Essays
Essays (89)
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.
In other words, from the Sat Yoga perspective, the prior God-image, that of the wrathful Father, would punish us for our sins, but the new God-image, the Son of Love, chooses meek submission unto death over violent retribution. This state of higher consciousness becomes our own through faith, which is identification or imitatio dei, and thus what really dies on the cross is the superego, the vengeful angry god of chakra three—meaning that through the act of tolerant, compassionate overcoming of anger, we are reborn as the Real Self, or in Christ-consciousness, and liberated from our ego, and thus from our sins.
This is all that can be expected of a false self. Once imagined, through the implantation of the I-thought and its gradually increasing attendant complex of signifiers, self-images, and signature emotions, the ego must keep its auto-illusion rolling along to avoid the fantasized catastrophe of ego death and depersonalization, which it depicts to itself as the ultimate dread, horrific lack, lostness, and abandonment in a barren void.
All such negative thought-forms are the real terrorist attacks, perpetrated on our entranced consciousness by the ego apparatus upon itself. These self-attacks, the false flag operations of the inner censor, originally a stimulus overload barrier grown out of control, can burgeon into full-blown anxiety attacks, which can then in turn bloom into psychosomatic symptoms and a morbid fear of both death and life. In fact, all psychopathology can be traced back to such auto-terrorism of the false self.
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.