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Sat Yoga Institute
The Transformational Imperative
Category:
Spirituality
ISBN-10: 0615221394
Shunyamurti is a modern Dante, guiding us poetically on a thrilling journey through the inferno of our unconscious mind, into the purgatory of psycho-spiritual purification and transformation, and finally to the ultimate ascent of the Mountain of God to Supreme Liberation. The Transformational Imperative represents the culmination of the “perennial philosophy.” It succeeds in uniting all spiritual traditions with the insights of contemporary science and the many varieties of transpersonal and psychoanalytic theory. The penetrating logic of the profound ideas brilliantly stated in this book will bring readers through their own awakening and illumination to final transcendence of the limits of ego-consciousness. In one breathtaking essay after another, Shunyamurti rips away the veils of illusion and reveals the underlying meaning of our lives. This masterful work re-founds human culture on the true Ground of our Being, preparing the way for a planetary renaissance of consciousness.
About the Author
Shunyamurti is the founder and research director of the Sat Yoga Institute, headquartered in Costa Rica. The institute’s mission is to accelerate the transformation of human consciousness and contribute to the spiritual and cultural renaissance that is fermenting now on our planet. One project of SYI now underway is to create an ashram/spiritual retreat and eco-village. Shunyamurti’s own spiritual path has included many years of Yogic training, including ten years spent as a formal Yogic monk, and many more years of meditative practice in diverse spiritual traditions. He has also deeply studied other transformational disciplines. Before moving to Costa Rica, he maintained a flourishing private practice as a healer in California for over twenty years, integrating such modalities as hypnotherapy, psychoanalysis, family systems approaches, gestalt, transpersonal and Jungian work, in addition to several forms of bodywork and pranic energy transmission. He functions now as a spiritual guide, retreat leader, and teacher, and he is engaged in spiritual community building, in addition to his ongoing advanced research in the Yogic sciences. Shunyamurti can be reached through the Institute’s website: www.Satyogainstitute.org. The Sat Yoga Institute offers ongoing training and accepts sincere volunteers who seek an intensive process of Self-realization.
Excerpt
Prologue: The Search
The soul is like a salmon. It seeks to return to the place of its birth.
For the salmon, that means leaving its comfortable known habitat in the deep ocean, swimming to the mouth of a strange river, one that it has seen only once in its life, and beginning a long haul upstream. Soon it will be struggling fiercely against the current, finally having to leap cascading waterfalls, then to wriggle through shallows and under logs, before it reaches its destination. And on the way, the salmon must face the greatest obstacles of every sort, from the predations, contaminations, dams, and debris of humans, to hungry bears and other beasts, the resistance of Nature itself, to arrive at last at the place of its spawning.
Most will not make it. But among the few who do, there is no question of having arrived at the right place.
Somehow, it knows, it remembers the very spot of its own origin. And there it mates, with another of the same brood but complementary gender. One lays the eggs, the other fertilizes them, and then both will die, having fully completed their life cycle.
How is the soul like a salmon? We, too, at some moment in life, realize the uncanny need to return to our transcendent point of origin. Societies have historically accommodated that need by establishing pilgrimage destinations and routes, physical journeys to the source of some sacred river or holy land or numinous object that represents our Supreme Being. But the real pilgrimage is within. And we know intuitively, when that moment comes, that we must enter into our inmost consciousness to re-find our original essence.
In contemporary society, there is no recognition of this ultimate drive of the soul. And so the inner pilgrimage is too often short-circuited, or else co-opted by social institutions into a more limited intention. But the soul, like the salmon, will not settle for a false destination. It must return to its true point of origin. Whether this point is called the Self, God, Allah, Buddha nature, Shiva, or Brahman, is unimportant. The point of origin is beyond names and beliefs. It lies in another dimension that is both beyond the world and yet here and now, more intimately here than our own ego-consciousness. To get here requires only the realization that we have not truly been here and now, that ego-consciousness is out of touch with its inmost Self, that the world of our ego-consciousness is an artificial construct of language that veils the Real. The journey begins when we allow that construct to drop away.
The inner journey for us is as perilous as the heroic effort to leap upstream to the source-point is for the salmon. We must leave behind the comfort of the ego’s habitus, the defenses and behavior patterns that enable us to maintain the illusion of a unified personal self, and face the psychic fractures, phantasies, conflicts, and currents of repressed affect from which we have hidden for so many years. To face the fact that our real Being is unknown to our own consciousness requires great courage. Yet the soul unerringly knows, even though the ego does not remember, where it is going and what it is seeking.
The soul encompasses the ego. Ego is the personal, three-tiered, structure of hardened mind-energy that constantly emits routine thoughts to maintain the homeostasis of its identity construct through time. It consists of a conscious level of subjectivity, and an unconscious cache of repressed thoughts, memory traces, axioms, phantasies, and other identificatory fixations. Between the conscious and the unconscious levels dwells the ego’s central intelligence agency, that is responsible for maintaining defense mechanisms; enactment of drives in accordance with phantasy scenarios; superego judgments to maintain control over the conscious mind; constant deception of the conscious mind as to its true agenda; and the general direction of behavior, according to that hidden agenda.
But unbeknownst to the ego, the encompassing power of the soul leads one’s life in directions that differ from the desires of the ego. The soul consists of what Jung called the archetypal intelligence of the Self, together with the power of compassion. The soul is still an individualized entity, but it operates from holocentric, rather than egocentric, principles. The soul slips its higher understandings and sublime feelings through the gaps in the ego, moments in which the censoring agency is off-guard. The soul expresses itself in dreams, in synchronicities, in spontaneous flow states, and in moments of grace that occur when the ego mind is too exhausted to ward off the inundation of blissful love.
But despite such moments, ego-consciousness remains confused and suspicious. How do I know that I am a soul? What does the term even mean? The soul, arriving at the destination of inner silence, recognizes itself as being just as illusory as the ego. The soul is a more subtle illusion, far more profound and serious, but it is finally only the vehicle of an even more vast, inconceivable Presence.
While on the journey toward ultimate Self-realization, the soul functions as a durable power that directs and impels the search toward the Absolute. Soul strengthens the conscious mind, facilitates the exploration of the unknown inner reaches, the space of dreams, of phantasy, of inspiration, of archetypal representations, of all the multiple dissociated realms of consciousness clamoring for recognition. At the moment when the soul has completed its extraordinary journey, it recognizes itself as illusory, a work of the highest art, the creation of a far more sublime Creator. The soul then dissolves into Atman, or Pure Spirit.
Each piece of the psyche claims to be the whole, until it collides with a conflicting piece or encounters a more powerful intelligence, presence, and will to which it must submit. Yet all the pieces together do not make up a whole. The puzzle can never be completed at the level of the ego, or even of soul, simply because they both lack real Essence.
The denial of this fact is the illusory ego’s raison d’etre. Since it has no true center, but only a swarm of inner usurpers, in the form of superego voices and their programmatic psychic attacks, along with shards of infantile ego images, the ego is in constant chaos, at least at the unconscious levels of the mind—and it can easily break through into a conscious crisis. Each ego and superego fragment retains the holographic property of believing itself to be the ‘I’. Brokering their conflicting demands is part of the function of the central censor. But it can only operate according to a rigid program of defending power and prestige, and protecting sources of security and objects of enjoyment. Sometimes, the conscious mind recognizes the illusory nature of its feelings, drives, and attitudes, but still it can rarely over-rule its primitive impulses.
The ego is normally saved from having to realize its weakness and the robotic nature of its pseudo-existence. It escapes self-understanding through willful ignorance and preoccupation with greed, hatred, and the other deadly sins that govern its libidinal economy. Only when all the egoic shards have been silenced is the film of the egoic imaginary finally pierced. Only then, when consciousness recognizes that its egoic identity is no substantial or authentic self, does that empty self-recognition realize the emptiness as the Self.
The ego flees from that recognition, since it feels it as annihilation. Indeed, the Self is void, an absence of objective being, a luminous emptiness that contains all. The Self’s emptiness, when understood and accepted, morphs into rapture, an extraordinary kind of love that deserves the adjective ‘divine’.
But to the ego, emptiness is the ultimate threat. The ego fears annihilation precisely because it is already non-existent, struggling to mask its pretense of reality from itself and everyone else. So the ego must be continually vigilant, always thinking, always aggressive, always hating, always staying a step ahead of the others. To the ego, this is a cruel and dangerous world in which divine love is an illusion, and because of the ego’s emotional fragility, one must reject the other before being rejected.
The ego complex believes it is the entity living your life, until one day its complexities cause it to crash. Its energies will burn out, its passions fade, and its reason for being will collapse in pointlessness and exhaustion. Then, if the ego has the honesty and clarity to surrender to its higher inner power, another more profound center of awareness, the soul, may take over from the censor, and purify the unconscious mind, while filling the conscious mind with what Buddha called bodhicitta, compassion and wisdom.
The soul then completes its inner journey to the Source. On reaching the eternal Light, the soul dies into the flame of the immortal Self, known to the ancient yogis as the Atman. The presence of the Atman—the unknown Real Self—emerges gradually within the soul, which intuitively surrenders. The soul makes an offering of all the lower chakras—the power drive, the sexual drive, and finally the security drive—and melts into ecstatic union with the supreme Light of God-consciousness.
There is yet another death still to come, the death of God into the Absolute. This has been called Mahakal, the Death of Death, the final annihilation of all distinction between God, Self, and Universe, and the return to the ultimate Source of Being.
Once the moment of destiny has arrived for the unfoldment of this extraordinary process, the soul—just like the salmon—diverts the ego out of its usual course of existence and incomprehensibly turns toward a strange inner river of Becoming and begins its apparently mad journey into the unknown dimension where completion, death, and fulfillment all wait.
The soul lives in a different dimension than the ego. The ego identifies with the body and thus with the family of the body, with the signature behaviors and personality traits of the biological family, and often with the place in which the body was born. But the soul has a different family, a different life span, and a very different intent. Once the soul is stimulated into activity, it begins to separate from all the known landmarks of the ego, to begin its fateful journey into the inner realms to find its hidden Source—the divine luminous point of pure and timeless awareness that resides as the Heart of all.
Many people have the experience of not being truly seen or understood by their biological family. One day, when the soul awakens, that family begins to appear like an assortment of strangers having no authentic relationship to one’s real Being. One begins to separate, at first internally, and then, perhaps, externally as well. The soul comes to connect with its Essence, triggering incredibly heightened aliveness. One opens both heart and mind to one’s higher destiny and to the Supreme Love that radiates in its inmost core. This enables it to achieve ultimate fulfillment.
Some souls have to cross the planet on their search; others need only cross the street; while still others can make the inner pilgrimage in the comfort of their own home. This, too, is a matter of destiny. Some people make pilgrimages to Rome or Mecca, others to Jerusalem, Benares, or Lhasa, some to the Congo, Chichen Itza, or Macchu Pichu. Some find in those places what they are looking for, while others have to continue their search. And they may ultimately return to find the treasure was waiting for them all along in their own heart.
What is every soul searching for? The soul is magnetically drawn onward by the unquenchable thirst for its lost Essence—for nothing less than the full realization of God within. At that moment, just as the ego had to die into the soul, now the soul dies into the God-Self, the Atman. And finally, Atman merges into the Absolute. This is known as Jivan Mukti, or liberation-in-life.
The transformation process is no doubt already underway within you. It is useful to those who find themselves in the hands of the living God to understand the nature of the ego, the soul, Atman, and Brahman, the Absolute. Understanding the relationship of all these levels of our Being will facilitate the transition to the deepest level of Presence.
The ego is constructed over a period of years, an ongoing elaborate response to the traumas and demands of infancy and childhood. The soul grows over longer spans of time, often millenia, a durable vehicle that survives the passages between deaths and births, and functions as the psychic creator and container of the ego. The soul is not the Self, and from the perspective of ultimate reality, yes, it is but another illusion. But it is an illusion that we must pass through to gain final liberation.
The soul is constituted by the profound longing for return from the fragility and impermanence of time to the refuge of eternity—yet it keeps moving along the trajectory of linear time, gaining wisdom through the sowing and reaping of karma. Its very identity is woven of the karmic thread that connects all its past and future lives. When that thread comes to an end, when the desires of all those lifetimes of exile in the universe of spacetime, energy, mass, and mind have culminated at last in the exhaustion of its outward-aiming energies, then the soul, like the salmon, seeks its point of origin from which to die back into God in final liberation.
The soul knows when it must begin its journey home. The ego may think the idea is irrational, but it must at some point yield to the higher powers within. You would not be drawn to reading this, if you had not reached the point at which such knowledge/power is unfolding within you. There are probably mixed feelings, of course. But, no doubt, there is a longing for the release of creative energies to fulfill the spirit’s ultimate desire. You are on the threshold of that miraculous moment.
Usually there are a number of false starts and dead ends. Until the soul fully separates from the ego, its true desire is always going to be distorted and foiled by the other-directed desires of the ego. The ego has a more limited agenda, a pale imitation of that of the soul. It wants the insignia of power, and more covertly, it seeks to return to the mother’s womb and/or receive the father’s symbolic phallus. But the ego can never fulfill that phantasy. Sexuality is a mirage. Neither orgasm nor romance can yield the holy grail of wholeness. Climbing the social hierarchy is a fool’s game. The ego is doomed to disappointment.
The soul, however, can succeed in its search for a different kind of womb, the cosmic womb, and the phallus of God (in Sanskrit called the Shiva Lingam), the penetrating power of the infinite supernal Light. Only in the attainment of the blissful orgasm of ultimate mystical union can the soul at last dissolve. In the moment of its merging with the Light, the soul dies into its own concentrated nucleus of pure Spirit. And then a new kind of life begins.
Just as every salmon finds its own river, and then its own spawning point in that river, every soul must find its own way to salvation. Its moment of awakening and that of its ultimate liberation will be different for each one. For some souls, who were born only a short way up the river of time, the return journey may be easy. But for those who were spawned a long way up the river, the journey home is far more arduous and filled with great obstacles. A few souls were spawned near the very source of the river. They face the greatest difficulties and the greatest rewards.
For those rare souls, the journey will seem endless and will take them through every kind of non-ordinary experience, from the most sublime to the most terrifying, dangerous, and absurd, until the awful moment when the river seems to peter out into a tiny rivulet, and all seems utterly hopeless. At the moment of the deepest darkness of despair, they will at last encounter the spring that is the Source, the luminous loving presence of God. And they will recognize that they have arrived at their journey’s end. Now is the season, within the long cycle of planetary time, for the attainment of the supreme goal—for all of us who have been on this long, strange trip.
We are awakening from a trance called history, from being lost in the mists of collective amnesia. For some, these words will provide a shock of recognition. We are returning Home.
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