Freedom from Suffering - 02.11.10

There are no techniques for meditation because all we’re doing in meditation is simply being, and there is nothing simpler than that. “And what the ancient yogis, and sages of all spiritual traditions have taught, is that the essence of our being is bliss,” explains Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “There is a phrase called Sat Chit Ananda. That’s the closest we can describe our essential Being. Ultimately it’s indescribable—it’s beyond any concepts—but the closest we can come is that, and this is true in all the different religions, it’s the equivalent of the Trinity in Christianity: our Being, our awareness, intelligence, and the joy, the unlimited bliss of love. Love in its true sense: of the unity, the oneness of all things, all beings, the cosmos, the mind of God. All of it is One, and we are That, that’s why it’s blissful, because we are not separated from That.” And instead of accessing that bliss, we chatter; we choose to suffer.

And the reason that we choose to suffer is because “it justifies and it gives a sense of reality to that which is unreal. The ego is only a fictional structure. It’s a story—not even a story that we invented but one that was given to us by parents, teachers, society. We took it from all kinds of places and we put it together and we said ‘OK this is who I am. This is my story and my signature is this particular way that I suffer, this particular pattern, and I’m proud of it, and it gives me a sense that I really exist.’ And that’s why we hold onto it because it maintains that illusion.” So to rid ourselves of that suffering, we must disidentify “with the organism or from any localizable entity. We want to return to that state. It doesn’t mean we’re going to lose the capacity to play our role, but we will be able then to realize we are not that role and then modify the role in ways that it no longer suits us, we can change it.” And this is the purpose of meditation. Recorded on the evening of Thursday, February 11, 2010.