Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt: “Consciousness is energy—but a very different kind of energy than the kind that physicists tend to talk about,” explains Shunyamurti, research scientist at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating: we’re accumulating this most positive, or sattvic, level of the orgone energy, and through that we are producing a transformation of our consciousness, we are creating a power of healing—and many other potential powers that the yogis also studied, which are called siddhis. . . . And so if we focus on meditation as a scientific experiment, and give all of our attention to it—because the energy is accumulated through the payment of attention—and we turn our attention inward and don’t allow any distractions, and don’t allow any lowering of the wavelength through aggressive or negative or depressed or anxious thoughts, but thoughts that are of the highest kind, and then transcending thought altogether into silence—but a silence that is a silence of devotion, of l

Student Question: Something that I’ve been thinking, but haven’t been able to word it, is that, on one level we have swaha, which is like throwing your ego on the flame—pretty much giving, as you mentioned, but in an absolute way. What would be the other side of that? We call it “ego.” We call it “narcissism.” We call it “schizoid.” But I don’t understand that resistance, and I want to get it because I feel that that’s the problem: the refusal to give all.

Student Question: How is giving a part of being in the now?

Student Comment: In your last essay you talk about samadhi, and I wanted to know what the difference is between samadhi and the Ground of Being.

With all the changes we are experiencing, as “reality” is getting stranger and stranger, “it’s important to understand how to meditate, how to shut off the static in the mind to reach the true signal that’s coming from that Supreme Reality that’s trying to guide us, but that we don’t generally pay attention to because we’ve been indoctrinated that It doesn’t exist, and [that] we shouldn’t pay attention to it, it’s only our imagination, and we should only pay attention to what we can establish by the scientific method, etc., etc.,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so, we have to learn to make that shift into a higher dimension of consciousness. And the traditional yogic way of doing that—which is the earliest scientific method—true method of conscious transformation—is through an internalization, a turning around of our conscious energies. And in the meditative state, we do this in a seven stage process that will lead to samadhi.” “So the first stage is

Excerpt: “Each of us is the incarnation of Christ. Or of Buddha, if you prefer; or of Krishna—take your pick, it doesn’t matter, but we’ll use Christ tonight; you’re all of them. But do you realize it? Is that real for you, or is that just an intellectual idea? The process of transformation is taking this from an idea into a realization. . . . The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said that history could be divided into three phases. In the ancient world, people sacrificed what was really valuable to them . . . until, finally, Christ said ‘God doesn’t want that, actually. What God wants is you to sacrifice your lower nature. Sacrifice your suffering! Sacrifice your ego itself to God.’ . . . And so in order to escape from this hell realm that we have turned time into and our lives into . . . we must rise to the higher level of the cross where the fullness of God can be re-experienced , re-grasped as our own nature. . . . To do that though, we have to recognize that the scientistic worldview that we inherited sin

“The greatest epic in all history is the Mahabharata. This is the great epic of world history,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. The Mahabharata is about a time when every human is a god—thus the immensity of Hindu deities. These gods represent the entire population of the previous Sat Yuga (the golden age spoken of in every religion). And every religion prophesizes that this kingdom did exist, and that it will return. Recorded on the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, 2009.

“In the spiritual traditions of the East—and in fact universally, in the esoteric traditions, which includes Sat Yoga—a spiritual teacher is not one who makes any claim to goodness, or special closeness to God,” remarks Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But it is only a matter of having become bored with one’s ego narratives,” whether those be of righteous indignation, victimhood and depression, superiority/inferiority, etc. “When one throws those away and lives in silence—a silence that is a surrender to the Real, to what is True, behind all of those narratives . . . then one is approaching Liberation.” “St. Augustine, who is of course a very orthodox-approved Catholic saint, made a very interesting comment in one of his books. He says, ‘Whenever you touch God, you’re touching the devil.’ And in one of the books of Shinran . . . he said that the Pure Land, which is paradise, Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, is for evil people. . . . Why is that? . . . Because the narr

Student Question: I’m still contemplating this koan that I have been given, that “God does not know the ego.” I think some light is starting come through on this topic, but I wanted to check it with you. I think that I’m looking at this from a dualistic standpoint, but this must be a nondual understanding. Is that right? “Yes,” answers Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “That’s why in Christianity it is said that you cannot get to the Father except through the Son.” However, this does not mean that Christ is the only teacher through which one can reach God, but through any spiritual teacher “who can be an intermediary and know the ego from the place of Emptiness. . . . So it is a relationship with a being who is not in the place of ego and so there’s not a reflection back of one ego to another, and therefore a power struggle—cause there’s always paranoia when two egos meet: ‘Who’s gonna be on top?’ . . . And it’s only when at least one party to the dyad isn’t playing th

Student Question: What is this “Impossible Witness” that you talk about? “It is simply the agent of the ‘master narrative’ that holds the ego’s reality in place, without which, you’d feel a major disorientation,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Any kind of an ideological statement that can’t be backed up with true scientific reason—not scientism, but scientific reason—is an impossible witness. Today science itself promotes an impossible witness and has become a religion: it thinks it knows what happened before the big bang. It doesn’t, of course. . . . But those things are just purely speculation to maintain an orientation in reality because otherwise reality becomes a trip: we realize we have no control over it and no sense at all of what is going on, or what reality really is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday December 9, 2010.

Student Question: You say that whatever adjective that goes after the “I am” is wrong. So what do you think about those affirmations in which you say “I am the Light,” etc. Where is the mistake there? “They’re good antidotes against negative thoughts,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, ultimately, as long as we remain attached to words, then we are in the image of that rather than the reality of it. . . . So we want to be free from language, and from any other form of representation so that we can experience the Supreme Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.

Student Comment: Sometimes people say that the more attention you give to something, the more chance that it will have of manifesting. And we were talking about the state of the world, and how the military is doing this or that, and I feel that, sometimes, I put too much pressure on myself about not speaking of these types of things because of the amount of denial . . . “These are often difficult issues to face, that do not have solutions within ego-consciousness which is based on the loyalty to the kind of values that we have been trained to uphold,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute of Costa Rica. “And the vertical dharma has always been threatened by its inherent disloyalty to all worldly values.” The Buddha, for example, left his duty as a prince and ruler, as well as his family, to achieve enlightenment. “He did everything wrong, the ultimate sin, I mean the guy must have been riddled with guilt for all of this. And anybody in those days would have said to Buddha, ‘

“In Japan, during the last couple of years of World War II, the intelligentsia of Japan knew that they were going to lose the war,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And there was a Japanese philosopher . . . named Tanabe Hajime, who was tormented by the fact that he could not express himself in public. His whole life was about truth and expressing the truth, and serving the people. And he wanted to write articles and give lectures about how to deal with the trauma that Japan was going to face with the destruction of their empire and their way of life. And he was not allowed to say anything. And he became more and more anguished by this situation. And he didn’t know what to do.” And gradually he began to feel he was totally useless as a philosopher, he was a failure, he was a failure as a human being, and he had a complete meltdown. . . . And in that state of utter internal collapse, something extraordinary happened to him: his consciousness was translated to a high

Student Comment: Earlier we were discussing rites of passage, and it appeared to me that the military had something to do with that. And I wanted to know what your opinion was of that. “It used to function as a rite of passage, when there was still chivalry, and when warfare was hand-to-hand combat and bravery, and the other martial virtues of manhood, in particular, were developed. But that was a long time ago,” answers Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Now . . . it’s a video game. And somebody in Nebraska is firing a drone at somebody in Pakistan. They’re not in any danger; there’s no bravery involved. There’s no sense of the reality of facing an opponent that a samurai or someone else would have. And the rules of combat based on an ethic of recognition of the sacredness of one’s task. All of that. That was the culture of Japan, and in the Middle Ages, the culture of chivalry, has been lost.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Question: In the chakra map, we tend to move within the first three chakras. And in understanding how and why we do it, we become able to use the higher ones. But is it more balanced to move within all seven, or to be within the higher ones? “The higher chakras are sublimated versions of the lower chakras,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the lower chakras, when you are in and operating from them, they lead to suffering. And they are operated as defenses against anxiety that end up leading to very inaccurate forms of karma. And at the higher chakras, one has unveiled the Real Self that is transcendent of the individual organism, or ego-based identity, and is therefore no longer acting from egocentric—or even anthropocentric—motivations, but can act in harmony with the whole cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Question: When you were talking about the trauma that Japan faced in the war, I was realizing that I couldn’t really relate because I feel I’ve never identified with a nation or a culture, and I couldn’t imagine feeling trauma over my country losing a war. “It wasn’t just losing a war; it was losing their culture,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the whole of modern history is the destruction of one culture after another by the dominant globalizing culture of capitalism.” For the Japanese, however, the loss in the war had “profound effects, at that moment, because they were in denial. And it was that forcible coming out of denial, with the sudden dropping of bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that literally left the population speechless. That was shock and awe in the true sense. And not only Japan, but I think the entire world has not yet recovered from that." They [the Japanese] were in denial of this event happening, you mean the destru

Student Question: This is a two-part question: 1) How would you define humility, and 2) How does one go about becoming humble? “One short answer is the word itself: hum-ble. ‘Bal’ is Sanskrit for power. ‘Hum’ comes from the same word as ‘humus.’ To be exhumed, comes from the soil, the earth, the root, the foundation. So it is the power of the very foundation of our being,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it is the opposite of trying to have the pseudo-power created by an artificial superstructure of prestige, position, intelligence, money—any of the artificial ways people try to get power in the world; this [humility], is the power of the earth itself. . . . And right now the whole meaning of this moment in history is that all the false powers are falling: the economic powers, the political powers, the powers that rule from egoistic positions, are collapsing. And the only true power that will survive and stand is the power of the Divine Light that

“In meditation, what we are doing is simply returning to the recognition of the essence. And that essence—because that essence is indescribable—creates difficulties for the intellectualizing mind to grasp. And that’s what makes something that is actually extremely simple to seem very difficult,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And the ego created its identity by grasping to landmarks: people, places, things, etc. But it has become so enmeshed in all of its support lines that it is unable to get free, and it becomes “a spider trapped in its own web. And so we want to get out of the web. And we can only do that by realizing that we are the weavers of that web.” “In the West, the Platonic dictum of ‘Know Thyself’ has been the basic maxim of intellectual development. But the problem is: the self cannot know the Self. It would require two selves, one to know the other, and there is only one. And so because we demand to know the Self, we create another, false s

Student Comment: It seems the goal of one’s life is to be what you want to be but not because anyone else wants you to be that, right? For example, if you are planning on having a relationship, you should be in the relationship because you want to love someone, not because you want someone to love you. “Well,” begins Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “the state you're describing is a very rare state. There’s nearly always an unconscious agenda. That’s why we talk here about the ‘I’ of the statement, the statement we make to ourselves and to other people, and then the ‘I’ of the one who is enunciating that statement that usually has another agenda that is implicit within that statement. . . . Most people use words in order to not communicate with the other, in order to create miscommunication that will favor oneself.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.

There are three registers of consciousness that have been understood throughout the history of religion: the Atman (or Spirit), the soul, and the ego. The Atman is the purest level of consciousness, but as the entropic process of Maya takes effect, consciousness becomes diffuse and eventually more and more fragmented—as we see epitomized in the postmodern ego. “I use the analogy sometimes of a cake,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the Atman is an uncut cake, whereas the soul is a cake that’s still whole, but it’s been cut into slices, but it’s all there. And then when you get to the ego level, there’s only one slice left, and it’s your slice, and you're gonna hold on to it. . . . And then life becomes a war rather than a whole, as the cake was originally, in which we are not only able to enjoy it—we can have our cake and eat it—but because we are the cake.” This example can be compared to the Christian forms of love: agape, philia, and eros. But now the forces