Refuse to Feed on Delusion - 04.08.10

“There was a great Zen master of the 14th century in Japan, named Bassui, who was asked about fasting and he said, ‘The only real fasting is to refuse to feed on delusion.’ Any other fasting may be helpful for the body, maybe not, but the real key is to transcend delusion,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. And, of course, this means fasting from identity itself: “The moment you believe you’re a someone who has something, some treasure, some priceless knowledge—let alone thinking you have some priceless material object or partner or money, or whatever else—any of those are delusional—but even the highest level of subtlety of sophisticated metaphysical conceptualization of reality is pure delusion.” And, your true nature “cannot be seen or known in any way in which the mind tends to conceptualize even the process of knowing. So this is sometimes referred to as a path of Gyana Yoga,” and Gyana is “translated as knowledge, but it is knowledge that is Being. You are That which you Know; you don’t know it conceptually. There is no subject/object separation in that state because both those poles of subject and object are illusions. There is no subject. Any subject is always going to be, simply, a conceptualization. That’s what the ego is, a self-image, or it could be a very sophisticated set of self concepts. So the ego can exist on a spectrum, but all of it is an illusion. . . . So there is no subject, and the object, of course, is simply form that arises within that very same consciousness that thinks it is looking at it. And so all there is, is that which Is. . . . So let’s give ourselves that gift of realizing that there is only one Sat, one Mind, and we are all That, together as a unity, not in separation. And let us not be a mind that is in a state of separation from that ultimate Reality. We are That.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, April 8, 2010.