Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

Excerpt: “…You can do it through Ramana’s approach which is simply to ask – but ask wordlessly, not using thoughts – ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is the I?’ ‘What is the source of the I?’ and keep going within until you’ve cleared out the thoughts and there is pure presence. And then hold the presence, examine it, palpate it, observe it, feel the quality of pure presence; without creating a discourse about it, without creating and trying to capture it in some net of words – but abiding in the silence of Presence. And if you do that for long enough, this Presence that is pure, unalloyed by any conditioned thinking, will accumulate an energy field, it will spread, it will grow, if you cultivate the silence moment by moment without falling back into ego thoughts, it will gradually wash away the conditioned thoughts; it will extinguish them. And it will leave your entire space of consciousness clear, peaceful, calm, filled with joy, filled with that original state of freedom, without any kind of conditionings or script that you may have been living by, but now completely open in life to the spontaneity of your own heart. Not controlled by any thoughts that were planted there in the ego by your parents, or schools, or society, but free to discover and to live out the truth of your being. And that’s when life becomes very interesting…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 21, 2013.

Excerpt: “In the old days, meaning about 20 centuries ago, when the yogis first realized that this problem existed – because it didn’t exist before then but in the early period of Kali Yuga when minds already started to vibrate with a much more unhealthy frequency and instability, much less though then now of course – they invented certain techniques. One of them is called Pranayama; breathing exercises.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 7, 2013.

Excerpt: “Tonight’s gathering is about meditation, which is the core activity of this community. The goal of meditation is a simple one – it’s to reach the state of contentment. You’d think that would be very easy, and yet contentment is probably the highest state that the human being can reach. And it’s a virtue that contains all other virtues. Because if you’re really content with what you have, and are not seeking from some state of lack, then you are beyond suffering; you’re at peace. You are liberated from most of the ills that plague human kind. How many people do you know who are in a state of contentment, real contentment? And so it’s a very odd paradox that here we are aspiring to be content. Is that possible? To want to be in a state in which there are no wants. And to understand that paradox we have to recognize that the ego mind, the ordinary state of consciousness that most people take for granted as their real self is not the real Self, but is a construct; it’s artificial. You weren’t born with your current identity – you built it; it was a work of art. Of course you did this work of art when you were about three years old, and so you might want to redo it. Because you put together – to create your identity – a little bit of your mother, a little bit of your father, a little bit of other family members, a little bit of the community, a little bit of the information overload that you were getting from TV, etc. And you created this, modified it over the first five or so years of your life and then you assumed that that’s who you were – and even when you repressed that and created a more adult-like personality, that remained underneath, a child, wanting to be an adult and feeling lack of power, lack of worthiness, lack of capacity to achieve your goals, lack of a sense of feeling lovable or deserving. And so the lacks get built into the structure of the ego mind, even if you’re not aware of it because it’s repressed to a lower level of consciousness, it’s usually there and arises either as symptoms or anxiety or inhibitions, or other pathologies of behavior of attitude of thinking and of emotion. And so to be in a state of contentment, which is our real state, we have to find out who we really are underneath this ego construct, and then, if we wish, we can modify that construct and make it reflect the contentment of our real Being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 24, 2013.

Excerpt: “… When you think about it you realize that consciousness is the only, I shouldn’t say thing it’s not a thing, but it’s the only element of your reality that doesn’t change. Your mind changes, the contents of your consciousness do. You have different ideas today, hopefully than you had 20 years ago, and you’ll have different ideas in the future. So your ideas change, you can’t be defined by your ideas, and most of them aren’t real either, they’re just things you heard about and decided to believe in and usually you find out too late that it wasn’t true. So your mind isn’t real – it’s just a flux of impermanent thoughts that ultimately don’t refer to any deeper reality of a self. They’re mostly imported from other people based on their ideas of what you should think you are, to suit their needs. So if the body is not real and the mind isn’t real and neither of them have any real reference to you, and the only thing that remains unchanging is something that doesn’t even have a form at all, it’s simply awareness, then that’s the only place to explore. It’s very clear – and why all of the sages, philosophers of all of West and East have agreed that, OK, if we’re going to find anything real at all, we’re going to find it in our awareness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 17, 2013.

Excerpt: “… That silence usually doesn’t become tempting until the mind is filled with such disgusting elements, or ones externalized reality is filled with such negative karma that one wants to escape into the silence. But then you are haunted by it; it is very hard to escape when you’ve got burdens of negative karma chasing you. And so that’s the only reason to follow a life that is led in integrity according to the dharma, both the horizontal and the vertical dharma. That’s the cross that we must be crucified on so that we can ascend. By living in integrity at least our conscience won’t bite us. But we must be stung by the Great WASP…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 16, 2013.

Excerpt: “We are here to practice yoga. Yoga is the ancient science of consciousness. How do you practice a science? It is through the exploration of your consciousness. And it is an applied science as well as simply a theoretical pure science and the application of this scientific method is to arrive at the purification of consciousness. The removal from consciousness of all the superimpositions that have like veils or transparencies, filters, ended up causing us to superimpose upon reality, illusions. If they are severe enough we call them delusions. The modern science of psychology derives from the ancient science of yoga, but it’s spectrum of understanding of the nature of consciousness is much smaller - it understands only a sliver of what we call ego consciousness, whereas the point of yoga is to transcend ego consciousness, because the great scientists of consciousness thousands and thousands of years ago discovered that there were levels of consciousness that far transcend anything available to the finite ego mind—and that that is our real self and our ego mind that we are so sure we are, in a body in a physical world, is actually a false state of consciousness—or at least a partial state in which only partial truths are available to us and therefore we create suffering. So if we want to live a life without suffering it is important to remove all of those filters that constitute the ego and arrive at true consciousness—and that true consciousness, because it is in alignment with that supreme power that has created all consciousness and the universe itself, then flows through our consciousness with inspirations, with wisdom, with love, with a sense of fullness and empowerment and all the things the ego mind is looking for but can never get…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 10, 2013.

Excerpt: "Impermanence is the rule of the phenomenal plane – everything comes and goes, nothing is permanent. And by accepting that and not resisting and fighting it, we can be at peace, and discover the one aspect of reality that is not impermanent which is the awareness that is aware of the impermanence. And that's what we happen to be. and if we accept that – that we are simply awareness – not awareness that is identified with any impermanent thing, like a physical body, or even a mind, or a personality, or any objective identification at all, we are free of suffering. It's only when we identify with something impermanent that we start to fear that we will lose our being, our existence. But that fear is purely based on an illusion. And all of our desires are simply the compensation for that fear; you wanna hold on to something that will help you maintain the illusion of this existence which isn't real. And the despair at realizing that it is ultimately hopeless to hold on to anything at all. And finally one gives that up and the ignorance on which that is based, the illusion that one is a physical being instead of pure consciousness, then one lets go and enters into the realization of liberation which was always there." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 6, 2012.

Excerpt: "Sri Ramana says that the abode of bliss that we are all seeking is stillness. And he says we are all seeking it whether we know it or not. But most of us are seeking it in the wrong places. Not in stillness but in some external person, situation, drug, music phenomenon of some kind – but the abode of bliss can only be found in stillness. And many of the things that we do are done in order to reach a temporary state of stillness. We know that runners often run just to get exhausted and then their minds stop working because they have no energy to keep producing thoughts and they get 'runner’s high.' And other people do many other things – not for the reason that they might consciously think but that it will give them a moment of a glimpse of the abode of bliss. But Ramana says it is our birthright to live in the abode of bliss, always. That's our real home – but most of us have run away from home. And now we have to be the prodigal sons and daughters to find our way back." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 29, 2012.

Excerpt: "...Because what he taught and what is the truth is that each of us has the capacity to be the manifestation of Shiva, if we renounce our ignorance of that; if we make it Real by dissolving the veil of the ego mind that stands between our consciousness and Shiva; and through the ceaseless practice of inner silence and remeberence of the Supreme Self as 'I.' And then that Almighty Self will flow through and fill our consciousness, and move our bodies and our minds in a divine way, and create an energy field of such power, such love, such joy that the world will be transformed by that. But we must be wholeheartedly dedicated to attaining our real consciousness as the Supreme Self, and not wallow in the ego mind and it's narratives, and not identify with memory traces of the past, and not act out the symptoms and the sufferings of the ego mind and its traumas, and not continue to inflict them on our self and others..." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 8, 2012.

Excerpt: “The process of meditation is that of realizing our Real Self because most of the day we live behind the mask of a false self that defends us against either real or imagined attacks, or deceptions, or difficulties in life, negative projections and rejections, and all of our fears and anxieties projected out into the world. And because we are doing that our energy is dissipated, and we get exhausted, burned out. We lose our selves. And so when we come to meditate we come to re-find ourselves, to pull our energies back inward to our center, to be balanced and to regain the wholeness that we had lost during our time in the false self, until eventually we don’t ever leave the Real Self, because we understand that there is no need to do that. But we are trained early in life to wear this mask and pretend it is our Real Self and we have accepted it for so long that we no longer even realize it’s a mask and we think it is all there is and there is nothing else behind it. So there is a terror of taking it off and not knowing who we are, because our conscious mind has forgotten.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, November 1, 2012.

Excerpt: “We come here for freedom – freedom from suffering. And we learn that all suffering is caused by our own ego and that the one job to achieve is to kill the ego. Some people object to that phrase, but it’s essential to recognize that the ego must be killed, and can only be killed because it’s not Real. What is Real cannot be killed. What is Real is eternal and immortal. But the ego – despite its unreality – is imprisoning our consciousness, in a self-sabotaging thought-form that destroys our happiness, destroys our life, destroys our capacity to be. And unless we destroy the ego, it will keep us imprisoned in hell realm life after life after life. And that means we’re not living at all.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, October 30, 2012.

Excerpt: "Sat Yoga is a finishing school - probably the last of the finishing schools. Feminism killed off most of them, but here we have a co-ed finishing school… and yes we are here to finish off the ego but we are doing it not by destruction but by allowing it to attain its perfect form and then the ego blossoms into the soul and if we allow it the soul blossoms into pure spirit. We teach about different assemblage points here. Each assemblage point is really an opening up to love at a higher, broader, deeper level. But the essence of what we are is love at every level - even at the level of the ego, which we say “oh, the ego cannot love”, which is true in terms of divine love, but the ego is love because that’s all that is, is love. At the first assemblage point the problem is the ego’s circle of care and love does not go beyond its own self-image… it loves what is sees in the mirror and it loves others adoring gazes and saying yes etc. and it loves sensual pleasures and that kind of thing – what Freud called the ‘ideal ego’, and it doesn’t love beyond that. At the second assemblage point the thesis of the egos narcissistic love turns into the antithesis of a narcissistic hatred - anger, fury at the family, wanting to get away, but this antithesis is actually necessary… one needs to break away by hating the ones that would tie you into a small image of yourself that you have outgrown in order to find love at a higher level, and so it is inevitable that one passes through this and then at the third assemblage point feels remorse for all that hatred, envy and negativity and at that assemblage point one enters fully into the ethical dimension of life and then love begins to be channeled in a higher way…. An aesthetic dimension, an ethical dimension, and a religious dimension of life all open up at the third assemblage point and love begins to blossom, one becomes a productive citizen because one loves one world etc. etc… one loves beauty, one loves truth, one loves higher truth even then that which is about the physical plane, but still there are limitations. So one's circle of love may extend to one's nation but does it extend to those in other nations or does one still demonize people of other countries of other religions, other skin colors etc. etc.? The love is still not universal, it is not unconditional, and it’s only at the next assemblage point that love becomes universal and all are recognized as children of God…." Recorded in the evening of Thursday, October 25, 2012.

Excerpt: “…And within that idea of return there is a crossroads that one encounters. One leads to the bliss of the Absolute and the other leads to nihilism – that leads to an emptiness that is a barrenness. And we have two kinds of spiritual teacher in the world: one who is pointing to the bliss and the light and the power and the joy of God and the other who points to absolute nothingness. And so it’s very important that when you let go of the ego and allow it to dissolve that you recognize there is still an awareness that is witnessing that. So you are still there when your ego has dissolved. You are still there when the mind is completely silent. But when there are no more narratives, who are you that is there? That’s the question. The real inquiry that Ramana recommends of ‘Who am I?’ only begins after the disillusion of the ego when you know you are not that, you are not the traumatized person but you’re the witness. And then you can begin to ask ‘but what is this witness?’ that is still there after everything is dissolved and the mind is quiet and there is actually peace. That’s when you can find the inner blissful Supreme Self.” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, October 18, 2012.

Excerpt: “The Christians talk about transfiguring the wafer and the wine into the body and the blood of Christ. It’s the theory of transubstantiation. But what it means is that you recognize that Real One, a mere wafer, a mere cup of ordinary wine, is actually simply the symbolic representation of Real Two, the love of God, the act which is the actual body and blood of God. But in our version of transfiguration everything is transformed, all of Real One, and all of the Imaginary of the ego is transformed into Real Two and into the archetypal realization that everything that appears here; including yourself, your own body, your own mind, is simply a symbolic representation of the Real that is God.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 15, 2012.

Excerpt: “We are here to do what the song just said… which is to Swaha - it means give everything to Rama… surrender every illusion that you are separate from God so that you realize who you truly are… surrender every bit of negativity, fear… every piece of anger, hatred, depression, anxiety… throw it all into the fire… throw everything that separates you from your realization of oneness with the supreme being and by doing that and invoking the supreme presence you will be free of suffering and you will be in bliss and you will be filled with power and creativity and clarity and you will be filled with love and you will know that you are loved and you will know that you are one with the source of love and that love is what is beautiful and love is what is good… love is what is real and eternal and you are that and everything that you might have thought that you were that is different from that is an illusion… it is Maya and if you don’t hold onto any Maya and you can let it all go, you will achieve liberation, so why would anyone hold back? Why would anyone keep the illusion of some identification that is less than the beauty and the perfection of God?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 12, 2012.

Excerpt: “What is it that we see when the third eye is open? The first thing we see, as all the ancient sages have testified to, is that this world is unreal. Do we all see that? To be unreal doesn’t mean that it doesn’t appear; it is real as an appearance, but it is not real as a world with all of the veils of the ego’s projections upon it. The projections are unreal; they are fantasies. And once those projections are put out there, superimposed upon the phenomenal plane, then that’s what we get back, are our own projections. And so the first thing that the Eye of Shiva must do is burn away the projections so we see the world as it is, as a creation of Shiva. And then we see it not as a world any longer but as a hologram, a multidimensional dream field, in which everything that appears is a symbolic manifestation of the mind of God.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 8, 2012.

Excerpt: “You know ‘SAT’ is an acronym. Did anybody know that? Do you know what ‘SAT’ stand for? Anyone know? It means: the Solid Abyss of Triumph. Triumph is the keyword; you will hear the word triumph often is the chants that Anuttara performs. In Sanskrit the word is ‘Jai’ and you hear songs that have the words ‘Jai Sita Ram’ and ‘Govinda Jaya Jaya.’ ‘Jai’ means victory or triumph, but what are we victorious over? It’s the triumph over maya, over the delusion of the ego that creates negativity, self-doubt, despair, depression, anxiety, envy, all the agonies of the ego that we all know so well they don’t need to be listed. So all of these need to be triumphed over, but how do we triumph over them? First we have to become solid…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 20, 2012.

Excerpt: “All experience occurs within the Self and can be modified by the Self because it is actually all part of the Self, and a creation of the Self. But the Self never appears as an object, and the Self, to all intents and purposes to the scientific mind, does not exist. And this is why many have called Advaita and Buddhism forms of religious atheism. You could say that, but they are not atheism in the same sense as the materialist [who] doesn’t believe in God. The materialist is simply refusing to believe in Sunday school stories. But if the materialist had to actually consider what is the ultimate transcendental condition of experience, then that would be a different matter. So when the atheists attack God, they’re attacking a straw God, a false God. But when you ask ‘Who is doing the attacking?’ ‘Who is the source of the consciousness with that attitude?’ you can take that consciousness back to a level which cannot be understood. But it is fair to say that Advaita and Buddhism are forms of transtheism because no concept of God can ever capture the Self, not even the word Self. And that is why we often will say the Self is no self. And the metaphor is often used that what the Self is, is the space in which consciousness occurs. But even that is only a metaphor because the Self constitutes whatever space it is in which experience occurs but is not Itself that space. And therefore the Self is absolutely transcendent of all conceptualization, and the only way to reach it is by letting go of the attempt to do just that.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 13, 2012.

Excerpt: “Many people’s egos try to convince them that this knowledge is too difficult to understand, too subtle. And it’s true that the ego cannot understand this knowledge. And yet everyone has a deeper intuition and a recognition of the Truth when they hear it. But the reason why the ego can’t understand it is that it doesn’t want to, because to understand it would mean the death of the very ego that comes to understand its own unreality. But it’s clear that everyone understands because it’s there in our collective culture. This information is hidden in plain sight, like all the other secrets that society holds back from itself.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11, 2012.

Excerpt: “When we meditate we are detaching from the ego mind and all of its mundane concerns, and its pointless narratives, and all of its absurd fears and anxieties about life and death that are completely irrelevant to the infinite life of the Real Self. The Real Self alone is. The ego and the forms are merely temporary appearances and they do not have a consciousness of their own. The consciousness of the ego is only borrowed from the Self. It is a dream within a dream. When we subtract our attention and our identification from the form, the ego dissolves like a bubble that pops and we realize it never was. And all of its projections on the world never were. And in the state of the Formless Self we realize that the illusion of the world was only created by the language in the mind that labels everything and creates the deception of a subject-object duality. None of that is real.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, September 10, 2012.

Excerpt: “It is always important to remember why we are here before we begin and sometimes we take it for granted that we know why we are here.... In some cirlces what we are doing is called mysticism, but really there is no mystery to mysticism... or maybe the only mystery is why some people think it is so hard... because all we are doing in the mystical quest is recognizing who we are – recognizing our original true nature... but what makes it seem hard is that we have aquired a conditioned nature – a false nature so that we could adapt to the sickness of society and pretend that that is normal... and then we identified with all of the family signifiers, the cultural signifiers and all of the values of the society in which we live and we lost touch with our original nature... and once we bought into what our parents told us or implied between the lines or what we overheard or suspected or imagined or fantasized, and then what we were taught in school, mostly by fellow students but a little bit by teachers and then what we gain through all the disinformation of the media, has created a false self that is completely clueless about the true nature of what is real... and not only have we forgotten but we are not allowed to know – it is prohibited – there is a censor in the unconsciouss that was put in there like one of those internet filters you put in so kids cant watch the pornographic sites, they put that into each of us so that we couldn't see or know knowledge that was forbidden or unbearbale to the ego... and so that made us into our own worst enemy because your not allowed to see all the skeltons in the family closet and you are not allowed to see even more skeltons in the social closet or in the historic closet of all of human history and you are not allowed to know the true significance of our whole experience in this earth plane because we live in a very small box... but a point comes in our growth when we out grow that box and we need to explode it like a snake outgrows its skin and needs to let it go – shed it to grow another one that fits - but we are afraid because knowbody else is doing it except a few other mad people like in a group like this.... Thursday, September 06, 2012.

Excerpt: “…Because that’s what Kali Yuga is doing to everyone now. Whatever can break down is breaking down, whether it’s our cars, or our plumbing, or our egos, or our bodies, that’s what’s happening. But don’t wait to have everything taken away from you before you realize that you are that which cannot be damaged or taken away. Be one who dwells in that undamageable, unblemished perfection of being now so that such karmic events won’t be necessary to liberate you, and won’t cause suffering and disturbance. But that no matter what happens you will flow with it in grace, and joy, and love. And you will know that you need nothing, because you are the source of all.” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, September 5, 2012.

Excerpt: “Meditation is simply an opportunity to drop the illusion that you are a separate ego; to let the identification of mind and body fall away; and more importantly to let go of the identification of Self with mind. The Self is not the mind. You were not born with the mind; you were born with consciousness, awareness. Awareness that in its natural state is free: free of thoughts, free of images, free of desires, free of fear. But once the ego mind is created through the incorporation of language, with the desires, fantasies, fears imposed by the parents, family, society, larger global culture, then a knot is formed that keeps your awareness identified with mind. And the mind feeling [in] a state of lack, a state in which something is missing to make you feel contentment and wholeness and joy. And we mistakenly think we can find what we are looking for by thinking our way to it; and so we think furiously, constantly, chattering about what we want, what we don’t want, rehearsing how we’re going to deal with some future situation, hating some past situation, never in the present, and ever deepening the hole of lack. But there is no lack; the lack is only created by the illusory identification with a separate bodily entity.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 4, 2012.

Excerpt: “…It is as if you hear a program on the radio and you like the announcer and you put a picture of the radio up on the wall and say ‘that’s what I like.’ The voice that is coming out of that radio isn’t the radio, it’s coming from a thousand miles away. But you are identified with it as if the words coming out of your mouth belong to that body, they don’t. The problem is this: we don’t just have a radio, we have a machine that has a tape and a radio, and we have it set to the tape machine that just keeps repeating over and over again the loops of the ego and the super ego voices…” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, August 30, 2012.

Excerpt: "There is a very ancient metaphor in yoga that we talk about a lot and we include it in seminar one about the bucket of water that’s put out underneath the full moon and how the bucket represents the body and the water in the bucket represents the mind… and there seems to be a moon in the bucket as well, but is there really? That’s the illusion… the moon we could say represents the Self, but the moon in the bucket is not the Real Self – we could say it is the ego self… and usually the bucket is being disturbed and the water is vibrating and so you don’t even get a clear image of the moon… you get different splinters of the moon-like light but it doesn’t make sense – it is an ever changing puzzle because our minds are going too fast to get an even image that is clear of the Self… but then if we do get that clear image then we are under the illusion that we somehow have to get out of this bucket – I have got to attain liberation, but there is no such thing as liberation because the moon isn’t in the bucket to begin with… the light is projected into the bucket… the moon is always free… the moon is the soul and it doesn’t need to be liberated… so all of this struggling that we do falsely identified as a bucket that is trying to find the inner moon is all based on an illusion – there is no inner moon… and each bucket doesn’t have a different moon in it… and so there aren’t many different selves, there is only one… but then when you finally realize, huh… I was never in there to begin with, I was always the moon, even then you realize the moon only has the reflected light of the sun… even the soul is only carrying the reflected light of the Spirit… the Supreme Being… and in the middle of the night that Supreme Being isn’t even visible… the moon knows it but on earth it is not known… and it is that that we are… that which from the perspective of the ego mind that thinks it’s the bucket can’t even be seen or imagined because it is a completely non-objective reality… it is the consciousness by which you are aware of your being but that consciousness does not exist within the mind… the mind exists within that… and that light is always there day or night… and so rather than struggling to attain liberation or to gradually transcend the ego mind or to work out all of its problems and distortions and try to still the water, just realize that you are not in the bucket to begin with and let it go…." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 30, 2012.

Excerpt: “A Sat Yogi is one who knows oneself to be Ajata. Ajata is the unborn, the uncreated, the eternal, the all powerful Self. Do you know yourself to be Ajata? Do you know yourself to be all powerful? Every power is given you, but have you claimed it? You have been given the power of healing; you have been given the power of love; you have been given the power of truth; you have been given the power to conquer maya; the power to remain beyond suffering; the power to remain ever at peace; the power to remain in bliss; the power to be fearless; the power of silence; the power to stay awake in meditation. Have you claimed your powers? Or are you still a beggar before God? Or are you still attached to the false power of weakness, because you prefer to get pity than to claim the power and majesty of the Supreme One? Do you prefer to remain a child rather than to grow up to your full potential as the deathless Self?” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, August 27, 2012.

Excerpt: “Tat Tuam Asi: Thou Art That – very ancient mahavakya, I am That. That which is the ‘I’ of the individual is actually the Supreme Presence. Duality is an illusion. There is one Self, and each of us is That. Can we feel the truth of that mahavakya? Do we resonate with it? Do we surrender to that truth? Do we realize the bliss that comes with that realization? There is really nothing more to know or to study. Because in that state, when the individualized has returned to That, to the Supreme One, to the realization that you were always That, and eternally shall be, then the journey of karma on this wheel of reincarnation, of multiplicity, is complete. Tat Tuam Asi is the sound of our graduation ceremony, the angels will be singing that as we arise to the Supreme Light. And in that realization, all suffering falls away, all fear, all the narcissistic wounds carried by the ego, can finally be enjoyed from God’s strange sense of humor. And that Divine Supreme Perspective heals all in this world, in all worlds. And there is no one left to need to do anything, because all that happens occurs within the dream of God, in absolute perfection.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 23, 2012.

“We come here to discover what is real. And the deeper we inquire within, the more we realize that everything is impermanent in this world of experience; it’s fleeting, it changes – it has no true identity. Even people we meet have no true identity: at one moment they’re friendly, another moment they’re angry, one moment they’re here, another they’re gone, different personalities appear and disappear, moods, attitudes, understandings, none of it is permanent; it’s just a fleeting appearance. So all of you, all of us as appearances, as egos, as bodily beings, are completely unreal. And yet our lives revolve around this non-existent concern with an unreal being, an unreal being in an unreal world. Because the world is in constant change, nothing in this world is dependable: not the climate, not the ground under our feet, not the air, not the solar vibrations where you see the sun, not the water supply. There is no guarantee that our existence will continue even for one more minute, or even that this planet will continue to exist, none. So what is real? What do you build your life on? What do you depend on? Who are you?” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, August 23, 2012.

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 that is attempting to understand is itself the illusion that must be transcended… for we are the Absolute and have never been anything else… but to explain that to a mind that is identified with its body, with its gender, with its family, its nation and religion and language etc etc etc is almost impossible… and so the approach of most spiritual paths have been to gradually strip away these identifications until consciousness receives a glimpse of naked awareness in which concepts do not arise… no narrative drags one away from the source of one's being into some imaginary discourse about what is… and in that moment of naked presence then the entire mystery of that which is revealed becomes impeccably and infinitely clear but what also becomes clear is that it cannot be transmitted in language to anyone else. This is why the Buddha almost gave up before he began his teaching… you know he sat there – he attained Buddhahood – and then as he got up he realized this cannot be taught and then he sat looking at where he was sitting becoming enlightened for about seven days trying to figure out, “What do I do with this”? It’s impossible to communicate that which transcends this entire dimension of illusion and yet it is what we are now….” Recorded in the evening of Thursday, August 16, 2012.

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 these negative thought-forms and purifies the mind and the heart forever.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, August 14, 2012.

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, different emotions, different attitudes, different thoughts, contradictory, conflicting, feeling, and cognition states; whereas the Real Self that’s non-arising is eternal, unchanging, immutable – untouched by the chaos of the false self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 9, 2012.

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 order, they get bipolar, they get fragmented, they fall into a meltdown. This is now happening around the world because nearly everyone’s battery has gone dead.” Recorded in the afternoon of Thursday, July 26, 2012.

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 why the final stage is just laughter.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 19, 2012.

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 whom does this thought occur?’ ‘Who is witnessing even the judgment about the judgment?’ ‘Who is the ultimate perceiver?’…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, July 18, 2012.

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… that is very minor and disappointing… this one is eternal – liberating – it brings salvation, but it is very much an ecstasy. It is the ecstasy in which you are transported beyond… the experience begins in chakra four but then literally you are carried upward through the three worlds…" Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 12, 2012.

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 chaos and confusion, or all at once. And the only way to maintain the coherence of your own energy field and that of the sangha is to remain in inner silence – with your consciousness united with the Source.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, July 9, 2012.

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 ‘me’ requires being willing to cut our link with thoughts – to be in stillness. And the thoughts continue to emerge robotically. But what keeps the robot going, what keeps it fueled is our addiction to those thoughts. The robotic thoughts produce jouissance; they produce a kind of pleasure, an enjoyment, even though that enjoyment is painful. Every ego is sadomasochistic and it produces a kind of enjoyment in the same way that the dog enjoys the taste of its own bleeding gums when it’s chewing on a bone.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 5, 2012.

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 must complete our own dissolution of the ego to be able to offer as a conduit as a channel the divine energies. So we must get out of the ego mind and we must enter the divine mind. If you’re in the ego mind, you are not of any help to anyone, least of all yourself.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, July 2, 2012.

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?

Student Question: I find myself falling asleep during meditation, why is that? How can I observe the ego falling asleep?

Student Question: When one is trapped in the lower chakras, how does one recognize that one is trapped and how does one get out of them?