The Source is Both Personal and Impersonal
I thank you for creating a very beautiful energy field in your hearts. And I hope that we will always be saturated by the divine energy of the love of God and transmit that into the entire field of the planetary dream.
So this satsang was a last-minute call—I really did my best to find a film and I have given up, and I think it’s over—my ability to even stand previewing any is finished, and even documentaries—I can’t show anything more on vaccines or Covid or any of that—I’m done with that field as well, and my last hope was a doc of an interview of Joseph Campbell, but it was so cringeworthy—not only the Moyers character, but even Campbell, who I have great honor for, but he was talking about his peak experience in his life, and it was when he was running a race in college, you know, and that was it! There was no higher peak than that. And I realized that this whole idea of peak experience of Maslow is a very inadequate paradigm, because there’s a whole mountain range of possible peaks, and you know, runner’s high may be a peak, but it’s a fairly low one in comparison to other kinds of peaks that one could have.
And the understanding of God from within the frame of reference of Jungian psychology, that is based in the projection of consciousness into the body, is far too low and too embedded in samsara, in the illusion, to be useful to us any longer. So I can’t even show those kinds of films. It’s too late in Kali Yuga to focus on anything except the complete melting into God-consciousness and sustaining that until all of the sanskaras of ego, or even of soul-consciousness, have been extinguished.
And we must do this with urgent speed, because of the density of the vibrational field that is increasing in its negativity and oppressiveness and the kinds of anxieties that are being produced out there in the world that are spreading, as a field that is going to become ever more intense and deadly at the level of body-consciousness that we must not be contaminated by, and we must be able to overcome and send out peace into the world. So Sat Yogi’s can’t have any anxiety, or any negativity, or doubt, or fear of any kind if we are to be of service to the world. We have to have become transcendent of the world and abide on the lotus throne of the true Self, or else we will fall into the same quicksand of maya as everyone else.
So we are being tested already, but those tests will become stronger, and to pass them and pass through them, through the eye of the needle, there must be the achievement of total egolessness. If any trace of the me or the mine remains, any trace of maya within the mind, any trace of thoughts going wild in the imaginary, or even extended dissertations in the symbolic, then one will have lost that connection to the Source that is essential now to being able to move through this illusion of time without being captured by its vibrational frequency. So I hope everyone understands that, and the urgency of Liberation now, and the importance of not thinking Jivan Mukti is something for a few sages whose pictures are on the wall, or for the far future, or for someone who is more advanced than you, or someone with different karma, or that you have to do a lot of karmic burning and intensive meditation before you could even imagine that. No, you have to bring the goal to you now, because there is no obstacle except your own disbelief in the truth of who you are. And that disbelief, of course, is sustained by attachment to the bodily identity and the identity of the biological drives that are embedded in Kali Yuga. And if you stop identifying with those—and even the reflective drive—and end up completely focused on the presence of God, you will be filled with that divine love and light that will liberate you now, not some time in the future. But you must be willing to surrender.
And this is why that question of the reality of God is so important to be able to answer—as long as there is an ego with any sense of separation, it is imperative not to be an atheist, because it is only the presence of God and God’s grace that can lift us out of the illusion. The ego cannot do it by its own bootstraps. It has to surrender. And without that capacity of devotion and love for God, and total surrender of the will, and the mind, and the heart to God, then Liberation won’t be achieved.
If there’s any attachment to anyone or anything in the phenomenal plane, or to any achievements or ambitions or goals that are not that of total oneness with God, then one is sabotaging one’s own happiness, one’s own fulfillment. You can’t reach the goal through the arts, or through philosophy, through music, through anything—until you have reached God—then you can use the arts and thought and whatever practices have been gained in order to serve the world. But it has to be done from God-consciousness—that has to be the achievement that then enables the capacities that have been gained through one’s karmic experience to be put into the service of God, and then the genius of one’s true nature will express itself in those vehicles. But if you try to develop talents from within the ego, or in an imaginary sense of higher consciousness that is only a thought-form, but not the realization that is beyond the illusion of ego, of a sense of separate I, then it will fail.
So the authenticity of our nature as manifestations of the one Self has to be attained, flawlessly, impeccably, or it will not work, and then there will be despair and all of those negativities of remorse that will simply create more obstacles. So to avoid having to take a path that goes through the slew of despond, as is talked about in that great book The Pilgrim’s Progress by Bunyan—we should read that one again, it’s a beautiful metaphor of the spiritual journey. But we mustn’t be trapped in the swamplands of the ego, and we must rise to those peaks that are beyond the imaginary or the symbolic, in order to be able to function in the world free of karmic obstacles.
So I wanted to go a little bit more deeply into this question of the nature of God and of Ultimate Reality. You know, Sri Ramana says that the ultimate state, he refers to as Aham-Aham (I Am I). Well, I is a personal pronoun. It’s not impersonal; he doesn’t say It is It. It’s I Am I. And so if that is the ultimate state, and it is, and all of the sages concur with that, then that means that God appears to the liberated consciousness as the person, the Self. Not the ego person, but the one Self. But it’s personal, but a person that is infinite Presence, and that is all-pervading, and all-encompassing, and non-local, and Absolute—but still, an intelligence with a sense of humor, and an understanding and compassion, that is able to function both within the world and in the transcendent state simultaneously.
There is also the impersonal. You can be in that state in which there is no thought, and that will seem impersonal. But one can also apply that intelligence in a way that is extremely personal. And it is that that is so attractive about all of these sages. The beauty of the personality that shines through them—it’s that glory of the goodness of a being who has reached total purification that is the whole crown of the majesty of this process of God-consciousness and of becoming an avatar of the one Self. If it weren’t so beautiful and so good and so intelligent and so creative, then it wouldn’t be worth all the effort that has to go into it.
And when Ramana spoke to his mother when she tried to take him home, to her home, and he said “Well, the Ordainer is not going to allow that”, it was quite clear that there is indeed an Ordainer, Ishvara, the Lord, and the Lord makes decisions as to one’s destiny. And the closer one is to the Lord, the more those decisions are going to favor the trajectory of one’s destiny as becoming that of fulfilment rather than of failure and of loss and lack. But until there is surrender and devotion to the Ordainer, rather than resistance and demand, or forgetfulness and faithlessness, then one cannot expect for the highest indicia of blissful liberation to be ordained for you. So this is the adaptation to the laws of the supreme Reality—the Real Dharma that Sat Yogis must internalize to such an extent—that we are embodiments of the Tao, and of its spontaneous emergence in word and behavior, without having to think about what is right or wrong, and what is good and bad, but it is an emergence based on our oneness with the Supreme Goodness.
So this is the road home. And it must be taken with great humility, and devotion, and with interminable and uninterrupted dedication. It can’t be a part-time hobby; you can’t be half-time in the ego and half-time a yogi and trying to meditate, because you’ll never get past that original state of effort and never reach the effortlessness of the Real. And this is the moment when we have to graduate from that level of efforting, into the being of God-consciousness—not one who strives to become, but that which is already That.
So I was going to read some of Satpurusha Mangatram’s quotes about this, but he basically is saying what I have just summarized—probably not as well as he said it—but I don’t want to belabor the point either, but maybe I’ll read a few of his teachings:
“As long as the sense of ‘mine’, and that addiction to and obsession with self-interest, dwells in the mind, it…continues to be pursued by many a thought, many a doubt and many a desire. For the eradication of this sense of ‘mine’, [which is a] deviation from [the Real] that Maya the fierce brings about, [one must have clarity] about the state of samata [or the oneness of all that is].
The being of the all-pervasive Lord dwells ever the same and as ever itself in all beings. When [one] comes to remember the Lord truly and is devoted…truly, there will [be] manifest in him the thought of the one in…all, of Being in all beings.” And the realization of that knowledge, of the one in the all, is what samata is.
“The primal bondage is the bondage of self-identification with action, with the thought, ‘I am the doer’. That gives rise to the sense of self-identification with the body. That in turn leads to identification with one’s family, clan or caste…[and] the sense of…being related to a [religion] and sharing beliefs… And this leads to the desire for domination over other groups [with different beliefs], and from that desire is born…identification with one’s [own] country”, and against other countries, and the desires are all infernal. This desire for identity is the road to the inferno.
“This passion generates the disposition of hatred and enmity, gives rise to hostility and aversion, disputes and controversies, [and the end of goodwill and harmony].”
“Only vision of the Lord, that Ever the Same, can release a being from this condition, the condition he [has] fallen into. As he moves forward in his contemplation of [the name of] the Lord, [one] finds these ties loosening their grip on him, letting him eventually to lose himself in Word the Eternal, Word, the all-knowing and all-powerful”—the same Word that Ramana was speaking of this morning.
“Word the Brahman, the Word that has no beginning and no end, dwells in all and transcends all, and ever remains self-same in all the three dimensions of time. Invisible is that Lord, infinite and nameless. To remember Lord and give oneself up to a passive contemplation of Him reveals unto man that Being whose being is [always the same, eternally]. Trust in full that Lord…[and] let your life and breath be tied unto him. Remember him as the Ordainer of all that comes to be and ceases to be. This disposition will lead you ultimately to the revelation of the Self, revelation of all as the Lord, that son of Man the Primordial [one shall become]. There remains no duality then for the being [who is] blessed with this vision.” He is absorbed in the Lord and liberated.
So, all the sages agree. There is no dispute between Taoists or Hindus or Buddhists or Christians or Jews or Muslims, or any other religious group. But we must transcend religion to the God that religions point to and be free of all separation.
Namaste,
Shunyamurti