Cesar Teruel

[michaelsees]

Cesar Teruel - Living in the Natural, Effortless, Choice Less Self



Cesar Teruel, born in Venezuela in 1969, was profoundly interested in spirituality since childhood. Cesar: “I went to India in 1998 looking for the truth. Been in India, I was suggested to visit the Ashram of a Sage called Ramana Maharshi who passed away at the middle of the last century. As I crossed the gate of the Ashram I felt strongly attracted to a particular hall. I entered the hall, and as soon as I had a glimpse of the statue of the sage I felt shock, paralyzed, as when you suddenly, get the fright of your life! My mind stopped and I was surrounded by a deep silence. The experience went deeper and after some time I couldn’t feel my body, and what ever I thought it was ‘ME’, the body and the mind or personality; simply disappeared. I felt as if I was space, living space and the manifestation or the world was just flouting as a mere game of light and colour. I didn’t know at that time that I had experienced what is known as ‘Enlightenment’ or the ‘Truth’. After I regained body mind consciousness there was nobody to confirm the experience as real and it was apparently lost. After some time in India I meet my teacher; Sri. Ratan Lal. He guided me to regain the same experience that I had in Ramana Maharshi Ashram through the question ‘Who am I?’ or self enquiry. After that, my old sense of self base in identity with the body and the mind or personality vanished and I established my self in my true nature; Consciousness”.

Since then, Cesar’s sense of individuality gradually melted away until its ultimate extinction. Since July 2005, after his teacher passed away, following his teacher’s request, Cesar has been conducting public Satsang six days a week in Puttaparthy, south India. He shares his experience and knowledge with other seekers of truth, helping them to realize their true Self. Now he is also travelling across Europe, to give Satsang. Cesar Teruel does not belong to any religion and is not associated with any spiritual organization.


Part 1:

The limited free will; you can only choose what you know; the metaphor of the cow with a rope around the neck; the option to live a life without choice; the fear of having no securities; to live in the natural, effortless, choice less self, without struggle; illusion turns into a friend; to see what comes next; to keep the hand open; the same experience in Satsang: the rising of the solution, the answer happens; not to know, to be. No truth in the words, only pointers; consciousness creates and destroys forms, this is its favorite game; the illusion of all and the question: What is real? Illusion is created from reality; identity with the reflection and the original face; liberation from that, what you think; simple, but very profound; old and new hints to basically the same; grasp and hammer it in until it breaks.
vimeo.com/20091533
Part 2:

Clarity, then again conceptual thinking; take away what covers silence; about reflection; thoughts are only rising long after the original experience; mind is always late; melting in the truth is like not being able to speak under water, only above water you can talk about it; but information about it is impossible, you can only have the experience yourself: go jump, dive, see, investigate; the only hindrance is one’s identity with form; the thought I is the mind; no thought, nobody is there; sun and shadow; I, the shadow of inner matter; sun directly from above, no shadow; the person itself is a thought; no thought can think; in the past without books, the practice to listen, let it sink in, then meditate about it, take it in like food, digest and assimilate. All happens; the world is like a wall in space, turn around, look inside, you are already free; truth comes to you; humor as the sixth sense.
vimeo.com/20092460
Enjoy
Michael

[Jasun]

Cesar just showed up in Tallinn, where I happened to be (because of Dave Oshana) and I went to all five meetings over the past five days.

Here are some of my notes:

If anything, Cesar is more of a hardliner than Dave. He's like the Venezuelan Jed McKenna.

It was a two and a half hour meet. Cesar spent the first few minutes laughing, not in a guru-esque way but over something going on in the room. His manner was very light throughout, despite talking about some highly unpalatable ideas (e.g. the non-existence of the soul). He said several times that what he was teaching was the devastation of all human values, and it didn’t seem to be even slightly exaggeration. Nietzsche would be thrilled that his “Übermensch” turned out just as he envisioned (in that regard anyway). [This was meant half as a joke, though Cesar read it and made fun of me about it on the second night.]

There were probably between 20 and 30 people gathered. Cesar sat in front with a translator, a young Estonian guy. He didn’t charge but took donations. The people were mostly in their 20s-40s, with a few older ones. There was no obvious feeling of reverence coming from the audience, nor did Cesar project any sort of otherworldly or “holy” vibe. He didn’t fidget, but he moved about quite a bit and rubbed his face and stuff, not physical tics but very much in his body. Apparently he was laughing at the start because he knew that he didn’t have anything to say until someone asked a question. Then when they did, he was off. His speaking style was similar to Dave’s, in that his mind moved very fast and covered a lot of ideas in a short period, without ever coming off track. On one occasion he needed to be reminded what he was talking about; the woman reminded him of the last thing he'd said, Cesar repeated it and then said, “And then what?” That got the biggest laugh out of me.

Actually I was laughing along with Cesar at the beginning too, mostly because of this one guy sitting on the floor by the wall, on Cesar’s left. He had a painfully wide smile fixed on his face that looked more like fright than amusement. He was staring at Cesar like a deer at headlights, and every time Cesar looked at him he cracked up. It turned out the guy’s name was Christian, because I hung out with him after the satsang.

Towards the end of the satsang, I managed to break the bubble of self-consciousness and asked Cesar a question. I told him that I thought I’d understood everything he'd said, but that in a way that was the problem. What had been running through my head throughout (partly because I was thinking about what I wanted to ask him), was, “What’s the purpose of this?” He asked of what, and I said “Of everything.” If all we were was a body, experiencing reality through its five senses, then the only purpose was to survive and procreate. He said that was true and then he seemed to tune into where I was speaking from and began to speak about “the apocalypse of the ego.” He even made a comment about how once I went through it, I would end up a crazy man like him, talking to people for a living. He repeated that awakening was not some blissful state but that it was the awakening of the body to all the distortion, all the way into the cells, which unnecessary and delusional thinking had caused it, and the discomfort of that. That matched my predicament to a T (for Terminate). I felt a much stronger connection to Cesar after that, because he’d been speaking directly to me.

Christian and I walked a while together talking and then we went our separate ways. I told him about the amazing timing of meeting Cesar, how the things he spoke about echoed exactly my recent explorations into The Void. I asked Christian if Cesar’s teachings had changed much and he said he was quite shocked tonight by how different what he was sating was from the last time, in India, I presume just a few weeks ago. He used the word “cynical” but I said “nihilistic” was a better word, to which he agreed. He said that Cesar had joked in the past about how he wanted all his followers to go away, but now he was saying it seriously. I told him that Dave seemed to have a similar point of view and that it was one of the things that led me to trust him. At one point tonight, Cesar joked about how he had been in the top ten most popular gurus last week, but now he had started straight-talking his ratings had dropped. He was less popular with girls too, he said. The reason he gave for stripping his message of all sugar-coating was that it hadn’t been working. He thought he may as well try stating it plainly.


2nd night:


This time Cesar put the two chairs on the stage so he was further away and higher up. It seemed an ominous omen - taking the superior position. I was less impressed this time, and not only because he failed to address my question about dreams adequately. (He diverted the focus onto what he wanted to talk about, which was essentially that the idea of self is false and the cause of all suffering, a la TS.) There was a more dynamic interaction between him and the audience (particularly a younger girl on my right, sort of Goth-type), and I had a fairly charged exchange with Cesar in which I was trying to argue that he must experience himself as separate insofar as his body was separate (from mine, for example). I wanted to point out that he knew/experienced things about/in his body that he didn't know or experience about mine, so that indicated some degree of separation (or 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon?). But he kept interrupting, and it was very hard to just slip a comment in there, because whenever he spoke, or I did, I then had to wait for the translator to catch up. Cesar was saying that his body wasn't separate from mine and that this was only my perception, and he mentioned an electromagnetic field. I said "Aha!" and we exchanged a look. But I never got to say what I wanted to say, which was that the EM field wasn't perceivable with the 5 senses, at least not mine, so that contradicted his statement that reality was only what our physical senses told us it was and everything else was just hallucination - including dreams.

I was on the edge of my seat for a lot of the time, and aware that my combative/questioning nature was overruling my desire to simply sit back, observe and allow something to happen in myself. Cesar's meetings are very loose and so is he, even compared to Dave (never mind JdR), there's very little sense of him having any authority, of being an authority. He even describes his state as not-knowing, the polar opposite to JdR. :lol:

(This video is a pretty good intro, for those interested: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX2GevUfNzc&feature=related)

He says that knowledge is necessary to survive in the physical realm and that it has become the currency, so he has to use it. But the body, which has its own intelligence, does not "know" anything - not even what sex it is. He even suggested that the body didn't know what a tree was! I expressed disbelief at that and he admitted that if it wanted to build a house it did, but otherwise... I don't know, presumably he is talking about pure energy perception? Cesar comes the closest for me to expressing the inexpressible, which amounts pretty much to his refuting everything - beginning and ending with time and space. And yet he talks ceaselessly about the body and how it is all we are or can ever be, experience, or know. It is a paradox.

...

According to Cesar, there exists an intelligence in the body that is silent and “at peace” but which knows exactly what to do at all times, without relying on knowledge, or information, to do so. He calls this the state of not-knowing, and says that it is only because he lives in a society that “lives, dies, and kills for knowledge” that he is forced to rely upon knowledge to survive—and to keep up the “act” of being Cesar. As he described it, the state of not-knowing doesn’t even allow him to tell the difference between a chair and the Moon—it is a state similar to the one babies are in before they learn to separate themselves from their environment.

...

That's all I have of my notes; after 5 days however, I would say that Cesar is 100% kosher. What criticisms I have of him are minor. He doesn't have much patience listening to the questioner, and when he speaks, although he speaks directly to you, his answers tend to be one-size-fits-all, non-particularized. This seems more than a minor complaint, I admit, but it's consistent with Cesar's basic message, which is that "you" don't exist besides as an idea anyway. Yet he is the warmest and friendliest of all the teachers I have encountered.

He is also the only one I know with a background in shamanism (which came out on day 4, when he was talking to me).

Most striking about Cesar is that, even more than McKenna, he spurns all spiritual lingo whatsoever. He doesn't even like the word "consciousness." He takes this hard line too far for my taste, however, as when he told me that dreams were just brain-activity. I emailed him flat out that this was untrue, but he didn't reply. I confronted him in one of the meetings about the more general subject of pyschism etc, and it became clear that he was trying to discourage people from getting lost in mystical concepts and bring them back to what they were experiencing directly with their senses.

Admittedly, that's a blurry line (intuition is a sense also), but Cesar's MO makes sense to me, because 99% of what we believe about spiritual and "energetic" realities is just that: belief. And it contaminates what genuine "spiritual" or psychic experiences we may have.

Perhaps his most radical angle is insisting that the "I Am principle" is just very refined ego - a thought form generated by "mental projection." According to Cesar, the Godhead and everything on down (that's every guru you ever met) is a lie.

He does put his money where his mouth is too: I never really felt as though Cesar had any special authority. His words had the authority of truth, yes, but he himself seemed as ordinary and approachable as could be.

[living]

Wow!! What you've shared reads very much like U.G. Krishnamurti.

I've been spending a lot of time with U.G. of late.

Must be fun hangin' with him!

[Jasun]

U.G was the one guru who Cesar quoted and seemed to have any regard for.

He even sent his own teacher (see above) to Hell, saying that he had just been keeping him a slave like all gurus. (It was the first time he'd gone on record with this, he said.)

[living]

May 14, 2012 9:40:02 GMT -5 Jasun said:

U.G was the one guru who Cesar quoted and seemed to have any regard for.

He even sent his own teacher (see above) to Hell, saying that he had just been keeping him a slave like all gurus. (It was the first time he'd gone on record with this, he said.)

The more I read, the more I agree with the insight of both cesar and u.g.. This morning, this is really resonating....

"He says that knowledge is necessary to survive in the physical realm and that it has become the currency, so he has to use it. But the body, which has its own intelligence, does not "know" anything - not even what sex it is. He even suggested that the body didn't know what a tree was! I expressed disbelief at that and he admitted that if it wanted to build a house it did, but otherwise... I don't know, presumably he is talking about pure energy perception? Cesar comes the closest for me to expressing the inexpressible, which amounts pretty much to his refuting everything - beginning and ending with time and space. And yet he talks ceaselessly about the body and how it is all we are or can ever be, experience, or know. It is a paradox."

U.G. says it is the body that is immortal.

I would really enjoy being you right now! Enjoy!!

[Jasun]

May 14, 2012 9:52:24 GMT -5 @living said:

U.G. says it is the body that is immortal.

Cesar said the same.

I would really enjoy being you right now! Enjoy!!

There is no me!

[living]

May 14, 2012 15:27:53 GMT -5 Jasun said:

May 14, 2012 9:52:24 GMT -5 @living said:

U.G. says it is the body that is immortal.

Cesar said the same.

I would really enjoy being you right now! Enjoy!!

There is no me!

;D

Enjoy anyway!!

[stardustpilgrim]

I hadn't heard of this guy