Summary: Shunyamurti begins this powerful teaching with a question: Where do you wish to abide for eternity? The moment has arrived to choose your destiny.
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The so-called “world” is imaginary. That must be understood very deeply. It is a dream within an infinite consciousness and our function is to escape from the illusion of being a character in the dream, to realizing the Dreamer.
And to do that, we must know the way—the Tao—the way to re-trace our steps from the Absolute Real to the imaginary flux of spacetime, and the delusion of being a bodily entity. And so the imaginary must be reflected upon, in the plane of the symbolic: in that capacity to interpret, to analyze, to synthesize, to transcend the contents of consciousness. And in that reflection, there is a recognition that the consciousness is knotted to the imaginary because of language that creates the illusion that the thoughts belong to the imaginary being, and that the consciousness is producing those thoughts from its reality, rather than from its imaginary dreamfield.
And so the plane of representation of the pseudo-symbolic, that is the thoughts that emerge not from the Real Self, but from the I-thought, the ego-mind—those thoughts are alien to the Real. They are embedded in the imaginary. They are based upon the illusion of duality, of the multiplicity of the “ten thousand things”, and as the “I” as one of those things. And so there must be a return, a reverse movement from the externalization of the mind into its imaginary world, and a return from that illusion of being a person in that world, to realize that the world and that person is simply a dream in one’s mind. But not the mind of the person—the mind that has created the person.
This return can only be accomplished through a letting go of language and the attempt to know, to grasp, to control, to manipulate, to calculate, the figure out how to become one’s Real Self, because it cannot be done with the instrument of the conceptualizing mind. That mind is the problem—it cannot provide the solution. It is too low a level of intelligence that is embedded in the dreamfield, and does not (and cannot) know the Self beyond the dream. To know the Self, one must follow the Tao in returning to the silence of the inconceivable Self. Because the Real Self does not appear within the dream, it cannot be known. It cannot be sensed, and it cannot be conceived of by the mind. The Self is literally inconceivable. This must be understood very deeply—that one cannot use the instrument of thought to know, to understand, to reach, the true nature of the Self. And from the perspective of the ego (that is imaginary), the Self does not exist. It is Nothing. And because the ego is terrified of nothingness, it locates the Self in a delusional place that signifies lack, and nihilism, and loss, and abandonment, and the horror of have nothing to hold on to, to ground oneself on, to depend upon.
And so there’s a natural repulsion from the ego against the realization of the true Self that has never been born, that can only be reached through traversing the plane of the imaginary, and the symbolic, and entering that Nothingness—that emptiness of all thought and image and concept and emotion, and giving up entirely the hope of understanding with thought, or of finding oneself as a form in a somewhere, and letting go of all desire—desire for form, for taste, for anything that can be imagined, anything that can be felt. Because the Self is without qualities, without qualities that can be conceived from within the imaginary context of the dreamfield. But the nothingness itself is imaginary, because it’s a conception of the imaginary mind. So the Self is not really nothingness, but you have to traverse the field of nothingness in order to get to the Real. But even nothingness is a delusional concept. The Real is a mystery that cannot be penetrated until one has become no-thing, no mind, no thought, no “I”.
And it’s in that absolute emptying out of all beliefs, all concepts, all frames of reference, all paradigms, all notions, anything that can be thought of—letting go of every object, sensory, mental, imaginal, or any sense of an existing “I”—until the purity of the Absolute Self that is beyond the field of the dream, beyond the sense of existence, beyond time and space, can be stabilized. And then one’s frame of reference shifts—it reverses, and the world is seen as an object in consciousness, and the Real is the infinite Beyond. And by merging entirely into that Beyond of thought one becomes the Mystery. One becomes the indescribable and the inconceivable. One realizes that one was always That, and could never be anything but That.
This Post Has 7 Comments
Carol Hayward
28 Jun 2021Dear Shunyimurti
Thank you so much for your beautiful expression of this Joy and peace that we inherently are. Your teachings reach far beyond the chattering mind and resonate with the
Supreme Being. You walk us home.
With such deep gratitude,
Carol Hayward
Purusha Aum
29 Jun 2021Thank you Carol, your comment is much appreciated. All blessings. Namaste
n13L5
29 Jun 2021Straight to the heart!
I love his dire pronouncements, his way to convey the urgency to do this and be serious about it.
It is hard to become silent!
I fear I will amuse myself to death with my silly internal dialogue, before becoming silent…
I did not now about Shunyamurti when I spent a lot of time in Costa Rica. And there is no way for me to come to Costa Rica now, as I’ve spent my last money on a farm on the very top of a 2000 meter high mountain on an eastern pacific island.
Maybe the mountain will help me, along with Shunyamurti’s beautiful and untiring teachings!
Linda Mandala
30 Jun 2021Infinite gratitude for this…..something resonates beyond any understanding when hearing this…..something knows this is what is…..and something remains speechless.
Namaste
Devalinda
Vajra Sat Yoga
26 Jul 2021Infinite Gratitude to you Devalinda! it is wonderful when the teachings resonate so deeply that you find silence. May you injoy the peace and bliss of Truth.
June Bertram
30 Jun 2021Thanks for reminding me.I have been reading his book and checking him out.Seen no reason to not follow along.He teaches what most other good teachers do, maybe has more charisma than most and that is a good thing.I am grateful for this help so do not misunderstand my motivation is simply not to waste any more time..although of course that is only in this phenomenal dimension.
My last teacher was Thich Naht Hahn, he had a stroke in 2013 and now is in Vietnam and cannot speak.I recognise some of Thays qualities in Shunyamurthi.
Good teaching on why we need to go beyond thinking
Vajra Sat Yoga
26 Jul 2021Thank you for you sharing, June!