The Ocean of Consciousness - 08.20.09

“When you look in a mirror, you are what doesn’t show up in the mirror.” But, according to Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute, “the problem for the ego is that it wants to show up in the mirror” because if it doesn’t, then how can it define itself? How can it prove that it is real? “In India, one of the metaphor’s for God is . . . ‘The Ocean of Consciousness.’” This metaphor is meant to convey that God is limitless. But the ego instead chooses to objectify itself, choosing a body floating in the ocean, rather than the ocean itself. And this limits us to becoming very powerless creatures who imagine themselves as individuals moving through time and space, rather than the infinite, eternal consciousness that we are. “But the consciousness, the oceanic consciousness, that even conceives of that, that is the very possibility of a world appearing to us, never appears in that world, just as when you’re in a dream the mind that’s dreaming up that dream doesn’t appear in the dream.” It is this unity that allows us to love, “because love is the realization we are all floating in this ocean of consciousness and that ultimately we are all waves of the same ocean.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 20, 2009.