Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Excerpt: ”. . . And therefore it is the transcendence of language, of thought, that is the essence of the first step in meditation, the opening up of the psyche to Pure Presence that is focused on the Source of Being, but without trying to grasp it conceptually; that is focused with devotion and with love for the ultimate mystery – that one must be very humble and careful not to believe one already knows just because you’ve read a lot of sacred texts or you’ve heard various gurus speak or you know that you’re supposed to believe that all is one or God is all that is or whatever is the current ideology, because none of that is true – because no set of words can capture the Truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 6, 2014.

Excerpt: “The two doctrines of most importance and usefulness in the East are those of Advaita and Advaya. The Advaita doctrine says that the Supreme Real cannot be understood by a mind trapped in duality – which is a mind that uses ordinary language to understand things because language defines each term in terms of an opposite term: we learn what hot means in terms of cold; we learn up in terms of down; we learn being in terms of nothingness etc. But God cannot be defined or characterized or in any way described or pointed at through language that is caught in this dualistic level of description. God is beyond both being and nothingness. . . . And so the Advaya doctrine, which is the one mostly offered in the Buddhist traditions, is that we cannot speak about God at all. And therefore what you can not speak about as Ludwig Wittgenstein came to understand himself (he’s one of the fathers of postmodern Western philosophy), what you cannot speak about, pass over in silence. And it is that silence that is at the heart of the spiritual traditions of both East and West.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 30, 2014.

Excerpt: “In the ancient world it was recognized that there was a bifurcation of the Real between being and appearance. Anything that appears in the world therefore is not; appearance means illusion. What has being does not appear in the world. But it has flipped completely in the postmodern period in which only that which appears seems real to the postmodern ego, and anything which can’t be grabbed onto is not real. This is the complete opposite of the way that every philosophical tradition for the last five thousand years – including the Western tradition – has understood being. That which has real being does not appear as an object in the world. It is the Source, the objects are the shadow of being, the reflection. But being itself is that which sends that shadow, it is the light, but when the light hits the mirage of the physical plane and we have appearances, that is a step removed from the Source: it has no being; it is a flux. And its reality must be interpreted by the human consciousness which is given the power to discern between that which is Real and that which is illusion. It’s based on using that discernment accurately that we live a life of purity and empowerment, but when we chose the illusion over the Real, that is what is called in Christianity the ‘original sin.’” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 23, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . And once that simple shift has been made then consciousness lets go of its contraction and realizes itself as infinitely vast, timeless, fearless – and completely empowered to play one’s role in the dream with heroic courage, with infinite creative potential, and with generosity and love; with all the virtues and all the siddhis that yoga speaks about, because your true nature is divine. But you’ve traded the divine powers for the ego’s anxiety. And all that needs to be done is to reclaim that original nature that is unlimited and that is fearless, and completely un-contracted.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, September 2, 2013.

Excerpt: ”We know that we are children of God, and that when all the veils of illusion have fallen away we are one with God. We know also that this world is almost gone. The old civilization is collapsing, the plagues are coming. Time is short. But God is here, and a new world is being born. It’s being born in your hearts. It’s being born in the beauty of your souls, in your love for the Creator and the Creation. It is your timeless and infinite Light that is giving birth to a new world that will form as the perfectly beautiful reflection of your Being.” Recorded on the afternoon of Monday, October 13, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Meditation is simply Reality’s self-revelation of itself, to itself. That revelation comes in the form of awareness which is revealed as our being; our nature is simply consciousness. And that consciousness reveals itself as luminous intelligence. And that luminous intelligence reveals itself as love. And the love reveals itself as bliss. And all of this reveals itself as the timeless presence of what we are now, in this moment of what we have always been and always shall be.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, October 8, 2013.

Excerpt: ”Once upon a timelessness there was only consciousness, all alone. And because consciousness dwelt in timelessness it was lonely, it is lonely, it will always be lonely – there is no other; this is its one sanskara. And it has no form, so it can’t even look in a mirror; has no name, there’s nothing to do. It has no TV, no Internet; it’s just consciousness, in infinite, eternal, boring bliss. So what is a poor lonely Supreme Self to do? It dreams up a world! And it dreams up very interesting worlds.” Recorded during the Timeless Truth retreat, on the morning of Tuesday, September 30, 2014.

Excerpt: “One of the mantras that is popular now is actually a very young one; it’s only about 3000 years old. But before that – before this mantra ‘Sat Chit Ananda,’ which is now one of the core mantras – there was another one called ‘Satyam Gyanam Anantam,’ and this goes back many thousands of years earlier - which has a slightly different nuance - which basically says ‘I am the Truth of Being (Satyam), I am the Knowledge that is aware of that Truth.’ So it is a state of full consciousness but that knowledge is not the knowledge that is now called ‘ciencia.’ So it is toda ciencia trascendiendo, but it is still a kind of ciencia, but it is the science that is the knowledge of infinity. Anantam is infinity; it is not Ananda but Anantam. Because it is the recognition, the knowledge, that all of this that we perceive, we are. God is all that is, you are That.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 18, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Anyone who meditates is committing a sin because you’re starting with the presumption that you’re separate from God and have to do something to reach God – when that illusion of separation is the ignorance, the sin – the original sin – and cannot be eliminated by that illusory ego making some effort to reach God – because where are you going to reach to if you’re already That? God is not an object somewhere out there, not a being you have to call on a phone, or have some telepathic connection with. There is no process by which you can reach God because any process simply takes you away from your own center. And so the only valid form of meditation is non-meditation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 11, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Pure and total presence precedes the interpretation of what is present. And it is through an inaccurate interpretation of what is present that the soul and then the ego illusions and the belief in an external world, and an internal world for that matter, are developed which create deeper and deeper levels of maya. The maya, or the illusion, is based on the mind’s wrong interpretation of what is present. But the presence itself is Truth and is the nature of our Being. That presence includes all of reality but the presence is not divided into separate individual entities. And it is the mistaken belief that this presence is seen from the perspective of a particular entity that then creates the I-thought from which the sense of self and of otherness enters in which creates alienation and duality and a loss of wholeness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 4, 2014.

Excerpt: ”As the duration of the silence extends, an impulse to go back into the suffering arises – a very strange, paradoxical impulse. And it is this final death throe of the soul that becomes the last obstacle to letting go of maya. There is a preference to hold on to the agony, rather than to die into the peace. And as long as there is any shred of the soul left to try to control things, it will hold on to its death rattle, to its refusal to go gently into that good night . . . and it will rail against the dying of its false light. And it is at this point that there must be the power of surrender to the Absolute to let go of that peacelessness. And to face the transition into the silence which will first appear as a loss, and even as a strangulation of the soul, which in a way it is, as it is finally put to rest. . . . But once the step has been taken, and that Beyond recognized as the real home, as the ultimate abode, then everything becomes very, very simple. And as the attention turns toward the infinite and away from the finite, away from what has been lost from what has died, into what has been discovered, then the power of Love, the meaning of salvation, the truth of redemption, the energy that supports the universe, the stillness which contains all in potential form is recognized as the ground of one’s Being.” Recorded during the Death and Rebirth Retreat, on the morning of Wednesday, August 27, 2014.

Excerpt:” Consciousness begins to realize it’s Beingness, it’s I Am-ness that exists prior to the body that has nothing to do with the birth of the body or its processes of development that are all within the karmic field – but it recognizes that the karma, the world in which the body exists, the body-mind itself, is simply an object in consciousness that is a temporary vehicle of the I Am-ness. But that the I Am-ness is universal and is simply the expression of Love.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 14, 2014.

Excerpt: “Most of us spend our lives waiting for the miracle to come. But the philosophy of Sat Yoga is to realize that you are the miracle – and there’s nothing more to wait for. This should be the simplest concept, if you will, to realize. But it’s not because we hold too many opinions about ourselves – opinions that were formed when we were young that were actually other people’s opinions of us that we internalized and took in as if they were realities when they were merely projections. And so the miracle we’re waiting for is for someone to wipe off the board that we have in our minds with all of the bad opinions . . . but because it is your mind, only you can erase it.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 7, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Sat Yoga means the realization of Sat – which is the fundamental energy of the universe. But we can also think of it as an acronym, of course, as the Silence of Absolute Transcendence. Absolute transcendence means transcendence even of transcendence. Relative transcendence is consciousness, Purusha, separating from Prakriti. That’s the first step in meditation. Because the separation enables you to realize that you are not the body and not the mind. So it is the relative transcendence of the ego, and the localizability in matter; the separation from all concepts, including the concept of matter. But then one must transcend even the concept of transcendence. Even the concept of the Self.” Recoded in the afternoon of Monday, April 29, 2013.

Excerpt: “[The Sat Yoga School] has three basic intentions. One is to help you think the unthinkable. The second is to help you bear the unbearable. And the third is to help you dare the impossible. So let’s take these one at a time. Obviously most people don’t want to think the unthinkable, and there are different levels of un-think-ability. And the first level is really more the resistance to coming out of denial. It’s not that it’s really unthinkable, but “I don’t want to think about it” – it’s that level. And that has to do basically with prudence. Any prudent business person will have fallback positions in case of worst case scenarios. . . . Well, most people do not want to think about the fact that this entire system is about to collapse; that’s too much to deal with. . . . If you want a plan B, and if you want to think your way through this and to survive, then it’s worth thinking about this before it happens. . .” Recorded on the evening of Saturday, July 26, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Our teacher Sri Ramana says that the ego has four pillars. . . . And when we understand the pillars of the ego, because they are all delusional, it is easy to bring them down. And the four are co-dependent on one another. In developmental terms the first is Avidya, or ignorance; forgetfulness of our True Nature. And that forgetfulness makes us vulnerable to false beliefs to buying into preconceptions and impositions and false implications of language, and the belief, that what you see is what you get. And the belief in the implicit reality that there must be some thing that stands behind the appearance of the I-thought.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, July 17, 2014.

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.