Living an Authentic Existence - 07.01.10

Student Comment: My whole life I’ve felt the need to live an authentic life. So what you said tonight was very poetic for me.

“This is what all of human culture is about,” reminds Shunyamurti, the authentic director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And through time, the different philosophers have given their own spin on that. But that’s been the essential question: ‘How shall I live?’ . . . All of culture, whether at the popular level or the high cultural level, [people] are always asking this question: ‘Do you want to be in the matrix and have a comfortable, inauthentic existence, or do you want to face the adventure of insecurity?’ . . . We have the insecurity of not knowing, not depending on someone to take care of us when it means betraying our values, not depending on cultural values that we know are not authentically true, caving in to the herd and not following our truth and our heart. If you don’t lead that authentic existence, you're lost.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 1, 2010.