Becoming a Chud Master - 07.01.10

“The journey to spiritual liberation is a rocky journey for everyone,” reminds Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Along the journey, one recognizes one’s own suffering. And the cause of one’s suffering is linked to an inability to love, and a fear based on the mis-perception of separation from the world, also known as the ego. “But the odd thing is we cherish this very ego that is the cause of our suffering, and we won’t let it die; we think it protects us. Ego death is the goal of every spiritual tradition,” and we are reminded of the Bible which says, “unless a kernel of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” So it is with ego death.

“And yet, how many of us will let that ego die. And we don’t let it die because we are afraid of loneliness. One of the words for ego death in the Ashtanga Yoga tradition, begun by Patanjali, is Kaivalya. . . . And for Patanjali, what this meant was a separation of Purusha from Prakriti, and then Purusha lives in complete solitude; Kaivalya means solitude. You’re all alone. And indeed we are all alone, and we don’t want to face that we’re all alone. And we would rather have a bad object out there, that we can be angry at and think ‘Well, if only it wasn’t for them I’d be OK and loved and alright,’ rather than realizing we are absolutely alone in a world that is our own projection.”

“The irony is that once we allow ourselves to enter into the solitude, we find [that] it’s not a solitude that is an isolation from the world; it’s not a loneliness. It is a unity with all that is. You are alone because there is no other; we are all One. . . . But we must let the mind die in order to know that, and the fear of that keeps the negative thought cycle going on and on. . . . But when we allow that all to settle, we find that the Divine Self is right there, it has been right there all along. . . . It’s on the surface, but we just don’t connect with it out of fear of losing this ego cycle that we think keeps us alive and actually keeps us from truly living.”

“There’s a great tradition in the Tibetan Buddhist lineage called ‘Chud.’. . . What it means is that you cut the self-cherishing of the ego. You cut all your connection to wanting to have this ego which will then give you all your suffering. . . . Then, once they have cut the connection to needing the ego to survive, they will find that under that fear is great joy. . . . So we all have to become Chud Masters here, and cut away the cherishing of the ego which creates the suffering and that cuts us off from the love that we all have within. And we want it to come out and manifest, and to be a gift to all others in the world. And that’s the only thing that will fulfill us.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 1, 2010.