The principle of nonduality is the core of the teaching—not just the teaching of Sat Yoga—it’s the core of every authentic spiritual tradition. What Sat Yoga has added onto it that wasn’t present in the ancient traditions is the structure of the modern and the postmodern ego, and the integration of physics, complexity theory, chaos theory, and modern sciences in general. Those help to understand the nature of consciousness in ways that were not available to the ancient sutra writers, and to explain the context of the fact that we are at the end of Kali Yuga so that you are no longer confused about “Why are things so bad?” and “Can it really be that we’re heading toward a global nuclear war?” to be able to help bring that into a context in which there is no fear but you understand the urgency of preparation for what is happening on the phenomenal plane and the urgency of liberation.
But none of that is essential to Sat Yoga or to liberation. What is essential is the principle of nonduality. So I don’t care if someone here says, “I don’t believe it’s the end of Kali Yuga,” or “I think after Kali Yuga we will get to another Copper Age; we’re not going to destruction, and then a Golden Age”—it doesn’t matter. You don’t need to believe that because, if you understand the principle of nonduality, the world is unreal anyway. There is no world—it’s a dream. And the key to understanding how to navigate the dream is to be in the dimension of the dreamer—not the dreamee (the character in the dream) but the one who is beyond the dream. And you can get there only through the understanding of nonduality.
Until that understanding happens, there cannot be a paradigm shift. This is the first step of Sat Yoga. For those who are new to Sat Yoga and don’t understand about our trivium and quadrivium, the first step is translation, meaning that you take in the idea of nonduality in its total implications and you accept the idea. This is the first stage in which most people already resist. They will not shift their paradigm from duality to nonduality. If you refuse to shift your paradigm, even at a symbolic level, if you don’t believe this idea—“I believe it’s a world of multiplicity, and we’re separate beings, and when you die it’s over, and I don’t want to hear about any pie-in-the-sky spirituality”—if you’re in that frame of reference or anything even close to it, then you can’t take in this idea. If you have a different idea than nonduality, then you will be in a different vibrational frequency and will not be able to use that idea in order to transcend the symbolic dimension itself.
So the first question is: is there resistance to taking in the idea? And it may take some people a long time to actually accept that idea, not just theoretically but that it pertains to you—that you are in a state of nonduality, meaning you are not other than the One Self. Do you accept that you are the Self—not the ego, not the bodily being who was born to certain parents in the world, but that you are eternal unchanging consciousness that contains the world as a dream? Do you get that for yourself?
The next step is the digestion of the idea, which leads to transformation. If you don’t digest and assimilate the idea, then it will have no effect upon your ego structure. The idea has to be digested; and that can take a long time because, even though seemingly a very simple idea, it has tremendously complex implications; because non-duality functions in every spectrum of good-bad, right-wrong, transcendent-immanent, nirvana-samsara, you name it—an infinite number of dualities that all turn out to be nondualities.
It’s even in the Bible, in the Torah, the Old Testament. Why did Adam and Eve lose their residence in the Garden of Eden? . . . They ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Duality (Good and Evil, the first duality). What happens as soon as you believe that good and evil are a duality, that they are two? As soon as you believe that, then you will by implication have to believe: “Well, the world is a world of evil, it’s a world of suffering, and good must be heaven. But heaven is elsewhere, because I don’t see goodness in the world. I see a lot of evil egos who are all in it for themselves. Everybody is selfish and attached and greedy, etc.” As soon as you believe in duality, you are going to see the world as a hell realm and heaven as elsewhere, if it even exists.
So this is why, psychologically, we were kicked out of the Garden. As soon as you believe in a duality, then you end up on the wrong side of the tracks of that duality. Even if you believe you are the good, then you are going to be attacked by evil. And then you would discover that it is the “good”—it is those who believe that they are good—who are actually doing the most evil. (Didn’t everyone who got injected do it for the “greater good”?) It is “good” that is evil in its masquerade form that then takes over the world, which is why the road to hell is paved with such intentions. If you’re naïve and you buy into the belief in that duality of good and evil, you will not be able to respond intelligently and accurately to the situations you face in life. Duality makes you gullible; nonduality keeps you innocent but wise.
When we’ve gone through the digestion of the process and accepted that I am the nondual Self—not just Ramana or those with pictures on the wall, or the theoretical philosophical system that says this is just for some people—no—I (each one) knows that this is my true nature. That’s when the bubble pops and we go into the third phase, which is transcendence.
That’s the final phase of the trivium (which doesn’t mean “trivial” but means “the path of three”). Once we have popped the ego bubble, we will discover the neti neti principle (“I am not this, I am not that”). Because what is the Self? When you’ve digested the realization that you’re the Self—but the Self is nothing (the Self doesn’t exist, it has being but not existence)—then you see the difference between the two. Existence is a determinate form, but the Self functions in indeterminacy because freedom requires indeterminacy. You must realize that you are indeterminate even to yourself, but the ego is very uncomfortable with indeterminacy. It wants certainty—it wants to know what’s on the menu, and it wants to decide what it wants to eat and how it wants it cooked, and it wants everything very specifically organized to its own comfort zone. It’s always suffering because nothing ever is the way the ego wishes it were.
So when the ego bubble pops and the neti neti has completely digested all identifications, then you enter soul-consciousness, where your values shift spontaneously. That’s transvaluation, and now we’re entering the quadrivium.
