Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

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

Student Comment: You spoke earlier of dissatisfaction, which reminded me of something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I listened to a talk with a prominent spiritual figure, and he spoke about heaven and hell. He said that heaven is like being doomed to eternal famility, or familiarity. He went on to say that there’s no need to create in the absence of discontent, and that heaven is an upgrade of the illusion and hell is a downgrade. I’m just curious of what you have to say about that. “God did not create out of discontent; this world doesn’t exist because of discontent,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But once egos are put into the world, the egos have discontent because an ego is not real and therefore it feels lacking inside. And that discontent causes it to do something, or find someone, to make it feel whole and real. But nothing it does can take away that discontent.” And, in actuality, heaven is not really the goal of any religion. “What the religions

Meditation is paradoxical. All meditations is, is an attempt to stop trying to do anything. “How can you create a technique for not trying to do anything?” asks Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “If you do, then the very technique defeats the effort of not making any effort.” This is akin to the problem of self-reference which “has become a very big business, actually, since Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel. . . . Basically it comes down to the ‘liar’s paradox,’ you know, the guy from Crete who says ‘I’m lying.’ Is he telling the truth when he’s saying he’s lying? Well, if he’s telling the truth, he isn’t lying.” And, at the same time, if he’s lying then he’s telling the truth. “Anyway, you can go around and round forever in this, and this is basically all the ego is: it’s basically a voice in your head attacking you, and then you defend yourself against that voice. It’s two voices of self-reference, but they’re both delusional.” “And the problem is that the ego does

Student Question: Based on the studies and the scientific books that we’re been reading lately, such as Signs of Meaning in the Universe by Jesper Hoffmeyer, what would you say the relationship is between biology and quantum physics? “Well, they’re two different aspects. They deal at different levels of scale with the same phenomenon,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the scientific and spiritual research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. You start with a photon, which has absolute freedom, but then once you move “into the realm of molecules and of organisms, then the amount of freedom is less.” However, following Arthur Young’s “reflexive arc,” freedom is regained in man. “But then even the mind becomes determined, as the ego does, and there has to be a consciousness beyond the ego that can observe and use the ego as a basis to transcend.” So we must now make a quantum—or evolutionary—leap “to go beyond biology. We went from physics to . . . chemistry . . . and then to biology, and now we have to move

Student Question: I would like to hear more about what is meant by the divine birth in the heart. The divine birth is an archetype. One can remember the story of the birth of Christ, the Immaculate Conception, or the birth of the Buddha from his mother’s side, symbolic of the birth into divine love at the heart chakra. “It is our birthright to experience the divine birth,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “but most of us turn down the opportunity for that because we’re so attached to the ego. It’s as if the larva, the caterpillar, refuses to become the butterfly because it’s still too attached to munching those leaves and growing fat and crawling on the earth, and it doesn’t know the joy of flying as the butterfly. . . . But the divine birth, once it happens, once we are willing to dissolve the ego shell so that the birth can happen, is, initially, a birth of love, a birth of openness to the world again, a birth of wonderment, of aliveness.” It is a birth t

Student Question: I’ve been reading that technology—if used the right way—would enable a world in which money is not necessary, and that there would be no war because money would not exist. So I was wondering if that would be like Sat Yuga. “Yes, of course. And, yes, money is a fiction that is used as a mechanism of control,” adds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the money system is collapsing as well because the money system requires trust. . . . And it only lasts, as any Ponzi scheme does, as long as people have confidence. And now that that’s been lost, the game is collapsing. . . . And that’s when real wealth, again, will be able to emerge into consciousness because money is fictional wealth; it’s a representation of wealth. . . . But there will be no need for money when there is true love again among human beings. And love for the earth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.