“So what are we doing when we meditate?” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To put it in the simplest terms, we are connecting our surface consciousness with our inmost center of our being.” And that surface consciousness, the main object of which is the ego, can handle the day-to-day tasks and demands of life very well. “But that’s not your Real Self. It’s a vehicle that we need to create. But we also need to know that it’s not us. It’s good to ha...
“So what are we doing when we meditate?” asks Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “To put it in the simplest terms, we are connecting our surface consciousness with our inmost center of our being.” And that surface consciousness, the main object of which is the ego, can handle the day-to-day tasks and demands of life very well. “But that’s not your Real Self. It’s a vehicle that we need to create. But we also need to know that it’s not us. It’s good to have a car that is four wheel drive and can take you anywhere, but you need to be able to get out of that car. Once you drive to a beautiful place, if you stay in the car and don’t get out and enjoy the scenery, then what was the purpose of the trip? So, most of you have a very well-adapted ego; it works well to deal with the world. But it doesn’t nourish you. And it’s usually running on empty because we haven’t gotten out of the car to fill it up with new fuel. So we need to get out of the car and go back into the core of our being from time to time.”
And as we refuel ourselves in meditation, we reach encounter the state of shanti which in Sanskrit means both peace and silence. But beyond the state of shanti, in deeper states of meditation, one reaches a state of indescribably blissful love. “And if you stay longer in the silent center, then you’ll go even beyond this love that has no object—it’s not just love for one’s own body, but it’s a love that becomes universal—but you will also reach a point where you realize that the center that you are is the center that is everywhere; it’s not just localizable in what you thought of as your physical body—that that center is everywhere and nowhere. And because it is everywhere, there is a love for all that is, and yet because it is nowhere, there is complete detachment and non-enmeshment from anything or anyone, and therefore freedom. And so there’s a realization of what freedom actually feels like; the Ultimate Freedom.”
“And just by sitting in the silent center,” the prison of the ego collapses, “and you see reality with new eyes. And that’s probably one of the main benefits of meditation. And you realize that what you had seen as finite, limited, impossible to solve, is easily solved because it is all infinite. So all we have to do is sit in that center; we don’t have to fight with it. . . . Once you disidentify from the mind and realize it’s not your mind at all, it’s just an implanted stream of consciousness, and you disidentify from it, it will stop; it needs an audience to keep going, and once you don’t care about it, it will stop.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, October 21, 2010.
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