Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt: “It has always been recognized that the only difference between a sinner and a saint is that the sinner settles for crumbs of pleasure – in between which are massive amounts of suffering – while the saint is always in bliss. And so therefore can’t we say that the difference is simply a difference in intelligence? One makes a wiser choice. But the choice of bliss comes at a price, and the price is, well two prices, which come to be the same: one is hubris, the other is greed.” Recorded on the morning of Friday, February 27, 2015.

Student Question: How can I live with an open heart without taking on other's suffering? Recorded during the Abyss and Pleroma retreat, on the evening of Tuesday, December 29, 2015.

Excerpt: “The Self, and by the Self we mean consciousness in its pure, original form, before it is conditioned by all of the indoctrination that we received in our childhood and in an ongoing way by all of the messages we get from society and each other . . . we are infinite beings in a state of bliss, with knowledge, with love, with power. And then we are taught a lot of misinformation that causes us to forget all of that. So within this infinite pure consciousness, little bubbles of finite belief systems form, and when such a bubble forms in which there is an identification, usually with the bodily form . . . we call that an ego. And that little finite bubble of consciousness gets cut off from the rest of consciousness and forgets about everything outside of that bubble.” Recorded on the evening of Friday, November 27, 2015.

Student Question: Why is love so painful?

Excerpt: ”Can you awaken to the dreamer of the dream who is within you at this very moment, and awaken to your own power to re-dream this world as a heaven rather than a hell? Do you have the courage? Do you have the will? Do you have the love to propel you to awaken from your own dream of life, and realize the truth that you are the dreamer? This is the real question we all face.” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, July 19, 2015.

Student Question: How do you deal with the hypocrisy of the ego when you say to yourself that you want to surrender and walk the spiritual path but you don't do it? How do you deal with that situation without starting an internal war?

Excerpt: ”If and when meditation is successfully accomplished it is the result of Grace. It is given, in the same way as in the Old Testament, the manna from heaven was given every morning in the desert; they didn’t have any food in their rucksacks. And they were moving along and couldn’t plant any, and it was a desert where very little was growing, but somehow every morning the manna would appear. In our meditations it is that same faith that the manna from heaven, the Shakti, the lumination, the presence of that inner Other, of that power that is the Real Self, will shine upon us, will grant us a glimpse or a realization of the fullness of the Being that we are that is beyond anything we can think we are. And that Grace comes when there is love.” Recorded during the Lion Heart Koan retreat, on the morning of Sunday, October 25, 2015.

Excerpt: ”Awareness is all that we know. Whatever seems to occur is only an appearance in Awareness. But what is Awareness made of? Does it have a substance? Is it objective? Awareness cannot be captured by any science because every science must be an appearance in Awareness; and science is a form of knowing, but there is no form of knowing that can know Awareness. Therefore we cannot say that Awareness is made of anything; it has no substance, no essence. And since everything is an appearance in Awareness, and is simply a modification of Awareness, then we cannot say that anything is.” Recorded on the morning of Saturday, October 3, 2015.

Excerpt: ”God is the infinitely branching reality of the creativity of life itself. And we who sit under this tree of life, we are life. And we can hear the sound of life, and it is the sound of love. And if we sit watchfully like the animals on the lookout, feeling the energy of God’s love, as Nature Herself, and realizing we are one with that; we are Nature’s tuning forks who transform the bliss of this divine presence into art, into meaning, into poetry, into philosophy, into prayer – into sheer delight. This is our function as part of Nature.” Recorded during The Dao of Love retreat on the morning of Monday, February 17, 2014.

Excerpt: “Our beliefs are a defense against love. We live in the head in order to avoid the heart. And by eliminating any hiding place in the head at the level of beliefs, we force ourselves to face the reality of the Self as love - and our surrender is a surrender to love. It is the bringing to an end the fearful flight from love that is the ego’s raison d'etre. And thus we can define meditation and yoga as the practice of the purification and perfection of love. Love is what we are. Love is what God is. Whatever is real is real because it is love.” Recorded during the meditation weekend on Sunday, August 2, 2015.

Excerpt: “Why is the world something to us that arises, and that creates not only sensations, which are easily correlated to the five senses, but feelings, intuitions, and all of the subtler aspects of consciousness? Because none of that would be necessary based on simple evolutionary principles in which we could have been simply robots, or zombies . . . and how do we know that everyone else in the world is not a zombie, in other words, seemingly conscious but actually simply a computer program; programmed to respond in given ways that are adaptable but that they have no interior reality, how do we know? And how is it that there is an ‘I’ that can even ask that question?  Well this Hard Question is in fact the original question that produced the field of yoga; it is nothing other than the question that Ramana insists that we ask which is ‘Who am I?’ ‘what is I-am-ness, being-ness?’” Recorded on the early morning of Friday, February 6, 2015.

Excerpt: ”The first important thing to recognize is that yoga cannot be defined. The closest definition I have been able to come to after many years of studying this subject is: yoga is the practice of the Real. However, because we are discussing this in language, which is a representation of the Real, the language is already an avoidance of the subject; and no representation of the Real, can reach the Real. Therefore yoga can only be known but not defined by a real yogi. And the word for Real in in Sanskrit, the original language in which this practice developed, is sat, so we refer to this as Sat Yoga.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, June 16, 2015.

Excerpt: ”… That’s the poison that we have is our addiction to the imitation self, and to its passions for trying to find a reality through clinging to some other, that also has become an imitation – and to detoxify means to find what is real and to let go of the artificial. It’s really that simple. Because the artificial will kill us; in fact the first artificial ingredient was our identification with the mortal body and thus we took in death, and the fear of death. But also we took in the loneliness that comes with being a body in a world of bodies, because bodies do not love, and bodies are only defence mechanisms to deal with survival. But to live at that level where we’re living to survive, to assure our security, that means that we never live, we’re never fully alive in joy, because we are always governed by these worries, these protective mechanisms…” Recorded on the morning of Sunday, May 31, 2015.

Excerpt: “Where does the story originate? And what is it that we must face? Is it not the face of God? And is not the face of God the very absence of God that requires us to fill in that absence with a story. But to restore ourselves to the Real requires us to be able to endure the face of God, who is the destroyer of the story, and to endure in that everlasting Emptiness, out of which the Real emerges as royalty – real and royal are the same word. And it is when we have burned away the stories, all the stories . . . what is left is the Real.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, May 28, 2015. 

Excerpt: “A Sat Yogi is one who renounces vanity. Religious, spiritual teachers have been pointing at vanity as the cause of our suffering for thousands of years. And one could see that as the core of the frame of reference of the ego – that because the ‘I-thought’ is based on nothing real, that that lack must be compensated for by vanity. And the vanity inherently includes an inverse level of vanity, and this produces the affects of pride and shame, and there becomes an obsession with those aspects of body, of mind, of behavior that one is proud of and others that one is ashamed of. And the life of the ego becomes an oscillation between one and the other, and a determination usually from moving from shame into something one can have pride about. And the more that one tries to move away from shame the more deeply one realizes that the vanity is embedded in the mind process of the ego itself.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, May 21, 2015.

Excerpt: “Every religion posits a trinity . . . [and] what it always comes down to is presence, intelligence, and love. In the Christian tradition, presence is the Father, intelligence the Son, and love, the Holy Spirit. The same trinity can be referred to as Sat Chit Ananda in which the blissful aspect of love is emphasized – but it is the same trinity. Or Satyam Shivam Sundaram, in which the beautiful aspect of love is emphasized. But love and the symbolization of love is what changes; the other two remain constant. Because love is that aspect of this ultimate reality that is vulnerable to the fourth member of the Godhead that remains invisible except as a glitch in all of these systems; because the Godhead is not a triad, but a quaternity. And the fourth member of the Godhead, that has been banished into the outer darkness returns in the form of. . . .” Recorded in the morning of Friday, May 22, 2015.

Excerpt: “Meditation is the discovery of the Real Self. In the process of discovering the Real Self, one also uncovers the fact that the ego is a false self; it is made up of conditionings that have been imported into consciousness from others . . . and accepted without due consideration for whether these are views that one truly holds oneself or were simply indoctrinated into one’s conditioning in order to comply with environmental demands . . . . Meditation is a kind of internal vision quest; there is no need to go out into the desert or the jungle or sit in a cave, but to move your attention into the cave of pure awareness in which you observe your own consciousness to discover ‘what is really there inside, what is really in my heart, what is really the source and foundation of my being?’” Recorded in the morning of Sunday, April 19, 2015.

Excerpt: “The victory of God means the defeat of the ego, the defeat of all egocentric narratives. God does not become victorious through some effort. God is always already victorious, but that victory is only recognized when the ego’s helplessness and the futility of establishing the reality of any ego, is recognized; it is at the fall of the ego that the victory of God is realized. It is this paradox that is most difficult to integrate. So long as the ego . . . remains the frame of reference of thought, then the reality of God will not be recognized or surrendered to, but God will remain as a bit player in one’s scenario. It is when all the machinations of the ego fail, when all of its knowledge proves inadequate, that we turn to God as a last resort, and recognize that the ego cannot do it.” Recorded on the morning of Wednesday, May 6, 2015.

Excerpt: “Presence is. Nothing more accurate can be said in language because language cannot approach Presence; language is the retreat from Presence into identification, into subtle subject-object duality in which the signifier itself is both subject and object. Sat Yoga could be said to be a return to Presence because Presence is primary. . . . Presence is the Supreme Real. Presence has no present, because it is timeless. It cannot be described because Presence is not an object or a thing – not even a subject. Presence is prior to subject-object duality.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, April 27, 2015.

Excerpt: “The mind is the cause of all suffering. When that becomes clear, then along with that the resolution of the problem of suffering becomes clear as well: that only a radical transcendence of the mind, the discovery, the realization of the transcendent Self will solve the problem. But the sages say that only when the realization of the urgency, of the need to transcend the mind, is at least equivalent to that of the urgency of a man whose hair is on fire to find a pool of water to dive into, should you begin a path like this. . . I tend to use the acronym now of “LA DI DA,” which is Lack, Anorexia, Deflation, Inflation, Dread, Avoidance. And in that dialectical oscillation one tends to go on with the ego as if nothing [were] wrong: “La Di Da” – and yet underneath that is the unbearable suffering that alternates with momentary jouissance or security-op[eration] that keeps one from having to feel the urgency, and thus the frog boils away in the water and never jumps out.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesd