Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Student Comment: You spoke earlier of dissatisfaction, which reminded me of something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I listened to a talk with a prominent spiritual figure, and he spoke about heaven and hell. He said that heaven is like being doomed to eternal famility, or familiarity. He went on to say that there’s no need to create in the absence of discontent, and that heaven is an upgrade of the illusion and hell is a downgrade. I’m just curious of what you have to say about that. “God did not create out of discontent; this world doesn’t exist because of discontent,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But once egos are put into the world, the egos have discontent because an ego is not real and therefore it feels lacking inside. And that discontent causes it to do something, or find someone, to make it feel whole and real. But nothing it does can take away that discontent.” And, in actuality, heaven is not really the goal of any religion. “What the religions

Meditation is paradoxical. All meditations is, is an attempt to stop trying to do anything. “How can you create a technique for not trying to do anything?” asks Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “If you do, then the very technique defeats the effort of not making any effort.” This is akin to the problem of self-reference which “has become a very big business, actually, since Bertrand Russell and Kurt Gödel. . . . Basically it comes down to the ‘liar’s paradox,’ you know, the guy from Crete who says ‘I’m lying.’ Is he telling the truth when he’s saying he’s lying? Well, if he’s telling the truth, he isn’t lying.” And, at the same time, if he’s lying then he’s telling the truth. “Anyway, you can go around and round forever in this, and this is basically all the ego is: it’s basically a voice in your head attacking you, and then you defend yourself against that voice. It’s two voices of self-reference, but they’re both delusional.” “And the problem is that the ego does

Student Question: Based on the studies and the scientific books that we’re been reading lately, such as Signs of Meaning in the Universe by Jesper Hoffmeyer, what would you say the relationship is between biology and quantum physics? “Well, they’re two different aspects. They deal at different levels of scale with the same phenomenon,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the scientific and spiritual research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. You start with a photon, which has absolute freedom, but then once you move “into the realm of molecules and of organisms, then the amount of freedom is less.” However, following Arthur Young’s “reflexive arc,” freedom is regained in man. “But then even the mind becomes determined, as the ego does, and there has to be a consciousness beyond the ego that can observe and use the ego as a basis to transcend.” So we must now make a quantum—or evolutionary—leap “to go beyond biology. We went from physics to . . . chemistry . . . and then to biology, and now we have to move

Student Question: I would like to hear more about what is meant by the divine birth in the heart. The divine birth is an archetype. One can remember the story of the birth of Christ, the Immaculate Conception, or the birth of the Buddha from his mother’s side, symbolic of the birth into divine love at the heart chakra. “It is our birthright to experience the divine birth,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “but most of us turn down the opportunity for that because we’re so attached to the ego. It’s as if the larva, the caterpillar, refuses to become the butterfly because it’s still too attached to munching those leaves and growing fat and crawling on the earth, and it doesn’t know the joy of flying as the butterfly. . . . But the divine birth, once it happens, once we are willing to dissolve the ego shell so that the birth can happen, is, initially, a birth of love, a birth of openness to the world again, a birth of wonderment, of aliveness.” It is a birth t

Student Question: I’ve been reading that technology—if used the right way—would enable a world in which money is not necessary, and that there would be no war because money would not exist. So I was wondering if that would be like Sat Yuga. “Yes, of course. And, yes, money is a fiction that is used as a mechanism of control,” adds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the money system is collapsing as well because the money system requires trust. . . . And it only lasts, as any Ponzi scheme does, as long as people have confidence. And now that that’s been lost, the game is collapsing. . . . And that’s when real wealth, again, will be able to emerge into consciousness because money is fictional wealth; it’s a representation of wealth. . . . But there will be no need for money when there is true love again among human beings. And love for the earth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.

Student Question: When we saw the film on Ramana Maharshi, he talked about tapas, which is profound perception, and I wanted to ask you what exactly is profound perception? And he also talked about the mind turning inward. Can you explain that? Tapas is “making the mind very subtle so that you perceive that source from which thoughts arise,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And Ramana was very clear that all thoughts begin with the ‘I’ thought, and they’re related to the ‘I.’ And that ‘I’ always wants something, or is reacting to something. And once you get into that reaction, then all of the associations and conditionings, that have attached to the ‘I’ since childhood, glom onto it and create predetermined circuits of thought. But if you’ll go back to the source of the ‘I,’ prior to the linguistic expression of the ‘I,’ but the certainty of being Sat—it is that certainty, rather than language or representation of the ‘I,’ but the sense that is indubitable of bein

Student Question: Our relationship with technology has been novel in the past few centuries, but particularly in the last decades. And a friend of mine who was having knee surgery commented to me the other day how glad he was that he lives in the 21st century. Another person I encountered was captivated by her technology and what it can do. Does technology play a positive role because it seems that technology is also at the forefront of destroying the world? “Well it’s the use of technology at the service of the ego rather than at the service of the Divine Self that is the problem,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so it is actually the lack of the highest possible technology, because we have externalized everything, because we think of ourselves as machines that have created a technology in our own image, in the image of the ego, that involves internal combustion engines, because we’re all combusting, exploding inside from our own ego conflicts—all of this is

“Yoga is about subtlety,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “In the olden days, in the ancient culture, subtlety was a central concept. And in those days, if you had a map of all of Asia and Europe, and even other parts of the world, you would recognize that there was a single culture, a culture of yoga, that was the same whether you were in ancient Greece, or you were in Persia, or you were in China, or you were in India. And whether you went with a Taoist yogi, or a Buddhist yogi, or a Greek yogi, the concepts were the same.” And the essence of that teaching is “just be still. Silence the chattering mind so you can pay attention to the more subtle levels of the mind.” “The great yogi Empedocles, about 2500 years ago in Greece, was very famous for saying ‘even silence is a veil over the silence’ because the real silence only begins when there is no sense of a self trying to be silent; that already creates a shell around the real nucleus of the nucleus. As t

Student Question: Why is competition so prevalent in this society? “Because the ego’s an imitation: you become who you are by imitating others,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But deep down, you know you’re just an imitation, and an imitation is a phony. And so you hate the one you’ve imitated. Now, the only reason you imitated them was because you loved them, and desired them, and thought they were great. But once you have become their imitation, then you wanna kill them so they no longer exist to take away your sense that you're the real one, because whenever they appear, they’re a threat, now, to you. . . . So, the ego is always terrified that it’s an impostor. And, therefore, it has to be unique, and it has to be superior to the other or it can collapse easily into non-entityhood.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.

Student Comment: In my darkest moments, I was faced with the fact that I hated the other’s aliveness. I feel like it’s one of the things that, if there’s going to be love and compassion for the other, has to be overcome. I don’t know if it’s just the terror of seeing how dead one is inside that makes it so threatening when somebody else is alive, and maybe this isn’t as universal as I think, and that’s why I’m asking. “Well, it’s one way that it shows up. I think every ego envies, at an unconscious level, and hates people who it believes are happy. And especially if it’s a kind of happiness that is closed to them,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And it’s universal “that you pick a shadow figure to dehumanize because you believe that they are enjoying something you can’t enjoy. . . . So it’s universal in terms of the envy, but the way it shows up is different. But every ego is in a state of competitiveness with every other ego. And that competitiveness creates a ne

Student Question: The agencies of evil and greed operate around the world openly and freely because there is no retribution. Such arrogance. Is there retribution to be paid, or do they get away with murder? “No. There is ultimate justice in the universe,” assures Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The law of karma reaches everywhere, but it’s not immediate. And in part, the reason why it cannot be immediate in this time period is that everyone participates in that evil to some extent, and therefore everyone deserves to suffer. And so the evil is the payment for evil. No one wants to live in an evil world, but no one’s willing to become good. And so it is the collective karma of the populations of the world that put up with evil in the society and the government—in whatever structures have been created that are accessories both before and after the fact. And it is our awakening from this internalized evil that is necessary if we’re going to change the world and bring

Student Question: In this transition of becoming porous—so you can perceive the miraculous—won’t that porosity also permit whatever residues that remain to boil up to the surface? “The more of this work you do, and the more serious you take it, the more you flush out the repressed unconscious traumas, resistances, egocentricity, narcissism—all of the very core, dirty truth—the hidden truth of the ego—it gets revealed. And that’s when the going gets tough, and you need to have an energy field of love that will unconditionally accept you when you feel miserable and unworthy of even being on a path like this,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s why it’s so important that we have a stable community that recognizes the shadow work, and that valorizes it, and that doesn’t stigmatize anyone for going through some negative period when the cloud of Maya is over their heads and you can’t even see them cause it’s so thick, but you still see the light through the cloud.

Student Question: When you’re in Maya can you realize God? And then also, is Maya created for you to get back to God? “Yes you can only see God when you're in Maya. And you can only see Maya when you're in God, this is true. Maya and God are two poles of the same ultimate reality,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it is given [to] us so that we can—by understanding it—get the juice out of it, the nectar, the divine nectar that is contained within every suffering, within every negative situation there is some gem of wisdom that we can extract from it and grow into greater God-consciousness. So rather than simply get negative about the negative, become a scientist seeking what is the hidden jewel, what is the hidden divine nectar that I can take out of this apparent disaster, and realize that it is a great blessing?” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 9, 2010.

“We are all beings of bliss. Do you experience that? Bliss is our natural state,” provides Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But once the Self, that is blissful, mis-identifies Itself with the physical organism and with the ego image, the ego complex, you could say, then It loses Its bliss. . . . So have you ever bought a new car, and soon after you drive it off of the lot it gets dented? And suddenly this new car that felt very heavenly, that made you feel wonderful because you bought the car you really wanted, and everything was perfect—the first dent takes all of that away. . . . So all of us are living with that: we go from an ‘I’ to an ‘I’-dentity; the ‘I’ gets dented. And once we have an identity, then we are filled with [a] sense of hurt cause when you're dented, you're hurt, and you don’t feel perfect; you feel defective. You feel used. And even abused. And so most of us are riding around in these vehicles, these car-bodies, creating karma, and feeling more and more ab

Excerpt: “As you all know, I’m sure, it goes quite against the grain of this time period to be building a monastery. . . . [and] spiritual retreats of the old type are falling away, losing their credibility, their integrity, the interest of people in leading a life devoted to contemplation of God, and a life of what has been called ‘blessed simplicity.’ And yet—because of all of that, and because of the hyperactivity of the modern world, and the disappointment that we all have come to feel about the projects of the modern age, and of science itself, as having led to a dead end, and to the destruction of our ecosystem, and to the un-sustainability of the modern way of life—there is a new interest—there’s a new wave of interest in creating spiritual communities in the world. But somehow we have to put the old wine into a new bottle that makes it attractive to the modern mind.” “So our approach here is very secular, and it’s open to anyone from any spiritual background. And we don’t focus on whatever name you h

Student Comment: When you mentioned the “Hundredth Yogi Effect,” or critical mass, I remembered all of the other spiritual traditions, such as Christianity, Buddhism, etc., which all had great expectations to transform the world as well. I agree that the problem of the world today is a spiritual problem, but I have noticed that there is a continual falling away of spiritual movements, and I wanted to know why this is. “The spiritual traditions that are now dying . . . were formed at what’s called the ‘Axial Age.’ They were what sustained humanity as the human ego became darker and denser and more materialistic,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And there has been a fall. ‘The Fall of Man’ is a true concept. And these religions were to maintain the Light in the darkness, but they all recognized that the darkness was increasing. . . . And this was understood: that we would come to such a climax, you could say, of the situation on earth in which the souls would reach t

Student Question: In school today we were learning about how to teach kids to read. And in one particular model, the first phrase that you teach the kids is that reading is thinking. I heard that and, I don’t know why, but it really rubbed me the wrong way. Is that true, that reading is thinking? “Well, it depends on what thinking is,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Reading is entering into the mind of another being, of another consciousness.” So a better question is not “Do you read?” but “Who do you read?” “Literally, reading is an act of altering your state of consciousness. That’s what it is, it’s a drug. And if you read something very powerful, it can bring you into chakra seven.” However, today, reading has fallen into “this horizontal mastery of some skill sets on the physical plane. That’s not what reading is about at all. It’s the ladder to Heaven.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.

“One of the bhajans that was playing during our preliminary meditation was sung by Lata Mangeskar, a very famous early Bollywood singer when it was still relatively pure, and they were singing mantras. And the first mantra was ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram.’ And this translates as ‘the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.’ And the aim of meditation,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the Good, True, and Beautiful spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “is to find that in yourself which is eternally True, supremely Good, and infinitely Beautiful. And what’s important is that you have faith that you have that within you that corresponds to those attributes. Everyone does.” However, to deal with the world, we created an ego structure. “And once we created that ego structure, it veiled the truth of our being. It veiled our radiance. And it veiled our goodness.” But the veiling was an illusion. And we have never been anything but the Satyam Shivam Sundaram. “And so all we’re doing in meditation is remembering t

Student Comment: During the teaching, you talked about how the ego is formed early on. So I was wondering how it forms. It has to come from somewhere. “Humans are like monkeys; we imitate the other. And so the infant takes in the mirroring from the parents—the mother, primarily—and begins to express that back, and that creates the first structure. It’s called the ‘Mirror Stage,’” delineates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And then more and more elements get added and built around that, and as the child is called certain things . . . negative and positive signifiers, they get attached to the identity, and the structure builds according to the clues that the child picks up from the parents as to the role they want the child to play.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.

“I wish you all a wholehearted welcome,” offers Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s important because there’s very little that happens in the world these days that is wholehearted.” The contemporary ego structure is hyper-fragmented. It can’t love. It can’t trust. It is paralyzed by “the fear of letting go of those beloved defense mechanisms” that cause us all of our suffering. And it has developed all of these defense mechanisms to deal with a very decadent, and even demonic, culture. And if we can put down all of the ego’s defense mechanisms, all of its narratives, and make a wholehearted effort to “dive into the silence,” then we will find “the salvation of our being. That’s where we put out the fire of suffering, and we are healed by the waters of life.” “But the world doesn’t value, any longer, this opportunity to dive deeply into the inner silence. It values busyness and distraction and continual production—activity—in which we lose our soul in the o