Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt: “. . . But in the spiritual field in India they do talk about four powers that are latent within you that must be remembered in order to realize the freedom that is your true nature. And they talk about this in mythological terms. And often they refer to them as the Power of Rama, the Power of Sita, the Power of Hanuman, the Power of Mrityunjay. You all know these powers because you have them, you use them on a daily basis – but we can go over them since we have to talk about something. The Power of Hanuman. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 13, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . . And so to know the Unknowable Self means to allow yourself to be – without moving, without distraction, without shifting your attention from the Self to any object or any thought, idea, image, emotion – anything that would take you away from the knower – until the very sense of being a knower dissolves in the knowing and there is only this energy that is awareness but without any source and without any object – it is the ground of the field of Being itself. And the reason that the ego mind has difficulty doing this is that it always wants to grasp onto certain attributes that it can objectify. And the awareness has no attributes, all the attributes have been projected into the world, which is a reflection of the Self, but the Self is attributeless, ‘Nirguna’. ‘Emptiness’ in the Buddhist terminology. . . .” Recoded on the evening of Thursday, June 6, 2013.

Excerpt: "... But there is a command, within the ego itself, never to silence the mind, never stop thinking, always got to produce thoughts; if you don't produce you're a failure. And so you got to be willing not to produce anything, but to be. Without putting any demands on yourself, or on anyone else, or giving in to anyone’s demands on you. Create a space of freedom to rediscover who you are without starting from any programming, whether that programming has to do with the gender of the body, or the age, or the nationality, or the religion, or the culture, or any of the other factors that determine the stream of thoughts in the mind – but prior to any thoughts, to when there was pure presence, when you were really aware of being, when the world really had this heightened presence, for you, and everything was new and astonishing. Let's return to that state. And it's very easy to do because you don't do anything, just be. And if the production wants to happen, just go back with the question ‘What is the I,

Excerpt: “…In any case Tilopa reduced the whole meditation process to three phrases; they’re easy you can’t forget these. The first one is: no distraction. That may seem simple but it’s not. Second one: no contrivances. Third one: no meditation. What!? These are meditation instructions; no meditation, very interesting. So then the question is, are these commands? Are they descriptions of the state you reach in meditation? Are they qualities of your true Being? Of course they’re in the negative so we are in the via negativa here, he’s not describing what you are or what that state is, he’s just describing what not to do, to be. But, let’s look at it more deeply…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 23, 2013.

Excerpt: “…And the minute we let go and really relax and forget the ego, or remember that we are not the ego, remember that we are pure potentiality, pure presence, that is inherently without mental activity – it transcends the mind, the real presence of your being, mind is only a tool that is used on limited occasions but otherwise you’re in the silence of Infinite mind, not limited linguistic-based mind. And to live in that Self, is to be free, is to be independent, finally, of all the conditionings and all of the self-limitations. And all of the illusions and the ignorance that come with identifying with a body and an ego mind…” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 9, 2013.

Excerpt: “Sat Yoga is the art of living in the state of love. Love is our natural state. But we have become denaturalized by accepting the programming and the conditioning of the ego mind. The ego mind is generally not in a state of love – which is not news to you I can see. It’s usually in a very judgmental state and mostly attacking others for being judgmental – which is the most self-righteous way of being judgmental – but also attacking oneself, feeling negative and lacking and all the games that the ego plays in order to make itself miserable that we know all too well so I won’t belabor that point, because I’m not here to keep you in that state of misery. I would like you to see that that’s not our natural state or our real state, and it was simply an indoctrination into misery because that is how you become adapted to social living and accept the miserable conditions that most people have to live in. But we don’t have to accept that. We can change our world by changing our perception of who we are and w

Excerpt: “This is a school of magic. Are you all interested in magic? Do you all realize that you are magical beings? Do you? But there is a difference between being a magical being and being a magician. To become a magician you must train your magical potential to be fully actualized. Western civilization can be understood as the sustained effort to repress magic. That’s its whole purpose – to repress white magic; there is plenty of black magic around. For the last 2000 years that has been the main intention of the forces that have been running this civilization, to disenchant the world. Why? Because you can’t control magicians; you can’t control sorcerers; you can’t control great shamans; you can’t control the Magi, so whenever they saw a magus, they would eliminate him. They wanted to eliminate white magic because white magic, when there are enough magicians . . . coming together to create an energy field of divine magic the world can be transformed, and they know that.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday

Excerpt: “So the realization of God begins with the understanding that what we mean by that term is the ultimate, supersensory apperception that you are capable of. It’s not simply extrasensory perception; that psychics do, they can see subtle energies and be aware of things that are happening in the external plane. It’s not simply extrasensory perception. It’s supersensory, it’s beyond the sensual realm – including the subtle level of sensuality – and it is not a perception but an apperception, which means that what is being perceived is the one doing the perceiving; there is no duality in God. And therefore you can never know God as long as you want to be a perceiver of God because God does not exist as an object. The atheists are right, but they are also very wrong because they don’t understand that in the same way you have to cultivate a taste for music like this – and many people in the world would not have said this is beautiful; if you would play some death rock they would have said ‘yeah that’s great!

Excerpt: “People think that complexity is a relatively new scientific discipline, and in the modern world it is, but it’s a very ancient concept. And the first full development of that is in the form of the net of Indra. The net of Indra is the most significant concept to come out of Vedic and Buddhistic thought and got explicated most fully on HuaYen Buddhism but it existed long before that. And that is the understanding that reality is not based on closed systems with independent or contesting territories but is a network of interconnecting subsystems within a larger hyper-complex system, in which there is harmony and unity that overlies any sense of difference. And so when we can begin to map the complexity of the ego-system, we rise to the soul level which is a hyper-complex system which is an assemblage of hyper-complex systems that extends overtime because the soul reincarnates and up to the point of understanding an entire cycle of time with all of the complexity of the permutations of time itself. And

Excerpt: “...And while the Buddhists are accurate in saying ‘yes you need to live in the Two Truths’; there is a conventional reality and Ultimate Reality and for purposes of dealing with conventional reality, keeping your bank account balanced and dealing with people at the phenomenal plane who are in that illusion, you need to be able to deal with it – but you can only deal with it without suffering if you are beyond it in the Ultimate Reality. So the idea of any spiritual path is not to leave the conventional reality behind, but to recognize that even this split between Ultimate Reality and conventional reality, is a convention. And that you don’t believe in it, you free yourself from any ‘naive realism,’ that accepts this world created by the illusion of the ego as real so that you will not suffer from the events in this world or from the ignorance that generalizes to having many consequences, unintended as well as intended, so that you can live in this world as a being of wisdom, a being in peace without

Excerpt: “… Because the ego mind is a knot based on the unproven premise that the ‘I’ is the body. And it builds its entire life on that false belief, that ‘I am a body’ and ‘the body is material.’ And it’s upon that premise, false though it be, that remains tenaciously the foundation of the ego, that it will not let go of, that is the cause of all our suffering. Because once there is a body in a physical universe there is fear, there is lack, there is anxiety, there is desire, there is disappointment, there is despair; the whole wheel of egoic life stems from that false belief. And it’s to undo that false belief, not just theoretically but really, which changes our entire psychology and frees us from the torments of ego consciousness. In principle it’s very easy. And it’s easier today because modern science, particularly quantum physics, supports the understanding that the world is not real; the universe is information, and information requires a knower, and the knower is consciousness. So it is no longer ev

Excerpt: “…So this is the problem in most people’s lives, if he’d gotten the dream saying just dig under your own kitchen he probably wouldn’t have listened to it, but it told him to go to Russia; OK, it’s enough of an ordeal maybe there’s truth to it. It’s the need to do something exotic, the need to do something outlandish and to pass through some ordeal that gives something credibility. This path is just too easy because you don’t have to do anything on this path, just be yourself, what could be easier than that? There’s no method, there’s no system, there’s no approach, there’s no drug you have to take, there’s no danger, there’s no side-effects. It’s boring, isn’t it? Just be yourself. But nobody want to be themselves, they want to be someone else. They want to go on some long exotic journey somewhere, only – always – to discover that what you were looking for was back home, was yourself. You are the Atman, you don’t have to wait for some message to come in an altered state of consciousness. You have al

Excerpt: “We are here to rediscover who we are, what we have forgotten about our deep Self, to dive beneath the surface, beneath body-consciousness, and even deeper than soul-consciousness, to discover the Spirit, the Absolute Self, that always abides eternally, peacefully, blissfully within. This is our divine essence, and we have come together to discover our divine essence, and then to share our divine essence with one another, to create an energy field in which that essence is able to fill everyone with that same power of truth, of love, of joy. And so meditation is not some serious business where you have to be very sober and solemn – it might seem that from outside, but in truth we are here to rediscover that within us which is always joyous. It’s said in every religious tradition that God is love, ultimate love, ultimate bliss, the bliss of overwhelming, overflowing infinite love. Can you imagine that state? Can you imagine living in that, and realizing that that is who you are?” Recorded on the evenin

Student Question: What is prayer? And what is the meaning of it, and how to pray?

Student Question: What are nightmares? Why is it that nightmares are the dreams that affect me most and that I remember the most?

Excerpt: “…You can do it through Ramana’s approach which is simply to ask – but ask wordlessly, not using thoughts – ‘Who am I?’ ‘What is the I?’ ‘What is the source of the I?’ and keep going within until you’ve cleared out the thoughts and there is pure presence. And then hold the presence, examine it, palpate it, observe it, feel the quality of pure presence; without creating a discourse about it, without creating and trying to capture it in some net of words – but abiding in the silence of Presence. And if you do that for long enough, this Presence that is pure, unalloyed by any conditioned thinking, will accumulate an energy field, it will spread, it will grow, if you cultivate the silence moment by moment without falling back into ego thoughts, it will gradually wash away the conditioned thoughts; it will extinguish them. And it will leave your entire space of consciousness clear, peaceful, calm, filled with joy, filled with that original state of freedom, without any kind of conditionings or script that

Excerpt: “In the old days, meaning about 20 centuries ago, when the yogis first realized that this problem existed – because it didn’t exist before then but in the early period of Kali Yuga when minds already started to vibrate with a much more unhealthy frequency and instability, much less though then now of course – they invented certain techniques. One of them is called Pranayama; breathing exercises.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 7, 2013.

Excerpt: “Tonight’s gathering is about meditation, which is the core activity of this community. The goal of meditation is a simple one – it’s to reach the state of contentment. You’d think that would be very easy, and yet contentment is probably the highest state that the human being can reach. And it’s a virtue that contains all other virtues. Because if you’re really content with what you have, and are not seeking from some state of lack, then you are beyond suffering; you’re at peace. You are liberated from most of the ills that plague human kind. How many people do you know who are in a state of contentment, real contentment? And so it’s a very odd paradox that here we are aspiring to be content. Is that possible? To want to be in a state in which there are no wants. And to understand that paradox we have to recognize that the ego mind, the ordinary state of consciousness that most people take for granted as their real self is not the real Self, but is a construct; it’s artificial. You weren’t born with

Excerpt: “… When you think about it you realize that consciousness is the only, I shouldn’t say thing it’s not a thing, but it’s the only element of your reality that doesn’t change. Your mind changes, the contents of your consciousness do. You have different ideas today, hopefully than you had 20 years ago, and you’ll have different ideas in the future. So your ideas change, you can’t be defined by your ideas, and most of them aren’t real either, they’re just things you heard about and decided to believe in and usually you find out too late that it wasn’t true. So your mind isn’t real – it’s just a flux of impermanent thoughts that ultimately don’t refer to any deeper reality of a self. They’re mostly imported from other people based on their ideas of what you should think you are, to suit their needs. So if the body is not real and the mind isn’t real and neither of them have any real reference to you, and the only thing that remains unchanging is something that doesn’t even have a form at all, it’s simply

Excerpt: “… That silence usually doesn’t become tempting until the mind is filled with such disgusting elements, or ones externalized reality is filled with such negative karma that one wants to escape into the silence. But then you are haunted by it; it is very hard to escape when you’ve got burdens of negative karma chasing you. And so that’s the only reason to follow a life that is led in integrity according to the dharma, both the horizontal and the vertical dharma. That’s the cross that we must be crucified on so that we can ascend. By living in integrity at least our conscience won’t bite us. But we must be stung by the Great WASP…” Recorded in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 16, 2013.