“Be Without Grasping” – 05.19.11

Excerpt: “When we meditate,” reveals Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, “we are making effort to reach our own natural state of being. It’s odd that you have to make effort to be natural, but this is how far away the human being has come from its own nature. Rather than having a nature any longer, the human being is conditioned by culture. The ego is an artificial construct that’s created and maintained by culture. . . . And we learn the rules of that culture and the intentions that we are supposed to live for, the values we are supposed to live by, and we become entrained by language. And from then on, pure consciousness, in its divine nature, gets filtered through this construct of what Lacan, the psychoanalyst, called ‘signifiers,’ language—master signifiers that determine our identity. And you become the subject of a signifier, of a certain set of words that determine the patterns of your life and the curvature of your emotional space, and that result in the repetition of various kinds of patterns, mostly traumatic, mostly that end in suffering and devastation because we have been alienated from our Nature. . . . That state of peace that will ensue upon the letting go of all the intentions of grasping will bring you into the Heart, into the peace, that will allow you to realize that you’re already enveloped by the divine presence; you're saturated by it. And you are fulfilled in your very essence by that which is—not only within you—but is your own Essence that you had not recognized in that blind effort to seek something externally to fulfill you.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 19, 2011.