The Meaning of Crucifixion – 08.12.10

Student Question: I’ve never quite understood the meaning of the crucifixion. Could you please explain it a little bit?

“Crucifixion has many levels to it,” begins Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “It is a crucifixion of duality, but there are many dualities: subject object duality; good and bad duality; desire and fear duality. And we are trapped in the mirage created by that duality. And because we want the illusion of the enjoyments that we think will come from the possession of other people, money, any kind of egoic power, that keeps us trapped—our attachments, our addictions—which all come from a self-image of being an entity. [As] soon as there is an entity, that entity is pinned to the world in which it appears. . . . And the spiritual journey of discipleship is the medicine that gets you off the cross because now, those disciplines pin you to the vertical; they force you to be vertical rather than horizontal. It is a higher ethic; a higher dharma. And it’s that dharma that has the power to pull you out of the morass of the desires and lower fantasies; it’s the only thing that can get you off the cross.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 12, 2010.