“Many people mistakenly believe that entering a spiritual path means taking on a new belief system. This is incorrect,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Instead, what is asked of us is simply to experiment with letting go of our current belief system. And that’s much more difficult. And the reason that it’s difficult [is that] not only is it our comfort zone, but it’s assumptions that we have never questioned about reality, including m...
“Many people mistakenly believe that entering a spiritual path means taking on a new belief system. This is incorrect,” argues Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Instead, what is asked of us is simply to experiment with letting go of our current belief system. And that’s much more difficult. And the reason that it’s difficult [is that] not only is it our comfort zone, but it’s assumptions that we have never questioned about reality, including many assumptions about reality that we don’t even know that we hold. And it’s only in the act of experimenting with letting go that we actually discover what our belief system had been. And that’s when we realize the absurdities and the inconsistencies of the belief system that our consciousness had been stuck in.”
“What’s interesting, is that the more you study the experimental results that the different sages and saints and mystics of the different spiritual traditions have discovered—whether they are Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, alchemist, Egyptian hermitists, whatever—it turns out that they discover the same thing: that there is a congruency among those who have made the experiment, carried it through to the end, and what they describe as Ultimate Reality. Now that doesn’t mean that we should believe them. But it does mean that there’s a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that if you will carry out this experiment you will also have a similar result. And the result has been uniformly auspicious, benevolent. [It] has been a transformation of one’s consciousness and character structure to one of benevolence, one of joy, one of love, one of positivity. One of freedom from fear and from anxiety with a greater clarity and wisdom and empowerment. And it has everything going for it; there are no drawbacks to reaching this state of consciousness if indeed it is true.”
“And so the intensity of your desire to discover what you are, ultimately, and the willingness to let go of what you had thought that you were, are the two factors that will determine how quickly the journey is completed. And the more that one is humble, in being willing to admit that ‘I don’t know what reality is,’ and that ‘my present belief system isn’t working beyond a certain point,’ and ‘I am open to learning something new that is so radically different that I can’t conceive of it.’ If one is willing to take that risk into the unknown, then the powers of higher consciousness will draw you magnetically into the source of your Being very easily. . . . So that’s what we’re doing when we’re meditating: we’re discovering ‘Who am I when I silence the mind, when I stop diverting, when I let go of all of my paradigms of reality, all of my beliefs—including the belief that I am in a physical body in a material world’—including that one, letting go of everything and returning to the very silent center of awareness, then Liberation is a natural and effortless achievement.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, June 3, 2010.
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