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.


Tuesday, 10 April 2007 17:39

The Basic Practice

Written by Shunyamurti

The basic practice of sat yoga is very simple: Just be. This, of course, is more difficult than we like to realize. If we understand why that is, then we are halfway to liberation. So let us go over the logic of the illusory bondage from which we are interested in escaping.

Friday, 30 March 2007 17:36

A Whole Bouquet of Secrets

Written by Shunyamurti

A few students have asked recently about my response to a popular new-age film called ‘The Secret’. I have not seen it, nor do I plan to. But because of the level of interest—and controversy—regarding its content, and the importance of understanding it correctly, I will take the risk of commenting on what I take to be its message on the basis of hearsay.

Sunday, 18 March 2007 17:33

Critique of Pure Rapture

Written by Shunyamurti
The opposite of rapture is reification. If not for that strange tendency of consciousness, we would all be blissful. But the current condition of consciousness is to make things out of the Transfinite Real, and to misidentify consciousness with a thing. Consciousness liberated from reification is rapturous. Once reified, suffering begins. Let us then examine the problem and uncover its root, so that we may return to our original nirvanic wholeness, and thus release the world from its travail.
Monday, 15 January 2007 17:23

"Why is it so Difficult?"

Written by Shunyamurti
The repetitive refrain that spiritual teachers hear from their students is that of sulking annoyance (no doubt at God or Brahman, or the unconscious ego structure, or projected on the teacher or the path of transformation itself) regarding the slow pace of inner change: “Why is it so difficult?”
Monday, 25 December 2006 17:20

Is This Advaita—or What???

Written by Shunyamurti
Someone asked recently if our institute is teaching Advaita. That is not an easy question to answer. Because one could say yes, and be correct. And one could say no, and also be correct. Let us say that we are teaching a unique, multimodal approach to the living realization of the nondual nature of our true Reality. Our approach values the struggles and victories (and the apparent losses as well) that make up the path toward the ultimate realization as well as the goal, the unitive realization itself. Perhaps the best description of the Sat Yoga Approach is to call it Advaita+ (Advaita plus a map of the levels of consciousness leading from the conflictual multiplicity of ego-consciousness to the realization of the Supreme Reality plus a variety of processes designed to bring about such transformation).
Thursday, 30 November 2006 17:16

The Veil of Logos

Written by Shunyamurti
The sixth veil of Maya—the Veil of Logos—can be thought of as the deceptiveness of dualistic reason. It is the veil that is constituted by a world-view based on the illusion that reason in the form of two-valued (true/false) logic has the capacity to grasp reality in a grand totalization that can be expressed verbally, or at least mathematically, and analyzed with finality. In historical terms, Logos became the dominant archetype and mode of thinking in the West at the time of the rise of the philosophic endeavor in ancient Athens, reaching its peak with the work of Aristotle. Logos gradually displaced an earlier relation to reality that became known as Mythos.
Monday, 30 October 2006 17:14

Them Impossible Enlightenment Blues

Written by Shunyamurti
Before Awakening, the imaginary person, full of itself, bumbles and mumbles through suffering and denial, living in bubbles that burst and befuddle, sinking into cycles of sickening repetition, until finally seeking a way of non-leaking, a high ground beyond the waves of anxiety and dreadful despair. But nothing is there. Just them Impossible Enlightenment Blues.
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