A Spill of Maya, Karma, and the Unconscious Mind - 05.27.10

Excerpt: “I would like to dedicate this Satsang to all the incredible life forms who are now being affected, harmed, and destroyed by the catastrophic ecological disaster taking place in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a disaster the effects of which are inconceivable and immeasurable. And we won’t even have close to a clue for months to come, but it will affect, ultimately, everyone on this planet. There is a single ocean. A single ecosystem. And it’s being massively destroyed at this moment. And it is a symptom of the pathological nature of the human ego in its present form, and a proof of how urgent it is that we transform and transcend the ego at a collective level to ensure that these things will not happen again. . . . And the irony is that here at the moment when human beings feel so all-powerful in their arrogance, never have humans been more powerless. Never have we seen a sight of a ‘superpower’ so impotent to protect its own beaches. Never have we seen a whole world of human organizations—from corporations to national governments to international united nations, governments, all of them—helpless because of a destructive event that took place as a result not only of negligence, corruption, and other human failings, but as part of the inevitable structure of the current situation that we have created through the ego’s own blindness to its own reality. And we must heal that: we have an obligation to heal that before we damage our planet any further. . . . And so we can look at this macrocosmic level and see that this is a symptom of what is going on at every level of life. And that’s the problem: we tend to focus on the most macro insults to our environment . . . and not see that this is the result of millions upon millions of micro events that happen every day in people’s lives at the most intimate levels of connection with one another—and even internally within one’s own mind. . . . The capacity of the Atman, or this naked Presence that is the intelligence behind the cosmos, will arrange things in whatever way is necessary to support the growth of the manifestation of that Cosmic Consciousness to appear here in the phenomenal world itself. And that’s the function of a human being.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.