Wisdom Teachings - Sat Yoga, Costa Rica

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.

Excerpt:  “We are here to practice yoga.  Yoga is the ancient science of consciousness.  How do you practice a science?  It is through the exploration of your consciousness.  And it is an applied science as well as simply a theoretical pure science and the application of this scientific method is to arrive at the purification of consciousness.  The removal from consciousness of all the superimpositions that have like veils or transparencies, filters, ended up causing us to superimpose upon reality, illusions.  If they are severe enough we call them delusions. The modern science of psychology derives from the ancient science of yoga, but it’s spectrum of understanding of the nature of consciousness is much smaller - it understands only a sliver of what we call ego consciousness, whereas the point of yoga is to transcend ego consciousness, because the great scientists of consciousness thousands and thousands of years ago discovered that there were levels of consciousness that far transcend anything available to

Excerpt: "Impermanence is the rule of the phenomenal plane – everything comes and goes, nothing is permanent. And by accepting that and not resisting and fighting it, we can be at peace, and discover the one aspect of reality that is not impermanent which is the awareness that is aware of the impermanence. And that's what we happen to be. and if we accept that – that we are simply awareness – not awareness that is identified with any impermanent thing, like a physical body, or even a mind, or a personality, or any objective identification at all, we are free of suffering. It's only when we identify with something impermanent that we start to fear that we will lose our being, our existence. But that fear is purely based on an illusion. And all of our desires are simply the compensation for that fear; you wanna hold on to something that will help you maintain the illusion of this existence which isn't real. And the despair at realizing that it is ultimately hopeless to hold on to anything at all. And finally on

Excerpt: "Sri Ramana says that the abode of bliss that we are all seeking is stillness. And he says we are all seeking it whether we know it or not. But most of us are seeking it in the wrong places. Not in stillness but in some external person, situation, drug, music phenomenon of some kind – but the abode of bliss can only be found in stillness. And many of the things that we do are done in order to reach a temporary state of stillness. We know that runners often run just to get exhausted and then their minds stop working because they have no energy to keep producing thoughts and they get 'runner’s high.' And other people do many other things – not for the reason that they might consciously think but that it will give them a moment of a glimpse of the abode of bliss. But Ramana says it is our birthright to live in the abode of bliss, always. That's our real home – but most of us have run away from home. And now we have to be the prodigal sons and daughters to find our way back." Recorded on the evening of T

Excerpt: "...Because what he taught and what is the truth is that each of us has the capacity to be the manifestation of Shiva, if we renounce our ignorance of that; if we make it Real by dissolving the veil of the ego mind that stands between our consciousness and Shiva; and through the ceaseless practice of inner silence and remeberence of the Supreme Self as 'I.' And then that Almighty Self will flow through and fill our consciousness, and move our bodies and our minds in a divine way, and create an energy field of such power, such love, such joy that the world will be transformed by that. But we must be wholeheartedly dedicated to attaining our real consciousness as the Supreme Self, and not wallow in the ego mind and it's narratives, and not identify with memory traces of the past, and not act out the symptoms and the sufferings of the ego mind and its traumas, and not continue to inflict them on our self and others..." Recorded on the evening of Thursday, November 8, 2012.

Excerpt: “The process of meditation is that of realizing our Real Self because most of the day we live behind the mask of a false self that defends us against either real or imagined attacks, or deceptions, or difficulties in life, negative projections and rejections, and all of our fears and anxieties projected out into the world. And because we are doing that our energy is dissipated, and we get exhausted, burned out. We lose our selves. And so when we come to meditate we come to re-find ourselves, to pull our energies back inward to our center, to be balanced and to regain the wholeness that we had lost during our time in the false self, until eventually we don’t ever leave the Real Self, because we understand that there is no need to do that. But we are trained early in life to wear this mask and pretend it is our Real Self and we have accepted it for so long that we no longer even realize it’s a mask and we think it is all there is and there is nothing else behind it. So there is a terror of taking it of

Excerpt: “We come here for freedom – freedom from suffering. And we learn that all suffering is caused by our own ego and that the one job to achieve is to kill the ego. Some people object to that phrase, but it’s essential to recognize that the ego must be killed, and can only be killed because it’s not Real. What is Real cannot be killed. What is Real is eternal and immortal. But the ego – despite its unreality – is imprisoning our consciousness, in a self-sabotaging thought-form that destroys our happiness, destroys our life, destroys our capacity to be. And unless we destroy the ego, it will keep us imprisoned in hell realm life after life after life. And that means we’re not living at all.” Recorded in the afternoon of Tuesday, October 30, 2012.

Excerpt:  "Sat Yoga is a finishing school - probably the last of the finishing schools.  Feminism killed off most of them, but here we have a co-ed finishing school… and yes we are here to finish off the ego but we are doing it not by destruction but by allowing it to attain its perfect form and then the ego blossoms into the soul and if we allow it the soul blossoms into pure spirit.  We teach about different assemblage points here.  Each assemblage point is really an opening up to love at a higher, broader, deeper level.  But the essence of what we are is love at every level - even at the level of the ego, which we say “oh, the ego cannot love”, which is true in terms of divine love, but the ego is love because that’s all that is, is love.  At the first assemblage point the problem is the ego’s circle of care and love does not go beyond its own self-image… it loves what is sees in the mirror and it loves others adoring gazes and saying yes etc. and it loves sensual pleasures and that kind of thing – what Fr

Excerpt: “…And within that idea of return there is a crossroads that one encounters. One leads to the bliss of the Absolute and the other leads to nihilism – that leads to an emptiness that is a barrenness. And we have two kinds of spiritual teacher in the world: one who is pointing to the bliss and the light and the power and the joy of God and the other who points to absolute nothingness. And so it’s very important that when you let go of the ego and allow it to dissolve that you recognize there is still an awareness that is witnessing that. So you are still there when your ego has dissolved. You are still there when the mind is completely silent. But when there are no more narratives, who are you that is there? That’s the question. The real inquiry that Ramana recommends of ‘Who am I?’ only begins after the disillusion of the ego when you know you are not that, you are not the traumatized person but you’re the witness. And then you can begin to ask ‘but what is this witness?’ that is still there after ever

Excerpt: “The Christians talk about transfiguring the wafer and the wine into the body and the blood of Christ. It’s the theory of transubstantiation. But what it means is that you recognize that Real One, a mere wafer, a mere cup of ordinary wine, is actually simply the symbolic representation of Real Two, the love of God, the act which is the actual body and blood of God. But in our version of transfiguration everything is transformed, all of Real One, and all of the Imaginary of the ego is transformed into Real Two and into the archetypal realization that everything that appears here; including yourself, your own body, your own mind, is simply a symbolic representation of the Real that is God.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 15, 2012.

Excerpt:  “We are here to do what the song just said… which is to Swaha - it means give everything to Rama… surrender every illusion that you are separate from God so that you realize who you truly are… surrender every bit of negativity, fear… every piece of anger, hatred, depression, anxiety… throw it all into the fire… throw everything that separates you from your realization of oneness with the supreme being and by doing that and invoking the supreme presence you will be free of suffering and you will be in bliss and you will be filled with power and creativity and clarity and you will be filled with love and you will know that you are loved and you will know that you are one with the source of love and that love is what is beautiful and love is what is good… love is what is real and eternal and you are that and everything that you might have thought that you were that is different from that is an illusion… it is Maya and if you don’t hold onto any Maya and you can let it all go, you will achieve liberatio

Excerpt: “What is it that we see when the third eye is open? The first thing we see, as all the ancient sages have testified to, is that this world is unreal. Do we all see that? To be unreal doesn’t mean that it doesn’t appear; it is real as an appearance, but it is not real as a world with all of the veils of the ego’s projections upon it. The projections are unreal; they are fantasies. And once those projections are put out there, superimposed upon the phenomenal plane, then that’s what we get back, are our own projections. And so the first thing that the Eye of Shiva must do is burn away the projections so we see the world as it is, as a creation of Shiva. And then we see it not as a world any longer but as a hologram, a multidimensional dream field, in which everything that appears is a symbolic manifestation of the mind of God.” Recorded in the afternoon of Monday, October 8, 2012.