Being Seen - 11.24.09

“The odd thing,” as Shunyamurti, the spiritual director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica, observes, “is that people want more than anything to be seen, and yet they’re terrified of being seen because they’re afraid of what will be seen. And there’s so much we want to hide, and yet we have hidden from ourselves that which is best in us.” As Shunyamurti reminds us, our true nature is Satchitananda: Being, Awareness, and Bliss. “But we have somehow generally cut ourselves off from that.” And in exchange, we have accepted a false self-image given to us by the unconscious minds of our parents and later by society as a whole.

But “each human organism is simply a portal for the one Cosmic Mind to flow through. And so each of us is That. We are the source of all power, all beauty, all love—everything that we’re looking for in the outer world, we actually are that. And because the world—being a dream—has the structure of a mirage, you can’t find it out there because what you will always find out there will be the shadow again that you took in as an identity that then gets projected onto the other.” And this shadow, this idea of something “out there” that will complete us comes from a sense of lack. “Lack gets installed with the ego. It’s part of the ego. The ego has the structure of a doughnut; there’s always a hole in the middle. And it’s always looking to fill that. . . . And the only way out of that, again, is to be free of the vulnerability of the ego that is protected by the shells of defense mechanisms, and be willing to stand naked in Reality, beyond the ego identity. Beyond the known. Beyond any certainties that our mind can provide. And be fully present to the Real.” Recorded on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 24, 2009.