilled our mission, lived up to our potential, lived an authentic life. Or did we give in to the lie? Did we betray our Spirit? Did we follow the easy path? Did we listen to what our paren

Student Question: In your book you make reference to a wave of light that’s going to affect the ego, against its volition. Could you please expand on that a little bit? “Well, it’s against the volition of the ego in the sense that the ego is in resistance to God,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the more you create a part of yourself that actually chooses this, then the more that that comes in as a beautiful, blissful energy that you welcome, and it won’t be anything threatening. If you’ve ever read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, they talk about the spirit going into different bardo states. The first states are beautiful, it’s the White Light, and then it’s the lovely deities that give you flowers and wonderful foods and nectar. . . . But then if you fall to lower bardo states, then you get the wrathful deities. And they come and they cut you open and destroy the ego in a very brutal way. So it depends on what you choose: we can learn through bliss o

“So what are we doing when we meditate?” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To put it in the simplest terms, we are connecting our surface consciousness with our inmost center of our being.” And that surface consciousness, the main object of which is the ego, can handle the day-to-day tasks and demands of life very well. “But that’s not your Real Self. It’s a vehicle that we need to create. But we also need to know that it’s not us. It’s good to have a car that is four wheel drive and can take you anywhere, but you need to be able to get out of that car. Once you drive to a beautiful place, if you stay in the car and don’t get out and enjoy the scenery, then what was the purpose of the trip? So, most of you have a very well-adapted ego; it works well to deal with the world. But it doesn’t nourish you. And it’s usually running on empty because we haven’t gotten out of the car to fill it up with new fuel. So we need to get out of the car and go back into the core of our bein

Student Question: How do I reconcile the understanding of the urge for purification without the perception that I am acting from a place of fear? “I think it is appropriate to have fear of an impure ego, of an unconscious mind that, through its impurity, could lead you to great suffering. So, not fear in the usual sense, but prudence,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And if one hasn’t worked out the unconscious issues, complexes, phantasies, desires, one’s life will be driven by those—and usually you're driven off a cliff. So, before that happens, the purification is very important. . . . I would say that the first order of business for everyone is purification of the unconscious. And this used to be what education was for. It wasn’t to learn mathematics or geography . . . it was to purify the unconscious mind so you could be a free human being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.

Student Comment: The way I have always understood free will is that it is not freedom of choice but freedom from choice; freedom from having to be faced with “Should I do this? Should I do that?” Freedom from that, and just living in a way in which you're not making choices, but you’re just flowing. “You can have it at any moment,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The consciousness doesn’t want to give up the illusion of its freedom. And it thinks it can attain freedom, but it’s always a false freedom, by following one course of action vs. another. So the ego is obsessed with trying to improve its state of freedom, even in the very act of giving up its real freedom. . . . And in its ceaseless striving for freedom, it enslaves itself more and more and more deeply. And the only way to achieve real freedom is letting go of that whole project of striving to achieve it at the ego level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.

Student Comment: If, when your body passes and dies, your Higher Self and your ego, then, together, find a new host, or a new organism, or they go their separate ways and the ego finds a separate person, and the Higher Self finds something else . . . “No, it’s not like that, because the Higher Self is not a thing, is not an entity, just as God is not—this whole world is consciousness,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. To give an example, “think of your brain as a transceiver, like a radio: it’s receiving energy waves that it will translate then into thoughts, images, feelings, etc., and operate your body. But, if you're listening to a radio and you turn it on and there’s a man talking, you don’t believe there’s a man actually in that radio, do you? . . . So in the same way, the Real Self is not in the body; it’s not localizable.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.

Student Question: How does the mind create the body? “To really understand this requires a very high level of understanding of the nature of reality,” begins Shunyamurti, the research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There is a higher level of reality in which the whole complex of belief systems—of materialism itself—is recognized as an artifact of consciousness. You may believe you're living in an external, physical world, but that belief is happening within your consciousness. This is ‘the matrix.’ And, it’s only when you can recognize that—that the entire world is consciousness, including what you call the body—that there is a conscious power, then, to shift the image of that body, or the code, the digital code, which can shift the analog code.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.

Student Question: Could you talk a little bit about object constancy? “It’s a developmental stage that is talked about in the field of psychology in which, as an infant, when the mother leaves the room, the infant doesn’t lose the sense of her existence and her connection,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So this pattern of not having an internalized object of an unconditionally loving other, which is then usually externalized as a God figure, if there isn’t that constancy, it’s kind of a supplement—which is why religion has always been of psychological importance for stabilizing the ego consciousness. But if that isn’t in there, then one will be liable to states of insecurity and anxiety and fear—phobias—that can also be created out of this. . . . And meditation is one of the best ways to cure it, because if you'll keep the mind silent, and free of mental objects, of any kind, then what becomes constant is the Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14

“Despite the fact that the lights can get very bright sometimes, and the darkness can get very dark in one’s life, reality is not black or white, and that’s one of the difficulties that people have in handling reality, they want things to be clear: this or that. And it’s not that way,” maintains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. One striking example is the belief in God. On the one hand, someone who has an imaginarized belief in God as a person or entity is unlikely to drop that belief of God as Divine Object (or Subject) in favor of the realization of Emptiness. On the other hand, you have people in a very dense egoic consciousness who can’t believe in a spiritual reality of being, or a higher dimensional intelligence, or anything of the sort, at all—let alone God. “And I’ve worked with many people over the years who can’t, although they say they don’t, they actually can’t. And when you analyze more deeply what the issue is, you find out that not only can’t the person believe

Student Question: Could you please expand more on the concept of vampirism? “I think the vampire is the dominant archetype today,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s because the ego, in its most negative form, becomes a vampire: it sucks the life energy out of others, but it has nothing to give. And so, life has become vampiric: whole societies are vampiric on other societies. . . . And this same process is true at every level, including the most intimate relationships, which is why they don’t last very long, you know: you suck whatever blood you can get, and the other one doesn’t have any more—you leave and find your next victim. And so relationships have become that kind of pattern. . . . And just as we have an oil shortage, we now have a blood shortage, a love shortage, so that the vampires are dying. And you know the myth of the golden spike, and they hide from the Christ symbol. They die in the face of God-consciousness. So the more that people awaken an

Student Comment: So there are some very fragile egos today. Isn’t so logical to realize, “OK, I’m so fragile. The only way out of this is to connect with the Almighty,” because you're so lost anyway, there’s nothing else that’s gonna hold you up but that. “Well a) they’re afraid to admit consciously that they need an Almighty, [and] b) they don’t believe there is an Almighty there,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it’s not easy for object constancy to develop in the ego today; even God as an object, as an other that you want to connect to, requires a capacity to maintain a persistence of intention. But there’s too much chaos in the mind. And so there’s a momentary desire for that, and then the other chaotic fragments take over and you're back to your next drug. . . . So, it’s a really nasty brew that makes it almost impossible to get out of—except through reaching bottom, that will sometimes help. But these days people take the death drive in such a

“We could say that the ego is a veneereal disease,” diagnoses Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “because it’s a veneer over this vast soul consciousness which, in turn, sits upon an even vaster transfinite Atman consciousness. But this little veneer, that is in a state of dis-ease, prevents us from realizing this infinitude of our being. . . . So another metaphor for our condition in egoic consciousness would be a kind of veterinary disease. . . . Think of an elephant, elephants often in India represent the Atman. . . . So, you're an elephant, but there’s a flea in your ear. And this flea is a talking flea, and it’s talking to itself about its problems. And fleas have a lot of problems. They’re always fleeing and biting, and they're always worried that they're gonna get crushed, and they have an inferiority complex and they try to compensate for it, etc. But, anyway, the flea is talking in the ear of the elephant, and the elephant mistakenly believes that it’s its own thoughts