“Be Still and Know that I am God” - 07.08.10

“I hope all of you feel at peace in your body and in your mind. That’s the starting point for the spiritual journey,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. Indeed, the first mantra, “Om Shanti,” reminds us of this starting point. “This is why Sri Ramana was very intent on repeating an expression from the Bible more than, even from the Vedas or Vedanta, it was a phrase that he was very fond of: ‘Be Still and Know that I am God.’ And, he analyzed it as follows: first you must be still; that’s the prime commandment. And in that stillness, you will realize that the ‘I,’ that you thought you were—the ‘I’ of the ego, the ‘I’ identified with the body, the ‘I’ that thinks to itself, talks to itself—that ‘I’ is not who you are. The real ‘I’ emerges in the stillness, and that ‘I’ is the Absolute.”

“And this is what the act of meditation really is: it is a surrender. It is an act of bhakti, of devotion, in which we sacrifice the luxury of chattering to ourselves and justifying our little ‘I’s existence, and we surrender to the great ‘I’ that is God. And in that stillness, all those other little ‘I’s, those fragments of consciousness, dissolve, they integrate back into the One Self until finally there is nothing left but the One Self. And all the illusory identifications fall away; they have no more purpose.”

“And so in the act of meditation through the silence, which is the sacrifice itself, the flame of consciousness melts away the illusions of Maya, and we are liberated. And the more that we stay in the silence—the stillness—the more the power of God emerges, opens our heart to love, and frees us from the thought patterns and the behavior patterns that had enslaved us to fear, to desire, to hatred, to suffering of all kinds. . . . And so if we meditate in that state—not wanting to get anything for the little ‘I’, but to give the power of the little ‘I’ to the Great Self—then Liberation is achieved.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 8, 2010.