Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt:  “There is really no point speaking about the Absolute… we can talk a lot about the ego and the unconscious and it’s structure and dynamics, but when it comes to the Absolute concepts are futile… one always ends up with paradox, inconsistency, contradiction, inadequacy and usually it leads to a distorted understanding on the part of those who are listening… and so many of the great teachers have simply sat in silence without saying anything, or they have taught in parables using metaphors and archetypal images… but nothing can be said about the absolute because the absolute is not a thing – not an object… but even to say that is incorrect…  in the Vedas it is called Nirguna Brahman… the Absolute that is beyond even the question of whether personal or impersonal and has no qualities, no gunas, no attributes… but the egoic mind cannot grasp that which has no attributes… and in fact the Absolute cannot be grasped because there is no one to grasp it… what really has to be realized is that the ego mind th

Excerpt: “The ego is a psychic sack filled with mind parasites. It has only a negative value. It’s a place in consciousness based on the falseness of an illusionary identity that gives a space for negative entities to hold on to and suck your life energy away. These mind parasites will destroy your life if they are not eliminated. The only way to eliminate these negative entities, that will drive you to insanity, destroy your health, and destroy your destiny, is through the surrender of the mind to God for the purification of the consciousness and the elimination of the ego. That is why this sacred act of meditation is so important. It is literally a matter of life or death, and not just this life but all of your future lives that depend on the sanskaras that are created now at the end of Kali Yuga. So we need to take meditation with the utmost seriousness. It is our one opportunity to link with God and feel the current of divine energy, and allow that current to come in with such power that it annihilates th

Excerpt: “Our natural state is pure awareness and absolute purity of mind and heart, and thus a state of love-filled joy. But we are only in that state if we are in the Real Self. And the problem for human consciousness is that a false self has intervened to disconnect our consciousness from the Real Self. And so we must learn to recognize the Real Self. And it’s easy to do because the Real Self differs from the false self in one essential way; the Real Self is non-arising. Any self that arises as an object, as a sense of being a body in the world, as having emotions, intentions, agendas, and relations in duality with others, is the false self. The Real Self is non-arising, and from the perspective from the false self, then, the Real Self does not exist because it doesn’t arise, it’s unborn, it’s unmanifest. But what the Real Self knows is that it’s that which arises that does not really exist; it’s not real because it’s fleeting, it’s impermanent, it’s in constant change, and it’s constantly fragmented, diff

Excerpt: “The two most important concepts in meditation are ‘Shiva’ and ‘Shakti.’ We need to understand the very deep inner significance of these two profound concepts that function as the energy source for our reality because when we are meditating, what we are doing is literally charging our battery. The soul is a battery; it’s a living battery. And that battery gets discharged over time. And the more that we function in the lower chakras, the faster the battery discharges and goes dead. And so every time we have an outburst of anger, or sexual lust, or insecurity, anxiety, paranoia, all of those lower chakra emotional fixations, the battery of our life energy goes dead. And if it can’t be recharged we will literally go dead. And our physical body then starts to have to compensate for the lack of spiritual energy and the organs become weaker, they become drained. And eventually we just have a meltdown, we can’t think, we can’t organize our self to act and function in the world, our emotions become out of or

Excerpt: ”How many of you believe that you really exist? Is anyone here still under that illusion? Admit it if there is. Anyone? No one will admit it, that’s good, it’s a start. It’s better to not admit it. Because we don’t really [exist]; it’s an illusion. Anything time-bound is not real. And all existence is simply an appearance followed by disappearance. Is the appearance any more real than the disappearance? No, but neither is real. You know a lot of times we talk about Jivanmukti as the goal of yoga, which means to be liberated in life; liberated from the ego with its illusory existence that is only an illusion. But actually Ramana says no, Jivanmukti is not the end; there is a stage higher than Jivanmukti. Does anyone know what it is? Sri Ramana calls it Videhamukti. And this means liberation even from believing you ever were an ego that has achieved liberation. There is not even the subtle sense of being one who has gone beyond the illusion – because you were never in the illusion to begin with. That’s

Excerpt: “…Those of us who have been here for some time have no doubt come to understand and been motivated by the fact that what we are doing is discovering who we are. Most of us have recognized that we have these experiences that are in a flux, almost like in a circle; our body and our minds are going through these changes, constant changes. And yet there’s a witness, there’s a center to all of these experiences, and what we call ‘imperiences,’ those which don’t happen in what seems to be an external world but happen in an internal world: dreams, visions, memories, thoughts; where do they actually happen? And to whom do they happen? And we usually focus our whole life on what is happening out there: ‘what a pretty flower,’ ‘what a strange person,’ ‘what extraordinary power of thunder and lightning and rain,’ and all these other things. And we have judgments about our experiences, and sometimes we have judgments about our own thoughts. But how often do we ask: ‘Who is it who is having the judgment?’ ‘To who

Excerpt: “Meditation is the act of gaining victory over death. And that makes it literally a life or death matter. Do we take it with that seriousness? One of the great names for a successful yogi is ‘Mrityunjay’ which means one who has achieved victory over death. There are two words for death in Sanskrit that refer to the two dimensions of death. One is ‘kal’ and kal also means time, and measure. Thus we have the word calendar (kalendar) in English, or calculate, or caliber, or Excalibur, the sword of immeasurable value, the legitimate wielder of which is given immortality. One of the great names for God is ‘Mahakal’, the great death, which is the death of death. It means entering into the dimension of eternity. But how you achieve that is revealed in the second word for death…” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, July 12, 2012.

Excerpt:  “I hope that you have all come prepared for intense erotic experiences… have you?  Those of you who were here for the film this week of the sculpture of Santa Teresa by Bernini will remember that here is a question that is open as to whether she is having a chakra four mystical experience or a chakra two orgasmic experience… and the art critics and philosophers and psychoanalysts are actually arguing over this point….  To the psychoanalyst like Lacan naturally it has to be a chakra two experience – there is no chakra four – that is the modern ideology… and this loss of the transcendent dimension has bought about the loss of the realization that our true relationship to God is an erotic one, but it is the Eros of the soul not of the ego….  The soul’s deepest desire is to be ravished by God – this is what we mean by surrender… you are literally abandoning your ego self and asking to be filled by Gods power – presence – love – bliss.  This is the true erotic experience not the other one at chakra two…

Excerpt: “As the world situation every day becomes more tamasic, we have to remain immune to the negative vibrations that are all around us that want to affect us and that want to drag us down back into ego consciousness. Because to whatever extent there is still ego within any of us, that ego is becoming more and more rancid every day – that’s really what tamasic means. It’s putrid, it’s decomposing. We’re in the final period of Kali Yuga, when not only the ego but the physical organism itself is losing its capacity to live, to remain healthy, to remain strong, to remain with an immune system that is functioning properly, because the very elements of matter have been defiled. And so it’s very important that Sat Yogis keep a sattvic energy field. Not only for the immunity of our own organism, but for the immunity of the sangha, as a super-organism, or we can be very easily be infected by the tamasic energy and then suddenly our field of love becomes one of conflict, and aggression, or lust, or fear, or simply

Excerpt: “A yogi is someone who is so sick of his ego that he wants to commit suicide. But he knows that if he does that he will have to face all the karma that he ran away from, in the next life. So it does no good. And so instead of killing the body in suicide he realizes he must commit egocide. Suicide, ‘sui’ comes from the Sanskrit ‘swa’, the real Self; the ego is the false self, the me. In fact the ‘me’ actually stands for ‘M-E,’ Machinic Entity because the ego is a machine, it’s a robot, with an operating system that was created in childhood and robotically repeats the same patterns over and over again – in just a slightly more sophisticated form. And so we have to get rid of this robot somehow. We have to give ourselves a robotomy – which is similar to a lobotomy but slightly different. In the lobotomy you get rid of the higher functioning aspects of the robot, then you are left with the lower ones. Here we want to get rid of the robot entirely so that we can be liberated in life. But to get rid of the

Excerpt: ”Each of us comes equipped with three levels of consciousness. Unfortunately there is no instruction manual as to how to operate these three. And the society today tells us only about the ego – the primary level – that is required in order to function in this society. But if one lives only from the ego, one is living a very petty, weak, fragile life, focused on very superficial aims; the greed for money or sexual pleasure or some kind of limited power or some kind of fantasy fulfillment that always ends up disappointing one and the ego always ends up depressed and anxious and lost. And the ego consciousness is not good for very much, and it is not intended to do very much, except to get you to adulthood…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 4, 2012.

Excerpt: “The purpose of meditation is to become empowered. You should feel more spiritual power at the end of each meditation than you started with. How many of you feel that? Good. We need a lot of spiritual power to deal with the energy field of the world as it is today. And every day the world becomes more tamasic. And there is a very short time before major world-shattering events will occur. That if we are not strong enough to face them, and have the adequate and accurate response, can be very devastating to our equilibrium. And Sat Yogis are here not just to stay in balance for ourselves but be able to offer peace and balance and strength to others, we have to be able to channel that strength. But to do that, we first have to purify our own unconscious minds. If we are still being overturned by maya, by fantasies, by impulses of the lower chakras and by negative thoughts, negative interactions with others, then we are not able to be of any service to the world. We must complete our self-service, we mus

Excerpt: “In order to be able to have some sense of God’s presence, first of all we have to recognize that what we mean by God, as a starting point, is the highest potential consciousness that you can have. Not the highest possible, the highest potential, because as soon as you say possible then that’s divided into what is possible and what is impossible. But you don’t know what is impossible; you don’t know the limits of potentiality. So we have to assume an infinite potentiality, and that you have that infinite potentiality of altering your state of consciousness to reach that of God consciousness.” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, June 28, 2012.

Student Question: Is it the ego that creates the illusion of growth and/or non-growth?

Student Question: To avoid falling asleep in meditation, I’ve read about a recommendation to do walking meditation instead. What advice do you have?

Student Question: What does it mean spiritually to have an identical twin?

Student Question: If one has superego projections with one’s siblings, can those projections be primary, or will they always secondary to those of the parents?

Student Question: Sometimes when I meditate I feel a kind or rush that feels like adrenaline. It feels very good and I want to go deeper into it. The problem is that it feels like I am holding my breath, and I am making this huge effort in order to go deeper. It only lasts for some time and then I feel exhausted. What should I do when this happens? Just let go?

Student Question: How do you handle drives in the lower chakras?

Student Question: Recently in a meditation my foot fell asleep and all these narratives of fear came up regarding whether or not I was hurting my foot or myself. Many of these ideas came up and once I detached from it the feeling in the foot came back. I was wondering what the symbolism of this is?