The Pressure Chamber – 08.19.10

Student Comment: The “pressure chamber” that you’ve always talked about all of the sudden came to my mind. Is this something that can last throughout one’s entire spiritual journey, like the “dark night of the soul?” There is this constant feeling that—because there is so much to learn and so much to discipline—one never leaves the pressure chamber until the end: Chakra Seven or death.

“Well, remember: if you put carbon under enough pressure it becomes a diamond. So that’s how the soul is transformed,” elucidates Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “The more pressure that you’re under, the quicker the transformation will happen. And it can’t be done without pressure. And that’s why the whole world is now under tremendous pressure—and why there are no solutions of any ordinary kind: it’s forcing us to recognize that there is a non-ordinary reality that we must enter if we’re going to solve the problems that the world has.”

“And every spiritual tradition has always recognized that you have to create a pressure chamber for those who are on the path. Discipleship is a pressure chamber. . . . There is a self-discipline that is required. You know even if you join AA, or any of these twelve-step groups, they’ll tell you, “Come every day!”—not just once a week—every day to a meeting, to put yourself under the pressure of hearing information that your ego doesn’t want to hear so that you can overcome the addictive processes of the lower chakra behavior patterns and cut their power to enact themselves. . . . And so it is that forcible creation of creativity itself, within the mind, and the brain, that will enable you to burst through into a higher level of consciousness.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 19, 2010.