Anything Could Happen During this Solar Eclipse!

What is the true spiritual meaning of Halloween? In this classic teaching recorded in 2018, Shunyamurti explores the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain as a symbolic passage through darkness and death into divine rebirth. Drawing on the Tree of Life, heroic myths, and the spiritual significance of sacrifice, he explains why the ego is the ultimate obstacle to humanity's return to divine consciousness, and why every new Golden Age must begin with the death of the old.

Note: Shunyamurti did not complete his explanation of why the Gaelic holiday pronounced Sahwen is spelled Samhain. The original settlers were Aryan speakers of early Sanskrit, and the holy day was a coming together of the living and the spirits of their dead ancestors, who were the gods of earlier yugas. The idea of coming together was expressed as a sangham, which could also be written as samhan. Thus, the Sanskrit root was preserved, though the spoken language evolved.

In this intellectually dazzling and spiritually transformative satsang, Shunyamurti bridges ancient nondual wisdom with modern philosophy to illuminate one of the deepest mysteries of existence: What is this world? Drawing on the insights of Jean Baudrillard, Abhinavagupta, Adi Shankaracharya, and Sri Ramana Maharshi, he reveals why reality is better understood as a simulacrum—a mirror reflection without an original—than as a material universe existing independently of consciousness.

Moving from a penetrating critique of consumer culture, desire, and the modern "Matrix," Shunyamurti then unveils the seven states of consciousness, showing why the waking ego is the least qualified to judge reality. True awakening begins when we transcend the limitations of ordinary awareness and enter the luminous stillness from which all experience arises.

This teaching is excerpted from Shunyamurti's latest seminar, "The Thrill of the Infinite: You Must Take the Leap." Access the complete teaching series here: https://www.satyoga.org/shop/products/retreat-package/the-thrill-of-the-infinite/

Traditional societies all provided sacred rites of passage for every member, to ensure that all became mature, responsible, brave, noble, and wise adults who could sustain the values of their culture and adapt them to changing circumstances. Our current social system not only does not offer such rites of passage, but indoctrinates children to not want to become adults in the true sense. However, karma always brings a return of the repressed. Somehow, sooner or later, we all must face situations that require ego death. It is wise to go through that sacred passage voluntarily, and with proper guidance. That is the value of an ashram.

The play’s the thing to kill desire to be king. Overcoming the lust for power is the first step to Self-realization. Theater has always been cathartic therapy, and a primary data base for constructing psychological theory. Every drama is a fractal of the cosmic Theo-Drama.

Question:

Yesterday I watched “The Fight Club of Saints” and as a result my body still aches to this day. I only saw corpses moving. The question now is how to harmonize the body with the Spirit of God. Despite the reflections of the sangha, I have only noticed vehicles that are full of knowledge, but none of them feel themselves. Where is the aliveness? Where is god? This is not a criticism, just what I experienced. It makes me very sad and I cry out to God to tell me what my contribution could be, so that the people given to you become capable of God’s love. I almost froze while watching the video. But God is merciful and has filled me with his love again today. I perceive that there are many long-time members in the sangha, and I wonder if they have only attained head knowledge? Where has the heart gone? I felt your own pain too. You are a brilliant teacher, but how bitter must it be to teach for years and the sangha cannot grasp the essence? You know what the problem is, Shunya! Please stretch out afterwards Shunya, you know what’s at stake!

Shunyamurti’s Reply:

I deeply feel the sincerity of your words. Indeed, I have compassion for your anguish. But I must tell you, with a mixture of humor and heuristics, that you are mistaken in your perceptions.

You are looking at the world (and our sangha) through ego-tinted glasses. And this is why you cry out for an absent God. But God is omnipresent, and not absent at all. Not only that, but God is acting through each character in this holographic theo-drama with perfection.

But to see that, one’s third eye must be open. In addition, one must be attuned to God’s extremely wry sense of humor. Every ego is structured in such a way as to cause misrecognition of its own real nature—and distorted projections of the nature and multi-leveled subjectivity of the other.

History is the operation of a divine dialectic, and in this final phase of our hysterical devolution, culture has already died, and in concordance with this, our fictional self-presentation has adapted to the barbaric conditions of collective terminal spiritual illness. This is expressed through a rigor mortis of psychological development.

However, all this appearance of lifelessness is only the recoil before the firing of the bullet of Truth, or the backstep of an athlete about to take a great leap forward. Although traditional yogic practice is to inquire ‘who am I?’, the postmodern ego can only discover, in the aftermath of its karmic punchline, ‘who was I?’ In the post-traumatic dispensation of raw presence, consciousness can at last integrate its scattered fragments and recognize its failure to become—yet not as a lack of Being, but rather, as an unborn and deathless Heart, capable of retroactive cancelation of belief in the bitter illusion constituted by its own disguise as a being-in-a-world.

I can assure you that I feel no pain or bitterness, but only joy and astonishment at the privileged position that God has mercifully granted me, to realize the awesome greatness of the Supreme Intelligence, Whose brilliance shows the brighter for its uncanny capacity to conceal its overwhelming and infinite Light.

Om Shanti,
Shunyamurti