Spiritual Teachings With Shunyamurti

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...

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 cause...

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...

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...

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 Awa...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 reac...

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...

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 em...

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 van...

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 bea...

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 i...

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 pa...

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 prese...

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...

Beginning with a deep relaxation, this guided meditation with Shunyamurti is designed to help you enter into a deep meditative state. Recorded during the Meditation Weekend on Friday, March 13, 2015.

Excerpt: ”The central existential problem for most beings is a lack of moral strength. And this plagues people at different levels; one is the lack of the strength to stop pretending one believes in one’s ego identity and all of its self-sabotaging sanskaras. And so the lack of moral strength to face the truth of one’s imposture as an ego is usually because one cannot face the anxiety of admitting...

Excerpt: “Meditation . . . is the silencing of the mind, with its attention one-pointedly focused on God; God as the selfless Self, the immutable center and heart of consciousness. Through that silent focus, which is a docking maneuver, the individual consciousness docks and unites with the supreme source of power . . . . In this unification of the individual consciousness and the supreme infinite...

Excerpt: ”Every soul carries so much pain from so many other lives, so much karma. The soul itself is ripped and torn and unable to function, let alone the ego split into a thousand shards of egoic fragments with no willpower; a total inner chaos of instability – that there is no way out except the death of the ego. And it’s when that is recognized that there is nothing else on one’s agenda but th...

Excerpt: “The trick is this . . . there’s only one obstacle to achieving Self-Realization instantaneously in meditation, and that is the lack of self-acceptance – simply that. If you would accept yourself as you really are, you would achieve enlightenment and liberation. But the ego mind, which is a kind of veil over the real Self, is in a state of non-acceptance, and that non-acceptance can be on...