Excerpt: “So a Satsang is an opportunity to experience bliss together,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Bliss is our natural state. It’s the state that we would be in 24/7 if we didn’t obscure it with a cloud of ego noise: chatter, worry, anxieties—all of these that are built on illusions. . . . The problem is today we have imbibed, as an indoctrination, this belief in materialism, that we are just bodies, and all there is, is matter a...
Excerpt: “So a Satsang is an opportunity to experience bliss together,” reminds Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “Bliss is our natural state. It’s the state that we would be in 24/7 if we didn’t obscure it with a cloud of ego noise: chatter, worry, anxieties—all of these that are built on illusions. . . . The problem is today we have imbibed, as an indoctrination, this belief in materialism, that we are just bodies, and all there is, is matter and motion, and there’s no higher power and no wisdom. It’s all chance, random—that whole Darwinian ideology. And we’ve been taken in by it, so that we no longer tend to make the effort to find out for ourselves if there is, actually, a transcendent reality. But if you’re willing to make the effort, you will find that you can penetrate through the box that we call this phenomenal plane, and that there is infinite vastness beyond what we think of as reality. . . . And that’s why yogis recommend leading a simple lifestyle. Don’t create unnecessary complications in your life. Don’t create unnecessary stresses. Life will be stressful anyway, but you can keep it more manageable if you have lost the ego’s need to be seen by as many people as possible, loved by as many people as possible, adored, approved of. And many people have an addictive need to get the approval of as many people as possible. Why? Because they don’t have a sense of self-esteem that’s internal because they don’t know who they are. And if they go even a moment without someone saying, ‘Yes, you’re good,’ people can decompensate; they can collapse. They need to then call somebody on a cell phone who will tell them that they really are good people. . . . And so are we willing to transcend the personal level of the petty world of constant activity for the stillness of the eternal present, as—not an individual separate from others—but the very energy that unites and underlies and permeates all that is? . . . And what’s present is a great laughter of realizing that all along you knew that this is what you are. You didn’t discover this along the way. You always knew it and were hiding it from yourself and now you’re allowing yourself to know that this is what you are, and this is why you are here.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, January 27, 2011.
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