Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt: ”… That’s the poison that we have is our addiction to the imitation self, and to its passions for trying to find a reality through clinging to some other, that also has become an imitation – and to detoxify means to find what is real and to let go of the artificial. It’s really that simple. Because the artificial will kill us; in fact the first artificial ingredient was our identification with the mortal body and thus we took in death, and the fear of death. But also we took in the loneliness that comes with being a body in a world of bodies, because bodies do not love, and bodies are only defence mechanisms to deal with survival. But to live at that level where we’re living to survive, to assure our security, that means that we never live, we’re never fully alive in joy, because we are always governed by these worries, these protective mechanisms…” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, May 31, 2015.

Excerpt: “Where does the story originate? And what is it that we must face? Is it not the face of God? And is not the face of God the very absence of God that requires us to fill in that absence with a story. But to restore ourselves to the Real requires us to be able to endure the face of God, who is the destroyer of the story, and to endure in that everlasting Emptiness, out of which the Real emerges as royalty – real and royal are the same word. And it is when we have burned away the stories, all the stories . . . what is left is the Real.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, May 28, 2015. 

Excerpt: “A Sat Yogi is one who renounces vanity. Religious, spiritual teachers have been pointing at vanity as the cause of our suffering for thousands of years. And one could see that as the core of the frame of reference of the ego – that because the ‘I-thought’ is based on nothing real, that that lack must be compensated for by vanity. And the vanity inherently includes an inverse level of vanity, and this produces the affects of pride and shame, and there becomes an obsession with those aspects of body, of mind, of behavior that one is proud of and others that one is ashamed of. And the life of the ego becomes an oscillation between one and the other, and a determination usually from moving from shame into something one can have pride about. And the more that one tries to move away from shame the more deeply one realizes that the vanity is embedded in the mind process of the ego itself.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, May 21, 2015.

Excerpt: “Every religion posits a trinity . . . [and] what it always comes down to is presence, intelligence, and love. In the Christian tradition, presence is the Father, intelligence the Son, and love, the Holy Spirit. The same trinity can be referred to as Sat Chit Ananda in which the blissful aspect of love is emphasized – but it is the same trinity. Or Satyam Shivam Sundaram, in which the beautiful aspect of love is emphasized. But love and the symbolization of love is what changes; the other two remain constant. Because love is that aspect of this ultimate reality that is vulnerable to the fourth member of the Godhead that remains invisible except as a glitch in all of these systems; because the Godhead is not a triad, but a quaternity. And the fourth member of the Godhead, that has been banished into the outer darkness returns in the form of. . . .” Recorded in the morning of Friday, May 22, 2015.

Excerpt: “Meditation is the discovery of the Real Self. In the process of discovering the Real Self, one also uncovers the fact that the ego is a false self; it is made up of conditionings that have been imported into consciousness from others . . . and accepted without due consideration for whether these are views that one truly holds oneself or were simply indoctrinated into one’s conditioning in order to comply with environmental demands . . . . Meditation is a kind of internal vision quest; there is no need to go out into the desert or the jungle or sit in a cave, but to move your attention into the cave of pure awareness in which you observe your own consciousness to discover ‘what is really there inside, what is really in my heart, what is really the source and foundation of my being?’” Recorded in the morning of Sunday, April 19, 2015.

Excerpt: “The victory of God means the defeat of the ego, the defeat of all egocentric narratives. God does not become victorious through some effort. God is always already victorious, but that victory is only recognized when the ego’s helplessness and the futility of establishing the reality of any ego, is recognized; it is at the fall of the ego that the victory of God is realized. It is this paradox that is most difficult to integrate. So long as the ego . . . remains the frame of reference of thought, then the reality of God will not be recognized or surrendered to, but God will remain as a bit player in one’s scenario. It is when all the machinations of the ego fail, when all of its knowledge proves inadequate, that we turn to God as a last resort, and recognize that the ego cannot do it.” Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, May 6, 2015.

Excerpt: “Presence is. Nothing more accurate can be said in language because language cannot approach Presence; language is the retreat from Presence into identification, into subtle subject-object duality in which the signifier itself is both subject and object. Sat Yoga could be said to be a return to Presence because Presence is primary. . . . Presence is the Supreme Real. Presence has no present, because it is timeless. It cannot be described because Presence is not an object or a thing – not even a subject. Presence is prior to subject-object duality.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, April 27, 2015.

Excerpt: “The mind is the cause of all suffering. When that becomes clear, then along with that the resolution of the problem of suffering becomes clear as well: that only a radical transcendence of the mind, the discovery, the realization of the transcendent Self will solve the problem. But the sages say that only when the realization of the urgency, of the need to transcend the mind, is at least equivalent to that of the urgency of a man whose hair is on fire to find a pool of water to dive into, should you begin a path like this. . . I tend to use the acronym now of “LA DI DA,” which is Lack, Anorexia, Deflation, Inflation, Dread, Avoidance. And in that dialectical oscillation one tends to go on with the ego as if nothing [were] wrong: “La Di Da” – and yet underneath that is the unbearable suffering that alternates with momentary jouissance or security-op[eration] that keeps one from having to feel the urgency, and thus the frog boils away in the water and never jumps out.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesd

Beginning with a deep relaxation, this guided meditation with Shunyamurti is designed to help you enter into a deep meditative state. Recorded during the Meditation Weekend on Friday, March 13, 2015.

Excerpt: ”The central existential problem for most beings is a lack of moral strength. And this plagues people at different levels; one is the lack of the strength to stop pretending one believes in one’s ego identity and all of its self-sabotaging sanskaras. And so the lack of moral strength to face the truth of one’s imposture as an ego is usually because one cannot face the anxiety of admitting one doesn't know who one is, and what life is about, or any of the pretenses that the ego assumes and suffers from. And then the lack of moral strength at that second level of anxiety at one’s cluelessness as to one’s being is the lack of strength to sit in the unknowing, the ‘cloud of unknowing’ if you will, until the Mystery reveals itself, as the Self.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, April 9, 2015.

Excerpt: “Meditation . . . is the silencing of the mind, with its attention one-pointedly focused on God; God as the selfless Self, the immutable center and heart of consciousness. Through that silent focus, which is a docking maneuver, the individual consciousness docks and unites with the supreme source of power . . . . In this unification of the individual consciousness and the supreme infinite consciousness, power is transmitted and the battery of the individual is charged.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, March 19, 2015.

Excerpt: ”Every soul carries so much pain from so many other lives, so much karma. The soul itself is ripped and torn and unable to function, let alone the ego split into a thousand shards of egoic fragments with no willpower; a total inner chaos of instability – that there is no way out except the death of the ego. And it’s when that is recognized that there is nothing else on one’s agenda but that, that liberation is achieved. But as long as there are any options of doing anything else, one will choose those options because this is the most difficult, the most radical, and it’s only an extreme amount of pain that would provoke someone to take a path like this. And so therefore consider your pain a blessing: without it you would not find God.” Recorded on the morning of Friday, March 27, 2015.

Excerpt: “The trick is this . . . there’s only one obstacle to achieving Self-Realization instantaneously in meditation, and that is the lack of self-acceptance – simply that. If you would accept yourself as you really are, you would achieve enlightenment and liberation. But the ego mind, which is a kind of veil over the real Self, is in a state of non-acceptance, and that non-acceptance can be on a spectrum going all the way to intense self-hatred up to a point of simply dissatisfaction with what one has achieved in life. But for most people the thermostat rests around . . . a point of lack of forgiveness of oneself for some belief that one has betrayed oneself and one’s integrity along the way – and that therefore one is not worthy of God-consciousness; that’s the issue. . .”  Recorded on the opening evening of a meditation weekend on Friday, March 13, 2015.

Excerpt: “A Sat Yogi is one who is practicing to endure the infinite intensity of the Real – who is no longer running away from the Real. But can anyone bear the intensity of the Absolute? Even to understand the meaning of this statement one must listen with the third ear open – an ear that we usually leave closed as an act of running away from an unbearable recognition of what is really being said within the words that are spoken. And even if the third ear is open, it is usually not connected fully to the Heart, because then the unbearable intensity of the Real would enter the Heart and shatter the ego.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, March 1, 2015.

Excerpt: ”. . . To be perceived means to be perceived in a consciousness; and therefore what is fundamental is consciousness. But if to be is to be perceived in consciousness rather than to be the consciousness which perceives, something is inside out and upside down isn't it? So the extraordinary thing is that idealism, as it is understood in the West, is precisely materialism. Because isn't materialism the belief that what is real is that which is perceived? That’s all matter is, is that which is perceivable. And why consciousness cannot be studied scientifically, they say, because it is not perceivable – it is only that which perceives.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, February 26, 2015.

Excerpt: ”Sri Ramana says that happiness is inherent to the human being. Inherent to the human being that has realized its True Self. But the human being, unlike other creatures, is capable of living in a false self. And that false self entails unhappiness, vexation, suffering, anguish. And the mystery of human existence is why so many human beings choose the false self of suffering over the happiness of our natural Being. And this strange conundrum of human self-chosen misery and self-defeat and refusal to accept love can only be understood once consciousness has realized our true nature.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, February 10, 2015. 

Excerpt: “The core myth that unites all the people of India is expressed in a rite that is referred to as the Kumbha Mela. And a Kumbha Mela, which minor versions happen every twelve years and more major ones every fifty and then there are the really big ones every five hundred years, but they are all representations of the one Kumbha Mela that they recognize happens at the end of time, at the end of the cycle, which is also the beginning of the cycle; the omega point is the alpha point because there is no end or beginning to the universe, or to time. And the big bang that is projected onto the physical dimension is actually an occurrence within consciousness.” Recorded during the Shiva Singularity and the Mystic Rose retreat, on the morning of Sunday, February 15, 2015.

Excerpt: “The human essence is that of a reader – because to read accurately is to set yourself free. All we do, constantly, in every moment, is to read; but do we understand what it means to read? We do not just read books, we read one another’s faces, we read the energy field, we read the auras, we read our dreams. We are constantly reading, and reading is tracking. . . . But what are we on the track of and what kind of fortune are we seeking? But the universe itself is a book if we learn how to read it.” Recorded in the morning of Saturday, February 7, 2015.

Excerpt: “Sat Yogis are those who make offerings to God. Religious people merely ask favors of God; they want something from God, whether it’s wealth or happiness or guidance – but it’s a taking. But what God wants to know is: what are you offering? The more that you offer to God, the more you shall receive – without asking. If you offer your heart to God, you will receive the power of transforming love; you will receive the power of bliss. If you give your mind to God, you will receive supreme knowledge…” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, February 1, 2015.

Excerpt: “In South India the temples are shaped like pyramids with many levels leading up to the top. And although a simplistic view – because there are many more levels than could be inscribed in a physical building – it is accurate that at the higher and higher levels that one rises to, the fewer apparent others can understand one until one reaches that level of consciousness that no one can enter.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, January 20, 2015.