The Catch-22 That Catches Every Soul

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So I thought it would be useful tonight to return to basics.

Sat Mind Beginner’s Mind.

And that calls for some definitions that you probably all know. We’ll start with these two.

Sat. What is Sat? Why do we want yoga with Sat? Anyone?

Student: The Real.

Who said it?

Student: The Real.

The Real. Which Real?

Student: Supreme Real.

The Supreme Real, which includes all the others, because the ego’s Real, Real One, which is the Real of Trauma, is caused by falling into delusion, of thinking that you have come into a world in which there are oppressive others and bad karma and situations of no love. And so the Real of the ego that it always wants to stay away from and therefore goes into the imaginary, and creates narratives of either denial or of sustaining the agony of the unreal that is the reason for the trauma. But what causes the trauma to persist is the very defense against it, of going into the imaginary. That’s the paradox in the catch-22. And when you are willing and able to observe it but not identify with it, then the imaginary dissolves and Real Two appears, and then there is love. Love without a subject and without an object, just love in its purity, which is the emanation of the energy of God, and we could say the motivation for the creation of the illusion in order to know God through loving that Real which is oneself that one had temporarily forgotten but never lost the yearning to return to.

That’s the souls level of the Real, and then, of course, Real Three is Sat. And the Real, which is the Supreme Self, the one Self, is not located in time or space, but is eternal, is presence, but without being present because to the ego, the Supreme Real is absent because it is unmanifest, and the ego, that is a mind split into subject-object perception, can never see or find the Real, the Sat, the Self, because the Self never becomes an object. The Self is the absolute Knower, but the Knower who is never different from the Known. This is nonduality. The Unmanifest and the manifest are not two. Nirvana is not different from samsara. The difference is caused by the fall into the imaginary construct which comes about through the chit jada granthi—remember the famous term of Ramana. Granthi means a knot, the consciousness by identifying with the inert body, the jada, which is a corpse when the consciousness leaves, it’s just material, and it is brought to life by the presence of consciousness—but once the consciousness is knotted to it with an identification, then the realization of the Supreme Real is no longer accessible. And the untying of that knot is what Sat Yoga is about.

So Sat is the Absolute Real. Yoga is the release of all defenses against being reabsorbed into Sat. That’s all it is. The word is often defined as “union”, but there can be no union because there was never duality in the first place. That’s the illusion. And so it’s the release of the defenses that prevent the obscuration of the truth of nonduality that one never left. It never really happened. The ignorance is only in a dream. It’s not Real. The world is a dreamfield and has no essence, no reality, except that it is pervaded by the Supreme Intelligence, the one consciousness that is all-encompassing and all-pervading. But when there is identification, the knot with a particular individual bodily entity, then that is obscured. It’s never lost, because nonduality never becomes duality, but it is distanced from consciousness, and then the ego that is knotted to the body out of its fear of death, because then God, the Real, means the death of its identity and its life and its addiction to jouissance, to trying to find some gratification to compensate for all the suffering and all the trauma, lead to a constant wheel of repetition of traumas punctuated by moments of gratification, after which there is usually disappointment, or guilt or shame, or all of the above, and a sense of, “No, that wasn’t what I was looking for”, and then onward into deeper lostness in the labyrinth of one’s own mind.

So to get out of this trap we have to release those defenses against freedom—because the ego is terrified of freedom, terrified of the infinite, terrified of the madness of the deep, terrified of not knowing who it is, terrified of losing touch with the figures of attachment that give it the illusion of security. All of that and more make up the defenses of the ego against its own liberation.

So the way to get there has to begin with the seeking of peace, because the ego is in a state of agitation, and it’s in a state of constant mental chatter. There’s never any inner peace. So the key concept for us is shanti. Now, shanti means peace, yes, inner peace, but it also means more than that. It means silence, inner silence, the end of narratives, a mind free of thoughts. And again, the ego becomes extremely anxious when one has stayed in a thought-free state too long—unless one’s in deep sleep, that’s the only time one can tolerate being without thoughts—and even then, deep sleep is interrupted by dream thoughts.

So the real question is: can you tolerate shanti? Peace? Can you even tolerate relaxation in your body? Because it means letting go of certain contractions that are also often suppressing somatized traumatic memories that you never want to see. They’re too unbearable—never want to know are there, never want to process—and you prefer bodily symptoms to having to face unbearable emotions.

And so this is the reason why shanti itself, which you would think is a state so easy to reach, it’s the way to get to liberation—but no, even shanti requires—well, it requires first going through and completing what we quaintly call “ego death”. Now, there’s not really any such thing as ego death because the ego was never alive. It’s a program, it’s a self-image, it’s a set of belief systems that algorithmically get projected upon the dreamfield, and it is a set of subconscious, usually, fantasies, that want to get acted out—and it’s a set of internal figures, inner child, superegos, often various other fragments. None of it is real, none of it. There’s no inner child. You could do an autopsy on your body and you’d find there was never any inner child there, nor a superego. It’s a delusion. It’s your own mind creating its hell realm because it enjoys it, it’s attached to it. It doesn’t want to let go into the silence and the Emptiness and the freedom. It wants to hold on, because if it doesn’t hold on to all of that, it can’t hold on to a sense of really existing in the world. And that leads to a kind of depersonalization—if I start to feel I don’t really exist, then if you’re in the ego mind one begins to feel like we’re in a very surreal—more than twilight zone kind of situation—that becomes also unbearable because the subconscious traumatic elements show up as parts of the world. The dreamfield itself becomes a nightmare, or that’s what at least one is afraid of. Actually the nightmare will end in the state of shanti, but the fear is, “No, it will then never end, because I can never get back once I’ve let go.” So letting go is the last thing the ego will allow itself to do. So shanti itself is problematic.

So I’m sure all of you remember the stages of facing death listed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross long ago, right?

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By signing up to receive your free sample of Shunyamurti’s thrilling new book, Coming Full Circle: The Secret of the Singularity, you are also subscribing to our weekly newsletter, which will help keep you up to date with newly released content and our online and in-person offerings. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Brahmachari:

One whose consciousness has merged with Brahman, the Absolute, and thus has been liberated from all desire, fear, attachment, and material frames of reference. Thus, a Brahmachari naturally lives a life of celibacy, simplicity, and inner solitude.

Satsang:

Meditative meetings in which the highest teachings are shared. Shunyamurti also offers guidance during questions and answers to resolve the most difficult and delicate matters of the heart.

The process of non-process:

Since awakening is instantaneous, along with the recognition that one was never really in the dream, but enjoying the creation of the dream, it must be understood that making awakening into a process can only be part of the dream, and has nothing to do with Awakening itself.

The Real:

When we speak of the Real, unless otherwise qualified, we mean the Supreme Real. The Supreme Real does not appear. Appearance is not Real. All that appears is empty of true existence. There are no real things. All that is phenomenal is temporary, dependent, and reducible to a wave function of consciousness. The world does not exist independent of consciousness. There is no matter or material world. All is made of consciousness. Pure consciousness is Presence. It is no-thing, non-objective, not in space or time. All that appears in Presence, or to Presence, is an emanation of Presence, but is not different from That. This is one meaning of nonduality.

The Real is also a term used in Lacanian psychoanalysis. What Lacan means by the Real is that aspect of phenomenal appearance which is overwhelming, traumatic, or impossible. We would call that Real One. It is a relative Real, not Absolute. We add that there is a Real Two, which consists of divine love. Love is not an appearance, but it changes appearance, through recognition of its Source, into a divine manifestation, a projection of God’s sublimely beautiful Mind as infinite fractal holographic cosmos. Real Three is the unchanging Absolute, beyond all conception or image.

Dharma and dharma:

When we use the term Dharma (capitalized), we refer to our dedication to living in accord with the timeless principles of impeccable integrity that keep us in harmony with Nature and our Supernatural Source.

When we use the term without capitalization, we refer to our acceptance of the community’s processes, protocols, and chain of command with the “Haji! Spirit” of going the “extra mile” and working overtime when necessary to make the impossible inevitable, as our unconditional act of surrender to Love.