Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

Excerpt: “Meditation is the easiest thing in the world and the hardest. It’s the easiest because it doesn’t require doing anything; and it’s the hardest because it doesn't require doing anything – because the ego always wants to do something. And what meditation is, is the freedom from doing. It is the act that is a non-act that is that is simply stopping the running away from your Self – because we run away though thinking, through chattering to ourselves. We run away from the present into some past experience that we’re reliving or rehearsing a future one, or having an emotional reaction about what we wished we had said to someone, or didn’t say, or feeling angry at what they said, or in some way dealing with some other who is not present, and not being with the Self. It is this constant act of running away that simply must be renounced, and that’s all meditation is.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 13, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . . And therefore it is the transcendence of language, of thought, that is the essence of the first step in meditation, the opening up of the psyche to Pure Presence that is focused on the Source of Being, but without trying to grasp it conceptually; that is focused with devotion and with love for the ultimate mystery – that one must be very humble and careful not to believe one already knows just because you’ve read a lot of sacred texts or you’ve heard various gurus speak or you know that you’re supposed to believe that all is one or God is all that is or whatever is the current ideology, because none of that is true – because no set of words can capture the Truth.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 6, 2014.

Excerpt: “The two doctrines of most importance and usefulness in the East are those of Advaita and Advaya. The Advaita doctrine says that the Supreme Real cannot be understood by a mind trapped in duality – which is a mind that uses ordinary language to understand things because language defines each term in terms of an opposite term: we learn what hot means in terms of cold; we learn up in terms of down; we learn being in terms of nothingness etc. But God cannot be defined or characterized or in any way described or pointed at through language that is caught in this dualistic level of description. God is beyond both being and nothingness. . . . And so the Advaya doctrine, which is the one mostly offered in the Buddhist traditions, is that we cannot speak about God at all. And therefore what you can not speak about as Ludwig Wittgenstein came to understand himself (he’s one of the fathers of postmodern Western philosophy), what you cannot speak about, pass over in silence. And it is that silence that is at th

Excerpt: “In the ancient world it was recognized that there was a bifurcation of the Real between being and appearance. Anything that appears in the world therefore is not; appearance means illusion. What has being does not appear in the world. But it has flipped completely in the postmodern period in which only that which appears seems real to the postmodern ego, and anything which can’t be grabbed onto is not real. This is the complete opposite of the way that every philosophical tradition for the last five thousand years – including the Western tradition – has understood being. That which has real being does not appear as an object in the world. It is the Source, the objects are the shadow of being, the reflection. But being itself is that which sends that shadow, it is the light, but when the light hits the mirage of the physical plane and we have appearances, that is a step removed from the Source: it has no being; it is a flux. And its reality must be interpreted by the human consciousness which is give

Excerpt: ”. . . And once that simple shift has been made then consciousness lets go of its contraction and realizes itself as infinitely vast, timeless, fearless – and completely empowered to play one’s role in the dream with heroic courage, with infinite creative potential, and with generosity and love; with all the virtues and all the siddhis that yoga speaks about, because your true nature is divine. But you’ve traded the divine powers for the ego’s anxiety. And all that needs to be done is to reclaim that original nature that is unlimited and that is fearless, and completely un-contracted.” Recorded on the morning of Monday, September 2, 2013. 

Excerpt: ”We know that we are children of God, and that when all the veils of illusion have fallen away we are one with God. We know also that this world is almost gone. The old civilization is collapsing, the plagues are coming. Time is short. But God is here, and a new world is being born. It’s being born in your hearts. It’s being born in the beauty of your souls, in your love for the Creator and the Creation. It is your timeless and infinite Light that is giving birth to a new world that will form as the perfectly beautiful reflection of your Being.” Recorded on the afternoon of Monday, October 13, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Meditation is simply Reality’s self-revelation of itself, to itself. That revelation comes in the form of awareness which is revealed as our being; our nature is simply consciousness. And that consciousness reveals itself as luminous intelligence. And that luminous intelligence reveals itself as love. And the love reveals itself as bliss. And all of this reveals itself as the timeless presence of what we are now, in this moment of what we have always been and always shall be.” Recorded on the morning of Tuesday, October 8, 2013. 

Excerpt: ”Once upon a timelessness there was only consciousness, all alone. And because consciousness dwelt in timelessness it was lonely, it is lonely, it will always be lonely – there is no other; this is its one sanskara. And it has no form, so it can’t even look in a mirror; has no name, there’s nothing to do. It has no TV, no Internet; it’s just consciousness, in infinite, eternal, boring bliss. So what is a poor lonely Supreme Self to do? It dreams up a world! And it dreams up very interesting worlds.” Recorded during the Timeless Truth retreat, on the morning of Tuesday, September 30, 2014.

Excerpt: “One of the mantras that is popular now is actually a very young one; it’s only about 3000 years old. But before that – before this mantra ‘Sat Chit Ananda,’ which is now one of the core mantras – there was another one called ‘Satyam Gyanam Anantam,’ and this goes back many thousands of years earlier - which has a slightly different nuance - which basically says ‘I am the Truth of Being (Satyam), I am the Knowledge that is aware of that Truth.’ So it is a state of full consciousness but that knowledge is not the knowledge that is now called ‘ciencia.’ So it is toda ciencia trascendiendo, but it is still a kind of ciencia, but it is the science that is the knowledge of infinity. Anantam is infinity; it is not Ananda but Anantam. Because it is the recognition, the knowledge, that all of this that we perceive, we are. God is all that is, you are That.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 18, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Anyone who meditates is committing a sin because you’re starting with the presumption that you’re separate from God and have to do something to reach God – when that illusion of separation is the ignorance, the sin – the original sin – and cannot be eliminated by that illusory ego making some effort to reach God – because where are you going to reach to if you’re already That? God is not an object somewhere out there, not a being you have to call on a phone, or have some telepathic connection with. There is no process by which you can reach God because any process simply takes you away from your own center. And so the only valid form of meditation is non-meditation.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 11, 2014.

Excerpt: ”Pure and total presence precedes the interpretation of what is present. And it is through an inaccurate interpretation of what is present that the soul and then the ego illusions and the belief in an external world, and an internal world for that matter, are developed which create deeper and deeper levels of maya. The maya, or the illusion, is based on the mind’s wrong interpretation of what is present. But the presence itself is Truth and is the nature of our Being. That presence includes all of reality but the presence is not divided into separate individual entities. And it is the mistaken belief that this presence is seen from the perspective of a particular entity that then creates the I-thought from which the sense of self and of otherness enters in which creates alienation and duality and a loss of wholeness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 4, 2014.

Excerpt: ”As the duration of the silence extends, an impulse to go back into the suffering arises – a very strange, paradoxical impulse. And it is this final death throe of the soul that becomes the last obstacle to letting go of maya. There is a preference to hold on to the agony, rather than to die into the peace. And as long as there is any shred of the soul left to try to control things, it will hold on to its death rattle, to its refusal to go gently into that good night . . . and it will rail against the dying of its false light. And it is at this point that there must be the power of surrender to the Absolute to let go of that peacelessness. And to face the transition into the silence which will first appear as a loss, and even as a strangulation of the soul, which in a way it is, as it is finally put to rest. . . . But once the step has been taken, and that Beyond recognized as the real home, as the ultimate abode, then everything becomes very, very simple. And as the attention turns toward the infini

Excerpt:” Consciousness begins to realize it’s Beingness, it’s I Am-ness that exists prior to the body that has nothing to do with the birth of the body or its processes of development that are all within the karmic field – but it recognizes that the karma, the world in which the body exists, the body-mind itself, is simply an object in consciousness that is a temporary vehicle of the I Am-ness. But that the I Am-ness is universal and is simply the expression of Love.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 14, 2014. 

Excerpt: “Most of us spend our lives waiting for the miracle to come. But the philosophy of Sat Yoga is to realize that you are the miracle – and there’s nothing more to wait for. This should be the simplest concept, if you will, to realize. But it’s not because we hold too many opinions about ourselves – opinions that were formed when we were young that were actually other people’s opinions of us that we internalized and took in as if they were realities when they were merely projections. And so the miracle we’re waiting for is for someone to wipe off the board that we have in our minds with all of the bad opinions . . . but because it is your mind, only you can erase it.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 7, 2014. 

Excerpt: ”Sat Yoga means the realization of Sat – which is the fundamental energy of the universe. But we can also think of it as an acronym, of course, as the Silence of Absolute Transcendence. Absolute transcendence means transcendence even of transcendence. Relative transcendence is consciousness, Purusha, separating from Prakriti. That’s the first step in meditation. Because the separation enables you to realize that you are not the body and not the mind. So it is the relative transcendence of the ego, and the localizability in matter; the separation from all concepts, including the concept of matter. But then one must transcend even the concept of transcendence. Even the concept of the Self.” Recoded in the afternoon of Monday, April 29, 2013. 

Excerpt: “[The Sat Yoga School] has three basic intentions. One is to help you think the unthinkable. The second is to help you bear the unbearable. And the third is to help you dare the impossible. So let’s take these one at a time. Obviously most people don’t want to think the unthinkable, and there are different levels of un-think-ability. And the first level is really more the resistance to coming out of denial. It’s not that it’s really unthinkable, but “I don’t want to think about it” – it’s that level. And that has to do basically with prudence. Any prudent business person will have fallback positions in case of worst case scenarios. . . . Well, most people do not want to think about the fact that this entire system is about to collapse; that’s too much to deal with. . . . If you want a plan B, and if you want to think your way through this and to survive, then it’s worth thinking about this before it happens. . .” Recorded on the evening of Saturday, July 26, 2014. 

Excerpt: ”Our teacher Sri Ramana says that the ego has four pillars. . . . And when we understand the pillars of the ego, because they are all delusional, it is easy to bring them down. And the four are co-dependent on one another. In developmental terms the first is Avidya, or ignorance; forgetfulness of our True Nature. And that forgetfulness makes us vulnerable to false beliefs to buying into preconceptions and impositions and false implications of language, and the belief, that what you see is what you get. And the belief in the implicit reality that there must be some thing that stands behind the appearance of the I-thought.” Recorded on the morning of Thursday, July 17, 2014.

Excerpt: ”. . .But there’s no reason ever to leave the stillness of the perfection of what you are; that is already liberated from maya. You don’t notice that you simply create maya in order to then liberate yourself from it. It’s a nice game, but this “Yo" "Yo” game that you play just brings you back to square zero anyway – so why ever leave it? Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, May 21, 2013.

Excerpt: “. . . And it’s only when you have entered deeply upon a path of Self discovery that you can even know what are the potentials that lie behind and beyond the event horizon of your current level of subjectivity – that offer miraculous powers and potencies for your own capacity to become and to realize yourself in this plane as the Infinite Being that you are. It is only when we constrain the ego mind and its weaknesses from acting out; its desire to regress, to take the easy path, the comfort zone, and never to dare those levels of your selfhood that are currently not yet known to you – because you are a mystery to yourself. But few of us explore that mystery. Most of us settle for an identity that we received from others that might just be adequate enough to make us a living, and to live a tolerable life, but never to know true ecstatic joy, bliss, and infinite fulfillment.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 3, 2014.

Excerpt: ”The ego is an unstable structure – and dependent upon the desire of others, the affirmation of others; what one takes as the love of others – but which is all always, at the level of ego, an narcissistic quid pro quo. To get beyond this impasse, we must dis-identify with any objective other, including the body that is considered one’s own. And to abide in silence and stillness, and inner aloneness without any co-dependence on any other, without any desire from any other – in oneness with the Supreme Self. This practice alone can liberate us; liberate consciousness from its suffering. The problem is, for the ego mind, that the Real Self is inconceivable. . .” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 26, 2014.