From Feeling to Silence - 05.27.10

Student Question: When we first started meditating, you were telling us to allow our emotions to be calm and our mind to be still, and my mind wasn’t quite still, and I realized I was feeling a lot. Is there also room in meditation for having those feelings and having those things, and it still being healing?

“Absolutely,” confirms Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “One only reaches silence at the end of a great deal of preparation. This is the state of a very perfected mastery over the ego-mind. . . . The mind isn’t gonna give up and let go until it has been truly mastered by one’s surrendering of all ego identity—including all fear and all desire. And that’s why the . . . disciplines of spiritual practice have been so seriously recommended of followers—or those who seek to reach these higher levels—because you have to retrain your mind to follow a higher center of value. . . . And so if there’s a cognitive sense of liberation from” the entrapments of the mind, “then what will follow is an actual transcendental experience of that: of not being who you thought you were on this plane. And that will raise the vibrational frequency very easily. And the mind will become silent. And it will become silent because something far more fascinating starts to appear—which is Divine Energy. And then all those mundane thoughts become: ‘Well wait a minute. Forget that, this is so much more interesting.’ That’s when things begin to get interesting in the whole spiritual quest.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 27, 2010.