How to Awaken From the Illusion of Ego and World: 7 Ways to Transmit Non-Duality
In this seminar teaching, recorded our recent Sangha Rainy Reason retreat Shunyamurti explains the 7 Methods of Teaching that Which Cannot Be Taught, or the 7 Ways to Transmit Non-Duality
So, if we examine the ways that the great sages of history have attempted to teach that which cannot be taught—which is the truth of nonduality—the further back we go, we see that the method was the most simple possible. Traditionally, the first yogi, who was an avatar of Shiva named Dakshinamurti, was the great teacher of yoga who said absolutely nothing. Therefore, we have no teachings by him; he taught completely in silence. And yet, that silence, because of the state of consciousness that he was in, resulted in a direct transmission of the truth, energetically rather than cognitively.
As time went on, not only were there fewer sages who could transmit that way, but there were far fewer students who could receive or even understands the significance of silence, and therefore that mode of teaching became much less in use, although it remains the core of any authentic teaching of nonduality.
The second method is to give very concrete and brief instructions as to how to do atma vichara, or how to do Zen, or how to do whatever is the name of the practice. But the practice, the sadhana, if it is a teaching of nonduality, is always ultimately going to be the same. And the instruction amounts to discovering the truth of the answer to the question, “Who am I?” “What is the ‘I’?” “What is the nature of being or Self or mind or Buddha?”—or whatever term is used to signify ultimate Reality. But there will be very simple instructions given, and those instructions, for the most part, people will be unable to follow, because they will no longer have the ability to silence the mind.
So, then teachers went to an attempt to make it more real for people by developing elaborate descriptions of ultimate Reality, beginning with simple mantras like Sat Chit Ananda, but then going on to all of the various, let’s say, noumena that arise and borderline phenomena that arise as one enters into the transcendent state of Being and leaves the ego behind—the nature of that unlimited consciousness as it is described—if it is described accurately, the terms of description itself, if people can get it—can help them sink into that state.
And so there would be terms that would range from peace, and serenity, to ecstatic love, joy, bliss, clarity, intelligence, stability, changelessness—all of these terms that we are used to would be given as a description of the aim to arrive at—but as time went on people were unable to reach that state even with a clear description of what it is like. And any description can only vaguely describe what it is like because it is not like anything and it is indescribable, but terms that can at least give one a sense of what one is letting go of, what remains when the illusion is peeled away, can help one to stabilize, at least temporarily, in such a consciousness.
Well, when that stopped working then they—the sages—developed maps of consciousness, the spectrum of consciousness, so that you could know where you were on that spectrum in relation to ultimate Reality, or the highest level of the spectrum. So, the kundalini map is the essential map, but variations of that were developed. Kabbalah has its own map using the sefirot, etc., and the Muslims have their own maps, but they all correspond pretty much to the same understanding of the developmental stages of psychological and spiritual maturation that one must go through in order to be able to let go of the ego. And so the map can help one to locate where one is resonating, and what needs to happen in order to take the steps to get deeper into consciousness. But the map is not the territory, and so you can become very intelligently familiar with the map and still have no direct realization. But, nonetheless, it’s useful if one seriously reflects upon where their consciousness is stuck on the way toward realization of the Self, and is determined to get unstuck. The determination is the key.
When the intellectual mapping was no longer of any avail, then the teachers simply began to offer guided meditations to help bring a person through the entrainment of consciousness by the gradual increase of time that one is kept in silence. But because of the guiding process, the voice of the guide becomes as if an auxiliary ego that takes over the job of mental chatter, so that the ego-mind can go off duty for a while, and pay attention to the thoughts that the guider is offering, and relax into the waiting for the next phrase to come, and in the meantime allowing oneself to be in silence for longer and longer periods, knowing that at least the silence will come to an end and one can tolerate it. And one gradually acclimates oneself to being able to bear more and more silence in the service of reaching a deeper level of peace.
But, gradually, even guided meditations end up not working: people fall asleep, even in the meditations that are guided, and their mind still finds ways to wander, even in these kinds of processes. And so the attempt to create a kind of artificial meditative imperience through guidance of that nature can result only in a very temporary gain, as everyone knows, but at least it can produce, perhaps, enough serenity so that there is an incentive to go deeper and sustain the silence longer.
And, when that stopped working, they decided that what we need is to exhort people, to recommend strongly that people become devoted to God, to the love of God, and to a life of virtue and dharma—so that they can clear away some of the garbage in the mind, some of the unnecessary karmic suffering. And the more one’s life became devoted to reaching higher consciousness, and one in a very regular and self-regimented way began to apply, consistently, these principles of psychospiritual development in one’s plan of life—the more that one gradually reached a point where the consciousness was ready, ripened, and willing to drop the ego identity, to discover the infinite and uncreated Self, and to let all of the illusion fall away.
But gradually even the exhortation to virtue and dharma became useless, because a social system was created in which the opposite was exhorted upon one, and people became indoctrinated to live for pleasure, for money, for immediate gratification, and for a dumbed-down version of consciousness that was not interested in these subtleties or ascetic practices, or even having the patience that it takes to develop a meditative practice in an authentic way.
And so then, finally, the last means was that of deconstruction of the ego, so that one could, at least, take apart the fantasies, the illusions, the fictional nature of the ego, its self-contradictions, to show its addiction to self-defeating tendencies and projections, and its unwillingness to live in truth. And by deconstructing it, one could understand the logic of why it was built, why it was geared to defend against in a non-healthy family system, what traumas it was reacting to, and why the illusions that create fear and suffering, and hatred, and fury, and self-hatred, and self-disgust—and all of these other egoic, negative feeling-states that prevent one from meditating—why they are there, and why are they no longer relevant, because they were part of an earlier phase of psychospiritual development that one is, now, not only free to abandon, but one is obligated toward oneself and one’s potentialities to drop the shell of the ego that was intended only for survival through childhood. And just because our society doesn’t offer rites of passage, in which the ego dies and one enters real adulthood, doesn’t mean one cannot do that on one’s own if one has the yearning to do it.
But the problem is, even in deconstructing the ego, many of those who are having their ego deconstructed feel attacked by that, and have a distrust of the deconstructers and are terrified that they’re going to be exploited, and become dependent and lose their weapons, and their power to defend their stability, or hold on to whatever they are using for their sources of emotional support—whether it’s the family system, the family money, the family this or that, or whether it’s the signifiers of security that come from sex, or drugs, or music, or all of the other ways that people use to prop up the ego.
So, even the deconstruction results in a backlash of un-deconstructable egos that refuse to go through the meat-grinder and hold on to their precious delusions upon which the ego is based, even though they’re the cause of suffering. And, of course, these include the romantic delusions, and the delusions of imaginary forms of spirituality, and various other delusions that the loss of which create sadness and despair, and hopelessness, rather than freedom and bliss.
And so, we have arrived at a very difficult situation for anybody wanting to teach what cannot be taught. Not that I am asking for pity, but we are all in this together. And it’s a difficult situation, because the ego—no matter how much it wants to escape its own delusional nature, and it knows, even in the midst of its delusion that it’s delusional—but it cannot escape because it cannot imagine not being an I-thought. It is so attached to that thought, as if that is its reality, it is so lost in the field of representation that it has no sense of what it means to be Real. The Real has been lost. And, therefore, the mode of consciousness that is “normal” for the ego, is the imaginary register of consciousness, and all it can do is look for images of security and safety and empowerment and enlightenment or whatever, but all of those are false.
So, the bottom line is: there is no way out of the trap of getting out of the ego, and the only hope there is, is for you to realize that the ego never actually existed at all.
So, the only way to escape the problem of the ego, at least in my humble opinion, is to recognize that not only is the ego a tapestry of fantasies, fictions, that are both self-created and projected into one, and family systems that one is told to imitate and to be indoctrinated into, and social systems, and religious systems, etc.—but not only is the ego unreal but the world itself is unreal—and, I think, it’s this that may be the way out of scientistically-minded egos.
So, even scientists admit that the world is miraculous. It cannot be explained even if they try to explain it with the Big Bang: they can’t explain how did that little singularity get there that went bang? There are—the whole universe is unexplainable by science, and it’s hopelessly unexplainable by science—the world should not be—and philosophers are always asking “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Well, who says there’s something rather than nothing? Only the illusion of the something is saying that. But, in any case, the world is an unexplainable miracle. And I think we need to accept that, because the scientistic attitude is to say: “Oh no, it’s a product of cause and effect and we can”, you know, “create the formulas and the mathematics, and we can recreate the entire universe and produce copies of it, etc.” But it’s not the case.
Whoever thought this universe into being is not anyone in this room, or at MIT, or Harvard, or anywhere else—so let’s get very clear that if we are dealing with an intelligence that has brought this universe into being, it’s an intelligence that you would want to reach. But the world itself can’t be explained without that intelligence.
And, as the Buddhists have been telling us for thousands of years, the world is impermanent. Things change, nothing remains the same from nanosecond to nanosecond, and so, therefore, if you are believing in any world, whatever world you happen to be believing in is already gone before the belief can even be formulated in your mind. You can’t step in the same river twice, as Heraclitus said a long time ago. In fact, you can’t even step into it once—the river is changing even while you are stepping, and the “you” that is stepping is losing cells as you step, and nothing is remaining the same from one moment to the next.
So, there is no world, in the sense that it’s a flux. And because it’s a flux, you who are in the flux cannot know where this river of time is going to take you; the flux is unknowable and the world cannot—or anyone in the world—find their way back to the origin of this river of time. It is without beginning and no end can be seen. Ends of civilizations and planets can be seen, but no end is in sight. But whatever is impermanent cannot be defined, cannot be said “This is real, this is true”—anything that happens or appears within the world, all of that is changing—and so, we cannot really say that there is a world, there is something in progress, but it is nothing that is real in any moment. Nor is time real. OK.
So, the latest scientific theories have agreed that, not only is time not real, but matter is not real. They used to think that the world was made of particles, or particles of particles. Now, quantum physics has destroyed that and turned to energy as the source. But energy itself turns into being nothing more than information. But information is very interesting because you need a consciousness to interpret the information, and it’s not the information you are reading in a book, it’s the information that is coming, not only to the senses, but are coming to levels of consciousness that are beyond that which is, pertains to the ego.
And so, there are waves, vibrational frequencies, that are in the air—we are not aware of them—radio waves, if we had a radio we could turn it on and be aware of them, but, otherwise, you’re probably not able to pick them up. There’s all kinds of vibrations and phenomena that you are not able to receive, and the more psychologically and spiritually sensitive you become, the more you are able to perceive that there are non-physical entities and presences in the space that others who are at a denser level of consciousness cannot perceive.
And so, as we grow into higher levels of interpreting this subtler and subtler information that we are receiving, the nature of what we consider the world to be, changes—and changes radically. And so, we cannot say that any world that we believe in exists, because the moment you get more information about higher dimensions of that reality, the more that that picture of the world is going to change.
Moreover, those who have really reflected deeply upon the nature of the world, recognize that you’re only aware of the world because the world (or any phenomena that arise that you consider part of the world) is only an appearance in consciousness. As an appearance, it is not really separate from consciousness, so we cannot say that there is a world outside of your consciousness. This was the whole discovery of Immanuel Kant, and those who have followed in attempting to find a way out of the situation. But your consciousness can only perceive itself, whatever is within its range, it cannot know anything outside of its perception, which is why Kant said “You cannot know the Ding an sich, the ‘Thing-in-itself’”. All you can know is your sensory perception of what you are calling a thing. What it actually is—or how it would appear to someone with different senses, with different sensitivities—would be maybe something totally different, or nothing. Because a different consciousness would simply perceive a different sort of world, or no world.
But because the world is only an appearance in consciousness, and your consciousness is always producing new thoughts, new interpretations, that you cannot predict in advance, you cannot say what the world is or is going to be in any given moment. And then you have to deal with the fact, not only is the world unexplainable, but consciousness is unexplainable. Science certainly cannot explain consciousness and really hasn’t even tried very hard, except to try to convince people to accept that it’s simply brain activity. But anyone who has done any work with those who have had out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences and other paranormal sensitivities, knows that consciousness cannot be a function of the brain, even though the brain may be a transducer of consciousness, it may receive it and translate it into motor activity for a particular organism, but consciousness is not knowable by science, because science has to use consciousness to try to discover consciousness, and therefore it can never discover itself, it’s always a step behind itself.
Moreover, as we said before, the ego is definitely, clearly, unimpeachably fictional. You cannot deny it, it’s an artifact of the system you were raised in: you created a set of self-images and personality strategies and sub-personalities—none of them have any reality. If you are in the ego, you are living a scripted, staged, pseudo-existence. That should be clear to everyone in the ego. And if you want to know what free will is, you have to drop the ego, because the ego has no will to do anything that it isn’t programmed to do, or to know anything that it isn’t programmed to know. The ego cannot change itself, because it’s a program; only the programmer can change it.
But the ego, because it is fictional, has no reality, no essence with which to be empowered, authorized, and capable of changing itself. And because the ego was originally created by other people, namely parents and family system, the ego remains, even as an adult, dependent upon the introjected image of those superego figures, or projected out onto others, which forms the basis for one’s likes and one’s dislikes, one’s hatreds, one’s envy, one’s—every aspect of one’s life and one’s emotional state are determined by an environment that is simply a field of projections. You don’t see other people as they are, you see them as they fit the projection you have unconsciously put on them, and, therefore, if there is someone that you have decided to project as the bad superego parent, you’re not going to understand or take in anything they are trying to tell you, even if they are trying to help you, you are going to assume that they are out to get you. So there are some people here that can’t take my help at all in this process, because all they can do is try to find fault, and inconsistences, and contradictions, and some form of megalomania or some form of whatever that would disqualify me from being able to offer any useful help to you. And if you’re in that state, then it makes it even more difficult to get through to enable someone to move out of the fictional level of consciousness, into the Real. So, these are technical problems that are difficult to work with.
But, finally, which I already mentioned, there are paranormal events that happen, just not synchronicities, but shaktipat and phenomena that suddenly shock one into recognizing that the ego’s frame of reference is illusory—or at least inadequate to be able to comprehend the reality that someone is facing. And so, therefore, in order to break through this fictional identity, more and more paranormal kinds of phenomena are happening in the world these days, which include the UFO phenomena and others that we are studying. But there are also different kinds of paranormal phenomena that will have a direct impact upon the individual that may not be public phenomena, but imperiences that come which can be in the form of very powerful dreams, or very powerful synchronicities, or very powerful messages that one gets in a non-ordinary way, that can open the mind up to levels of consciousness beyond the ego. Those are the means that the intelligence that transcends the ego is using to break the consciousness open to realize its own true nature.
I want to read a few words of Annamalai Swami, who was one of the foremost disciples of Sri Ramana. He was the main builder of all the buildings in the ashram, and walls, and efforts to keep the ashram safe from flooding and various other things. He worked on many projects. So, then, at one point, he was given a very paranormal realization that put him into a samadhi state that brought his ego to an end, and he retired, and people came to him for instruction and teachings and he gave them. So, I want to read a few things that he said about his own relationship to Sri Ramana.
“Bhagavan watched me very closely in the years that I served him in the ashram. One time, I went to the Mother’s Temple where many people were talking about worldly matters. Bhagavan called me back saying ‘Why do you want to go and join that crowd? Don’t go to crowded places, don’t talk about worldly things with people, if you move with the crowd then their vasanas will infect you’.”
How many can relate to that? And how many people let their vasanas be infected by others? It’s one of the main obstacles on the path.
“Bhagavan always encouraged me to live a solitary life and not mix with other people. That was the path he picked for me. Now yes, other people got different advice that was equally good for them”—there are some people who have socially important obligations and tasks that require interpersonal contact—but, fortunately, he did not, and so he went faster than most.
“But while Bhagavan actively discouraged me from socializing, he also discouraged me from sitting quietly and meditating, during all the years I was working in the ashram. If Bhagavan ever saw me sitting with my eyes closed, he would call out to me and give me some work to do”.
He literally didn’t let him meditate. That should be some comfort to you, I think.
“On one of these occasions he actually told me ‘Don’t sit and meditate, just do your work and don’t forget that you’re the Self. You should keep in mind all the time that you are working that you are the Self, this is your sadhana and it’s enough. The real sadhana is to not forget the Self, it’s not sitting quietly with your eyes closed. You’re always the Self, just don’t forget it.’
Bhagavan’s way does not create a war between the mind and the body. He doesn’t make people sit down and fight the mind with closed eyes. Usually when you sit in meditation you are struggling to achieve something,”—even to stay awake a lot of the time—”fighting to gain control over the mind. Bhagavan did not advise us to engage in this kind of a fight, he told us ‘There is no need to engage in a war against the mind, because the mind does not have any real existence. The mind is nothing but a shadow.’ He advised me to be continuously aware of the Self while I did the ordinary things of everyday life and that was enough.
‘If you understand the Self and you realise you are the Self, everything will appear to you as your own Self. No problems will ever come to you while you have this vision. Because you are all and all is the Self. Choices about liking or disliking will not arise. If you put on green-tinted glasses everything you see will appear to be green, if you adopt the vision of the Self, everything that is seen will be the Self, and the Self alone.’
So these were Bhagavan’s teachings for me. If you want to understand the Self, no formal sadhana is required, you are always the Self. Be aware of your Self while you’re working. Convince yourself that you are the Self, not the body, not the mind, and always avoid the thought ‘I am not the Self’ or ‘I am the ego’.
Avoid thoughts that limit you, thoughts that make you believe that you are not the Self. I once asked Bhagavan, ‘But you are at the top of the hill, you have reached the summit of spiritual life, whereas I am still at the bottom of the hill. Please help me reach the summit’. Bhagavan shook his head and answered: ‘It would be enough if you just give up that thought’. This thought that ‘I’m at the bottom of the hill’ is nonsense. If you can do this, then there will be no difference between us. It’s just your thoughts that are convincing you that I am at the top and you are at the bottom. Just give up this illusion of difference. And everything will be fine.’
Don’t adopt attitudes such as those that automatically assume you are limited or inferior in any way. On another occasion I asked Bhagavan ‘Nowadays many people are crossing big oceans by planes in very short periods of time, I would like Bhagavan to find us a good device, a gyana airplane that can speedily transport us all to moksha. And this time Bhagavan replied, ‘Look, we’re both already in a gyana airplane, but you don’t seem to know it’.
In his answers, Bhagavan would never let me fall into the false believe that I was separate or different from the Self, or that I was a person with a mind and a body who needed to do something to reach some exalted spiritual state. Whenever I asked him questions that were based on assumptions such as these, he would show the error that was implicit in the question and gently point me back to the truth, the Self. He would never allow me to entertain wrong ideas.”
So it comes down to that simplicity—you don’t need to meditate—even meditation is based on the illusion that you’re a person who has to get to that summit of consciousness, you have to silence your mind, you have to this or that. No—realize you’re not the mind, you’re already the Self, and that will quiet the mind.
It’s only the identification with the mind that keeps it busy trying to entertain you, otherwise, the mind will simply do what it is meant to do, whatever work is required, and then it will shut up. But even while the mind is active in some work, you remember you’re the Self, not by thinking it with the mind, but by recognizing it non-verbally, as the witness of the body-mind going through the sadhana, the practice, the karma yoga, but without any identification except with the witness consciousness that is changeless.
And in that state the Sat Chit Ananda, that is the quality of the Self, will emerge and there need to be no struggle with your ego, with your body, with pains in your body, with pains in your mind or your heart, or with any of the other things that arises as a result of the wrong thought that you are the ego. All of that will fall away by itself. Just know you are the Self. Know you are Buddha, know you are Shiva, know you are Sat Chit Ananda, know you are the silent Presence that is eternal, and all will be revealed, and perfection will be attained. You are That. You don’t have to become that, you don’t have to stop becoming something else, there is only the Self, there are no other options, just accept reality.