Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

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 lev

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

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.