Essays
Essays (73)
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.
The goal of spiritual development is the purification of love. Love is our innermost essence, our nature, and our fulfillment. But the love that is the very life energy of our Being is occluded by the false consciousness that developed in childhood and which has been petrified by unconscious conflicts, adaptation to social norms, and entrancement by ideologically determined limitations of our horizons. To free our minds from such constraints and open our intellects and hearts to our vast untapped potential, as individuals and as a united community of God-realized beings, is the focus of aspiration of the great work of self-transformation.
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.]
Many people still want to waste time arguing—over how serious a crisis is this really; or, whether any leader can be trusted to guide us through the transition; or, whether the vaunted goal of transcendence of the ego is even more than a mirage; or if renunciation of egoic jouissance is useful, healthy, and a necessary part of a redemptive path; or whether grace will simply descend upon us all one day, no matter if we are meditating and fasting, or drinking beer and watching tv.
Thankfully, there is no more time for such barren debates. Civilization is breaking apart; unpredictable catastrophes are occurring daily in every part of the world; the ecological die-off accelerates, murdering our oceans and our lands; the climate continues to morph our sacred planet savagely into a world that is uninhabitable; while armies and bands of guerrillas everywhere continue an irrelevant armed struggle, either to defend or to overthrow a system that is doomed, no matter which side wins.
The fall of the guru as a living presence in high culture is part of the general movement of consciousness into materialism and away from spirituality—indeed it is a part of the loss of high culture as a whole. Religious organizations and lineages have lost credibility not only because the culture has marginalized them, but more importantly because they have failed to live up to their own teachings. Corruption has destroyed the religions of the world.
But such assertions of the existence of specific dimensions of impossibility evade the radical ubiquity of impossibility as the hallmark of existence tout court. Impossibility is always and everywhere. There is no relation of any kind—not just sexual. Even friendships are based on illusion. No colleagues are really in the same league. Our words are riddled with ambiguities, our desires with unconscious conflicts and counter-desires. Our identities are inauthentic. We are imitations of imitations. Finding oneself is impossible. Discovering truth is impossible. There is no credible knowledge. No scientific theory lasts for very long (although its lifespan can be prolonged by being turned into an ideological given; in other words, a religious belief, as has happened with Darwinism—which cannot explain a long list of scientific observations, ranging from the Cambrian explosion to the fact of eco-systems to the irreducible complexity of even the most apparently simple microbiological structure). The impossibility of understanding the world or each other or oneself is at least useful in deflating the arrogance and grandiosity of the narcissistic ego. Unfortunately, narcissists can easily remain in denial of their own impossibility for a long time, until karma catches up with them.
The crisis we face at the sociopolitical level is one of legitimacy of authority. The OWS movement (Occupy Wall Street) and the Indignado movement in Spain and other anti-austerity movements all over Europe, following on the so-called Arab Spring, not to mention student movements and general protest movements in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are simultaneously rising to a crescendo.
The artist is a shaman. The artist’s role, especially in the West, has always been to alter the state of consciousness of the viewer, and to force the big Other, the capital “O” Other, the collective superego, to face its own shadow—as well as to face the super-consciousness, the One that is beyond the Other, that it denies.
The collective superego denies that there is any power greater than itself. That is why powerful nations, identifying with the big Other, can appropriate the right to invade smaller countries or otherwise determine the destiny of our planet. But this hubris, whether played out on the scene of international politics or within a family system or even within a single individual mind, can never be successful.
The power of karma will eventually restore justice and balance to the world. One of the most potent instruments of that power is the artist. The artist reveals the higher Truth to an arrogant establishment that claims hegemony over the world. And it is that revelation that then moves the conscience of the world toward reconciliation of the great powers with the greatest Power of all. This archetypal battle of vision between the artist and the political establishment has created much of the tension that has formed the trajectory of history. In this context, even religions can be considered as works of art. Religions begin as visions of Truth, and become refuges within which the arts can flourish. But the religious establishments soon become battlegrounds themselves, being appropriated in time by the big Other, and the artist is soon cast out once again into exile.