“We have come together to meditate. But why? What do we wish to achieve through meditation,” asks Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. We wish to achieve liberation from the ego—and specifically from the lowest, imaginary part of the ego—for whom life is a constant oscillation between desire and suffering. All satisfaction, a mirage. “The mirages create suffering because they create false expectations and delusions. And embedded in them is fear because the ego is aliena...
“We have come together to meditate. But why? What do we wish to achieve through meditation,” asks Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. We wish to achieve liberation from the ego—and specifically from the lowest, imaginary part of the ego—for whom life is a constant oscillation between desire and suffering. All satisfaction, a mirage. “The mirages create suffering because they create false expectations and delusions. And embedded in them is fear because the ego is alienated from its true nature. And its true nature—the True Nature of your being—is of course one with all that is, and therefore there is no fear and no desire because you already are, and have, everything you need within.”
And although Sri Ramana Maharshi himself once said that meditation could not bring about liberation, he was referring to meditation on an object. Nonetheless, Sri Ramana was a strong advocate of the practice of “Atma-vichara” or self-enquiry. “Atma-vichara means to realize who you are, beyond the ego. Beyond the mind. And so you cannot use the mind for that purpose. And you cannot assume the ego is the one who is meditating; that assumption has to be deconstructed. The meditation is an experience of pure awareness. . . . And so it’s this shift that enables one to be free. To be free of what? To be free of the ego’s insecurities.”
So we don’t want to become “spiritual materialists,” and build an ego around reaching high states in meditation. “We want to dissolve the ego. . . . But the ego is always looking for things to build up its self-esteem, its sense of empowerment in the world, without realizing that this is actually working against its true empowerment that only comes from dissolving the need to have a mask, an attainment—even a style. . . . All of those things create a self-image. And then we work to support that self-image. And that self-image is the very thing that veils the Real Self from us.”
“And immediately when you answer the question ‘Who am I that is behind the mind?’ there will be a state of peace. . . . and a sense of energy that is beautiful energy, it’s divine energy. It’s love. And it is there, within you, and it wants to emerge. And when you allow that to happen, you will find that you’re free of the neediness and the aggressiveness and the defensiveness. . . . You will have realized that the Self you are needs no defenses, it needs no style—it needs no mask. . . . And this is what enables life to then blossom and flourish in a completely new octave that the ego can never reach.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, July 22, 2010.
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