Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt: “When we meditate,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “we are making effort to reach our own natural state of being. It’s odd that you have to make effort to be natural, but this is how far away the human being has come from its own nature. Rather than having a nature any longer, the human being is conditioned by culture. The ego is an artificial construct that’s created and maintained by culture. . . . And we learn the rules of that culture and the intentions that we are supposed to live for, the values we are supposed to live by, and we become entrained by language. And from then on, pure consciousness, in its divine nature, gets filtered through this construct of what Lacan, the psychoanalyst, called ‘signifiers,’ language—master signifiers that determine our identity. And you become the subject of a signifier, of a certain set of words that determine the patterns of your life and the curvature of your emotional space, and that result in the repetition of va