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.
The line that separates sanity from madness has never been clear. In fact, it is not clear that such a line ever existed. This is because what passes for sanity today is in fact still a kind of madness. Even the psychoanalysts admit that normality is neurosis, a form of mental illness. They also admit that one of the most tenacious forms of psychosis is what they call normotic disease, meaning the insane need to appear normal. What if all normality is really normotic? This underlying insanity of the normal is becoming more evident every day as normal people and societies fail to adapt to reality, fail to respond to the climatic and other changes in our natural and social world that should put us all on red alert. Instead, we are being terrorized by propaganda regarding conspiracies that are themselves delusional. Reality-based discourse has become impossible.
Aliens, Angels, Apocalypse: An Advaita Perspective
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.
We have entered a period of epistemological chaos. The true condition of our world, indeed the very nature of our phenomenal reality, including agreement regarding the meaning of knowledge itself, is completely up for grabs. Not only are we witnessing rapid paradigm shifts and schisms within mainstream science, but also, and more dangerously, the politically motivated suppression of authentic discoveries and insights has led to epistemological blowback on every front. Every established authority has been de-legitimized. This has led to the rise of a new and unprecedented kind of discourse, which can be categorized as psychotic knowledge.
To call it psychotic is not to disparage it, but to recognize that such knowledge is produced by ripping apart the fabric of consensual reality. What pours through that tear in the discourse of conventional sanity may be brilliant with lucid transcendental insight and it may equally be speckled with nuggets of paranoid fantasy and archetypal imagery serving the narcissistic ego. It is psychotic from the perspective of the hegemonic paradigm that cannot permit multiple realities that elude the control and deny the legitimacy of the materialist construct. Coping with the accelerating explosion of psychotic knowledge, and the general contamination of the current information deluge with every sort of misinformation and disinformation, will become ever more challenging. It may, therefore, be useful to establish some guidelines that will enable us to maintain our sanity while remaining open to new horizons of possibility.
We can trace this problem back to the period immediately following the Second World War, when the government of the United States created a national security establishment and a general secrecy state. The geostrategic push to gain total hegemony over all global political actors had to remain covert. More and more information became classified as top secret, not only in areas of normal politics, but also in the sciences. Some of this rush to restrict the flow of information was a response to the intrusion of alien spacecraft into our skies. Since the government had no adequate response to this threat, the existence of such entities had to be denied and ridiculed. Many careers of honest observers of such phenomena were destroyed by that disinformation campaign.
Shunyamurti’s Spiritual Message for the New Year 2011
Those who have eyes to see have already long recognized that we are descending ever deeper into the final apocalyptic vortex of Kali Yuga. We recognize that the archetype of apocalypse has been activated, not because it is so written in some sacred text, but because it is a matter of scientific observation. The physical sciences, including those of ecology and climate change, point clearly to the mass extinction that is underway, as well as the mega-disasters ahead for the human species. But beyond those disciplines, there are more subtle levels and kinds of knowledge that we ought to be studying, if we wish to understand the times we are living in.
Yogic science includes not only the physical sciences, but also, and more importantly, the many interrelated sciences of consciousness. If we summate what we can extract from such fields as sociology, psychoanalysis, archetypal psychology, political science, economics, chaos theory, and complexity, as well as that which is knowable because the facts are publicly available, but which remains unknown, or at least unspeakable because subject to ideological taboo, we can graph the coming events quite easily. If we add what can be downloaded by yogic mindwork from the akashic noosphere, then the case for affirming the shift in the velocity of the vortex is clear.
The fall of the world into the darkness of chaos, disintegration, and destruction will doubtless accelerate drastically in 2011. But what is essential for all true Sat Yogis to keep in mind is that the imminent death of our global civilization and ecosphere that the coming events portend is really the prelude to the birth of an even higher and more glorious culture of divine life and light. Shiva the Benevolent One works in wondrous ways. The new cycle of Creation will be born out of the ruins of the old, corrupted, demonic world. And now we are very close to the rebirth of the Kingdom of Heaven on our Earth. Reclaiming our own authentic Christ-consciousness is necessary, however, to bring about the most auspicious unfolding of this potential.
All the world’s religions have prophesied about this time. And now we have the exquisite good fortune to be living through the extraordinary climax and denouement of our astonishing world-historic drama of human and cosmic consciousness. For each of us, this is the moment of ultimate trial. Our souls are being tested in the scales of righteousness. We must have the courage and the strength to choose the highest path of total surrender to Allah. It is for the purpose of supporting souls in making the right choice, the choice to attain eternal spiritual Liberation, and to serve as a conduit into the next age of pure love, that our spiritual community exists. When a soul does choose the true path of self-emptying—through psychic purification, detachment, sacrifice of ego, and merger with God—many of the secrets of the Creation and the Creator are soon revealed. Revelation in turn leads to ultimate redemption.
This year will be the last opportunity for those in the privileged Western world to have the luxury of time to prepare. It is important to come out of denial. The crisis is upon us. We must gain mastery over the mind. We must learn to live in the complete and profound remembrance of God at every moment. We must transcend and redirect all the egoic drives and harness their energy for the ascension of Spirit. We must become beings of true charity and infinite love. The kundalini can only rise when we have let go of the anchor that binds us to the lower chakras. This is the time to break free of the hold that sexual and sensory desires have on us. This is the time to be free of our imaginary self-image and all the baggage that entails. This is the time to rise even beyond the symbolic focus on intellectual understanding. We need that understanding, but we must not be held back by it. Once we understand, then we must silence the mind and enter the higher dimension of pure awareness.
In this coming year, most of us are in for many surprises.
“I saw a shooting star with a luminous tail unlike any I had ever seen before moving slowly across the sky and reaching the top of Arunachala, the mountain, disappearing behind it. We immediately looked at our watches. It was 8:47. We raced to the ashram only to find that the master had passed in to Mahanirvana at that exact minute. Nor was this experience only documented by a select few … All the English and Tamil papers which arrived this morning from Madras referred to the meteor which had been seen in the sky over the entire state of Madras at 8:47 on the night of April 14 by a large number of people in different places. These eyewitnesses had been struck by its peculiar look and behavior.”
The Devolution and Rebirth of Western Thought
Once we focused our minds on the unmoving eternal Ideas that transcend the physical dimension. But Plato’s poetry soon paled as inquiring minds built their empires with empirical concepts designed to confer command and control. Aristotle shifted our gaze first to the unmoved Prime Mover, and then to the motions that Mover created. But his student, Alexander the Great, had other uses for philosophy. Military technology was first on his agenda. Mathematics developed as an instrument to map the heavens as well as the Earth, to gain control through knowledge. And gradually the scientific drive to understand the structures that appear in this world and the dynamic interactions of such structures enabled us to build extremely complex theories about the nature of reality. These theories led to ever more marvelous technologies, and the result was apparent mastery of Nature.