Transcending the Conventional Values – 12.02.10

Student Comment: Sometimes people say that the more attention you give to something, the more chance that it will have of manifesting. And we were talking about the state of the world, and how the military is doing this or that, and I feel that, sometimes, I put too much pressure on myself about not speaking of these types of things because of the amount of denial . . .

“These are often difficult issues to face, that do not have solutions within ego-consciousness which is based on the loyalty to the kind of values that we have been trained to uphold,” maintains Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute of Costa Rica. “And the vertical dharma has always been threatened by its inherent disloyalty to all worldly values.” The Buddha, for example, left his duty as a prince and ruler, as well as his family, to achieve enlightenment. “He did everything wrong, the ultimate sin, I mean the guy must have been riddled with guilt for all of this. And anybody in those days would have said to Buddha, ‘You’re wrong. Go back. Sit on that throne. Take care of your family. You created them, this is your karma.’ . . . But when he saw that all of the consequences of karma, of acting in a conventionally good way, led to more suffering, and would lead to more war, and would lead to egoic enmeshment rather than liberation—and when he saw that being a good person was the ultimate evil, from this higher position, and that he had to transcend these dualities in order to find himself, then he went on a path that was absolutely lonely and alone—that no one understood; absolutely no one in his world ‘got’ what he was doing. . . . And he entered a dimension and a logic and a understanding of reality that no one would validate for him, or could. And it was in that absolute uniqueness and aloneness—and wrongness from the perspective of the world—that he found the Ultimate Reality.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2010.