The Real – 03.17.11

Excerpt: “The Real is a limit concept,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “because it does not occur in reality; It is that which contains reality and makes reality possible. But it does not appear within reality. [It’s] very similar to this film, The Matrix, in which ‘reality,’ the matrix, is unreality—it is illusion—and the real is beyond it. . . . So we want to bring our consciousness from the ‘reality,’ that is in fact Maya, or illusion, to the Real. Where is the Real? Well, it is beyond, but not beyond in a spatial sense—because all the concepts that we use to understand the so-called ‘reality,’ are unreal in terms of the Absolute Real. . . . But it’s very difficult to let go of these concepts, as we know. And even more difficult to let go of the belief in entities. And Sri Ramana says that this is the ultimate key to liberation. And of course the prime entity that we have to stop believing in is the ‘me’, the ego, the false self. . . . And so we have to give up our addiction to conceptualization, to constant thinking. It’s the thinking in the mind that supports the illusion of the ego; you feel real as long as you're able to justify your existence by talking to yourself. . . . So that’s what we’re doing in meditation, is we’re cutting that addiction to dispersing our energies out into the world, justifying our existence with our minds, seeking images and emotions that support the egoic fantasies, and entering into the silence—that is a death; it is the death of the ego—but the opening to eternal life, in the Real.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, march 17, 2011.