All blessings! 2012 is here. This is the year of the return of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, the meeting of the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial, the earthly and the celestial. The culmination of our pilgrimage to God consciousness, to Self-Realization, must occur this year.

We must learn to simply be, and stop desperately trying to become. But this is the year to realize that we already are that which we seek. And it is the year to shift from the mind into the heart. Most of all, it is the year to rest in the Heart. Simply be in the state of divine love, with a silent mind, in the stillness of transcendent inner peace.

This is the year we must let go of all of our hatred, our anger, confusion, nostalgia, loss and lack, attachment, traumas of the past, fantasies, desires, fears, all of that—just let it go and simply be, be in serenity, in oneness with God.

And most important, maybe most difficult, is to let go of the chatter that invades the mind and keeps one at a mundane level of pettiness and of ego, rather than realizing the infinity of your true being when you are in the boundless openness of pure silent awareness.

So let us empty the mind of futile thoughts and discover who we are when all that wallpaper is removed from our minds. We shall become transparent to the Spirit that has been veiled by the noise and distractions of the egoic illusion.

To do that, we must maintain the mind in what in yoga practice is called eka chintan. Eka is “one;” chintan is “thought.” Stay with only one thought, one intention. No matter what we are doing, there should be only one thought in the mind, of the Almighty One, our Supreme Beingness. This thought will turn into the blissful realization of who I am, it will bring the joy and awe of the divine Presence. But there must be loveful surrender to God in every moment.

If you practice coming back regularly to eka chintan, then very soon you will master the skill of staying constantly in the sublime thought and sweet feeling of eka chintan, throughout the day. And then your meditations will easily enter into the blissful silence of the purest Samadhi. You will feel the grace of God encompass you, and permeate you, and dissolve all illusory separation from our Source, from the beauty and the love and the power of the Supreme Presence, who is invoking us now to return to the supernal light.

The ego is just a cloud over the Sun. But always remember that the Sun is here. Let all the clouds disperse, and allow the rays of the Sun of your Supreme Beingness to shine into your consciousness and illumine the world.

There are no obstacles except your fear of the infinity of your own Being. This is the year to overcome the fear of the Real Self, your fear of Love, the fear of eternity and boundlessness, and traverse the illusion of finitude into the fulfillment of your existence, into the fullness of infinite Being.

May you give your consciousness and the collective consciousness of our sacred planet the ultimate gift of reunion with the Source, the Almighty One, Who is the fount of all miracles. May you surrender your mind and heart to the Supreme Self, here and now, in this auspicious moment.  In that way, this year of 2012 will unfold truly as the dawn of the new Solar Age. You are the Sun who must now rise.

Namaste,

Shunyamurti

[The above essay is a transcription of Shunyamurti's 2012 New Year's Retreat teaching at Arunachala Costa Rica.]

To understand the true significance of the extraordinary world events that are unfolding around us, we must activate what Sat Yogis call our buddhi, our capacity for multidimensional integrative intelligence. When we do that, we become buddhas. Buddhas have access to the omniscient wisdom of the Akashic dimension and its unlimited storehouse of information. We need that information now, and thus we need to realize our buddha-nature, if we are to navigate accurately through these apocalyptic times.

Yoga is the original science of consciousness. It was far ahead of our current materialist pseudo-science of consciousness, the one that is looking futilely at our neurons and synapses to find the meaning and source of consciousness. Modern science is a joke when it comes to consciousness. And since everything eventually comes to consciousness, modern sciences, other than physics, are of little help to us. The scientistic mindset remains determined to deny teleology, God, and the Akashic records (or the Alaya-Vigyana in Buddhist terminology), or any other concept that would enable us to grok the fact that we are caught in a spacetime vortex that is bringing a rapid end to the world as we have known it and hurling us into a new phase and level of existence. Since the velocity of the vortex is accelerating at a mind-boggling rate, we must activate our buddhi now, while it is still possible to do so, to have an influence on the outcome of this trans-cosmic event, so that we can arrange to get spit out into a new world that is worth living in. Few of us realize the real nature of our power to influence events. This is also a result of our indoctrination into a materialist culture that is clueless regarding consciousness. So the study of the original science of consciousness, sat yoga, is essential.

By the way, the term yoga has been degraded in these end times of kali yuga to refer to a form of physical exercise. None of what currently goes under the name of yoga, which focuses on asanas and pranayamas (stretching and balance poses plus breathing techniques) was part of the original yogic science. The original form of yoga focused on the development and use of our capacity of attention in order to discover the ground of Being, referred to in Sanskrit as Sat. Once consciousness merges in Sat (which is also another name for God-consciousness), many other powers, or siddhis, can be attained. These correspond to the same attributes that physicists have discovered to function at the quantum level of reality, such as interconnectivity, the capacity to be in more than one place at a time, to convert from particle to wave form, the capacity to transcend time, and to perceive the dimension of eternity that permeates time (realizing the unity of samsara and nirvana, as the later Buddhist yogis would put it), and so on.

The immersion in Sat, a state known as Samadhi, is the goal of authentic yoga. This achievement of Sat-mind comes with the side-benefits of chit and ananda (divine intelligence and the bliss of infinite love). So it is worth the effort to become a Sat Yogi, since it is the key to happiness, wisdom, and ultimate redemption. By the way, all the current religions began as schools of Sat Yoga, but gradually, as these schools became politically powerful, they were infiltrated and co-opted by human egos with lower agendas, and eventually they were reduced to the condition of fossils, caricatures of their original form, and dogmatized into media of social control.

After the above excursus, let us return to our main topic. To re-establish the science of consciousness for the postmodern mind, which has been reduced to a condition of attention deficit disorder and thus cannot practice Sat Yoga effectively, we can still awaken and activate the buddhi by examining two well-known phenomena that have been conclusively established as real—even though mainstream scientists largely steer clear of both, fearing punishment by the inquisitors of the scientific establishment.

Questioner: Hello master. I have two questions, one involves Jesus and the other involves suffering in the world.

Questioner: Shunyamurti, you have mentioned how prayer can heal others, I was wondering if you can address how to pray effectively. The heart has to be involved but there has always been two schools. The ones who pray asking, and the ones who pray thanking, as if what is asked for has already come to pass.

I would be forever grateful if he could clarify the mechanics of prayer. Thank you.