A Wholehearted Journey to Silence – 08.19.10

“I wish you all a wholehearted welcome,” offers Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And that’s important because there’s very little that happens in the world these days that is wholehearted.” The contemporary ego structure is hyper-fragmented. It can’t love. It can’t trust. It is paralyzed by “the fear of letting go of those beloved defense mechanisms” that cause us all of our suffering. And it has developed all of these defense mechanisms to deal with a very decadent, and even demonic, culture. And if we can put down all of the ego’s defense mechanisms, all of its narratives, and make a wholehearted effort to “dive into the silence,” then we will find “the salvation of our being. That’s where we put out the fire of suffering, and we are healed by the waters of life.”

“But the world doesn’t value, any longer, this opportunity to dive deeply into the inner silence. It values busyness and distraction and continual production—activity—in which we lose our soul in the outer crust of our consciousness.” Ironically, the Self is actually “closer to us than our own minds,” but it has been “obscured by the thoughts and the chaos of negative feelings—of lostness, of terror, of fear, of anguish. But that consciousness that contains all of that—no matter what it is. That consciousness that is the ground and the support and the substratum of whatever arises in our minds and our hearts—that is pure and soothing. And if we enter into that silence, we will be healed. To whatever extent we are willing to dissolve that ball of suffering in the silent space of the Self, we will be whole; we will be made whole by the very consciousness that we’ve been running away from.”

“And then we discover—we come back from that silence with a new meaning, with a new understanding—a new intelligence that grasps the world without its coating in the conditionings of the past upon which the ego-mind is based. We find a new freedom to be reborn from that silence. And we are reborn . . . [as a] free, reborn spirit that is able to—now, without those preconditions and stories that limit and prevent us from seeing the world as it truly is—now, we can really find what is our heart’s desire and live it out, fully, wholeheartedly—no longer split—because we’re no longer deceiving ourselves, hiding from ourselves—running away—but wholeheartedly jump into life fully, passionately, wisely—and achieve the ultimate potential of which we are capable.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.