The basic practice of sat yoga is very simple: Just be. This, of course, is more difficult than we like to realize. If we understand why that is, then we are halfway to liberation. So let us go over the logic of the illusory bondage from which we are interested in escaping.

The reason that simple advice like “just be” is not sufficient to enable most people to gain spiritual liberation is that our current level of normal ego-consciousness is completely out of touch with our being. We cannot even understand the word ‘being’ since we have never experienced it, and therefore our minds distort it to signify permission to regress to primitive ego states, rather than to transcend the ego and its illusory charade of being. This is why the traditional approaches to Self-realization based on such apparently simple (though really quite subtle) formulae as ‘be here now’ or ‘thou art That’ or ‘I am Brahman’ are bound to fail. It is not that these formulae are incorrect. It is that we too easily deceive ourselves into believing we understand such statements when in fact we do not.

This is because the contemporary ego is not in its right mind. The ego today is in a state of intense, malignant, and desperate narcissism. Our current form of narcissism is more intense than that of yesteryear because it is reinforced on all sides by society. We are virtually mandated by social pressure to live in a state of heightened egocentricity. The narcissism is malignant because it is balanced by no redeeming countervailing tendencies. The current social climate is so cynical and corrupt that one need do nothing to earn approval except get ahead financially or look good in a bathing suit. Nobility of character, sweetness of demeanor, high ideals, humility, seriousness of purpose, charitable acts, concern for the welfare of others, have all become subjects of disparagement. Only ‘geeks’ act from such motives, according to the current ideology of materialistic pseudo-individualism.

But even for those who are committed to higher ideals the suggestion to ‘just be’ remains insufficient to put them on the right track. This is because our being has become confounded with our thinking process. The famous formula of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” is symptomatic of the problem. We have so lost touch with our being that we can only demonstrate to ourselves that we are by representing our being in language. In fact, the opposite is true. Descartes would have been closer to the truth if he had argued, “Because I think compulsively, and my mind is constantly full of chatter, I have become unaware of my underlying being.”

So the phrase ‘just be’ means: stop thinking. Only when we halt the production of mental constructs can we recover our connection to our being. This is easier said than done, of course. We are thought addicts. No matter how banal and irrelevant the thought, most of us prefer a mind filled with words than a mind that is empty and fully present. This is a strange phenomenon. We cannot seem to rest in a state of serenity, unless we first exhaust ourselves physically or trick ourselves with absorption in some external activity, or adopt an auxiliary ego to do the thinking for us, as happens when we fall into a hypnotic trance.

It is important to understand why this aversion to peace of mind. Since inner silence is the key to learning, to concentration, to creativity and to relating to others, without that capacity our lives will remain trapped in a very small narcissistic box. Why is the ego so afraid to be present?

The ego in its typical state is like a dog chasing its own tail. It is desperately trying to catch itself, to grasp who and what it is. Therefore, most egos feel a powerful urge to stare into mirrors. And many egoic relationships (including that of parents and children) have the clear underlying purpose of enjoying imagining how the other sees us—and controling the other’s image of us through a variety of psychological maneuvers that make up the bulk of what psychotherapy is then required to undo.

But of course all those efforts of control are futile anyway, since all one can hope for from them is to establish a positive ego-image. But the ego always knows in its heart that the image is false. And thus beneath its brave front, the ego dwells in a permanent state of anxiety. The ego’s deepest longing and deepest terror is to know itself. It is terrified because of the secret knowledge that it is not what it has pretended to be. It knows it will one day have to be unmasked as a fake. And it feels barren, uncreative, and stupid; it can foresee the day when it will be publicly revealed as an idiot standing before the world naked and guilty for all the harm its false bravado has caused.

A sat yogi is simply someone who has digested all that and has moved on to the day after. Paradoxically, sat yoga is the opposite of itself. Since ‘sat’ means our essential being and ‘yoga’ means union, superficially sat yoga ought to mean the effort to unite with our being. On the contrary, sat yoga means giving up the futile chase to attain union with being. The real union comes ironically from realizing its unattainability. You cannot catch your tail. But your tail is part of you. You don’t need to catch it. ‘Just be.’

Of course, these words can only be heard correctly by one who has overcome the tendency to be seduced by the passions of the lower chakras. ‘Just be’ does not mean to give oneself over to the unholy desires of the ego. To fall into a maelstrom of rage, insatiable sexual activity, or addiction to food, alcohol, or other substances is not to be, but rather to try to escape the feelings of lack, abandonment, badness, and non-being. Paradoxically, it is our vague but anxious intuition that we have no real being that leads us into nihilistic destructiveness. The false exits of the lower chakras must be locked up, so that one has no choice but to learn to be, to digest the shadow of the ego, to transform the hatred and dread at the core of our unconscious, and to accept the truth of our radical aloneness.

Since our being is pure subjectivity, any attempt to reify our being automatically fails. Whatever we think we are cannot capture the part of us that is thinking that thought. Awareness escapes all nets that we create in which to capture it. Our essence is freedom.

In other words, we cannot know who we are. The Self is unattainable as an object of knowledge. And of course we cannot know who someone else is either. This is why egoic relationship is impossible. It is based on flawed assumptions. Therefore, relationships generally end in frustration and impasse. Friendships usually petrify into ritualized transactions lacking depth. Marriages tend to become either endless angry tirades and withdrawals or cold, inert nights of the living dead.

These dynamics occur not only at the individual and family level, but throughout human reality, including that of national and international (non)relations. This is the problem that is paralyzing the human race. Either we find a way to surmount the angry, power-hungry lovelessness of the ego or we will be destroyed by its collective death drive.

The practice of sat yoga is a way to escape this trap. It begins with the realization that none of us knows our essential nature. We are in exile from our real being. To come out of exile, we must accept that this is the human condition. Ignorance is our fate. To realize that our self-ignorance is structural, inherent to our being, is already to advance to the first level of self-knowledge.

To grasp fully the significance of the statement “I cannot know who I am,” is to pierce the veil of narcissism. It is to recognize that all self-images are false and ridiculous. It implies that “I exist only as an absence, an emptiness.” To realize that emptiness is our nature frees us from having to put up a false front. It enables us to drop at least some of our anxiety. But then we can take the next step: to realize the emptiness of emptiness. In other words, there is no ‘I’ even to realize its emptiness. Even that I, the one that comments on its absurd situation, is just hot air. Thus, there is no infinite regress of I after I after I, each one reflecting on the emptiness of the previous one. There is no I and never has been. The ‘I’ is only a trick of language.

The illusion of ‘I’ is a necessary part of socialization. It is a convenient fiction with which to install internal structure in our children, to inculcate in them ideals that further their education and their ability to differentiate themselves from the herd. But once a person can stand alone and think independently, that illusion of ego-self must be dissolved. In traditional societies, there were spiritual teachers, gurus, shamans, rites of passage and mystery cults to help people to attain ego transcendence and Self-realization. Today, our religions and therapies are failing to provide the cutting of the egoic umbilical cord that alone can turn those who are physically adult but psychologically still children into true adults. This is the meaning of spiritual liberation. Sat yoga is a process that is filling the void in the performance of that essential function.

Once the mind stops producing I-laced thoughts, there is an awakening from the egoic trance. At that point, both sides of the subject/object duality fall away. Not only does the objectification of subjectivity come to an end; simultaneously, what had been perceived as the world of objects is recognized as the astonishing expression of the emptiness itself.

In Mahayana Buddhist terms, there is the double realization that nirvana is samsara, and samsara is nirvana. Or: Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. In Kashmir Shaivite terms, it could be said that there is the double realization that ‘I am Shiva, the Supreme Self’; and that ‘I, Shiva, have become the universe’. ‘All that is, is I, Shiva’. Or in terms used in Advaita Vedanta: ‘I am Brahman’, the Absolute. The world seen as separate from the Absolute is Maya, illusion. But once liberated from Maya, Atman recognizes both itself and world as nothing other than Brahman. So all the different schools of Eastern wisdom come to the same understanding, using different but equivalent terminology. The same is ultimately true of the Western religions, when understood in their esoteric dimensions.

But when we consider such a statement as “I am Shiva” or “I am Brahman” or “I am That” we must keep clearly in mind the non-dual significance of that equation. It it is not the case that there is a personal I identified with a body and a name and a history that has the property of being infinite light and love. Rather, what must be realized is that there is only infinite light and love and awareness and that this rapturous awareness, rather than a human person, is the reality behind the illusory word ‘I’.

Thus, sat yoga is nothing new and nothing different from the understanding that has always been taught, in every culture, by those who have realized the Self. The only word of caution is to beware of deviations from the essential insight, deviations that can snare the ego into a subtle continuation of its narcissism, individual or collective. Such deviations can include an over-emphasis on the physical postures of hatha yoga; or an undue emphasis on the state of being of another, either that of a living teacher or that of a founding father of a religion, like Krishna, Christ, or Buddha; or an emphasis on ritual, dogma, holy scriptures, visions, supernatural healings, or the achievement of other extraordinary powers. Any of the above can encourage the ego-mind to fester.

Of course, the most common deviation is to make sat yoga, or whatever one calls one’s practice, from advaita to zen, into yet another ego identity. To master zen does not mean to become a zen master. To attain yoga does not mean one has become a yogi. All these nouns can be occasions for the re-starting of the egoic illusion. This is what has been called ‘spiritual materialism’. It is the mistaken concretization of the ineffable Self. The Self is not a something or someone. We are the pure process of Emptiness becoming different moment by moment, our only mark of identity being difference itself. Remember that no one has a monopoly on truth—because there is no one. There is only the truth, the unspeakable truth. Once spoken, it is already lost.

So that brings us back to the fact that the only way to escape the trap of the egoic illusion is constant practice, constant remembrance of the Emptiness that is the Self, constant recognition of the presence of Shiva encompassing and illumining the illusory personal identity. Shiva, the Lord of the Dance, is eternally dancing on the dreaming dwarf that is the human ego. Awakening is the simple realization that the dwarf is the dream and Shiva the reality: this is the final implication of the ancient formula, ‘I am That’. But what it all comes down to is: Just be.

Namaste,
Shunyamurti