You Must Pass These Exams to Get Off the Wheel of Karma
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Now, in the Kali Yuga world, probably everybody—at least gringos—who graduated high school and wanted to go to college, had to take an SAT. How many people had to take an SAT? OK, quite a lot. You’re lucky if you didn’t. For them, it means “Scholastic Aptitude Test”. But for us, we have two different tests, two SAT’s that we have to take if you’re a Sat Yogi, and you have to take them simultaneously. It’s a real drag. I’ll tell you why.
You have to simultaneously complete Shakti’s Aptitude Test and Shiva’s Aptitude Test. The problem is they require two different kinds of aptitude. What is aptitude? Who knows what aptitude means?
Student: Predisposition. Ability. Capacity.
Alright, to be apt for something means that you have been appropriately trained, and you are appropriately sensitive, and appropriately able to express yourself in the discourse of that particular discipline. OK? So you need to be able to speak the lingo of Shakti, and at the same time be comfortable with the silence of Shiva. And this creates a paradoxical situation because you are taking both tests simultaneously, and the same answer has to suit both. And that means you are tied by two different ropes. It’s not an alternation, that, “OK, I’ll answer a question on this one, and then I’ll go to that one, and this one, and that one.” That’s what most people do. Sat Yogis can’t do that.
Therefore, they must find an answer that paradoxically suits both tests, which have completely opposite value systems and types of attitudes.
(Shunyamurti writes on whiteboard.)
This is Bhagavat Parvat, the Mountain of God. Although it’s a dancing landscape, we all have to climb this mountain. The dance is that it’s very hard to recognize when you’re on the mountain, and what is the correct step to take to go up the mountain, because the trails always seem to be changing, and sometimes people put signs in the wrong places to actually get you off trail and lost. Tricky. It’s not an easy test to pass.
Now, before I explain this, I have to explain the “El Cid Theory” of egoic development. Does everybody know who El Cid was in history? Yes. Who said yes? Who was El Cid?
Student speaks (inaudible).
No, he was real. He was historically real. And what position did he have?
Student: He was a nobleman.
A what? He was a general, actually. He wasn’t really a nobleman, but he was the general of the army, or he was a minor nobleman, and he won a bunch of wars for Castilla and he was riding very high—he had a very high reputation, and they began calling him El Cid, which means…
Student speaks (inaudible).
It means “the Lord”. Now, this title went to his head, and as soon as his boss, who was the king, I think it was Alfredo or something like that, he got overthrown and the king’s brother came into power, and the king’s brother didn’t like El Cid very much, and he lost his position as general very quickly, because he had too much power for his position; he was a threat to the new king, and the boss fired him and he was exiled from the kingdom. And that was the end of El Cid.
Now, he hired himself out for other kingdoms because they did that in those days, and he worked for a few other kingdoms—sometimes he fought against the Muslims, sometimes he fought for them. He didn’t really care. He was kind of a mercenary. And they had those in those days, not just now.
So the reason why I’m using that, because the ego takes itself to be El Cid. It thinks it’s the Lord in its own game and that it makes the rules of its own game, and it doesn’t realize that it’s actually playing a game that it doesn’t know what the rules are.
(Shunya writes on whiteboard.)
What it stands for is that the Ego Loves Contact Interruption Devices. That’s how the ego maintains its power. It interrupts contact at certain strategic moments in order to achieve certain ends, that turn out to be manipulative or ulterior, and even though they may be unconscious, they will be a product of using others as objects.
One could even take it further and say the ego lives as a set of Contact Interruption Devices. That’s really all the ego is. And that set of devices creates its own strategy; it produces, it self-organizes in accord with its intentions, depending on where it is on the Mountain of God.
Now, in its first stage, it is simply FALSE, which is an anagram for Feelings Attuned to the Lack of Self-Empathy. In the early stages of the game, there is a great deal of self-hatred that is actually motivating the ego to become the Lord. The lordship is a compensation for its feeling of inadequacy, and it desperately tries to overcompensate through creating a narcissistic illusion of grandeur. And this is where the ego begins to create some very bad karma but remains in its narcissistic bubble, and can avoid the consequences for a while. Let’s see, mostly this state, let’s see. It will be to compensate for the really unbearable feelings that are in the stage one here, of dread and angst. And the interruption is then developed by the compensation of greed, and then lust, and then the urge to dominate.
And obviously all of these intentions break contact with the others, and they come out of a kind of ruthlessness of the ego, with very primitive feelings that are of vengeance, and projections of self-hatred on the other, and condescension, and paranoia. And it’s made up of a whole brew of such emotional states, OK?
If it can get past that, it can become SEMI-PURE. We’ll then get into the semi-purist state, which stands for Sensory Emotional Mental and Imaginary Production of Unconscious Relational Enmeshment, in which the relationships that it gets into are grounded in karma, and they’re grounded in the body identification, and in the illusion of needs, and the illusion of the possibility of possessing another, and controlling and making the other belong to one, and giving one the illusion of wholeness.
And if one graduates from the semi-pure state, then one becomes TRUE, which is the Transcendental Realization of Unity as Emptiness, and that brings to an end relationality proper—or improper—but relationality within the dualistic frame of reference.
So this trajectory spells out the lineaments of Shakti’s Aptitude Test, OK? And it is the test to see whether you can get from 1 to 4, or from the I-1 one to the I-Thou state. And this relationality test is valid so long as your consciousness considers itself a being in a world. If you are a being in a world, then you need to relate to others in that world with truthfulness, with love, with compassion, with gratitude, with openheartedness, with mutuality. And when you have gained that ethical capacity and consistency, Shakti will say “OK, you passed the test”, and you can get to the summit of the Mountain of God.
But that’s only half the test…