Podcasts about sat yoga institute

In this landmark sixth chapter of The Journey Beyond Death, we begin a new arc titled “Mystics & Seers” by welcoming two of the most piercing voices in spiritual inquiry: Jeff Berwick and Shunyamurti. Together, they unravel what lies beyond this world—and how to reclaim the truth buried beneath illusion. Jeff Berwick, founder of The Dollar Vigilante, challenges the very nature of reality. Is this world a divine simulation? Is death just a shift of levels in a cosmic game? Through years of intensive meditation and consciousness experimentation, Berwick offers raw, revolutionary insights: that fear is programmed, death is misunderstood, and freedom begins when the mind surrenders. Shunyamurti, spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Ashram, takes us even deeper—into the still center of being that never dies. With razor-sharp clarity and mystical presence, he explores why the soul incarnates, how ego fragments the Real, and what it means to awaken before death. His message: You are not the body, not the mind, not even the story. You are the eternal light watching it all. This episode is not for the casually curious. It's for the seeker standing at the threshold, ready to cross. Death is not the end. It is the illusion we must transcend to truly live. ------------------------------ Featuring in order of appearance 01:00 - Metaphysical Seeker & Sovereignty Advocate Jeff Berwick 44:00 - Spiritual Master & Founder of the Sat Yoga Institute Shunyamurti -------------------------------- Jeff Berwick is a financial iconoclast, spiritual truth-seeker, and founder of The Dollar Vigilante. After building and selling Canada's largest financial website, Stockhouse.com, Berwick spent years traveling to over 100 countries—seeking freedom, truth, and a deeper understanding of reality beyond the mainstream matrix. One of the first analysts to call Bitcoin at $3 and Ethereum at $2, Berwick also teaches that we're living in a cosmic simulation—a spiritual “video game” where awakening means reclaiming our power from fear, control, and illusion. Through his media platform Vigilante.tv, bestselling book The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire, and his annual Anarchapulco conference, Berwick fuses financial independence, metaphysics, and radical self-liberation. Website: TV Channel: ----------------------------- Shunyamurti is a renowned spiritual teacher, yogi, and founder of the Sat Yoga Institute and Ashram in Costa Rica. Drawn to the path of inner liberation from an early age, he immersed himself in advanced practices of meditation, self-inquiry, and multiple yogic disciplines. His training included an apprenticeship with Baba Hari Dass, extensive study of Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings, and over a decade of committed spiritual life in a Brahmachari ashram in India. Shunyamurti's wisdom synthesizes the core insights of Advaita Vedanta, Shaivism, and Buddhism with Western psychoanalytic traditions, transpersonal psychology, and mysticism. He has also explored altered states of consciousness through entheogens and integrated learnings from esoteric traditions like Taoism, Kabbalah, and mystical Christianity. Through his talks, writings, and intensive retreats, Shunyamurti offers a transformative path for those seeking inner silence, self-realization, and the transcendence of ego. Website: YouTube Channel: --------------------------- consciousness after death, ego death, Jeff Berwick, Shunyamurti, spiritual awakening, near death experience, life beyond the body, escaping the matrix, how to stop fearing death, non-duality teachings, spiritual sovereignty, sat yoga, dollar vigilante, mystical insights, simulation theory, transcendence, Outer Limits of Inner Truth

Shunyamurti is a spiritual teacher and the founder of Sat Yoga. Sat Yoga is dedicated to raising human consciousness, offering teachings and retreats to aid in healing and self-realization. In this episode of Stars & Destruct, Juliana Spicoluk, Mark Spicoluk, & Shunyamurti practise jnana yoga together and discuss the function of yoga, the apocalypse, God, parenting in times of destruction, the great awakening, ego, god consciousness, lost souls, the kingdom of heaven on Earth, illusion, trauma, the death of culture, psychosis, nuclear war, duty to dharma, non-duality, frozen light, matter & anti-matter, Love, and the end of suffering. Learn more about stars+destruct.: Website: https://www.starsanddestruct.com IG: https://www.instagram.com/starsanddestruct SIGN UP & JOIN THE STARWALKER MOVEMENT get updates, new episodes, bonus stuff, and more... https://www.starsanddestruct.com/starwalkers Get to know the hosts of stars+destruct.: Juliana Spicoluk: https://www.julianaspicoluk.com IG: https://www.instagram.com/juliana.spicoluk Mark Spicoluk: https://www.markspicoluk.com IG: https://www.instagram.com/mark.spicoluk Heidi Souffriau - producer https://www.heidisouffriau.com IG: https://www.instagram.com/unfold.yoursoul Stardust: Shunyamurti Links: YT: https://www.youtube.com/c/satyogainstitute IG: https://www.instagram.com/satyogaashram Free Seven-Part Mini-Course by Shunyamurti "the Art of Meditation": https://www.satyoga.org/shunyamurti-meditation-mini-course About Shunyamurti: https://shunyamurti.org About Sat Yoga Ashram & Wisdom School: https://www.satyoga.org more topics discussed: yoga of the mind, hatha yogis, politics and yoga, the end of kali yuga, destruction, Costa Rica, Sat Yoga Institute, soul consciousness.

In this classic Sat Yoga Institute teaching, Shunyamurti reminds us of our true nature as gods and goddesses of this Cosmic Dream. It is our duty as such to be free of fear and desire, and to live blissfully in the realm of freedom. Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 1, 2009.

In this classic teaching from the Sat Yoga Institute, Shunyamurti offers practical wisdom to find the way out of suffering: we must aspire to lift our consciousness out of the ego-mind and ascend into the divine mind, gaining the power of the Supreme to win the battle for the salvation of the soul.

The new book by Shunyamurti will be available on September 11, 2021. Click here to get your free sample and watch the full teaching: https://www.satyoga.org/gems-of-wisdo... A classic teaching from the Sat Yoga Institute in which Shunyamurti addresses purity on many levels, from purity of lifestyle to purity of mind to purity of spirit; when we shed the impurities of the ego, when the mind is pure and silent, and when the attention is directed inward--to the ultimate source of purity--that is when Liberation is achieved.

Who are the greatest teachers, wholeheartedly devoted to truth, who deserve more time in the spotlight? Of the numerous masters I've studied over the past five years, the works of three great teachers stood the test of time: Sri Acharya of Dharma Nation, Leo Gura of Actualized.org, and Shunyamurti of the Sat Yoga Institute. In our episode, I give guidance on what these teachers are made of -- from ancient Vedic tradition to the mind-bending nature of reality. Also included in our episode is talk of the Golden Age we could now be entering, due to the pandemic and its cosmic influences on our planet. Email me at curiousbodhi@zoho.com. See you next week, lovely fellow Human Beings!

Shunyamurti is the founder of the Sat Yoga Ashram, located in the misty mountains of southern Costa Rica. The ashram includes a wisdom school (Sat Yoga Institute), a research and teaching division on creating self-sustaining spiritual communities (Premaculture), a new … Continue reading →

Excerpt: “As you all know the Sat Yoga Institute is a school. It’s not just a place to come to meditate, but to do more than that. And the process begins with the Trivium which is a braid of three different processes that have to happen simultaneously for the process to be effective. It involves Translation, which is a paradigm shift – which is the conceptual understanding of the spiritual path so you will at least be able to explain to yourself why you’re going through this ordeal – because unless you can justify this to your own ego mind, there is no reason to put up with the suffering that it entails. But when there is a clear conceptual understanding of why you’re going through this experience, and what the benefits are, then the ordeal actually becomes very joyous, and not really filled with that much suffering. The transformational dimension of the Trivium is where the suffering is located. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thusday, July 4, 2013.

Excerpt: “When we meditate,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “we are making effort to reach our own natural state of being. It’s odd that you have to make effort to be natural, but this is how far away the human being has come from its own nature. Rather than having a nature any longer, the human being is conditioned by culture. The ego is an artificial construct that’s created and maintained by culture. . . . And we learn the rules of that culture and the intentions that we are supposed to live for, the values we are supposed to live by, and we become entrained by language. And from then on, pure consciousness, in its divine nature, gets filtered through this construct of what Lacan, the psychoanalyst, called ‘signifiers,’ language—master signifiers that determine our identity. And you become the subject of a signifier, of a certain set of words that determine the patterns of your life and the curvature of your emotional space, and that result in the repetition of various kinds of patterns, mostly traumatic, mostly that end in suffering and devastation because we have been alienated from our Nature. . . . That state of peace that will ensue upon the letting go of all the intentions of grasping will bring you into the Heart, into the peace, that will allow you to realize that you’re already enveloped by the divine presence; you're saturated by it. And you are fulfilled in your very essence by that which is—not only within you—but is your own Essence that you had not recognized in that blind effort to seek something externally to fulfill you.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 19, 2011.

Excerpt: “How many of you are here to achieve union with God?” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Well that’s good because it’s very easy to do. You’ve picked the right goal. And the reason it’s easy to accomplish is that God is your own innermost Self. . . . So God is that absence which makes everything present. And the only reason that God manifests as absence is [because] we have abandoned God into that which God has made present. And then we have taken the miracle of what has been made present for granted and forgotten that we are in fact emanations of the same God that we are sometimes searching for and sometimes glad that we have lost, and that we hope has lost track of us. And then in other times we’re very anxious that God may have lost track of us. And it is this game that the ego plays of hide-and-seek with God that creates all of the suffering and torment and longing, nostalgia, agony, and ultimately the ecstasy of existence." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 12, 2011.

Excerpt: “‘The sense of imperfection is a disease and the sole source of every misery,’” reads Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So the truth is that we are all perfect, purnam. We are not imperfect. This is the illusion, the imperfection. But the illusion of imperfection comes with the belief that we are entities. [It] comes with the belief that consciousness is a manifestation of an organism, a body. And as long as your consciousness is identified with the body, through which it’s operating, there will be, of course, a sense of imperfection. And so that’s the illusion. And that knot has to be cut.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 5, 2011.

Excerpt: “Sri Ramana Maharshi recognized that all of us are one Self, manifesting as many,” recalls Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And because of this realization of our oneness, of course Ramana had no interest in the [Indian] caste system. . . . The lowest caste [in the Indian caste system] were called the ‘Chandalas,’ which can translate as ‘Untouchables.’ And you should never touch an untouchable; you’d have to go through some extraordinary ritual of purification. And Ramana laughed at that and said this is only a metaphor. The only real Chandala is the ego. That’s what you must never touch. You must never enter ego-consciousness...” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 14, 2011.

Student Question: We often hear here that for thousands of years the celibacy has been undertaken in certain societies. And I’m assuming that that’s referring to the yogic tradition. I’m more familiar with Judaism and Islam, and in cultures built around those traditions—which have lasted for thousands of  years—celibacy has not been practiced, to my knowledge, or if it has then it has been in a very different form. So I get a little confused when I hear that “for thousands of years, this has been done” or “that has been done,” and, at the same time, it’s been practiced for thousands of years in a totally different way. Could you please provide a little clarity on this matter? Excerpt: “If you study the Jewish tradition, as well as the Islamic tradition, you will find that they actually do encourage celibacy, up to a certain point in one’s life. And one is really not intended to marry until one has gone through the Talmud, for example, and reached a state of having put sexuality in the correct perspective, which is as a way of serving God. It is a mitzvah; it is a commandment. It is not the unbridled urge of the ego. And once one has gained the ego under control, then sexuality operates,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “So if you look at those traditions, they are practicing a near-celibacy, particularly for rabbis or mullahs or people who have chosen a path that is spiritual in nature and they, and they aren’t simply giving lip service to their tradition.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Excerpt: “Imagine a scene in a biological laboratory,” begins Shunyamurti, the lead research scientist of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There’s a woman scientist bent over a microscope and gazing at one of those little slides. And the slide has on it a drop of water that’s filled with amoebas. And as she’s gazing in, she sees that these amoebas have a whole world of their own. . . . And at the moment that she’s looking at them, imagine that one of these amoebas somehow, uncannily, becomes aware that it’s being gazed at. And it can’t quite comprehend ‘Who’s looking at me?’ but it knows someone’s looking at it from a dimension beyond its own little world. And let’s imagine that the intensity of its desire to understand the energy it’s feeling causes its mind to actually rise up until this amoeba’s consciousness is united with that of the scientist, and for a moment, it sees itself from her perspective. . . . And at the same time, the scientist realizes that some 84,000 lifetimes ago, she was an amoeba just like that one. And someone gazed at her, and it created this desire that then led to the evolution of her soul through all these different forms until she had become this scientist—now gazing at her own origins. . . . But at that same moment, the scientist realized, ‘But what if I am still being gazed at by a consciousness beyond where I am to the same extent as I am beyond that of the amoeba?’ And her mind suddenly turned within, and, with great intensity of desire, was pulled upward to that higher dimension and realized the Witness consciousness that had been gazing upon her with love. And that consciousness had at one point been a human who had evolved to God consciousness, and there was another union at an even higher level." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Student Question: In one of your essays, you made a distinction between the yoga of Patanjali and of Sat Yoga. You mentioned the Advaita perspective, but you also mentioned that we still need to follow the yamas and niyamas, and I couldn’t quite grasp the difference. So could you explain it a little more? Excerpt: “Patanjali’s understanding of Reality is dualistic,” begins Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Whereas the yoga of the Bhagavad Gita, which is leaning more towards the Advaita position, is about recognizing that subject and object are separate, but then—at a higher level—we want to know what is the source of both of them, and reunite the two, not keep them as separate poles of reality.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 24, 2011.

Excerpt: “The Real is a limit concept,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “because it does not occur in reality; It is that which contains reality and makes reality possible. But it does not appear within reality. [It’s] very similar to this film, The Matrix, in which ‘reality,’ the matrix, is unreality—it is illusion—and the real is beyond it. . . . So we want to bring our consciousness from the ‘reality,’ that is in fact Maya, or illusion, to the Real. Where is the Real? Well, it is beyond, but not beyond in a spatial sense—because all the concepts that we use to understand the so-called ‘reality,’ are unreal in terms of the Absolute Real. . . . But it’s very difficult to let go of these concepts, as we know. And even more difficult to let go of the belief in entities. And Sri Ramana says that this is the ultimate key to liberation. And of course the prime entity that we have to stop believing in is the ‘me’, the ego, the false self. . . . And so we have to give up our addiction to conceptualization, to constant thinking. It’s the thinking in the mind that supports the illusion of the ego; you feel real as long as you're able to justify your existence by talking to yourself. . . . So that’s what we’re doing in meditation, is we’re cutting that addiction to dispersing our energies out into the world, justifying our existence with our minds, seeking images and emotions that support the egoic fantasies, and entering into the silence—that is a death; it is the death of the ego—but the opening to eternal life, in the Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, march 17, 2011.

Excerpt: “Each of you is a divine jewel of radiant consciousness and eternal perfection,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The difficulty that gets in our way is that the ego-mind does not live in reality; it lives in its theory of reality. It lives trapped in a belief system. In fact, these days it’s even worse than that: it lives trapped in a number of different, conflicting belief systems. . . . And the information overload, and the lack of structure—the lack of social values that make any sense—make it very difficult to return to the wholeness and empowerment of the Real Self. But nonetheless the truth remains: that this divine jewel of light is what you are.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, March 3, 2011.

Excerpt: “The Supreme Reality that we are all seeking is absolutely simple. And all we really need is to abide in that simplicity, which is our true nature,” teaches Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Everyone’s looking for a good investment, a safe investment. And so my suggestion to you all is that you invest in God. It’s the only sure investment. And what is most sure is that the more you invest, the greater are the returns on your investment. So in the ordinary capitalist world, they say get a basket of investments so you hedge your bets. But, actually, because investing in the Supreme Being is a sure thing, it doesn’t pay to hedge your bets; it pays to invest—fully—in the Godself. But what kind of investment are we talking about? It’s not about money. It’s investing your love, your attention, your energy, your time—your focus on realizing the presence of God within you. . . . And so there are many many levels of consciousness through which we can rise if we are willing to let go of the lower. And this is a principle of spiritual progress: if you want to rise, you must let go of what you’re holding onto at the lower level. And this is what people are unwilling to do. They want a guarantee first that they’ll get the higher before they let go of the lower rung, and so they never get there; they get paralyzed. And this is where faith comes in. The faith of taking the risk of jumping into the abyss, the unknowable, the mystery of not knowing who you are. That’s what being fully alive means. That’s the thrill of existence, is the not knowing, when you push the envelope—and even push yourself out of the envelope—to discover the formless, infinite Self.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 24, 2011.

Excerpt: “Meditation is simply abiding in the Self,” teaches Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Abiding in Brahman means bramacharya, that is the original state of purity. It’s the same as the kaivalya state that we have talked about before where the Purusha has extracted Itself from Prakriti. There’s no more interest in matter, in sensuality; desire falls away naturally. You’re repressing it, or suppressing it, it’s just not there because you are already all that is, what is there to desire? What is there to fear? . . . It is that level of consciousness in which one graduates from this phenomenal plane, this school in which we learn what is right and wrong, what creates suffering and what creates joy and bliss. And the ultimate bliss comes simply from abiding as the formless, eternal Presence.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 17, 2011.

Excerpt: “There’s an old joke, I’m sure everyone knows it. . . . It was a joke about an academic scholar in the Vatican who was trying to understand the roots of apostolic celibacy, and he went to the original writings that were then copied by the scribes, and he found that one scribe made a mistake, he dropped out an ‘r,’ it was supposed to be celebrate!” recounts Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so the celebration was, originally, a coming together of those who were celibate, in solitude, in their inner solitude. . . . And only those who have realized the solitude of Self, and are no longer co-dependent on others, and don’t have voices in their minds that are attacking them, or causing them to have distorted self-images, etc., are truly free to celebrate, because everyone else is suffering and in agony. . . . But in any case, this was the original meaning of it, and the first celebration was of that Liberation from the ego that is co-dependent on others, both externally and internally. And so when we meditate, it is in order to silence all those voices in the mind, and to dwell in the solitude of Pure Consciousness. And that solitude is blissful. And it’s cause for celebration.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 10, 2011.

Student Question: In the book that we have been discussing, Ashram Dharma, the author mentions the importance of the guru for maintaining the energy field of the ashram. In ashrams in which the guru has passed on, or if the guru has several ashrams, how does his energy permeate the ashram, or does it? Excerpt: “The true guru is within. And each of us must take responsibility for manifesting the guru. The guru is not an external person. The external person, who is often referred to as the guru, is simply the one who has the job to remind you that the guru is within,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It’s like the conductor of an orchestra: the conductor doesn’t make any music, but just points to the others who make all the music. So there’s nothing special about the guru, except to hold that space of Emptiness . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 9, 2011.

Excerpt: Each of us, at one level, is a separate individual cut off from each other by our own thoughts, in a bubble of our own concerns, phantasies, desires, drives, fears, anxieties, etc. . . . And yet at another level—a more important level—we are all one,” reminds Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the only friend, ally, that will not abandon us in this moment is the Supreme Being. And through that alignment, we can create, on this horizontal plane, relationships that we can also trust because we can see and meet and recognize other beings who are also in that state of unconditional love and integrity. . . . So that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating. And by meditating together, we’re offering each other the gift of that divine energy.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 3, 2011.

Excerpt: “So a Satsang is an opportunity to experience bliss together,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Bliss is our natural state. It’s the state that we would be in 24/7 if we didn’t obscure it with a cloud of ego noise: chatter, worry, anxieties—all of these that are built on illusions. . . . The problem is today we have imbibed, as an indoctrination, this belief in materialism, that we are just bodies, and all there is, is matter and motion, and there’s no higher power and no wisdom. It’s all chance, random—that whole Darwinian ideology. And we’ve been taken in by it, so that we no longer tend to make the effort to find out for ourselves if there is, actually, a transcendent reality. But if you’re willing to make the effort, you will find that you can penetrate through the box that we call this phenomenal plane, and that there is infinite vastness beyond what we think of as reality. . . . And that’s why yogis recommend leading a simple lifestyle. Don’t create unnecessary complications in your life. Don’t create unnecessary stresses. Life will be stressful anyway, but you can keep it more manageable if you have lost the ego’s need to be seen by as many people as possible, loved by as many people as possible, adored, approved of. And many people have an addictive need to get the approval of as many people as possible. Why? Because they don’t have a sense of self-esteem that’s internal because they don’t know who they are. And if they go even a moment without someone saying, ‘Yes, you’re good,’ people can decompensate; they can collapse. They need to then call somebody on a cell phone who will tell them that they really are good people. . . . And so are we willing to transcend the personal level of the petty world of constant activity for the stillness of the eternal present, as—not an individual separate from others—but the very energy that unites and underlies and permeates all that is? . . . And what’s present is a great laughter of realizing that all along you knew that this is what you are. You didn’t discover this along the way. You always knew it and were hiding it from yourself and now you’re allowing yourself to know that this is what you are, and this is why you are here.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 27, 2011.

Excerpt: “Consciousness is energy—but a very different kind of energy than the kind that physicists tend to talk about,” explains Shunyamurti, research scientist at the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating: we’re accumulating this most positive, or sattvic, level of the orgone energy, and through that we are producing a transformation of our consciousness, we are creating a power of healing—and many other potential powers that the yogis also studied, which are called siddhis. . . . And so if we focus on meditation as a scientific experiment, and give all of our attention to it—because the energy is accumulated through the payment of attention—and we turn our attention inward and don’t allow any distractions, and don’t allow any lowering of the wavelength through aggressive or negative or depressed or anxious thoughts, but thoughts that are of the highest kind, and then transcending thought altogether into silence—but a silence that is a silence of devotion, of love, of reverence of the sacredness of all that is—that level of silence produces itself a kind of energy field. And then by staying in that energy, and not interrupting the flow of it, it’s as if we open the spigot from the zero-point—from the noumenal level beyond this cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 20, 2011.

With all the changes we are experiencing, as “reality” is getting stranger and stranger, “it’s important to understand how to meditate, how to shut off the static in the mind to reach the true signal that’s coming from that Supreme Reality that’s trying to guide us, but that we don’t generally pay attention to because we’ve been indoctrinated that It doesn’t exist, and [that] we shouldn’t pay attention to it, it’s only our imagination, and we should only pay attention to what we can establish by the scientific method, etc., etc.,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And so, we have to learn to make that shift into a higher dimension of consciousness. And the traditional yogic way of doing that—which is the earliest scientific method—true method of conscious transformation—is through an internalization, a turning around of our conscious energies. And in the meditative state, we do this in a seven stage process that will lead to samadhi.” “So the first stage is that of pacification: if you want to meditate, you have to pacify your body. . . . enough that we can then go to the second stage, which is pranafication. The body is not basically physical, that’s the illusion. The second level, the more subtle level, is that of prana, which we could call ‘bioelectromagnetic energies,’ that are flowing through the body. And we need to become aware of the prana and get it to flow. . . . And the pranafication will then lead to the third stage, which is a pyramidization: the prana will begin to pyramid upward, the ‘kundalini shakti energy,’ which is even more subtle than the prana, will begin to rise.” This will lead to the fourth stage, which is “pinealization, the activation of the pineal gland.” The activation of the pineal gland, revealing the inner light, will lead to “pontification” in which one can “download, from the Source, information that can be turned into symbolic form, whether in language or images or mathematics or music, whatever is needed for a particular kind of communication . . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 13, 2011.

“The greatest epic in all history is the Mahabharata. This is the great epic of world history,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. The Mahabharata is about a time when every human is a god—thus the immensity of Hindu deities. These gods represent the entire population of the previous Sat Yuga (the golden age spoken of in every religion). And every religion prophesizes that this kingdom did exist, and that it will return. Recorded on the afternoon of Saturday, December 12, 2009.

“In the spiritual traditions of the East—and in fact universally, in the esoteric traditions, which includes Sat Yoga—a spiritual teacher is not one who makes any claim to goodness, or special closeness to God,” remarks Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But it is only a matter of having become bored with one’s ego narratives,” whether those be of righteous indignation, victimhood and depression, superiority/inferiority, etc. “When one throws those away and lives in silence—a silence that is a surrender to the Real, to what is True, behind all of those narratives . . . then one is approaching Liberation.” “St. Augustine, who is of course a very orthodox-approved Catholic saint, made a very interesting comment in one of his books. He says, ‘Whenever you touch God, you’re touching the devil.’ And in one of the books of Shinran . . . he said that the Pure Land, which is paradise, Garden of Eden, the Golden Age, is for evil people. . . . Why is that? . . . Because the narrative that one tells oneself is almost always to put oneself in the position of the ‘good guy’ with the white hat, who’s been exploited and taken advantage of and misunderstood, etc., etc. And it’s that narrative that has to get very boring, and has to be recognized as a fabrication that has no validity.” “And so in this act of meditation we’re letting go of the narratives. We’re letting go of the walls we’ve put up around our heart and the attacks and the defenses and the rationalizations for why it’s impossible to be free and to live life responsibly, facing reality on its own terms without trying to have it one’s own way. And it’s that that frees one to let go of the anger and the anxiety and the depression and all of that. Nothing else will do it; there’s no other medicine, really. But letting go of the whole narrative. And we don’t like to do that because, of course, yes, we’d like to get rid of the vexation, but we want to keep the jouissance. We like the anger and the justification. And we like the feeling like we’re the good guys and all of that. Nonduality means you give up this sense of good vs. evil, negative vs. positive, me vs. the other. There is no ‘me.’ There is no other. But it’s only when the mind is quiet that we can recognize that, and be free.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.

Student Question: I’m still contemplating this koan that I have been given, that “God does not know the ego.” I think some light is starting come through on this topic, but I wanted to check it with you. I think that I’m looking at this from a dualistic standpoint, but this must be a nondual understanding. Is that right? “Yes,” answers Shunyamurti, the spiritual guide of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “That’s why in Christianity it is said that you cannot get to the Father except through the Son.” However, this does not mean that Christ is the only teacher through which one can reach God, but through any spiritual teacher “who can be an intermediary and know the ego from the place of Emptiness. . . . So it is a relationship with a being who is not in the place of ego and so there’s not a reflection back of one ego to another, and therefore a power struggle—cause there’s always paranoia when two egos meet: ‘Who’s gonna be on top?’ . . . And it’s only when at least one party to the dyad isn’t playing that game that the game itself falls, and then you can be known as you truly are, but don’t know yourself to be yet, that same Emptiness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.

Student Question: What is this “Impossible Witness” that you talk about? “It is simply the agent of the ‘master narrative’ that holds the ego’s reality in place, without which, you’d feel a major disorientation,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Any kind of an ideological statement that can’t be backed up with true scientific reason—not scientism, but scientific reason—is an impossible witness. Today science itself promotes an impossible witness and has become a religion: it thinks it knows what happened before the big bang. It doesn’t, of course. . . . But those things are just purely speculation to maintain an orientation in reality because otherwise reality becomes a trip: we realize we have no control over it and no sense at all of what is going on, or what reality really is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday December 9, 2010.

Student Question: You say that whatever adjective that goes after the “I am” is wrong. So what do you think about those affirmations in which you say “I am the Light,” etc. Where is the mistake there? “They’re good antidotes against negative thoughts,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, ultimately, as long as we remain attached to words, then we are in the image of that rather than the reality of it. . . . So we want to be free from language, and from any other form of representation so that we can experience the Supreme Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 9, 2010.

Student Question: What is the difference between guilt and paranoia? “They exist at two different assemblage points: guilt is at the disillusionment point, paranoia is at the dispossession point,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Guilt is based upon an identity that has been established in a very strong and healthy way within the ego that takes its motivation from a lineage of symbolic signifiers of tradition and ideals and higher meaning. And that enables an individual, who carries that burden, to operate responsibly and with integrity in the world to fulfill their duty. Whereas paranoia does not have any of those characteristics, and it is more based on the terror that someone will take away its sensory enjoyments and its capacity to act in freedom and will impinge on its sense of autonomy and self-empowerment. And the more paranoid one is, the more [one] will project that the world is filled with enemies who want to destroy one. But this is not, then, an ethical way of responding to the other as an equal, but seeing the other in a demonized form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

“In Japan, during the last couple of years of World War II, the intelligentsia of Japan knew that they were going to lose the war,” explains Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And there was a Japanese philosopher . . . named Tanabe Hajime, who was tormented by the fact that he could not express himself in public. His whole life was about truth and expressing the truth, and serving the people. And he wanted to write articles and give lectures about how to deal with the trauma that Japan was going to face with the destruction of their empire and their way of life. And he was not allowed to say anything. And he became more and more anguished by this situation. And he didn’t know what to do.” And gradually he began to feel he was totally useless as a philosopher, he was a failure, he was a failure as a human being, and he had a complete meltdown. . . . And in that state of utter internal collapse, something extraordinary happened to him: his consciousness was translated to a higher dimension. In Japan they actually have a word for that called ‘zange.’ It is when the mind is brought to a level of ‘metanoetics’ . . . to a level of consciousness beyond the mind, beyond the realm of representation, beyond concepts.” “And in that state, he felt the presence of what he called the ‘Other-power’ . . . which he, being Japanese and in that culture, named as Amida Buddha, the Buddha of infinite light and infinite life. And it was that. If he was Indian, he might have called it Shiva. If he was Christian, he might have called this Christ-consciousness; it doesn’t matter. But it was a flow of Divine Energy through him in that state of collapse in which he was totally surrendered to this higher power that was now coming to him.” “But the real message of this story, to me, is that regardless of what state of consciousness you’re in, you cannot reach the ultimate Ground and Source of empowerment and strength from the plane of the ego; you must be in a state of surrender. And that the Real, that will give you the strength to deal with impossibly difficult situations and challenges, comes from a place beyond the mind. . . . And it’s the faith in that—the opening of that inner portal to the transcendent dimension within, of the Divine—that will bring the fulfillment of your own life. And from the Emptiness, you will experience a fullness that you have never imagined possible.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Comment: Sometimes people say that the more attention you give to something, the more chance that it will have of manifesting. And we were talking about the state of the world, and how the military is doing this or that, and I feel that, sometimes, I put too much pressure on myself about not speaking of these types of things because of the amount of denial . . . “These are often difficult issues to face, that do not have solutions within ego-consciousness which is based on the loyalty to the kind of values that we have been trained to uphold,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute of Costa Rica. “And the vertical dharma has always been threatened by its inherent disloyalty to all worldly values.” The Buddha, for example, left his duty as a prince and ruler, as well as his family, to achieve enlightenment. “He did everything wrong, the ultimate sin, I mean the guy must have been riddled with guilt for all of this. And anybody in those days would have said to Buddha, ‘You’re wrong. Go back. Sit on that throne. Take care of your family. You created them, this is your karma.’ . . . But when he saw that all of the consequences of karma, of acting in a conventionally good way, led to more suffering, and would lead to more war, and would lead to egoic enmeshment rather than liberation—and when he saw that being a good person was the ultimate evil, from this higher position, and that he had to transcend these dualities in order to find himself, then he went on a path that was absolutely lonely and alone—that no one understood; absolutely no one in his world ‘got’ what he was doing. . . . And he entered a dimension and a logic and a understanding of reality that no one would validate for him, or could. And it was in that absolute uniqueness and aloneness—and wrongness from the perspective of the world—that he found the Ultimate Reality.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Comment: Earlier we were discussing rites of passage, and it appeared to me that the military had something to do with that. And I wanted to know what your opinion was of that. “It used to function as a rite of passage, when there was still chivalry, and when warfare was hand-to-hand combat and bravery, and the other martial virtues of manhood, in particular, were developed. But that was a long time ago,” answers Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Now . . . it’s a video game. And somebody in Nebraska is firing a drone at somebody in Pakistan. They’re not in any danger; there’s no bravery involved. There’s no sense of the reality of facing an opponent that a samurai or someone else would have. And the rules of combat based on an ethic of recognition of the sacredness of one’s task. All of that. That was the culture of Japan, and in the Middle Ages, the culture of chivalry, has been lost.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Question: In the chakra map, we tend to move within the first three chakras. And in understanding how and why we do it, we become able to use the higher ones. But is it more balanced to move within all seven, or to be within the higher ones? “The higher chakras are sublimated versions of the lower chakras,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the lower chakras, when you are in and operating from them, they lead to suffering. And they are operated as defenses against anxiety that end up leading to very inaccurate forms of karma. And at the higher chakras, one has unveiled the Real Self that is transcendent of the individual organism, or ego-based identity, and is therefore no longer acting from egocentric—or even anthropocentric—motivations, but can act in harmony with the whole cosmos.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Question: When you were talking about the trauma that Japan faced in the war, I was realizing that I couldn’t really relate because I feel I’ve never identified with a nation or a culture, and I couldn’t imagine feeling trauma over my country losing a war. “It wasn’t just losing a war; it was losing their culture,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the whole of modern history is the destruction of one culture after another by the dominant globalizing culture of capitalism.” For the Japanese, however, the loss in the war had “profound effects, at that moment, because they were in denial. And it was that forcible coming out of denial, with the sudden dropping of bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that literally left the population speechless. That was shock and awe in the true sense. And not only Japan, but I think the entire world has not yet recovered from that." They [the Japanese] were in denial of this event happening, you mean the destruction in the war? Or were you referring to a different kind of destruction? “Of the fact that they were losing; it was inconceivable that they could lose. Just as it’s inconceivable now to many people that the present system can fall. You have people who think, ‘Ah, this will go on forever.’ People can more easily imagine the destruction of the world by an asteroid than the fall of global capitalism. It’s inconceivable and it’s not discussable.” But this is not the end, “and we have to become very strong, and filled with the inspiration of what is going to be born through this trauma, ‘cause it’s a blessing, ultimately; everything is a blessing if it’s understood in its true significance.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.

Student Comment: It seems the goal of one’s life is to be what you want to be but not because anyone else wants you to be that, right? For example, if you are planning on having a relationship, you should be in the relationship because you want to love someone, not because you want someone to love you. “Well,” begins Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “the state you're describing is a very rare state. There’s nearly always an unconscious agenda. That’s why we talk here about the ‘I’ of the statement, the statement we make to ourselves and to other people, and then the ‘I’ of the one who is enunciating that statement that usually has another agenda that is implicit within that statement. . . . Most people use words in order to not communicate with the other, in order to create miscommunication that will favor oneself.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.

Student Question: This is a two-part question: 1) How would you define humility, and 2) How does one go about becoming humble? “One short answer is the word itself: hum-ble. ‘Bal’ is Sanskrit for power. ‘Hum’ comes from the same word as ‘humus.’ To be exhumed, comes from the soil, the earth, the root, the foundation. So it is the power of the very foundation of our being,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And it is the opposite of trying to have the pseudo-power created by an artificial superstructure of prestige, position, intelligence, money—any of the artificial ways people try to get power in the world; this [humility], is the power of the earth itself. . . . And right now the whole meaning of this moment in history is that all the false powers are falling: the economic powers, the political powers, the powers that rule from egoistic positions, are collapsing. And the only true power that will survive and stand is the power of the Divine Light that will again be visible in the world. But to have that power, to be the embodiment of the power, means to surrender all of the other powers of trying to be somebody who stands out in the world, and to return to the Source.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.

“In meditation, what we are doing is simply returning to the recognition of the essence. And that essence—because that essence is indescribable—creates difficulties for the intellectualizing mind to grasp. And that’s what makes something that is actually extremely simple to seem very difficult,” explains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And the ego created its identity by grasping to landmarks: people, places, things, etc. But it has become so enmeshed in all of its support lines that it is unable to get free, and it becomes “a spider trapped in its own web. And so we want to get out of the web. And we can only do that by realizing that we are the weavers of that web.” “In the West, the Platonic dictum of ‘Know Thyself’ has been the basic maxim of intellectual development. But the problem is: the self cannot know the Self. It would require two selves, one to know the other, and there is only one. And so because we demand to know the Self, we create another, false self. But that one needs to know itself and it creates yet another, and then yet another, and then yet another. . . . And so you cannot know yourself intellectually, in the sense that you can know mathematics or you can know a painting or a person or something objective; you can only be the Self. And you can only be when you let go of trying to know.” “And then you discover what the Self really is. And the Self in Its pure form, when It’s not holding onto and identifying itself by that which it holds onto, is Emptiness: empty awareness. The awareness is cognizant; there is an Intelligence. But when turns inward to know Itself, there is nothing there; there is no-thing. There is only awareness that is formless. And that awareness that is formless, because it is Nothing, is nothing special. That’s what’s horrifying to the ego, which strives day and night to be something special in the eyes of the other. But it’s very special to give up that need to be special. And that’s what brings one to the sacred core of one’s being. And one discovers there another kind of specialness, a specialness to the Supreme Being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 18, 2010.

Student Question: As one grows in the many levels of love, one also comes to discover the many levels of the mind, which can be very strange, like visiting another planet or something. And though they may not be altogether unpleasant, they can still be very disconcerting because they are unfamiliar. How does one overcome that in meditation? “If you meditate long enough, you’ll realize you’re not a person at all,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “You are pure consciousness that has no limits. And that is interconnected with all that is. And it’s only in that state that you can really tolerate all of these phenomena that otherwise make you think you’ve gone mad.” This world is a school, and if you go about learning in a natural way—through your meditation practice—then you will be given only what you are ready to handle, though you will be pushed to your limits. And you can’t truly begin this type of higher education until you have fully individuated from your family, your friends—and all of your identity markers. “And you have the absolute right and duty to do that. If you are truly honoring your parents, you do that by growing beyond them and then being able to help them to grow, not by staying a little child. And the deep secret of every ego is [that] in the unconscious everyone’s still a child, refusing to grow up.” Recorded on the evening on Thursday, November 11, 2010.

Student Question: I’m meditating more now, and I’ve been using two different strategies: either trying to stop all thoughts that come up and staying in a state of intense concentration, or staying in the observer position, although I easily fall out of it. Which is a better strategy? “It’s different for each one because everyone has different karma,” begins Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But, the ‘vasanas,’ the tendencies to externalize and to keep the mind busy, running away from one’s core of silent awareness, is a tendency that can be defeated by consistent return to the center. And it just has to be a habit that becomes more important, more powerful, and then the other habit will be extinguished.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.

Student Comment: You wrote an essay this week on love and wisdom and the need for the two to be combined. And I wanted to know if you could expand a little on this “wise-love.” “Love is your true nature,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the ego defends against love . . . [and] it doesn’t feel safe loving in a loveless world. And so it puts its own love in the dungeon and tries to forget it’s there. And lives with as thick a skin as it can produce. But the thicker the skin, the more that affects the intelligence, and our ability to think also becomes thickened and more dense and more incapable of maintaining a very active state of intellectual creativity; all those defenses wear down that capacity.” But once the repressed, unbearable elements of one’s ego have been purified, “then the kundalini, which is simply a channel of love, rises, opens the heart, opens the mind, and flows out into the universe and you become one with the universe; you realize there are no boundaries. And all of this is love, but right now in a hidden form.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.

There are three registers of consciousness that have been understood throughout the history of religion: the Atman (or Spirit), the soul, and the ego. The Atman is the purest level of consciousness, but as the entropic process of Maya takes effect, consciousness becomes diffuse and eventually more and more fragmented—as we see epitomized in the postmodern ego. “I use the analogy sometimes of a cake,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And the Atman is an uncut cake, whereas the soul is a cake that’s still whole, but it’s been cut into slices, but it’s all there. And then when you get to the ego level, there’s only one slice left, and it’s your slice, and you're gonna hold on to it. . . . And then life becomes a war rather than a whole, as the cake was originally, in which we are not only able to enjoy it—we can have our cake and eat it—but because we are the cake.” This example can be compared to the Christian forms of love: agape, philia, and eros. But now the forces of eros, or desire, rule the world, and the ego is in its most fragmented and demonic state. And the world’s religions have not specialized in dealing with this aspect of ego-consciousness. And this fragmentation, this decadence, has been best documented in the writers of the modern era, who have noted this uncertainty that is inherent in all egos. “And the only way out is in. And so although we say that, yes, in meditation you reach bliss, but you have to go through the sadness first, of letting the ego die. And that’s what is unbearable to most people.” But, as Shunyamurti reminds us, it is still better to kill off the ego in this bardo state rather than to have it ripped to shreds by the wrathful deities at the time of death. And the internal demons that we project onto the world “can only be defeated through meditation. They can only be defeated by being willing to abide in the Self and draw in all of those fragments into the center, into the core, and fuse them back into the oneness that they are.” And by abiding in the Self, “you will realize that the bliss that you were seeking out in the world is coming through your very consciousness, and flowing through the very pores of your body into the world, and that the whole world is also a divine dwelling place of God’s Love and Presence. And that’s the only way that we can transform the world.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 11, 2010.

Student Question: In your book you make reference to a wave of light that’s going to affect the ego, against its volition. Could you please expand on that a little bit? “Well, it’s against the volition of the ego in the sense that the ego is in resistance to God,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “But the more you create a part of yourself that actually chooses this, then the more that that comes in as a beautiful, blissful energy that you welcome, and it won’t be anything threatening. If you’ve ever read the Tibetan Book of the Dead, they talk about the spirit going into different bardo states. The first states are beautiful, it’s the White Light, and then it’s the lovely deities that give you flowers and wonderful foods and nectar. . . . But then if you fall to lower bardo states, then you get the wrathful deities. And they come and they cut you open and destroy the ego in a very brutal way. So it depends on what you choose: we can learn through bliss or we can learn through suffering.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 28, 2010.

Excerpt: “It’s time to learn how to be in silence,” offers Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “I don’t think it would be appropriate for this evening to just be an evening of words. The time for words, even the most beautiful words, is passing. The time for gathering knowledge, the time for trying to understand what’s going on in this world, intellectually, is passing. It’s now the time to be, to experience, from within, from the deepest place, the realization of the meaning of all of this, but not from a place of theory or belief system. We’re long past the ability of our conscious minds to grasp what’s going on.” And at the end of each lifetime, despite what we may have accomplished in terms of worldly success, we will all have to face our own conscience and face whether or not we have “fulfilled our mission, lived up to our potential, lived an authentic life. Or did we give in to the lie? Did we betray our Spirit? Did we follow the easy path? Did we listen to what our parents told us instead of our heart? . . . And how many have the courage to break away from the socially permissible paradigm and be different from the world in order to find a truth that you won’t find on CNN or in the other media? Do we have that courage? . . . And it’s only when we have found our inner center and we are connected to the Cosmic Self, beyond the individual self, that we can find within us a source of strength and of peace and of love and of empowerment—and courage—to face this unknown world that we’re now in.” “And we can’t do this through simply theoretical means; we have to practice it. And this is where things start to go wrong for people, and they say, ‘Well I don’t have time. I’m too busy,’ or ‘I can’t meditate! My mind doesn’t stop.’ And rather than training the mind and realizing that you are inherently the master over your mind, if you want to stop it, you have that power. It’s a God-given power. It’s our birthright! But we don’t take it because we’re too fragmented. . . . Our egos are too filled with contradictory desires and agendas and fears to be able to have a consistent practice of anything, not just meditation, but almost anything in life.” “So the problem is this: within all these egons that we have, all these little psychological fragments, there isn’t a fragment of a liberated being. . . . And that means you have to create an ego fragment that believes that it is spiritual. . . . And the idea is: if you don’t feel like you're holy and pure and liberated and a saint or a sage, now—pretend you are! And don’t think, ‘Oh that’s dishonest,’ because by pretending you’re actually creating an ego fragment that believes it, that is acting it out, and that acting becomes more and more authentic the more that you put on the act, until it is actually second nature. And the point is you’re already an actor; you’re already pretending to be somebody that you aren’t. Your ego is an imposter. But why be an imposter of a sinner and a loser and somebody who is an addict or depressed, or whatever you're pretending to be, instead of pretending to be the great sage, saint, liberator, avatar . . . and why not be that that God’s Will wishes you to be anyway—as long as you're pretending in any case? And the point is that you're pretending to be something you really are; that’s the great joke of it.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 28, 2010.

“So what are we doing when we meditate?” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To put it in the simplest terms, we are connecting our surface consciousness with our inmost center of our being.” And that surface consciousness, the main object of which is the ego, can handle the day-to-day tasks and demands of life very well. “But that’s not your Real Self. It’s a vehicle that we need to create. But we also need to know that it’s not us. It’s good to have a car that is four wheel drive and can take you anywhere, but you need to be able to get out of that car. Once you drive to a beautiful place, if you stay in the car and don’t get out and enjoy the scenery, then what was the purpose of the trip? So, most of you have a very well-adapted ego; it works well to deal with the world. But it doesn’t nourish you. And it’s usually running on empty because we haven’t gotten out of the car to fill it up with new fuel. So we need to get out of the car and go back into the core of our being from time to time.” And as we refuel ourselves in meditation, we reach encounter the state of shanti which in Sanskrit means both peace and silence. But beyond the state of shanti, in deeper states of meditation, one reaches a state of indescribably blissful love. “And if you stay longer in the silent center, then you’ll go even beyond this love that has no object—it’s not just love for one’s own body, but it’s a love that becomes universal—but you will also reach a point where you realize that the center that you are is the center that is everywhere; it’s not just localizable in what you thought of as your physical body—that that center is everywhere and nowhere. And because it is everywhere, there is a love for all that is, and yet because it is nowhere, there is complete detachment and non-enmeshment from anything or anyone, and therefore freedom. And so there’s a realization of what freedom actually feels like; the Ultimate Freedom.” “And just by sitting in the silent center,” the prison of the ego collapses, “and you see reality with new eyes. And that’s probably one of the main benefits of meditation. And you realize that what you had seen as finite, limited, impossible to solve, is easily solved because it is all infinite. So all we have to do is sit in that center; we don’t have to fight with it. . . . Once you disidentify from the mind and realize it’s not your mind at all, it’s just an implanted stream of consciousness, and you disidentify from it, it will stop; it needs an audience to keep going, and once you don’t care about it, it will stop.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.

Student Comment: The way I have always understood free will is that it is not freedom of choice but freedom from choice; freedom from having to be faced with “Should I do this? Should I do that?” Freedom from that, and just living in a way in which you're not making choices, but you’re just flowing. “You can have it at any moment,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The consciousness doesn’t want to give up the illusion of its freedom. And it thinks it can attain freedom, but it’s always a false freedom, by following one course of action vs. another. So the ego is obsessed with trying to improve its state of freedom, even in the very act of giving up its real freedom. . . . And in its ceaseless striving for freedom, it enslaves itself more and more and more deeply. And the only way to achieve real freedom is letting go of that whole project of striving to achieve it at the ego level.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.

Student Question: How do I reconcile the understanding of the urge for purification without the perception that I am acting from a place of fear? “I think it is appropriate to have fear of an impure ego, of an unconscious mind that, through its impurity, could lead you to great suffering. So, not fear in the usual sense, but prudence,” clarifies Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And if one hasn’t worked out the unconscious issues, complexes, phantasies, desires, one’s life will be driven by those—and usually you're driven off a cliff. So, before that happens, the purification is very important. . . . I would say that the first order of business for everyone is purification of the unconscious. And this used to be what education was for. It wasn’t to learn mathematics or geography . . . it was to purify the unconscious mind so you could be a free human being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.

Student Comment: If, when your body passes and dies, your Higher Self and your ego, then, together, find a new host, or a new organism, or they go their separate ways and the ego finds a separate person, and the Higher Self finds something else . . . “No, it’s not like that, because the Higher Self is not a thing, is not an entity, just as God is not—this whole world is consciousness,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. To give an example, “think of your brain as a transceiver, like a radio: it’s receiving energy waves that it will translate then into thoughts, images, feelings, etc., and operate your body. But, if you're listening to a radio and you turn it on and there’s a man talking, you don’t believe there’s a man actually in that radio, do you? . . . So in the same way, the Real Self is not in the body; it’s not localizable.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.

Student Question: How does the mind create the body? “To really understand this requires a very high level of understanding of the nature of reality,” begins Shunyamurti, the research director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There is a higher level of reality in which the whole complex of belief systems—of materialism itself—is recognized as an artifact of consciousness. You may believe you're living in an external, physical world, but that belief is happening within your consciousness. This is ‘the matrix.’ And, it’s only when you can recognize that—that the entire world is consciousness, including what you call the body—that there is a conscious power, then, to shift the image of that body, or the code, the digital code, which can shift the analog code.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 2010.