A Shunyamurti Spiritual Wisdom Teaching
Every old soul whose had more than a few past lives at the end of Kali Yuga is born with a broken heart and Karma makes sure that the heart gets broken several more times in childhood so that it’s thoroughly crushed by the time it reaches adulthood.
The young souls are just born heartless and so they do not have to struggle in the same way, but they also cannot reach the same depth of feeling because it is anguish that is the engine of ascension and so you will know how old you are as a soul by how much anguish you feel. And every old soul who is brought to Sat Yoga knows that they come here not because their ego brought them but something greater than the ego which cannot be considered a part of oneself. It is that which is not the ego self, it is that which the ego cannot understand and can only think of it so long as the ego paradigm remains as something mysterious, magical, inconceivable.
The broken-hearted soul comes to a place like an Ashram and hopes to heal that broken heart, but gradually discovers that it cannot be healed. The soul is terminally wounded and it cannot hope to obtain relationships of love that will heal its wounds, its agony of feeling the lack of ever being loved, adored, recognised, never having known real union or even compassionate containment and it has to come very gradually to the deflationary recognition that it will never achieve its goals of being loved by another ego or by itself and it will also come to realise, sometimes with great agony, sometimes with sadness, some times simply a kind of blankness that the ego cannot even love God, cannot even believe in God.
The ego as an instrument of thought is flawed, is inherently unable to get out of its ego-centric orbit, its narcissism, its demand circuit and it cannot think clearly about the real, and because of its broken heart that must remain as repressed as possible, cannot feel authentically. So, feeling is replaced by affect and the agony of the ego’s loneliness is usually covered over by anger, negative projections, superiority complex alternating with inferiority, anything but feel the truth of what is actually occurring within and without.
The ego mind does not want to come to the recognition that it is still tied to the lost object of childhood, it still wants what it knows it’s impossible to get and because it won’t give up on this, it won’t accept the present, it won’t accept what is offered, that’s not satisfying enough, God is not satisfying to the ego.
Because the ego’s perspective, its frame of reference is inherently that of an entity separate from God in a material world that has no meaning, it can never attain a sense of its own meaningfulness, its own goodness, its own purpose. And so its efforts to prove itself in some kind of a manic or hyper-manic effort to achieve something worthy will always collapse into depression and despair at the futility of any effort bringing about what it really wanted from that effort which was that unconditional adoration of the other that is not to be found.
So, existence itself becomes a dreadful burden to the ego. Just to get up in the morning, just to be conscious, just to be aware of its lack and of its sense of not belonging in the world. Of its inability to shed its ambivalence about everything, its inability ever to make a full commitment because fragments of the mind are simply not able to rise out of the infantile desire not even to live, to return to a womb, to find an easy way out, to choose the lower death drive, to believe in the fantasies that things would be different if only somewhere else called one, if one could live in a different place with different people or had more money or had a different job or a different this or that.
The ego will go on ruminating and fantasising rather than being present because it cannot stand its presence, it cannot be comfortable in its own skin and so it is in constant running away from itself mode. Either running in a rajasic sense or a tamasic, dying into inertia, spacing out, creating symptoms that keep it from being conscience because they overwhelm the mind. It cannot deal realistically with its situation because there are too many infantile fragments that get in the way of realistic thought and it does not even know what a realistic thought might be, because it has never been in the real.
So, the time spent in meditation for a yogi in this condition is a kind of purgatory in which it cannot physically run away and it must sit and stew in its own brew of horror, of self-hatred, of sense of guilt, and shame and hatred and fury. At the same time its conscience witnessing of its own futility grows and a sense of the emptiness of its life gradually bring it around to a recognition that there is some force maintaining one’s consciousness and one’s life that is not part of the ego. Although one cannot in that state recognise the presence of God, one recognises the need to suicide the ego, one recognises at some moment that one cannot live another moment inside the ego’s monstrous mind.
Without any guarantee or sense that there is a God that will contain and save one from deep personalisation into some psychotic meltdown. A process of self-annihilation of the ego begins to get under way and one begins to face what life would be if one were empty of the ego’s thought patterns.
It is here that that quantum level of consciousness begins to make itself felt and known as the patterns of thought begin to be de-collapsed. The signature thoughts of the ego, whether of fury, or of shame, or some kind of withering away inside out of the sense of the lovelessness of the world and oneself.
But then having failed oneself in one’s efforts to attain some kind of nobility or worthiness or transcendence however one has articulated it to oneself, it is the final and irrevocable recognition that the ego cannot take one any further on one’s life journey and that to kill oneself physically would be only to forcibly have to come back and face it all again with an even worse situation because one at least knows that consciousness does not die and the ego’s samskaras, if they have not completely melted away will bring one to a life in which those same situations recur but with more sense of defeat and of negativity in one’s face.
The process of self-annihilation does not begin with any celebratory transcendental victory, but rather with a simple understanding, a final realisation that one has been in a state of misunderstanding one’s whole life, of who and what one is, of what reality is and what can be expected.
The reconciliation comes only after the recognition that the World will not bring satisfaction to the ego and only its annihilation can bring peace. As one consciously sits and annihilates the mind and its thinking process and enters into that silence from which there is no return what had been felt as an emptiness that surrounded and encompassed one as the ego weakens and its own pulse begins to generate thoughts at more and more of a kind of silent gap that enters into the space of the mind between each thought. What had been perceived as emptiness gradually begins to be felt as a kind of fullness, a kind of supporting ether that surrounds and saturates the mind as the ego’s thought patterns and defence mechanisms finally fall away that ether pervades and that ether turns out to be love. A kind of love that the ego could never recognise and it turns out to be the only kind of love that can heal the heart. Dying into that love is what brings bliss, dying into the fullness of what seemed to be non-existent emptiness turns out to be the very presence of the God that one could not recognise or believe in. As the ambivalence of the ego’s mind falls into silence the presence of God fills the heart with its own force of will that has nothing to do with an individual attainment, but is simply the power of the real that takes over a heart that had died into its own nature and finally comes to that it had shut its own being, it had its own truth, it had shut out the very power of love because it thought that was the only way to survive.
Once that value of survival of the egos, bastion of individual entity hood is finally surrendered then the power of that eternal life that is not individual, but universal, cosmic, eternal, ineffable brings the power of divine presence in which will and love and intelligence are finally united at a level in which the body functions now as the direct servant of God.
All of the ambivalence and all of the anger and all of the heartbreak is gone along with the ego itself. The victory comes without anyone left to feel victorious or to celebrate, but the victory comes and the victory is always God’s because we are Gods.
In that final surrender of the hubris of the ego and its demand to be right about everything we finally realise that the ego was the wrongness, was itself the sin, was itself the missing of the mark of its own being, was itself its own fall into a hell around that it needed to discover it needed to realise the value, the beauty, the goodness, the eternal love of God who saves us all when we are finally willing to fall into those arms of unconditional love that are there for us when the ego can go no further and has reached its end.
The World is now at ego’s end and those that have gone through that ending into a new beginning that is egoless can provide the energy field in which trust and safety can be felt so that one can have the courage to go through that same death, that same dying unto God that alone will bring salvation and the cessation of all suffering.
May we all be blessed with a quick ending of the ego’s agony and a new beginning of a life of Godliness in which suffering is unknown and in which the mind is finally and forever silenced and the heart, the divine heart can begin to speak.