“Yoga is about subtlety,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “In the olden days, in the ancient culture, subtlety was a central concept. And in those days, if you had a map of all of Asia and Europe, and even other parts of the world, you would recognize that there was a single culture, a culture of yoga, that was the same whether you were in ancient Greece, or you were in Persia, or you were in China, or you were in India. And whether you w...
“Yoga is about subtlety,” reveals Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “In the olden days, in the ancient culture, subtlety was a central concept. And in those days, if you had a map of all of Asia and Europe, and even other parts of the world, you would recognize that there was a single culture, a culture of yoga, that was the same whether you were in ancient Greece, or you were in Persia, or you were in China, or you were in India. And whether you went with a Taoist yogi, or a Buddhist yogi, or a Greek yogi, the concepts were the same.” And the essence of that teaching is “just be still. Silence the chattering mind so you can pay attention to the more subtle levels of the mind.”
“The great yogi Empedocles, about 2500 years ago in Greece, was very famous for saying ‘even silence is a veil over the silence’ because the real silence only begins when there is no sense of a self trying to be silent; that already creates a shell around the real nucleus of the nucleus. As the great Muslim yogi Ibn Arabi used to say, ‘the self of the self, as we go deeper and deeper within, through the ego, deeper into the soul and into the Spirit, we reach levels of silence that are not only free of concepts, but they're free of duality, they’re free of the very structures that have been opposed on reality.’ As Immanuel Kant discovered in his philosophical meditations, ‘space and time are simply structures of consciousness.’ Go deeper than those structures, and you enter the realm of eternity.”
“So it is in this level of the deepest silence that we become liberated from the chain of consciousness that locks one idea after another after another, and through those associations predetermines where we will get to. If we want freedom from those predetermined cycles of thought, then we must reach a level of consciousness that is prior to any identification with thought; any identification—or even use—of language. And it is in that state that we will receive inspiration,” which will come, not in language, but in light and in an intuitive knowing. “But a knowing that is realized as our being. There will no longer be an ‘I’ who knows something about that. There will be a realization of the unity of subject and object, of seer and seen. And that unity is the expression of love.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, September 16, 2010.
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