Yoga: The Shift From Thought to Love
- July 6, 2019
- Teachings
In this video teaching, Shunyamurti explains that the essential first step of yoga is the replacement of thought by divine love.
Excerpt: And so what must be achieved is the replacement of thought by Divine Love. This is the essential first step of yoga. If we are going to reach God, we must replace the chattering and imaginary jouissance*-inducing tendencies of the consciousness to avoid its own essence, because it does not realize that that essence is Love; and when it gets close to the feeling of Love, it feels it is in danger.
And even the religions mostly teach you to worship the Son of God or the Holy Book of God, but the Son of God is that state in which the human consciousness realizes the Father. And so to worship the son keeps one in the very state that one yearns to be free from, which is the identification with the body, the identification as a creature, as a physical, mortal entity, as someone who is therefore dependent on the desire of the other.
It is the freedom from that desire, whether externalized or internalized, that has to be the first portal that brings one to freedom.
*Jouissance – (term popularized by Lacanian theory) pleasure that causes pain or pain that causes pleasure; any “enjoyment” (in quotation marks because it creates some residue of suffering, though the enjoyment or the suffering may be unconscious) that maintains the ego and keeps one away from God.