Summary: It is time to face the facts of life: You cannot make contact with anything unless you yourself are Real, and the entire project of the ego is to make contact with the imaginary. This world is a hologram, a simulation, an illusion—there is nothing out there. Letting go of belief in any and all self-images, self-concepts, identifications with the body or with the mind, or even with the heart, is the key to real validation and valid realization. This teaching was recorded on the morning of September 3, 2015.
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It is time to face the facts of life. You cannot make contact with a mirage. You cannot make contact with a hallucination. You cannot make contact with a projection, and you cannot make contact with anything unless you yourself are Real.
And so, a self-image can’t make contact with a Self; a self-concept can’t make contact with anything but another concept. And the entire project of the ego to make contact with an other is a complete fraud, a chasing after memories of what never was and never can be—an ongoing nostalgia, a teleological nostalgia—and let’s face the facts: teleology itself is an illusion.
If you can’t make contact in the present, there is no future in which you’ll be able to make contact with those hallucinations either. So all of those drawings of setting sail for some beautiful future, aren’t they just as much in the imaginary and a way of avoiding the pain that there is nothing to make contact with. This is a hologram, a simulation, an illusion—there is nothing out there.
And the one you think you are, who is so lonely because there is nothing and no one out there for you, isn’t real either. There’s no one out there, and there’s no one in here. And all of the dreams and the fantasies and the negative self-attacks, as well as the positive illusions of some beautiful future, all of them are avoidance of making contact with the one Self.
But who is there to make contact with the one Self? You are already that, and there is no way to improve upon that, but what we are in avoidance of is the acceptance of that. And we are willing to project our love out onto the illusions—and our refusal to love—but all of it are simply scenarios to avoid. The fact that all of those objects that we either love or hate, including the self-object, have no essence, no substance, are simply flickerings of an impermanent flux that has no reality at all. And only the unchanging, formless Self is real.
And although through the shifting from a negative self-image to a positive one, we can move from a storm of chaos to an interesting complexity of a koan, and we can bring some higher order into the world as we surrender to a dharma that at least constrains the impulses to act out, and run toward those mirages until we fall dead in the exhaustion of our efforts to reach the unreachable Self. But we know already in our heart of hearts that it is to no avail and that to engage in one delusion after another—one seduction after another, one rejection and devastation after another—is a futile waste of the precious time that we have to discover the timeless eternal immortal Self, through letting go of the very project of trying to make contact with anything but that which we are. Which is the ultimate Real, the only Real, that cannot be contacted, but can only be realized.
It is this acceptance of the hopelessness of the ego’s project of finding that other that will make you whole—that media naranja, that marjiva, that celestial light, that one who will validate you as some heavenly being who deserves all happiness, who will celebrate you, and find some audience to applaud you—all of these secret fantasies of the ego’s being worshipped by the others must fall away before we can find who and what we really are.
No one and nothing can make us whole. No validation by any other has any validity at all except as a band aid over our loneliness. Until we have validated ourselves by letting go of the need for validation, all validation will simply be temporary, and become an addictive need for more and more. No one can validate you and no one can invalidate you, because what is real in you can never be known by any other, then whatever compliments you receive that make you feel better about yourself are just straw in the wind and will soon be gone with the wind.
It’s only by letting go of all the futility of desire and the imagining that something will come from that future that we think is calling us, that is really the wholeness that is already here right now…”
This Post Has 3 Comments
Jack Poteet
4 Oct 2022I love so many of your teachings. And I thank you for them. However, you appear to be recommending cutting all loyalties to others, as part of cutting all attachments to ego. It seems to me that to be human is to crave human relationships and touch. So to attain liberation on your stated terms, one would have to become inhuman it seems. If God is love, would God not want us to take care of family and friends even if such relationships are not perfect? And you say that nothing is real in this phenomenonal plain. And you say do not fear death. But pain seems real. If you hit your hand with a hammer, I think you will agree that the pain is real or seems real. So, those are inconsistencies I have not reconciled to. But I do appreciate your views and your generosity in sharing them. Be well ❤️
Vajra Sat Yoga
10 Oct 2022RESPONSE FROM SHUNYAMURTI
Dear Questioner,
Thank you for expressing your doubts. I shall try to clarify the Sat Yoga teachings. First, let me make this very clear: We never recommend people to cut their loyalties to others. In fact, quite the contrary. What we teach is to cut one’s identification with an obsolete, infantile version of oneself. That will enable one to enhance one’s relationships to others from a more adult and empowered position. It will also enable one to forgive and to love unconditionally. The problem with the ego is that often it cannot open its heart fully, either to give or receive love. And the ego’s loyalties are often hostile-dependent relations, rather than healthy and compassionate relationships. The only time we might suggest considering breaking a relationship is when it is chronically abusive.
In regard to your second doubt regarding the reality or lack thereof of the phenomenal plane, I would say the following: The term ‘real’ in Indian philosophy of all schools means that which is perpetually present. What is impermanent is therefore not considered real. What is present at all times is only consciousness. Therefore, you are real as consciousness, but the world is a kind of dream or simulation, an appearance in consciousness that is in constant flux.
So long as you are identified even a little bit with the body, then of course you will feel pain and you will suffer to some extent over that pain. Even after one becomes disidentified from the body, the body still feels pain, but there is no suffering over it. And at the highest level of consciousness, not even the body feels pain. You may remember when Buddhist monks in Vietnam during the U.S. war on that country set themselves on fire in front of U.S. troops to show them that they were unafraid of the napalm their army was using on the Vietnamese population. The monks sat there in meditation while their bodies burned, and they felt no pain. They were wrapped in divine light. The same is true for many Catholic saints who were burned at the stake by the church authorities in the Middle Ages. They withstood the pain because of their attainment of union with God. So do not sell short the power of God to enable you to endure what would otherwise be impossible to bear.
I hope that clears your doubts. Blessings for realization of the real and ever blissful Self.
Namaste,
Shunyamurti
Remy
5 Oct 2022Nothing but a gentle breeze over the vast and endless ocean.