This is an excerpt from a transcript from the Orientation of the Sat Weekend in India, February, 2023.
“The very thing that allows us to get identified with ourselves and our ego and our story and makes us so miserable, is a capacity of consciousness to merge with what it attends to.”
The opportunity of a SAT Weekend is to discover for ourself, or get a sense of it for ourselves, what this is. The opportunity of a SAT Weekend is to discover for ourself, or to get a sense of it for ourselves, that the only aspect of existence that can know what this is, is us. And the only way we can know is because we know everything else, all our suffering, all our misery, all our attachment-to-our-beliefs.
You could say that the human is basically in samādhi with their ego. You could say that’s the first samādhi. You absolutely are merged with your thoughts, your emotions, your story. And your consciousness has no other place to go in that samādhi. The nature of that samādhi is uniquely miserable, in that it lives in a condition of separation. But it’s the training ground. It is the forging of the pressure of the individual being to come into a solidity in its own identity. This is the mystery of our condition.
The very thing that allows us to get identified with ourselves and our ego and our story and makes us so miserable, is a capacity of consciousness to merge with what it attends to. From birth, you’re told what to attend to by your body and the senses and the needs of your body and requirements, and your helplessness, your requirements to be cared for and supported. The universe prepares you to be in the samādhi of the self. So much so that when we’re not in the samādhi of the self, we don’t know what we are. The samādhi of the self is not all suffering. It’s suffering that has happened, there is the suffering that is happening, and there’s the suffering that could happen, but in between, there is happiness. Because you’re existing. The purpose of consciousness is to know it exists.
The habit of samādhi, in the human samādhi, is you can only know what the human samādhi allows you to know.
The path to knowing what you are as the SAT is the path of stopping your ego. Just stop. Stop doing “you”. There’s a “you” on this spiritual path, I assure you. A “you” that thinks it needs to do something, or not do something, or do it different. It’s the carry-over of the habit of ego. To just stop is very hard for most, almost all. The nature of “ego-ing” is to constantly be in action. It’s only in action that it can know it exists. It thinks, it feels, it acts, it reacts, and then it knows it’s alive. It doesn’t know it can exist without action.
The pathway to finding the presence, that quality of ourselves that’s at least interim-ly, a reflection, is to stop and be empty for as long as we can. You’re in the physicality of existence, and matter is movement. Matter is change. Therefore, it is inevitable that movement will be going on. But what we are isn’t that which moves. What we are – and I say the word “what” – is that which has moving going on. To find that place of “stop” is the secret of coming out of our enthrallment with our ego.
And then what happens with consciousness when it comes out of its enthrallment with what it’s identified as itself? First, it scatters in spaciousness. First, it expands outside of the habit of its doing and its focus and its story and its future and the past. But after a while, something starts emerging. A spaciousness that goes beyond any one moment starts showing itself. A quality of an unchanging knowing. A quality of a sense of, perhaps, connection with something other than what would be available to us if we were not in that spaciousness or that presence. We become empty. And it’s in that emptiness that the universe can begin to show what it is that we are in Truth.
Now, normally, we can’t do that outwardly. Normally, our outer personality and our outer actions are such that, it’s not going to be enough, no matter how much yoga you do or how much sevā you do. It has to be inward. Where you learn to develop your capacity to dive in.
“This is the path of meditation. Basically, in meditation, you pull your attention away from your habitual outer life, and you start paying attention to yourself, sitting there, often, trying to meditate. Or evaluating how you’re not. Or whatever.”
This is the path of meditation. Basically, in meditation, you pull your attention away from your habitual outer life, and you start paying attention to yourself, sitting there, often, trying to meditate. Or evaluating how you’re not. Or whatever. You start meeting the “doing-ness” of the habit of “you” by forcing your body to sit silent and still long enough. And you can say “well, that can’t possibly be meditating.” No, it won’t be at first. Because there’s a momentum for movement.
When you withdraw from that movement for enough time each day, and enough days of each week, then there’s a slowing up of the movement. And the slowing up then allows you to recognize that you’re putting the brakes on to the habit of the identification with yourself. It’s not satisfying. As a matter of fact, when you first start stopping, you begin to discover how miserable your thoughts are. How they go on and on, and they don’t want you to sit still. And how uncomfortable – you’re restless – your body is. It doesn’t know how to stop.
What happens when we sit together? Something of my samādhi – which will happen, over these next few days, just as for those of you who have been in India with me here now – something of my samādhi-s go to you. You go with me on a journey inward. Or outward, because I go either way. I’ll dive in, or I’ll dive up. I have a say about which way it goes. But also, I just follow the thread of the moment in time and feel into what is the best direction. And in that, then, I carry you with me, to begin to introduce you to qualities of what we call “absorption” or samādhi with something different than your ego.
The nature of the samādhi in my system is that it includes the vital, which goes quiet. The mind, of course, is silent and empty. And the body grows very very still. The capacity of my body to be still is reflected in how it happens that my heartbeat slows way up, my breathing becomes very very small, one would hardly know I’m breathing, as I drop into this state. And the nature of that is that you may not even be aware of these physical symptoms because your consciousness, which is the one part of you in the surface self that keeps track of things, can’t keep track of what’s happening. You don’t even know you’re going there. When you sit together with me, I’m taking you on a journey that I have travelled, and that I travel all the time. And you get to begin to discover not just vicariously, but through a transmission, of the nature of what it is that you are at levels that would not normally be accessible to you.
This begins to open up a possibility within you, that over time, can establish itself and become yours. The purpose of a SAT Weekend is to take you on a journey, first, to come out of the samādhi of your ego, second to discover the samādhi of your Self, of the central organizing consciousness of the “I am”-ness before the “I am angry”, “I am happy”, “I am miserable”, “I am dissatisfied”, the “I am”-ness before content. And that Self, then, by meeting it, is also the one Self. The one being.
“Everything we seek, even as human beings, comes from that same will-to-be. We don’t get born to suffer, we get born to learn, to experience, to grow, to evolve, and eventually, to wake up to what it is we are in Truth.”
By the process of us individually finding the Self that lives us, we begin to discover the Self that lives us all, and of which we are an expression. And we are the means by which that larger Self can know Itself. It’ll always be through each of us.
It’s my experience that in the creation, consciousness comes into existence to know itself, to experience existence. It was that which was there before existence, and inherent in that which existed before existence was the possibility of existing. That possibility is a huge force, huge intent. It is the purposeful driving of everything, to live, to be alive, to experience, to learn, to grow, to evolve. It’s the source of all energy. It’s the source of all of the unfolding of physical matter. And everything we human beings know. That force lives within us. It’s the current of becoming.
I remember one day when I was in samādhi and there was this restlessness to wake up. And I was questioning “why would you wake up?”, and it said “to live, to live, to exist.” I said “Oh! There it is! That’s where all the trouble started!” (Sat Shree laughs ecstatically) All the trouble started in that “will-to-be”! Everything we seek, even as human beings, comes from that same will-to-be. We don’t get born to suffer, we get born to learn, to experience, to grow, to evolve, and eventually, to wake up to what it is we are in Truth. We are the means by which that which existed prior to existence can know of its own existence, and that principle exists within us.
I’ve had this come to me the last few days. And it’s just this fierce fuckin’ energy! It’s like “string theory”, it’s just this string that’s really the curtain, a crack in the current. And in that crack is this just extraordinary completely intoxicating existence. It doesn’t last long, I mean, it just doesn’t last long. But it blows my system out for days. So I figure, “alright, it likes India, likes Arunachala!” (Sat Shree chuckles briefly). It wants to be the contagion, it wants to go to you, you know. It wants to grow, it wants to expand, it wants to be alive in everything that lives. It’s like an electricity, but it’s like electricity at the source that then we step down so that it can be tolerable and it can be just our normal consciousness.
The opportunity is to be open to something you do not yet know, to recognize that over these next two or three days, and probably the days after – and for most of you, because you’re in this program with me, it’s already been happening – to open to something that has yet to manifest. To find the timelessness within you as a physical event. To find your vital lost its demand and insistence to have it its way. To find a relaxation in the substance of your physical body. And what’ll happen is, when the body can relax, it too starts opening up to its own existence. It feels freer, it feels more alive, it feels like it’s worth living. It’s in a discovery and an exploration. It’s a complete different aspect of that which binds us out of fear or anxiety or doubt or control or judgement or attraction or repulsion and all the other things that run us. It’s my experience that there’s two principles, but one is the antecedent, one is prior to the other.
The first principle is what I speak of as the SAT. But when that principle comes into existence, it’s an unspeakably, incredibly intense love. It’s my experience that the more we can be that, the more we be in what it means to be in the Mahānanda. To be alive in existence. To be free of fear. To be in the discovery of what it is to be “you”, in ways that you haven’t before. And in the process, discover what in “you” that you’re still merged with, that you’re still identified with, that you’re still keeping in place, and in the process of you meeting that, it dissolving its hold over you.
In the very dejection that inevitably occurs for every ascension, where we come back into the content of us, there comes another ascent of a greater authority, a greater Truth that then sets in motion a deepening and a horizontal integration of that in us that has not yet learned the possibility of being in existence.
~Sat Shree