Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt: “Meditation is simply abiding in the Self,” teaches Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Abiding in Brahman means bramacharya, that is the original state of purity. It’s the same as the kaivalya state that we have talked about before where the Purusha has extracted Itself from Prakriti. There’s no more interest in matter, in sensuality; desire falls away naturally. You’re repressing it, or suppressing it, it’s just not there because you are already all that is, what is there to desire? What is there to fear? . . . It is that level of consciousness in which one graduates from this phenomenal plane, this school in which we learn what is right and wrong, what creates suffering and what creates joy and bliss. And the ultimate bliss comes simply from abiding as the formless, eternal Presence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 17, 2011.

Student Question: Tonight in the study group we were studying chakra two, and that chakra two energies must come into consciousness and not be repressed. So how are these energies brought into consciousness? Does one have to engage in a sexual act in order to bring these energies into consciousness?

Excerpt: “There’s an old joke, I’m sure everyone knows it. . . . It was a joke about an academic scholar in the Vatican who was trying to understand the roots of apostolic celibacy, and he went to the original writings that were then copied by the scribes, and he found that one scribe made a mistake, he dropped out an ‘r,’ it was supposed to be celebrate!” recounts Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so the celebration was, originally, a coming together of those who were celibate, in solitude, in their inner solitude. . . . And only those who have realized the solitude of Self, and are no longer co-dependent on others, and don’t have voices in their minds that are attacking them, or causing them to have distorted self-images, etc., are truly free to celebrate, because everyone else is suffering and in agony. . . . But in any case, this was the original meaning of it, and the first celebration was of that Liberation from the ego that is co-dependent on others, both

Student Question: How can one return to innocence?

Student Question: In the book that we have been discussing, Ashram Dharma, the author mentions the importance of the guru for maintaining the energy field of the ashram. In ashrams in which the guru has passed on, or if the guru has several ashrams, how does his energy permeate the ashram, or does it? Excerpt: “The true guru is within. And each of us must take responsibility for manifesting the guru. The guru is not an external person. The external person, who is often referred to as the guru, is simply the one who has the job to remind you that the guru is within,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s like the conductor of an orchestra: the conductor doesn’t make any music, but just points to the others who make all the music. So there’s nothing special about the guru, except to hold that space of Emptiness . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 9, 2011.

Student Question: Could you speak a little bit about duty? We are given, by the culture, definitions of what a good mother or a good daughter, etc., is. But then we have karma, in which we are karmically indebted to the families that we are born into. How do we ascertain what our true duties are to our family and to God?

Excerpt: Each of us, at one level, is a separate individual cut off from each other by our own thoughts, in a bubble of our own concerns, phantasies, desires, drives, fears, anxieties, etc. . . . And yet at another level—a more important level—we are all one,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the only friend, ally, that will not abandon us in this moment is the Supreme Being. And through that alignment, we can create, on this horizontal plane, relationships that we can also trust because we can see and meet and recognize other beings who are also in that state of unconditional love and integrity. . . . So that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating. And by meditating together, we’re offering each other the gift of that divine energy.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 3, 2011.

Student Comment: I was wondering if you could explain a little bit—especially to those who are coming for the first time and are about to become parents or have small children—how the community could help in their spiritual evolution.

Excerpt: “So a Satsang is an opportunity to experience bliss together,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Bliss is our natural state. It’s the state that we would be in 24/7 if we didn’t obscure it with a cloud of ego noise: chatter, worry, anxieties—all of these that are built on illusions. . . . The problem is today we have imbibed, as an indoctrination, this belief in materialism, that we are just bodies, and all there is, is matter and motion, and there’s no higher power and no wisdom. It’s all chance, random—that whole Darwinian ideology. And we’ve been taken in by it, so that we no longer tend to make the effort to find out for ourselves if there is, actually, a transcendent reality. But if you’re willing to make the effort, you will find that you can penetrate through the box that we call this phenomenal plane, and that there is infinite vastness beyond what we think of as reality. . . . And that’s why yogis recommend leading a simple lifestyle. Don’t create unn

Student Comment: It’s become clearer to me tonight, as you’ve been speaking, of the importance of joining a spiritual community, and that it’s the hardest challenge for one to undertake in terms of giving. I was raised in a culture that was still very family-based, a family that will do everything for you. But in a spiritual family, one must break the box of merely biological connection and family values in order to transcend to the next level of maturity and growth in which all are accepted as family.

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