Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Excerpt: ”. . .But there’s no reason ever to leave the stillness of the perfection of what you are; that is already liberated from maya. You don’t notice that you simply create maya in order to then liberate yourself from it. It’s a nice game, but this “Yo" "Yo” game that you play just brings you back to square zero anyway – so why ever leave it? Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, May 21, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . . And it’s only when you have entered deeply upon a path of Self discovery that you can even know what are the potentials that lie behind and beyond the event horizon of your current level of subjectivity – that offer miraculous powers and potencies for your own capacity to become and to realize yourself in this plane as the Infinite Being that you are. It is only when we constrain the ego mind and its weaknesses from acting out; its desire to regress, to take the easy path, the comfort zone, and never to dare those levels of your selfhood that are currently not yet known to you – because you are a mystery to yourself. But few of us explore that mystery. Most of us settle for an identity that we received from others that might just be adequate enough to make us a living, and to live a tolerable life, but never to know true ecstatic joy, bliss, and infinite fulfillment.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 3, 2014.

Excerpt: ”The ego is an unstable structure – and dependent upon the desire of others, the affirmation of others; what one takes as the love of others – but which is all always, at the level of ego, an narcissistic quid pro quo. To get beyond this impasse, we must dis-identify with any objective other, including the body that is considered one’s own. And to abide in silence and stillness, and inner aloneness without any co-dependence on any other, without any desire from any other – in oneness with the Supreme Self. This practice alone can liberate us; liberate consciousness from its suffering. The problem is, for the ego mind, that the Real Self is inconceivable. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 26, 2014.

Excerpt: “. . . But that means that the Self that you are here to realize is not your individual self. It’s the universal Self, the Supreme Self. This is no small matter. This should not be taken lightly. You are endeavouring to enter the precinct of God, the throne room of God, the highest possible level of consciousness. And the good news is that when you get there you will realize that is your Self. But not the self you think you are now. That self cannot get even close to that throne room.” Recorded on the evening of Monday, May 19, 2014.

Excerpt: All our suffering arises from “the I-thought: the thought that I am this or that; I am this body, this personality, this history, this chain of signifiers going off in my mind, language with its narratives, its scenarios and melodramas that create all the suffering. That thought is what splits your mind between the false ego, and the real Self. Separating you from God for as long as you choose ego, and at the same time beginning the life of suffering that is somehow preferable because although it is suffering, it contains the instant gratification of the bodily, sensory, phenomenal plain of the collapsed quantum wave in which free will has been lost and all is determined by that choice to fall into the illusory world and leave the world of bliss, of liberation, of truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 12, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . And that this presence has always been there, it’s not something to attain in some other dimension; it’s here. But it’s here in the dimension that is other to the physical plane that witnesses it, that is the silent awareness that uses the instrument of the senses and the organism. But is a formless incorporeal eternal presence that forgets itself in its own true nature the moment it enters into language.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 5, 2014.

Excerpt: ”At this very moment you are the infinite Self. You are not the body who has a soul, or a spirit or a Self or a connection to the Super-Conscious, no. You are the Super-Conscious, you are the Self Supreme manifesting with a form in this phenomenal plane to make actual the highest potentialities in the mind of God as a reality in this plane. You are the Self. Your nature – right now – not in the future – right now – is total awareness. Your real Self – right now – is divine radiance, luminous intelligence, pristine, pure awareness. And it doesn’t matter if that is clouded by the ego mind, that’s completely irrelevant. All that is relevant is that you know who you are. And stop believing that you are a body, or a mind, a personality, an entity, that’s a precipitate out of the infinite Self; it is not you.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 15, 2014

Excerpt: ”We offer here not a twelve-step program, not even a one-step program. This is the world’s only zero-step program, which makes it the simplest and the hardest, because the mind cannot imagine taking zero steps, and therefore to get there you must realize you’re already there, and that underneath all the chatter of the mind, you are a zero. That’s what the mind is terrified of: discovering that there’s nothing behind it. Buddha discovered there was nothing behind it – he called it ‘Nirvana.’ But for the ego mind – the mind of the chatter – it’s called, ‘anxiety.’ So the first paradox to recognize is that anxiety is just a disguised form of bliss. So if you have a lot of anxiety, you really have a great deal of bliss, so know that it’s a great blessing. Don’t try to get rid of it, but you must recognize it from the right perspective. The perspective is everything.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 8, 2014.

Excerpt: ”It is attained very simply – because we are already That. There is nothing actually to be gained: it is simply returning from a state of false consciousness based on constructs and ideas that we learned within a context of a social system with agendas that were different from that of Truth. And so we are again learning to rest in the Truth of our Being. To realize this Truth . . . let go of all untruth. This means silencing the mind, it means letting go of all concepts, and learning again to be.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 6, 2014.

Excerpt: “[Reading from a Ramana Maharshi text] ‘However much, one may explain, the fact will not become clear till one attains self-realization and wonders how one was blind to the self-evident and only existence for so long.’ So none of this could be explained, because the ego mind is not capable of grasping it, for many reasons. One, it takes the succession of events in time as real. It takes this dream of reality – that it calls reality because it labels it as such – as being something different from that state you’re in in deep sleep when there is no external reality. And it makes a false distinction between the dream and the waking state. All are simply the manifestations of the one unchanging Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 24, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Often we think of Yoga as a spiritual journey, and that we are seekers – but actually it’s the end of the journey; it’s the realization that there is nothing to seek. But the journey of experience through life has concluded with our wisdom, our understanding, that the goal is actually to be: not to become, not to experience, but to return to the original Self that has always been there, but that we have forgotten. So it is simply our willingness to be. In that realization of our beingness comes the recognition that we are already perfect; we are already filled with the Supreme knowledge. We are constituted of the supernal light, the divine light, that is the emanation of God, and the term God refers only to the Self that we have forgotten and projected into some other dimension. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 3, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . This school is dedicated to help you answer those questions. But not to answer them theoretically, because theory is, frankly, empty; talk is cheap. The answer lies in the silence of the heart. The answers emerge when we are at peace, when we have found our center. And many people think ‘Well, yes, but my question is how do I find that center? How do I open the heart?’ But it happens, not actually by making some kind of difficult effort, but simply allowing yourself to be. It’s simply a very radical self-acceptance. But what we have to come to accept is the fact that we don’t really know who we are or have the answers to those questions, at the surface level; they are not in our minds and they are not our in the world. But they are present as that very silence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 27, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Asparsa has two meanings depending on how subtle that you wish to take it. The first meaning means to come out of imprisonment, but the way you get out of imprisonment is by going in – not out; there is no escape out there. The prison is the belief in the out there and the belief that you are a creature with a physical body. That objectification of your own nature and of the nature of reality is the imprisonment. So the way in means to come back into your subjectivity and into the fullness of pure consciousness that is not determined by laws of nature or ideologies or belief systems of any kind or material gratifications or inflictions of pain and suffering.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 13, 2014.

Excerpt: ”The human psyche is extraordinarily complex, and, at the same time, amazingly simple. That’s the first paradox that we have to face in reality . . . . it’s important to be able to think paradoxically and break through illusions that are based on what seem to be contradictory opposites that are both true. So, the mind has a number of different levels to it. Many of us tend to live on the outer most level of the mind and not go too far inward because they either get scared or there is a repressive block to knowing too much; there is some kind of programming that makes certain knowledge forbidden to you, etc. So that first level of the psyche identifies with the physical body. And therefore it is subject to fear of that body’s death or its pain or it’s subject to desire on a bodily level, it’s subject to anger when it doesn't get its bodily needs met, it’s subject to all kinds of hysterical meltdowns, due to the fact that it is identified with a perishable object. So, according to the logic of that level of the mind, it makes sense to be in a fragile and vulnerable state of consciousness and to defend against that vulnerability with all kinds of bravado or evasion or avoidance or of different kinds of personality quirks and strategies in order to not have to put oneself at risk because one feels always that one is at risk in a world that is dangerous. . .” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, March 6, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Tonight is the thirteenth night of Shukla Paksha according to the ancient Vedic lunar calendar. For those who worship Shiva, the most ancient name for the Supreme Being, this is the holiest night of the year – it’s referred to as ‘Maha Shivratri,’ the great night of Shiva. The worship of Shiva carried on, secretly, in the form of late-coming Shiva cults such as Judaism and Christianity. In Judaism, the holiday of “Maha Shivratri” became known as Pesach or ‘Passover.’ And of course in Christianity it has two forms: one is the last supper and the crucifixion, but the most true rendition of “Maha Shivratri” is the represented in the Book of Revelations as the apocalypse.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 27, 2014.

Excerpt: “Meditation is a practice of freedom. And it’s practiced because the consciousness begins in a state of un-freedom. Meditation is the cure for our addiction to thinking. The mind is out of control, it’s the primary addiction. People can’t stop their minds from running away with them. Minds are in chaos, filled with negative thoughts, chaotic thoughts, thoughts that people don’t want to have but can’t stop. It turns out that all the other addictions are actually attempts to cure that addiction. The reason that people smoke cigarettes, or pot, or take other drugs or alcohol is to try to stop their mind. You can be a little more peaceful – but then you’ve got a worse problem, now you’ve got another addiction to deal with on top of the first one, and that one has other consequences. And then usually people try to stop those with others, they get into some other kind of obsessive practice, and life becomes one set of obsessions on top of another. When a much easier solution is to simply be free of the non-productive, chaotic secretion of thoughts in the mind.” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, February 11, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . .Because God doesn’t need to know anything. And that non-knowing comes from having transcended the need to know, not from not having reached it. It comes from an overflowing realization that what you are is all you need to know – because you are complete in yourself. And that realization transforms the lack and the desire to grasp and to continue that process of seeking and controlling that is futile, into the final letting go that brings the bliss of union with the Supreme Being.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 11, 2013.

Excerpt: ”. . . This is a classic example of what Baba Hari Dass used to call “headache yoga,” perhaps the ultimate headache – but worth it if you need to undo a lot of false beliefs about who you are; the book will do it. But if you can just let go of those false beliefs you can skip to the hundredth verse. . . . And verse one hundred actually sums up the whole book, it is the core of the core, and it’s the only verse you need to read . . .” Recorded on the evening of Tuesday, January 28, 2014.

Excerpt: “. . . [Yoga is] the science of consciousness. It’s the science of how to develop the full potential of our consciousness – because we are not born with an instruction manual as to how to do that. But we have many higher centers of our mind, not just our brain but our mind, our soul, our spirit, that need to be activated in a systematic manner in order to be able to unfold the full powers that are latent in us. They call them siddhis in yogic terminology. And there are seven major modalities that emerge, naturally. The first one is an increase in our intelligence because as you go inward you have access to more of the wisdom that comes from the deeper levels of your mind, and you see reality in a more subtle way. . .” Recorded on the evening of Saturday, January 18, 2014.

Shunyamurti addresses the importance of giving thanks - at the Enlightenment Now retreat.

Excerpt: ”Christianity is one of the most potent forces in the world. Both the Christian myth and the Christian teachings are of extreme importance to us all. In some sense I think the world has not even been ready for Christianity until now. A true Christianity may only be beginning to emerge. Much of what has passed for Christianity in the passed has actually been a defence against the teachings of Christ – a fear of them, a denial of them even in the form of worshipping Christ. For one thing Christ taught that the love of money is the root of all evil, and yet we’ve created a society based on the love of money, and we’ve called it a Christian society, something’s wrong with that picture. . .” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, December 19, 2013.

Excerpt: ”. . . And so this concept of Hanmaum (One Mind) is central to every true path of spirituality. That our individual minds are a subset of a larger mind and then a larger, and a larger, and ultimately there is one single intelligence that flows through all of the myriads of life forms and even what we think of as inanimate objects. They all participate in the same ultimate intelligence. And thus the entire universe is intelligent. And if there are parallel universes they are included in this as well. Everything that can possibly be is part of a single intelligence that includes all the past, the present, and the future – which is all now to that intelligence. Because that intelligence that is beyond space and time creates, sustains, destroys universes, recreates them, it all happens within a timeless instant. But that timeless instant for any given creature within a universe can last centuries or millennia. But time is an illusion from that perspective. But the key teaching about Hanmaum is: you are that intelligence.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, December 12, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . .But what the great yogis say is that in order to see God, your mind has to have been trained, purified, in three stages. The first stage is truthful mind. If the mind is not in Truth with itself, and with God, in integrity, in sincerity, earnestness, openness, transparency, maturity, willingness to let go of ones illusions and delusions then nothing more will happen; then you need a drug. But if the truthful mind is achieved, there will be an automatic flow into the next stage. . .” Recorded on the afternoon of Monday, May 6, 2013.

Excerpt: ”. . .In the same way Christianity says body consciousness is a sin – but really, yogis’ view of it is that it’s worse than a sin; it’s stupid. The idea of sin is itself sinful because it takes place within the same framework of ignorance and duality; that’s the problem. We have to get out of that whole framework because all that does is lead to more judgements, super ego attacks, and a quicksand of self-loathing that is useless for anyone on a spiritual path. So we have to get the fact that what we’re doing when we’re meditating is we are accumulating power. It’s as simple as that: do you want to be powerful or do you want to be weak?” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, June 4, 2013.

Excerpt: ”Carl Jung, in his approach to transformation, had no interest in child development . . . he was only interested in people going through a midlife crisis. He didn’t do child therapy, he didn’t do adolescent therapy — he didn’t even feel it was appropriate to do that. What he felt was missing from Western culture was that process of the cocoon in which the caterpillar would enter to become the butterfly. And he wanted his approach to be that cocoon where the transformation could happen to the ultimate development of human capacity.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 7, 2013.

Excerpt: “The prison that our consciousness is in is made up of the opinions of others. And when you let go of your belief in those opinions, which often comes with anger at those opinions or a seduction by those opinions or any other attitude toward them, then they become the identity of the consciousness with all of the fine print and the limitations that those identifications come along with. And so the spiritual process is simply letting go of those opinions. . . .” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 14, 2013.

Excerpt: ”. . .And by doing that we have kept our heart closed. And the power of our heart’s energy of love emerges in a state of devotion. Devotion is what realigns us with the universe so that the power of attraction will become manifest. But we have to be first attracted to the source of what is real in the universe for that source to feed us with grace and blessings. And our devotion to that True Self is essential, and that is what nourishes us, because the more devotion we give the more love we receive, the more light the more flow of divine energy of shakti moves through us. And people are afraid of overdosing on that light and that love; there is a terror of love. Because the more devoted you are the more you find that the defense mechanisms that you created to protect yourself against others have to fall away. You become more vulnerable, you become more open, more transparent. But through that devotion, you are then able to speak Truth, you are then able to act courageously, and to triumph over all negative feelings, inner demons or outer ones, nothing will stop you in that state of devotion. And the more you offer, the more you get back.” Recorded in the evening of Wednesday, October 9, 2013.

Excerpt: ”We’re like people who own a mansion with a hundred floors and a thousand rooms, and we’re living in the entrance hall. And we feel like we’re impoverished and we’re stuck in this tiny little space. And we don’t dare to look at the whole place we have! Our consciousness is infinite. We have so many latent powers, that if we knew about them, we would be in astonishment right now, in bliss, just exploring the treasures that are there waiting for us to start using.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 3, 2013.

Excerpt: ”Many people don’t know that Bobby McFerrin got those words from a poster he saw of Meher Baba, who was one of the great spiritual teachers of the last century. . . .And the full message was not just ‘don’t worry, be happy,’ it was ‘do your best, then don’t worry. Be happy in My love, I will help you.’ This is of course being spoken as the voice of God. And so out of context, the ‘don’t worry be happy,’ is like whistling past the graveyard. But if you’re happy in God’s love, then you will receive power, grace, support, energy, shakti, to succeed in what you’re doing. And if what you’re doing is an act of karma yoga, is an act of service, is not simply for the ego’s pleasure or benefit, but to serve God and serve the world, then you will be happy because you will receive God’s love, and you will receive God’s help.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 12, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . .But the reason that religions have holidays is to express symbolically what can otherwise not be understood by the ego mind – using actual conditions of the physical universe in order to express some very deep insights into the nature of reality that were conferred by the Supreme Being. So there’s a little known Shiva cult that was a late arrival on the scene in human history that left India and entered into the Middle East, and the people who were Shiva worshipers became known later as Jews. And the name Jehovah and Shiva, one derives from the other. And this happens to be the main holiday of this Shiva worshiping group, called Rosh Hashanah.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 5, 2013.

Excerpt: ”In the west, since the ascendence of the roman church there has been a sense that humans are distant from God, from ultimate reality, and that you need som kind of intermediary, you need a priest or you need someone to advocate for you and you need some kind of rituals and a prayer book to know what to say to God. It’s a very formal thing you know, it’s some distant king that you’re suppose to get to visit via some, help by someone else but you never get to have direct contact. And then of course from that point from there it goes to the point that he’s so distant he doesn’t even exist. And the idea of an ultimate reality has been eclipsed and eliminated in the modern western mind set. Which leaves the ego in hedgeomanic control of our societies, untamed by the higher power of goodness and the ego that doesn’t surrender to a higher Truth and a higher level of integrity and sacrifice, then creates a world of the kind we’re now living in.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, August 29, 2013.

Excerpt: “What is the ego? It is simply the mind operating according to two valued logic… that's all it is…. Two valued logic is absolutely absurd, and we can blame Aristotle for it... but he was the first philosopher who maintained that you need to analyze reality according to two valued logic… before that everyone was in infinite logic – it was totally different…. Two valued logic is recognized in the bible as the cause of the fall of man – why Adam and Eve got kicked out…. What was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? That’s two valued logic. That this is either good, or evil… This is true or false, up or down. Everything is this or that, and once you are caught in believing that then you are caught in a prison in which you can no longer be whole, because the truth is that you are this and that… and neither of the above… and all of the above… and beyond any of the above… that’s the truth, and so when you have to follow two valued logic, you have to cut off and split most of your mind and repress it… that what Jung called the shadow… everything that you were not allowed to be, you had to repress… Thursday, August 22, 201

Excerpt: “All of us are travellers through space and time, eternal travellers, and yet eternally never moving at all, but enjoying the illusion of the dream that brings richness and joy and learning, even through pain and suffering, the learning of the lessons that bring about wisdom and freedom and re-empowerment as we go through the labyrinth forgetting we are the One Self and then remembering again – playing peek-a-boo with the Self. And there’s nothing really to do in this act of remembrance except to let go of the forgetfulness, to let go of all of the thoughts that are based in the illusion and not in the Witness. And when one returns to the self-luminous, infinite intelligence that is pure consciousness all of the suffering of the dream falls away, all the fears, desires, egoic identities drop away very easily without any struggle.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 1, 2013.

Excerpt: ”Meditation is the practice of melting away the ego. What we are melting away are the fixed thoughts that create patterns of suffering, repetitive patterns of behavior and emotional states that produce pain for ourselves and for others. And so as we melt it down we free ourselves and the world from that pain and the energy that was locked up in those painful patterns is liberated. We are not liberated, but the pain is liberated – because we are not the ego, it’s a mistake to think you are the ego. But the ego is a structure, that has grown, in the psyche, in the mind, that needs to be dissolved in order for there to be the full freedom of the potential of the ground of your Being to emerge with all of its creativity and love and will.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 11, 2013.

Excerpt: “As you all know the Sat Yoga Institute is a school. It’s not just a place to come to meditate, but to do more than that. And the process begins with the Trivium which is a braid of three different processes that have to happen simultaneously for the process to be effective. It involves Translation, which is a paradigm shift – which is the conceptual understanding of the spiritual path so you will at least be able to explain to yourself why you’re going through this ordeal – because unless you can justify this to your own ego mind, there is no reason to put up with the suffering that it entails. But when there is a clear conceptual understanding of why you’re going through this experience, and what the benefits are, then the ordeal actually becomes very joyous, and not really filled with that much suffering. The transformational dimension of the Trivium is where the suffering is located. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thusday, July 4, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . . But in the spiritual field in India they do talk about four powers that are latent within you that must be remembered in order to realize the freedom that is your true nature. And they talk about this in mythological terms. And often they refer to them as the Power of Rama, the Power of Sita, the Power of Hanuman, the Power of Mrityunjay. You all know these powers because you have them, you use them on a daily basis – but we can go over them since we have to talk about something. The Power of Hanuman. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 13, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . . And so to know the Unknowable Self means to allow yourself to be – without moving, without distraction, without shifting your attention from the Self to any object or any thought, idea, image, emotion – anything that would take you away from the knower – until the very sense of being a knower dissolves in the knowing and there is only this energy that is awareness but without any source and without any object – it is the ground of the field of Being itself. And the reason that the ego mind has difficulty doing this is that it always wants to grasp onto certain attributes that it can objectify. And the awareness has no attributes, all the attributes have been projected into the world, which is a reflection of the Self, but the Self is attributeless, ‘Nirguna’. ‘Emptiness’ in the Buddhist terminology. . . .” Recoded on the evening of Thursday, June 6, 2013.

Excerpt: "... But there is a command, within the ego itself, never to silence the mind, never stop thinking, always got to produce thoughts; if you don't produce you're a failure. And so you got to be willing not to produce anything, but to be. Without putting any demands on yourself, or on anyone else, or giving in to anyone’s demands on you. Create a space of freedom to rediscover who you are without starting from any programming, whether that programming has to do with the gender of the body, or the age, or the nationality, or the religion, or the culture, or any of the other factors that determine the stream of thoughts in the mind – but prior to any thoughts, to when there was pure presence, when you were really aware of being, when the world really had this heightened presence, for you, and everything was new and astonishing. Let's return to that state. And it's very easy to do because you don't do anything, just be. And if the production wants to happen, just go back with the question ‘What is the I, what is the awareness that is watching or listening to these thoughts being produced?’ And you keep going back to that ground of thoughts that are trying to arise and realize that there is a non-arising presence to whom the thoughts are arising. And then just focus on that non-arising presence. And you will find it's already peaceful, it's already happy, it doesn't need anything, it's not angry, there is no desire, has no fear – it's quite content..." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 30, 2013.

Excerpt: “…In any case Tilopa reduced the whole meditation process to three phrases; they’re easy you can’t forget these. The first one is: no distraction. That may seem simple but it’s not. Second one: no contrivances. Third one: no meditation. What!? These are meditation instructions; no meditation, very interesting. So then the question is, are these commands? Are they descriptions of the state you reach in meditation? Are they qualities of your true Being? Of course they’re in the negative so we are in the via negativa here, he’s not describing what you are or what that state is, he’s just describing what not to do, to be. But, let’s look at it more deeply…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 23, 2013.

Excerpt: “…And the minute we let go and really relax and forget the ego, or remember that we are not the ego, remember that we are pure potentiality, pure presence, that is inherently without mental activity – it transcends the mind, the real presence of your being, mind is only a tool that is used on limited occasions but otherwise you’re in the silence of Infinite mind, not limited linguistic-based mind. And to live in that Self, is to be free, is to be independent, finally, of all the conditionings and all of the self-limitations. And all of the illusions and the ignorance that come with identifying with a body and an ego mind…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 9, 2013.

Excerpt: “Sat Yoga is the art of living in the state of love. Love is our natural state. But we have become denaturalized by accepting the programming and the conditioning of the ego mind. The ego mind is generally not in a state of love – which is not news to you I can see. It’s usually in a very judgmental state and mostly attacking others for being judgmental – which is the most self-righteous way of being judgmental – but also attacking oneself, feeling negative and lacking and all the games that the ego plays in order to make itself miserable that we know all too well so I won’t belabor that point, because I’m not here to keep you in that state of misery. I would like you to see that that’s not our natural state or our real state, and it was simply an indoctrination into misery because that is how you become adapted to social living and accept the miserable conditions that most people have to live in. But we don’t have to accept that. We can change our world by changing our perception of who we are and what this reality is...” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 2, 2013.

Excerpt: “This is a school of magic. Are you all interested in magic? Do you all realize that you are magical beings? Do you? But there is a difference between being a magical being and being a magician. To become a magician you must train your magical potential to be fully actualized. Western civilization can be understood as the sustained effort to repress magic. That’s its whole purpose – to repress white magic; there is plenty of black magic around. For the last 2000 years that has been the main intention of the forces that have been running this civilization, to disenchant the world. Why? Because you can’t control magicians; you can’t control sorcerers; you can’t control great shamans; you can’t control the Magi, so whenever they saw a magus, they would eliminate him. They wanted to eliminate white magic because white magic, when there are enough magicians . . . coming together to create an energy field of divine magic the world can be transformed, and they know that.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 18, 2013.

Excerpt: “So the realization of God begins with the understanding that what we mean by that term is the ultimate, supersensory apperception that you are capable of. It’s not simply extrasensory perception; that psychics do, they can see subtle energies and be aware of things that are happening in the external plane. It’s not simply extrasensory perception. It’s supersensory, it’s beyond the sensual realm – including the subtle level of sensuality – and it is not a perception but an apperception, which means that what is being perceived is the one doing the perceiving; there is no duality in God. And therefore you can never know God as long as you want to be a perceiver of God because God does not exist as an object. The atheists are right, but they are also very wrong because they don’t understand that in the same way you have to cultivate a taste for music like this – and many people in the world would not have said this is beautiful; if you would play some death rock they would have said ‘yeah that’s great!’ or ‘that’s wicked’ or whatever term is now the equivalent of ‘I like it.’ But you need to cultivate a taste for beauty, for goodness, and particularly for the Supreme Beauty and the Supreme Goodness that we’re talking about when we signify the word God or any ultimate reality term that is an equivalent whether Buddha-nature, Nirvana, etc. etc.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, April 11, 2013.

Excerpt: “People think that complexity is a relatively new scientific discipline, and in the modern world it is, but it’s a very ancient concept. And the first full development of that is in the form of the net of Indra. The net of Indra is the most significant concept to come out of Vedic and Buddhistic thought and got explicated most fully on HuaYen Buddhism but it existed long before that. And that is the understanding that reality is not based on closed systems with independent or contesting territories but is a network of interconnecting subsystems within a larger hyper-complex system, in which there is harmony and unity that overlies any sense of difference. And so when we can begin to map the complexity of the ego-system, we rise to the soul level which is a hyper-complex system which is an assemblage of hyper-complex systems that extends overtime because the soul reincarnates and up to the point of understanding an entire cycle of time with all of the complexity of the permutations of time itself. And then you get to the higher level of ultra-complex systems at the level of the Atman. And this is an assemblage of hyper-complex system that includes many different universes, many different independent levels of functioning but that are all part of a harmony at the highest level. And so as we go up to higher and higher of levels of consciousness, what they are, are higher levels of complexity and at the very highest level of infinite complexity you reach absolute simplicity.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, April 4, 2013.

Excerpt: “...And while the Buddhists are accurate in saying ‘yes you need to live in the Two Truths’; there is a conventional reality and Ultimate Reality and for purposes of dealing with conventional reality, keeping your bank account balanced and dealing with people at the phenomenal plane who are in that illusion, you need to be able to deal with it – but you can only deal with it without suffering if you are beyond it in the Ultimate Reality. So the idea of any spiritual path is not to leave the conventional reality behind, but to recognize that even this split between Ultimate Reality and conventional reality, is a convention. And that you don’t believe in it, you free yourself from any ‘naive realism,’ that accepts this world created by the illusion of the ego as real so that you will not suffer from the events in this world or from the ignorance that generalizes to having many consequences, unintended as well as intended, so that you can live in this world as a being of wisdom, a being in peace without neurotic or psychotic suffering, and without even the ordinary suffering that Freud says you cannot get beyond. Pain perhaps won’t end but suffering over whatever seems to be going ‘wrong,’ doesn’t have to be part of one’s world, one’s umwelt. That can be left behind. And that’s the only practical benefit of the spiritual quest, is that you have left that behind and you can act in the world wisely. But always knowing that the one who is acting in the world – to bring peace, order, greater happiness, etc. – is an illusion.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 21, 2013.

Excerpt: “… Because the ego mind is a knot based on the unproven premise that the ‘I’ is the body. And it builds its entire life on that false belief, that ‘I am a body’ and ‘the body is material.’ And it’s upon that premise, false though it be, that remains tenaciously the foundation of the ego, that it will not let go of, that is the cause of all our suffering. Because once there is a body in a physical universe there is fear, there is lack, there is anxiety, there is desire, there is disappointment, there is despair; the whole wheel of egoic life stems from that false belief. And it’s to undo that false belief, not just theoretically but really, which changes our entire psychology and frees us from the torments of ego consciousness. In principle it’s very easy. And it’s easier today because modern science, particularly quantum physics, supports the understanding that the world is not real; the universe is information, and information requires a knower, and the knower is consciousness. So it is no longer even scientifically sustainable to believe ‘I am a body’: ‘I am consciousness’ is the prevailing scientific understanding. “ Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 14, 2013.

Excerpt: “…So this is the problem in most people’s lives, if he’d gotten the dream saying just dig under your own kitchen he probably wouldn’t have listened to it, but it told him to go to Russia; OK, it’s enough of an ordeal maybe there’s truth to it. It’s the need to do something exotic, the need to do something outlandish and to pass through some ordeal that gives something credibility. This path is just too easy because you don’t have to do anything on this path, just be yourself, what could be easier than that? There’s no method, there’s no system, there’s no approach, there’s no drug you have to take, there’s no danger, there’s no side-effects. It’s boring, isn’t it? Just be yourself. But nobody want to be themselves, they want to be someone else. They want to go on some long exotic journey somewhere, only – always – to discover that what you were looking for was back home, was yourself. You are the Atman, you don’t have to wait for some message to come in an altered state of consciousness. You have altered your own state of consciousness by creating the ego – the ego is an altered state. It’s a state in which you’ve lost touch with your real consciousness; it’s not a higher altered state but a lower one that you chose to identify with. But all you have to recognize is that who you really are in your very natural state, if you’re not too manic depressive, is quiet presence…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 07, 2013.

Excerpt: “We are here to rediscover who we are, what we have forgotten about our deep Self, to dive beneath the surface, beneath body-consciousness, and even deeper than soul-consciousness, to discover the Spirit, the Absolute Self, that always abides eternally, peacefully, blissfully within. This is our divine essence, and we have come together to discover our divine essence, and then to share our divine essence with one another, to create an energy field in which that essence is able to fill everyone with that same power of truth, of love, of joy. And so meditation is not some serious business where you have to be very sober and solemn – it might seem that from outside, but in truth we are here to rediscover that within us which is always joyous. It’s said in every religious tradition that God is love, ultimate love, ultimate bliss, the bliss of overwhelming, overflowing infinite love. Can you imagine that state? Can you imagine living in that, and realizing that that is who you are?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 28, 2013.

Student Question: What is prayer? And what is the meaning of it, and how to pray?

Student Question: What are nightmares? Why is it that nightmares are the dreams that affect me most and that I remember the most?