Essays (39)
Spiritual Essays by Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute, on a wide variety of topics ranging from the goal of the spiritual path, to enlightenment and liberation, psychoanalysis and ego dynamics, and even quantum physics.
From Tragic Love to Blissful Love: The Path of Sat Yoga
One of the great thinkers of the twentieth century who has explored the unconscious mind of human beings, perhaps more profoundly than anyone in history, is a French theorist named Jacques Lacan. Toward the end of his life, he made a very important pun in French on the word symptom, referring to it as Saint Thom, which in French is pronounced the same as symptome. He was alluding to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great Catholic philosopher. Lacan implied that every symptom is our attempt at sainthood. Every love object becomes our cross to bear, and the site of our crucifixion.
The difficulty in explaining the meaning of Self-realization is that the mind tends to understand everything from within the paradigm of subject-object duality, and that is the very obstacle to the Self-realization we wish to achieve.
That dualistic paradigm, which is illusory, structures language itself, so the very categories of thought by which we attempt to understand ourselves, prevent understanding from occurring. This is the double bind on the symbolic level.
The more intelligent we become in terms of being able to manipulate symbolic forms, the more alienated we become from the Real that lies beyond the realm of symbols. And so we can say that Self-realization is a matter of surrender of the power of symbolic manipulation, investigation, and articulation to the higher power of Presence.
True Sat Yogis must be members of the KGB. In this case, of course, KGB does not refer to the defunct Soviet intelligence agency. Rather, it means to be those who vow to always act with KGB—Kindness, Generosity, and Benevolence—toward everyone we meet, but especially toward our spiritual community.
We need to act with KGB-consciousness because we know that in these final days of Kali Yuga everyone who is not a true Sat Yogi is in a state of hyper-sensitivity, emotional fragility, paranoia, lost-ness and confusion. So we must offer KGB—here, it also means Kali Good-bye Blessings—to help people recognize that it is time to return to the Light, to leave behind this plane of illusion and merge once more into the Supreme Reality. We can only give that message, non-verbally of course, if our consciousness is already united with the Supreme One.
Most people today, before they enter a spiritual path, are made miserable by a mind that is out of control. The ego mind is wild, savage, selfish, filled with lusts, anger, greed, demands, judgments, hostile disregard for the feelings of others, it is utterly self-ungovernable—and yet at the same time it is weak, unbalanced, irrational, emotionally unstable, incapable of perseverance, humility, or clarity, or of full dedication and cooperation with others. Yogis refer to the ego-mind as the monkey-mind. The first task of a new yogi upon entering the path to the Supreme Liberation is gaining control of this monstrous monkey mind.
Someone asked recently if the teachings of Sat Yoga are frozen, or if they are evolving. It was clear that the questioner had some objection to certain teachings and wanted them to change. But the question of the evolution of spiritual teachings goes beyond that issue. So it is important to clarify this matter for all our students. The answer has to take into consideration a number of factors.