Insane With Love: Shunyamurti Interprets Rumi
Everyone here is insane with love in a certain way; they express it differently, but it’s really about love, even though we call this Gyana Yoga, OK, which is the yoga of knowledge, gnosis, right, but the knowledge is only used to deconstruct the ego that is not in a state of love. The ego is actually a defense against love, because it’s afraid of love, it’s afraid of being hurt. And so the ego is a structure of defenses, and those defenses are constructed out of language, out of thoughts.
And so the way that we get to liberation is, first, we silence the mind—but you can’t fight with the mind from within the mind—so you have to become interested in who you are who is witnessing all of those thoughts that are defenses against love, recognize that they’re not you, and that you as the witness have the right to turn toward your Source, disidentify from both body and mind, because they are simply vehicles and programs that you’ve used, and discover who is the real you, the Real Self, who is unborn, and who has never left the state of blissful love, because that’s the nature of our being, even though the ego may have been traumatized, and may have become cynical, and dark, and split, and dissociated and full of delusional narratives—nonetheless the Real Self is unchangingly blissful and in a state of unconditional, infinite, universal, love. And so why not live in that state?
But to do that, we need to use the mind for the purpose of recognizing the false self, disidentifying, and disinvesting in its values—which are usually about something that isn’t love, but money, or whatever enjoyments of a sensory nature it can hold on to—but it’s only in the letting go and the return to the Emptiness that is beyond the mind, the superconscious Self, that freedom and fulfillment are found.
So it’s a very simple path, it doesn’t require techniques, it doesn’t require a tremendous amount of rituals, or any rituals, or any kind of approach that requires a mental process—it’s actually letting go of the mind, because the Self, the Real Self, does not think, does not need to think, because the Real Self already knows whatever it needs to know, and knowledge will drip down from the superconscious into the conscious mind when needed, if there is a bond of love with that infinite intelligence that is the blissful Self.
So I’m not really one of the teachers here, I just deliver the teachings of other beings. So this past weekend we had a visiting professor named Zhuangzi, who is one of the great Chinese sages, and he taught a couple of classes, and has a very uncanny intellect. And those of you who are visitors, I recommend reading Zhuangzi, and perhaps checking out some of the teachings that we have offered from that sage. But tonight we’re going to go to Persia, and study a little bit from Rumi, who is our visiting teacher tonight.
OK, I bet everyone has read some Rumi. Does everyone know Rumi? OK. This is from a book, a translation of the rubais, which is a kind of Persian haiku, and it’s titled Insane with Love. So that’s the key: to be willing to be insane. And Zhuangzi said on Sunday: “Think recklessly and outside of the box, and don’t allow logic to stand in your way.”
So I’m going to read a few, and particularly ones that I thought most interesting for those who are relatively advanced on the path. And you know, if you don’t speak Farsi (I guess was the original language) and you have to read a translation, you can never trust that it’s accurate, so I’m assuming that something is always lost in translation. But I think we have a key point—whether it’s in the original or not—I think a very important point. So this one, this rubais, is:
“If, even a tiny piece of yourself remains in existence, you are still worshipping idols.”
Now, that’s a very radical teaching: if even a piece of yourself—yourself meaning here your ego, right?—remains in existence, you’re still worshipping idols. The ego is an idol, because it is literally an icon that is a self-image. And even if it’s a negative self-image, to whatever extent you believe in it, your ego is your private religion, and it’s the love for the ego rather than the love for God, that is the obstacle. God meaning the Real Self—we’re not talking about a mythical religious icon—but the Self. OK.
“But if you break free of all doubt and suspicion”—interesting that he puts those two, and I think they are together, which I could simply call paranoia. The ego—every ego—is in a state of paranoia. Now, because it is egocentric, and it is in a state of distrust, because of the ways that you have been hurt before, and the ego wants to protect you from being hurt, it is always going to have a slight doubt, or a distrust, in any situation that is going to take away your peace. So, and there will always be that suspicion. So our job is to go from paranoia, which the word, noia from noos, the noetic field—you’ve all heard that word—means mind in Greek. So paranoia literally means you’re out of your mind in a fallen way—you’re in a delusional state, if you have any anxiety, any fear, any doubt, suspicion, all of that, which you were born to believe we should have to protect ourselves, then we’re in a paranoid state. The function of yoga is to bring us from liberation from paranoia into metanoia. Right? Which we we’re still out of our mind, but we’re insane with divine love, not with fear and anger and confusion and delusion, right? OK, so:
“If even a tiny piece of your ego remains in existence, you’re still worshipping an idol, but if you break free of all doubt and suspicion, only with the axe of reason, then you create a new false idol called self-confidence.”
Now that’s very interesting; I’m not sure I agree with the last line—that self-confidence is the accurate term, and I also would say this: if you only use the axe of reason, you cannot break free of doubt and suspicion—you cannot, because reason itself is always weighing on the scales whether a situation is reasonable or unreasonable. So to be reasonable means to have doubt. You can’t reasonably be sure of anything.
You know, these days it’s very popular for people who are studying logic to veil themselves with something called “Bayes’ rule”. Has anyone ever heard of that? Bayesian logic and all of that? It’s very popular now in quantum physics—there’s even a whole school of thought that interprets physics according to this logic. But people are using it now to try to figure out what percentage of belief do they actually have in a certain thing. You know: how certain am I that I’m going to get dinner tonight? Well, I don’t know what percentage I would put on that, or even if I want it, what percentage, you know? But you could put a percentage on anything: what percentage do I put on the sun rising tomorrow? Maybe slightly higher; here often it won’t happen but in other places without so many clouds you will see it. But the doubt is always there: there’s never 100% certainty about anything, right? So long as you’re in a state of what is called reason to the human ego, it’s in a two-valued state of logic, where something’s either true or false. And, therefore, in that state you’re always going to have doubt, so you cannot break through only with the axe of reason, you have to use love, and acceptance, radical acceptance that everything that happens is benevolent. Because the intelligence that underlies the existence of this apparent world is benevolent—that it was created out of love and for the purpose of our realization of the Self that is infinite love and bliss.
So he’s saying you create a new false idol called self-confidence, but again, self-confidence is always relative, and it can be, let’s say, broken through, or it can crack, at a certain moment of performance anxiety, let’s say, or some kind of worry that overcomes the reasonable sense that you deserve to be confident.
So self-confidence is never certain because the ego is a state of lack. The ego is a defense against the being that is fullness of love and power and intelligence and the real essence of being that is immortal, but the ego lacks that. And therefore, its self-confidence is always a crust over a sense of inadequacy and unreality.
So if we are going to break through that, it cannot be done only with reason; reason can get you to that point where you realize it is essential to break through. But to break through you have to take a leap of faith, until you make contact with the Real Self and feel the bliss. And that leap of faith has to be based on love, that makes you willing to take that leap.
But the love can be based on the reasonable understanding that even science today has proven that consciousness is at the base of reality. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, the dominant paradigm that they tried to indoctrinate everyone into was materialism. But materialism has been found to be false. I hope everyone has recognized that—science itself has come to that conclusion—materialism is a dead paradigm, it’s over. But this hasn’t trickled down, I don’t think, to the educational system, because there’s a political will to continue to believe in such corollaries as Darwinian evolution, which has also been refuted. But all of those paradigms that are based on and related to materialism, imply that the world is meaningless, random, that it’s simply based on cause and effect of a mindless conglomeration of particles. But how did what we call particles even get here?
When you get down into the field of cosmology, the scientists recognize that the world did not create itself—there had to have been before space and time, and matter and energy—there had to have been an intelligence that determined what would be the rules that would govern nature. Those rules had to precede nature. Nature could only be expressed in accord with the laws that would have had to have been prior to nature. So the intelligence, the consciousness, is primary and prior, ontologically, to the what David Bohm the physicist, called the “explicate order”; there’s an “implicate order” that is prior where all of time and space is already present now, because spacetime is an artifact that has only validity in terms of its linear unfoldment from within the spacetime continuum, but before it—and what created it, and what is outside it, transcendent of this holographic appearance, and yet pervading it—is that which is timeless, eternal, infinite, and ever-present. So the laws of, what we call the laws of nature, are simply habits that are installed by that original consciousness that created all of this, and that continues to create it, in every nanosecond.
So we are in a state where, if we don’t want to worship idols, and we recognize that the human mind and the language that is embedded in this world and developed in order to navigate through an illusory world—or at least a secondary phenomenon that comes as a result of an expression of a higher intelligence—that level of our minds is not adequate to understand the Real. But the good news is that we have access to the direct realization of that supreme Self, because we are all expressions of that, and the real meaning of the word “I”, is that one “I Am” that is the intelligence that has brought all of this into being. And everyone can use the word “I” for themselves, but that “I” should not be confused with the I-thought that relates to the body. The Real “I” is the “I” of pure Awareness. And that pure Awareness, once it lets go of all the beliefs that have weighed you down and created baggage of doubt, suspicion, paranoia, etc.—once you’ve let go of all that, that pure Awareness realizes itself as blissful and complete and whole and transcendent, as well as immanent.