Transcript:
Robert: Think and ask yourself, “Why did I come here today? We come to a hot room for what? We could have gone swimming, bowling, we could be home watching TV, but something motivated us to come here, what?” Ask yourself. There is a mysterious power that motivates people to do what they do. Some people are motivated to go to a house of ill repute. Some people are motivated to go to the movies. Some people are motivated to go to spiritual meetings, what causes this? Who makes this happen? We can say God does it, but of course God is within yourself and some of the things you do, you would never allow God to make you do that, if God is yourself. So we would have to say it’s your karma. It’s your karma that motivates you to come here or to go anywhere else. When you come to a meeting like this you can rest assured that you have been working on yourself in past lives. You’ve been practicing for many lifetimes. Remember this is not a church and this is not a teaching, this is a confession of reality. Whenever I use the pronoun “I,” I am not referring to myself, I am referring to I am. So when I refer to my confession, I am referring to our confession, omnipresence. Remember whenever I use the word “I,” it means omnipresence. So, I am here to confess, of absolute reality, of being unborn, of ultimate oneness, of pure intelligence, of emptiness, of nirvana. I confess all these things for you. Let’s ponder these things as we meditate together. [ plays music then Robert continues ] If you truly want to repent, just sit in silent meditation and see the perfect reality within, for all manners of error merely arise in erroneous thought, and like the morning due before the rising sun, can perfectly be eliminated through the benevolent light and wisdom. Om, shanti, shanti, peace. When we meditate like this, it’s for the purpose of emptying the mind. The mind is like a garbage can. It’s full of preconceived ideas, thoughts, concepts, not only from this life but from previous lives. There’s a lot of stuff in that mind. In truth there is no mind, but as long as you’re expressing concepts, ideas, opinions, then we will talk of a mind. As you sit in silent meditation and you watch your thoughts, observe how they come, and they go. Observe the kind of thoughts that come to you. We do not try to change them. We do not repeat affirmations. You merely watch the thoughts and they leave of their own accord. This is how you deal with your mind. You observe your thoughts, you become the witness to your thoughts or you ask yourself, “To whom do these thoughts come?” one or the other. If you do this often enough, the day is going to come, when you become totally free and you realize and understand what I mean, when I say, “You are unborn, you are nirvana, emptiness.” What do I mean when I say you are unborn? Now the opinions that I express to you, does not have to be accepted. Remember I am speaking to my Self. I-am is speaking and I-am is the infinite, the absolute reality. And I tell you in truth I-am unborn, everything is unborn. Take a tree for instance, what gave birth to a tree? A seed, where does the seed come from? Another tree? Where does the tree come from? Another seed, and you go back like that and there is no answer, no validity. Take for instance, creatures, worms, cockroaches, bugs, who gave them birth, originally? Where did they come from? Flowers, the moon, the sun, the earth, the stars, human beings, ideas, intuition, discrimination. I tell you none of these things exist. Nothing has ever been born. It is a false premise you believe in. Changing bad to good, wanting positive experiences, it’s all nonsense. The reason you don’t want a positive experience is because you’ve never had a negative experience. There is no birth. What gave anything birth? Where did it come from? Do you know what anything is? You have no idea what anything at all is, you just give it a name. For instance, a cat, what is a cat? You have no idea. It was here when you came into existence and we called it a cat. Why don’t we call it a tree? We call it a cat. We give everything a name. That’s the first mistake because no thing is, what it appears to be. Therefore the first rule of the true spiritual path is called divine ignorance. Divine ignorance. You have no idea what anything is, you just assume to know. You want to act intelligent, to imagine you know something. So you study harder, to learn relative existence. But what you don’t realize, is that you’re studying yourself right into the grave. You’ll learn and you’ll study and you’ll become something as it appears, and you’ll get older and older and older and before you die you’ll wonder what anything is all about. You have no idea what anything is, but I tell you again, everything is unborn. Nothing actually exists and the only explanation is, it’s like a dream. When you have a dream, do you give birth to everything? The dream just begins, with everything as it appears. You do not go to a beginning, or to an end. The dream just starts from nothing and it goes on until you awaken. The waking state is called the mortal dream. We’re dreaming the mortal dream. All of the things that you are interested in, all of your fears, all of your frustrations, goods and bads, all of your happy and sads, it’s all a dream. And the more you get attached to it, the more human you become. It’s like getting attached to a dream and never waking up and you keep living the dream. Consequently, you create your own reincarna- tion because you are attached to person, place and thing. And this pulls you back into a body, over and over and over again until you learn to let go, until you start practicing, emptiness. Remember, there is no being and there is no non-being. There is no birth and there is no death. Just knowing this brings you a semblance of peace. Just thinking of these things makes you happy. But it is beyond human happiness. It is beyond human peace. It is beyond laughter. Laughter is when the body is happy over something. When you realize there is no body, where is the laughter? Where is the crying? Where is being impersonal come in? None of those things exist. Therefore you ask the question, “Well do I exist?” You have to ask yourself, “What do I mean by I? Do I exist as a human being? As a reacting mechanism? As a person who gets turned on and turned off?” That is a false concept. It is called false imagination. You imagine a world populated by insects, trees, the moon, the sun, human beings and everything else that appears to exist and you have discrimination. You like this, you hate this, you enjoy this, you despise that, but I say to you, you must go beyond these concepts if you wish to be free. Just imagine how peaceful you feel when your mind stops thinking, stops trying to change conditions, stops trying to get even, to fight for your rights. What rights? You have no rights. As a human being you have rights, and you always will have to fight for them, for it will appear that someone is trying to take them away, but in reality, there are no rights. There is nothing to stick up for. You may ask, “Well what do I become, nothing?” No, emptiness is not no thing. It is called emptiness because it means nothing exists as it appears. But there is something, a mysterious power that is an embodiment of love, compassion, peace, happiness, joy, bliss. Yet those words are meaningless. They do not give it justice for it is much more behind that. You have to experience it to understand it. You have to experience to go beyond cause. Metaphysics teaches you, there’s a cause for everything but that’s kindergarten. Cause does not exist. There never was a cause, for there would have to have been someone to make the cause, to produce the cause and of course most people call that God. So we get into duality, into separation. We say that God made the cause and we’re experiencing the effect. So I ask you, “Where does this God come from that made the cause? And who made the God?” It’s all concepts, it’s all relative thinking. Do not try to understand this with your finite mind, you cannot. The infinite can never comprehend the finite or the finite can never comprehend the infinite. They are two different things. Suffice it to say, that you as you exist now are complete emptiness. You are pure intelligence, pure awareness, absolute reality, nirvana. Just the way you are right now! Do not think about it, if you think about it you spoil it. Do not just try to understand this with your finite mind, you cannot. The infinite can never comprehend the finite or the finite that can never comprehend the infinite, they are two different things. Suffice it to say, that you as you exist now are complete emptiness. You are pure intelligence, pure awareness, absolute reality, nirvana, just the way you are, right now! Do not think about it. If you think about it you spoil it, just the way you are this moment. You are pure intelligence, absolute reality, you are the unborn, but every time a thought comes into your mind you spoil it. When you first wake up, those few seconds between getting up, waking up. Just before you wake up, that’s when you are in your true state. You just opened your eyes and you haven’t thought of a single thought yet, that lasts a few seconds. Think about that time, don’t you really feel good in those few seconds. Before you start thinking about the days activities, that’s reality. Try to catch yourself tomorrow morning as soon as you open your eyes. Before a thought comes. That is your true state and that is what you are. Forget about your problems. There is a power that knows how to take care of everything for you, if you allow it to. You have to allow it to. You have to surrender your ego, your pride, your concepts, your opinions, your questions, your answers, everything has to be surrendered and the power works on its own volition. A great Master said, “Take no thought of what you should eat, of what you should wear, of where you should go, but seek ye first the kingdom of heaven and all these things will be added unto you,” it’s the same thing. But how often do you take thought. Most people take thought every moment, you’re always thinking, worrying, trying to correct something, trying to figure it out. And that’s what keeps you from the kingdom of heaven. So what do you do, nothing. You do not try to fix anything. You do not even try to change. You simply become your Self, just the way you really are. You leave the world alone. You leave things alone, you leave people alone. So you say, “How can I exist? I have to go to work? I have to mix with people? I have to make decisions?” Have no fear. You will do all those things, but it’ll be different. You will understand totally that you are not the doer. Your body came to this earth to do something and it will do its job. You have absolutely nothing to do with it. Stop fighting, stop trying to make things happen, keep your mind on your Self. What do I mean when I say, “Keep your mind on yourself?” Your real Self is your heart, not your human heart, but your spiritual heart. Your heart is God. Keep your mind stayed on God in your heart. If you want to use your imagination to begin with, you can image a sphere of white light in your heart on the right side of your chest, your spiritual heart. And allow all your thoughts to merge into your heart. In other words, do not allow your thoughts to go outward. When your thoughts go outward conditions take place. When you keep your thoughts in your heart centered, all of a sudden you find peace, pure happiness it comes by itself. We have to allow the power that we don’t understand to take care of us. This mysterious power knows what your needs are. I recall when I first saw a picture of Ramana Maharshi in my teens and I had to go to India to see him. I had no idea, why? I didn’t have the funds. A couple of months later my aunt died and left me fourteen thousand dollars. And I left my family and went to India. I don’t know why? And it has been like this all of my life. So I’ve learnt to surrender my wants, my desires, my ego, to the power that knows the way. And this power will always carry you on a stream of blessedness to your highest good, if you allow it. But you have to become humble and you have to let go of fear. You do this by this the methods we teach, through self-inquiry and becoming the witness. This is called Satsang: it means that I shouldn’t even be talking as much as I do and just answering questions and talking back and forth. So let’s do that now. Express your ideas, ask questions, do something, share with us some of your experiences: SD: I have a question Robert, I understand the concept of surrender, but at the highest level you say to allow it but how could you possibly disallow omnipresence? R: It appears as if you are, that’s all a part of the appearance. (SD: That’s on the mortal plane?) Yes. (SD: But I mean if everything is unfolding as it should and predestined, on the highest level how do you disallow it?) You do not try to disallow it, but you hear these words and you no longer react to it. By not reacting you disallow it. For if you didn’t hear the words you would still be fighting. But now you watch and you see it unfolding before your eyes. Yet you do not react to it for you realize who you are. You’re like the mirror, like that mirror over there and a reflection is taking place. But you are not the reflection, you remain as the mirror, so you do not fight, you do not argue, you do not fear, and you’re not overly happy. (SD: Not overly happy?) Yes, physically. (SD: I do not know of anyone who is overly happy.) (laughter) If you, if someone won forty-million dollars in the lotto last night? If you won forty-million dollars would you be overly happy? (SD: For a while.) (laughter) That’s what I mean, for you become overly happy for a while. But if you understand what I’m talking about, all that stuff stops. (general talk between students) R: What’s the other question Dana? SD: Oh my other question is that on a certain level I except that we know nothing and yet I think Arnold brought up the other day that the evolutionary process which has a certain logic to it, would that be, I guess that would be just part of the dream right, in other words, that would be an explanation within the dream? (R: All explanations are the dream.) That’s true because how can they be, that doesn’t exist? R: There is no cause, there is no birth of anything. So there are no explanations, you’re wasting time trying to explain. (SD: That’s true because you’re explaining with the mind.) People write voluminous texts about nonsense, about existence. And we read and we get involved and we try to be intelligent about it and we suffer. All suffering stops when you stop searching and you stop fighting. SB: So Robert you’re saying, since we really don’t know what anything is, and since we don’t know who we are, therefore we would be released into a disposition, if we don’t really know what anything is and if we realize that the self that we think we are, is all perceptual or it’s an illusion, that would automatically release us into a no-self condition? (R: Into emptiness?) Like a releasement into emptiness. R: But remember the emptiness is not real emptiness, it’s bliss. (SB: It’s like a nocentre, it’s not like a regular spiritual path, they are always trying to get you to go back to a centre and that keeps you in the ego-self, you know. But this is like a releasement.) Total release, total emptiness, there’s no centre. (SB: So no centre, that’s tremendous.) For if there was a centre where did it come from? There is no centre. (SB: Yeah and as long that there’s thinking, there’s a centre. We separate ourselves right there?) Exactly. (SB: When you’re released there’s no centre.) So there is no thought to have no center. (SB: Then there is no differentiation between things?) No discrimination whatsoever. SD: A release is scary to the ego. SB: Oh, it’s death, It’s death. Nobody wants it. How many people are here, do you see the whole Los Angeles wanting this, nobody wants this. R: This is why I always say in the beginning, I’m just relating my confession, what I feel, the experiences that I’ve been through, and I ask no one to except it, but I ask you to work on yourself and see what happens. SA: I have a question about self-inquiry and self-observation. About a week or so ago there were just three of us here, Sam, myself and Dana. You asked us to speak about what has been happening in our lives and we all kind of spoke and we all gave a little brief, a very positive synopsis of the previous weeks. Very chipper, very up, each one of us. And I’ve been thinking about that and I’ve been thinking about the importance of being positive that you speak of and out-projecting the positive. And so I want to use one little example which will help you get to my eventual point, which gets us into the literature. There are two kinds of books, I’d say, one is a very famous bestseller type where people go through certain experiences and all ends well and there’s true love and all that kind of thing and people are drawn to that and then there’s, I’d say, war and peace. I don’t know how many people have read war and peace? Where you really get involved in life in a way that most literature does not allow us to get involved with or most experiences. There is the black and white in war and peace. There is the ying and yang. Tolstoy created a vast world of both pain and pleasure etc, etc. Unlike these other books. So my point is to get back to where I was before. When you read war and peace the final experience is one of being moved to a higher reality, of being moved by something beyond oneself. It leads you to something else whereas this other literature although in a temporary sense appears to be positive does not. Okay now to get back to my original point, my original example. We all spoke very positively about our little weeks. We’re all good little soldiers, good little boy scouts and girl scouts. Was this a valid experience of self-observation or was this positiveness that everybody is mad for in Los Angeles, or was it a distortion? Or would it have been better for us in the long run to have said something like for example, you know today, the morning was hell, this that and the other thing was hell, this afternoon I’m feeling better I can see certain things. In other words to give an experience in the ying and yang, the black and white which appears to lead to these higher realms. R: You’re right. Always be truthful to yourself. Don’t put it on, don’t imagine, things are going well when they’re not. Be free and be yourself. When you’re free you can express yourself positively and negatively and you have no fear of either one because they’re both the same as far as a human path is concerned. But when you’re not free you try to hide the negative and accentuate the positive and as you see you’re making a mistake because you are just fooling yourself and in your subconscious you’re hiding all the negativity. SA: That’s what I feel here very much and this is particular to Southern California which is where because of the constant sunlight and all that sort of thing and people want to have pleasure and they want to be positive, it’s a misinterpretation of what being positive is, it seems to me. (SD: It’s like happy faces.) It’s like it’s all happy faces all the time. And the ultimate result is that if anybody is honest – we’ve talked about this, is that people are not happy really underneath, it’s a surface phenomena, it’s an illusion again. R: But these people are going through whatever they have to go through. This is why when the question is asked, “What can I do to change the world and make everybody know the truth.” The answer is become self-realized, because when you’re self-realized that’s not a selfish answer. Self-realization means omnipresence and when you’re self realized you see the world for what it really is. But when you see it through human eyes, you see suffering, you see good and you see bad and you think it’s true. So your omnipresence of self-realization helps others, just by being your real Self. In the beginning it appears selfish because you’re saying I-am and self-realized, what about the other people that are suffering? What about the homeless? First become self-realized and then see what you think of the homeless, you’ll have a completely new idea. SD: That’s what Maharshi always says too isn’t it? Just do self-inquiry and the world will appear differently. R: And that appears strange and it even appears sometimes like a cop out. Because you say, “Work on yourself and you’ll help others,” how can you do that? But it’s true, because as you know, God is in everyone and in everything and when you become self realized, you become God. So you become the Self of all. The real Self of all is perfection. So when you become the real Self of all you see perfection in everything. And the seeing of perfection, not with your eyes, but with your spiritual Self, that perfection causes the perfection to be in others. SA: Well that’s a different kind of positiveness than just saying, “Yeah, it’s just marvelous… (R: Oh yes of course.) …it’s a lovely day and I’m going to be marvelous?” (R: Of course, totally different.) SA: Would you analyze this thing that happened to me yesterday, what was really going on with this. I went to a party, a family party and I had an experience with someone else in the family several weeks ago. You know I used to write books and do quite a bit of writing and it happened that I was with these people and this cousin of mine read one of my books and he finished it and he threw it on the floor and this… (R: He really liked it huh?) (laughs) …was quite an experience. This is a very unusual thing for somebody to do. SN: I’d take that as a compliment. (laughter). SA: So, I was with these other family members yesterday and I wanted to tell this story. I took great joy in telling this story for one thing because it was an interesting story to tell and for another thing my cousins, I could arouse their intense interest which I enjoy doing. What was I doing? Was this kind of a negative experience for me, I wanted to communicate very much and also I wanted to, in this communication, I was relieving myself from the tension of this experience because it did happen (I didn’t comment on it) to this man who did it. I didn’t say anything because that’s a very difficult situation with that married couple, they wouldn’t be able to understand anything that I might say. So I repressed everything then. Do you have any comments on that? R: Yes, what was the name of the book? (Laughter.) Ask yourself, “To whom did this happen and who wants to comment?” It’s your ego playing all these games. If you were coming from your real Self, it doesn’t matter, you would have no feeling for or against. SA: But since I still am involved in the ego, wouldn’t it be better for me just to – now I’m trying to justify my actions of course – wouldn’t it be better for me to…? (break in tape then tape starts abruptly as another student asks a question) SB: …we have moments of being able to do the self-abiding and it happens and then just a moment later the habits of attention, the consciousness is addicted to the habit patterns and all of a sudden the self-abiding just seems to disappear and we’re back in the ego again in the motions of attention. And we can never transcend that ego attention. (R: Don’t say never.) Not never, but it seems to lasts for only a very short time and then by habit we’re back. Then there is attention moving in, there is desire and the me and the memory. You know the whole thing again, you know? R: Of course, in the beginning this is quite true, but say you’re trying to become a surgeon. You have to keep practicing, you make mistakes, that’s why you practice on the stiffs and dead bodies. (SB: Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do right now.) What are you doing? (SB: By myself, practicing on the stiffs.) (laughter) Yes, you keep practicing, you practice again and again and you have more stiffs to practice on, until the day comes when you give a perfect operation, then you become a surgeon, same principle. You keep catching yourself. (SB: Yeah trying to recognize through recognition…) You keep remembering to catch yourself and it happens more often, more often. (SB: And that is what the inquiry is helpful for…) Yes. (…it keeps reminding me that I’m back in me again.) The time lapse becomes closer and closer to reality and starts coming closer to it. SB: It’s really interesting because when you’re doing even a little bit of self-abiding to some extent, no matter all the things that get you angry when you’re in the ego, they don’t bother you, you know people driving they cut in front of you, usually you get all tight and contracted and angry, but when you’re self-abiding you are just resting, they can do anything, you don’t react, you’re released, you’re not tense, the day goes smooth… R: If you’re really doing it, it brings you perfect peace. (SB: Perfect bliss, yeah.) It really does. So we keep remembering, remembering, we’ll forget. Then we’ll remember again, sometimes we’ll get disgusted with the whole thing and we’ll stop for a couple of months, who knows? But then we’ll go back to it. If we keep abiding, we’ll get there and become free. But then again if you don’t that’s okay, because you’ll come back again and you’ll be ahead of the game. (SB: But the way you’re speaking now it seems like we’re going to get there. It seems like we’re not there, isn’t it true that we’re there…) Of course. (SB: …only that we’re just distracting ourselves?) Of course, you’re distracting yourself. You can awaken anytime. (SB: Yeah, but it’s not a goal to be attained, it’s just to recognize.) To awaken, just like from a dream. You keep dreaming the same dream until you wake up. (SB: So we’re going to wake up to what is already the reality, truth, right there aren’t we?) Of course. And the only difference about this and the dream is that this appears longer, that’s all. SD: And another difference it seems to me that, with rare exception and I guess you’d call it lucid dreaming but we usually aren’t trying to wake up from the dream at night when we have night dreams. (R: But some people are.) Yeah, in lucid dreaming you do. (R: It depends on the dream.) Because you know that you are dreaming but most dreams you aren’t attempting to awaken within the dream and in this dream we are. Consciously we’re attempting to awaken to this different dream. R: I had an interesting dream the other night. And I dreamt that I was conducting a class and Queen Elizabeth came in and she sat down and took off her crown and put her hands on her lap, then I woke up. (SD: That’s interesting.) Whatever that means? (SD: Did she have a crown on, I was going to ask whether she had one of her silly hats on but she had a crown.) She had a crown on and she took it off and put it on her lap. SA: I know that we can’t take this word literally, but it kind of leads to certain conflict. You speak of the great reality, at times pure intelligence, I think I’ve made this point before more than once, but you use the term pure intelligence. It’s so hard for me to accept that term and not believe that intelligence leads to something else. Intelligence for us in our current state implies so many other things, so that this intelligence when you use the word, and I know you mean something more than intelligence. R: I mean non-discrimination, non-attachment. When there is non-discrimination and non-attachment there is pure intelligence because you see things as they are. (SA: But isn’t there a suggestion that something develops out of this type of intelligence, that it is a pregnant situation.) If you accept it that way, but that’s not the meaning. The meaning is just pure intelligence, period. No concepts, no definitions, non-discriminatory, nothing you hold onto, it’s pure existence, pure knowledge, same thing, pure bliss, those words are all synonymous. (SA: That reminds me of – I told you have been reading Plotinus again, Plotinus says, “Nothing can be said about the one. No attributes can be given to the one, beyond any such thing.”) That’s true. That’s why we call it ultimate oneness, there’s no definition. SN: You can’t even call it one. (R: It’s not one at all!) One is also a concept. SB: That’s why they call it non-dual, instead of one they call it non-dual, for not two. (R: Or emptiness.) Robert, I had an idea about it with that I think might be interesting. I think what it is, is really realization of consciousness. I’ve been living as realization of mind. You know, me wanting to know, wanting to get realized, you know, wanting to be released. I’ve been really living as realization of me, realization of mind, with memory, conditioning. I think this whole thing is coming to rest as realization of consciousness, just consciousness, not consciousness of anything but just consciousness. And when that position is held onto, rested in, established in that position, something magical happens. R: Yes, you are speaking of no realization. Realization of consciousness is really, no realization because there’s no one to realize. (SB: Yeah, no self?) SD: Isn’t it called pure awareness? (R: Same thing, absolute reality.) SA: The Zen Buddhists speak of no mind, that’s a common term. (R: No mind.) SB: No Self. (R: Or nirvana, the same thing.) SD: So maybe Arnold when you think of pure intelligence, you might think of pure awareness or pure consciousness. (R: Why think?) (laughter) If only we could stop. (R: Who said that?) Like it says, my ego. Oh I have a kind of dilemma that has occurred to me in meditation once in a while and that is, say it goes on for a long time when we’re listening to music and everybody, the natives grow sort of restless, and I’m thinking to myself, you know, “Well who is restless?” and I think as you have taught us, “I am,” then I think, “Who is I?” but that’s contradictory because the real I could not possibly be restless. R: Of course not, but when you realize who your ego-I is and you follow it to its culmination, you follow it to emptiness, to nothing. (SD: So it’s the ego-I that we’re asking about when we say, “Who is I?”) It’s the ego-I. (SD: And it will just annihilate itself by…?) It annihilates itself when you take it to its source, which is nowhere. (SD: Because I thought for a long time that it was the I who was awareness?) That exists by itself, but when you don’t know it, then you’re talking about the ego-I. (SD: So in self-inquiry when you say, “Who am I,” you are talking about the ego-I?) The ego-I, yes. SA: The little I, you might say. R: Yes, and when I play music in between, it’s not to make you feel nice listening to music. It’s because it gives you the space to watch your thoughts when the music is playing and see how you respond, see what you do. Always watch, always be aware, always watch yourself, watch how you react, watch how you think, watch the kind of thoughts that come to you, while the music is playing, while you’re meditating. Be aware of all these things and the more aware you become the more you disappear. All these concepts start to disappear, just by you being aware of them. It’s like playing hide and seek. You’re trying to find the person who is hiding. So you’re trying to find the thoughts that are lurking deep deep in the subconscious and they come up themselves and you say, “I see you. I know that you’re there. You cannot fool me any longer. The fear is there, I see where you are,” and you ask yourself, “Who fears? Where did you come from fear? Who is your mother? Who is your father? Who gave you birth? You have no birth? You don’t exist?” You keep talking to yourself like this, so that part of you no more exists and it dissipates of its own accord. That’s how you work on yourself. Let’s play some more music. (music played) When he says, “I need no one or I need nothing and I am free,” he doesn’t mean that literally. He means he’s not attached to people, places and things. There’s quite a difference. You ask perhaps, “How can I have a relationship without being attached?” You can have the most beautiful relationship that you can ever imagine. It doesn’t mean you become a loner on this path. It means you have friends, you have loved ones, but you give them all the freedom in the world and you’re not attached to their emotions or with anything else. That means total uncommitted love. It’s a little different than what most people do. Being non-attached means being compassionate, being loving, being kind. Now you know what mercy means. Helping your friend before you even help yourself. If you’re attached you think of yourself first but if you’re not attached you think of the other person first, there is a lot to that. Any comments? SB: Robert being released from the self, I think instead of calling it self-realization it should be called, realization of there’s no self. (laughter) That would be closer to… R: It would be complicated for some people. (SB: Because self-realization people think, “Oh me as the self is going to realize something,” but that’s absolutely the opposite.) That’s what brings them in. That’s how you begin. (SB: It brings them in, in the beginning thinking the ego’s going to get something. It’s just the opposite of that it’s just losing everything.) Of course. SD: But it’s also realizing that the Self is all there is. SB: Yeah. But you know my mind… it’s such a strange condition. Like the mind is just not used to walking around being released from themselves. Like we walk around like we always hugging ourselves, like me, me and I’m trying to grab everything, you know. And understanding this it would be a release from everything, walking around it’s like being a zombie. It’s different to what we’re used to. As a person educated, as a child, you know we’re used to me and the world you know. It’s a very strange condition and the mind doesn’t like it. You know it’s hard to have to constantly reinforce, to be able to… R: First experience the condition and then see how strange it is. (SB: It’s like a zombie condition.) It’s your natural condition. (SB: Yeah, it’s natural but we’re so unnatural.) Yes. (SB: The self is so unnatural and that’s all we know. So you glimpse it for a second and then you run back and grab hold of yourself again, you know.) That’s how it happens. That’s why you keep working on yourself, working on yourself. You keep remembering what to do until it becomes second nature. (SB: It’s almost like floating around, you know it’s so light, there is no tension.) You become light, that’s true. (SB: It’s so light it’s pleasant.) Yes. SN: How do you know if you’re so not in bliss. (laughs) SB: So in other words you have to go to total zero, from the point of the mind. So it’s like dying, going to total zero. R: Well it isn’t that bad really. What you are doing is that you are just changing your allegiance. Before you used to have faith in the world and people, places and things. Now you have faith in omnipresence, in the infinite. In something that you can’t feel, taste, touch, smell or see. And the more faith you have in that which is your Self the more faith that you have in the world, the real world, as your Self. (SB: So really it starts with an act of faith in that…) Faith in the invisible. (SB: …in the invisible so that you go on with it.) You drop your self-importance. And you stop having conflicts with people, places and things. And you just start loving and you become compassionate. And you realize everybody is your brothers and sisters and everything happens by itself. SD: Isn’t he right in saying in a way that it feels like dying, because I think it was St Paul or one of those who said, “I die daily?” R: Yes, St Paul said that, you die daily to the world. But it’s not a negative experience, it’s a good experience. Every time you let go of something you feel better. (SB: Self transcendence?) As an example, say you have a job and you’re worried about being laid off, inflation, pay increases, strikes, but as you begin to understand this teaching you let go of all those thoughts, you realize that you will always be at your right place and no one can take your right place away from you. So wherever your right place is that’s where you are going to be. You subsequently stop worrying about your job, about layoffs, about strikes, about pay increases and you just do your work without fear and you become a better worker as a result. So you get promoted, you get a raise and everything happens by itself but all fear goes away. SB: It’s really amazing not to be attached to body-mind and to people, places and things. R: And life goes on. But it goes on the way it’s supposed to go on, naturally, infinitely and it’s all good. (SB: I think it would make you healthy because you’re not all nervous about things.) It improves you in every way. All parts of you will improve. It’s amazing how it works. You stop seeing evil. First you stop seeing evil in yourself, you sort of forgive yourself for all of your mistakes. It’s like being born again and then you can forgive everybody else, totally, completely. You become free, unlearn everything and you feel your omnipresence. You realize you are not yourself as a person, you are the Self as the universe, it’s a grand feeling. (SB: Tell us about the bliss aspect of it.) Bliss, love, joy, happiness, those words are all synonymous. But take the happiest experience you can think of as a human being, what’s a real happy experience that you’ve had in your life. An experience that really turns you on. Now compared to bliss, it’s not even an atom of bliss. That’s how more powerful bliss is, it has nothing to do with human happiness. It’s a billion times more powerful, it’s unexplainable, it’s ineffable, nothing you can even think about. You can just be in it and partake of it, but nothing to explain. SB: How is it possible to stay conscious if it’s that good? (R: Who’s conscious?) If something is really painful you lose consciousness. So I would think if something is unbearably ecstatic one would also lose consciousness. R: You’re speaking in human terms, that’s why they call it transcendental. You transcend human terms and you’re in a completely different space, so there’s no one to lose consciousness. You can only lose consciousness as a human being but if you transcend your humanhood there’s no one left to lose consciousness. There has to be a body to lose consciousness but when you see “I am not the body,” there is no one left to lose consciousness, do you follow? To have any experience, there has to be someone left to have the experience. If you get rid of the someone then you become natural and you do not lose consciousness when we’re natural. (SB: So there’s no experience anymore?) There’s no experience at all! (SB: The one who experiences has been transcended, is gone.) Is dead. (SB: So realization is a non-experience, it’s like a primal…) It’s not even that, it’s beyond that, it’s totally transcendental. SD: You can’t experience bliss is that true? (R: That’s right!) SB: You really do feel bliss, I mean, you feel bliss but it’s different, it’s not the mind experiencing bliss. R: It’s like the sun trying to experience heat. (SB: (laughs) That’s good.) You can’t. (SB: There is bliss but there’s no one experiencing, there is just bliss.) That’s the natural state. (SB: Yeah.) SA: Speaking of the sun, I don’t know if it’s out of speculation but, there’s a teaching that the world, the earth, is an intelligence. The earth is going through its evolution and it’s struggling for its own revelations, its own enlightenment as we are part of this way of life. And the same is true for the sun. (R: Umm.) Do you have a teaching on that? R: That’s the mental plane. In the mental plane everything is alive. There is no such thing as dead matter. Everything lives and wants to express itself, the moon, the sun, the earth, the flowers everything. But when you go beyond that, it doesn’t exist. It only exists on the mental plane but in truth there is no mental plane. So none of that exists it’s like a dream. Always go back to the dream. (SA: So the whole universe, the solar system and the universe are projections in a sense also.) Projection of the mind. SD: All part of the Maya? (R: All Maya.) SB: And all the inner planes too? (R: All the inner planes, projections of the mind.) Astral, causal, physical, all of that? R: For whom are these things, where did they come from? For whom are they? They’re all projections of the mind. When the mind goes everything else goes. So that’s why when you follow the I, the I is the mind and the ego. When you go to the source, everything is attached to mind — all the things that we’ve been discussing — they are all part of the I-thought. I see the sun, I perceive the moon. As you said, “I perceive the earth as being alive.” I do these things. But when the I is transcended who’s left? Just itself and all of those things are gone. So there’s peace, there is nobody left to worry about those things, that they concern themselves with. SA: When you say you go beyond it reminds me of a line in a book I’m very fond of, it’s called “the secret teachings of the Tibetan Masters” and one of the phrases that is used by the Tibetans is, “Going beyond the beyond.” R: (laughs) Is that by Paul Brunton? (SA: No, Alexander David Neal, French woman from Tibet.) I don’t know, her. SB: Was Paul Brunton a realized being? (R: Yes.) I thought he was because he had a whole series of books. SA: Oh it’s a very thick book, it’s very succinct, which is wonderful. She speaks on the misconceptions of the self of being having any identity at all, she pushes more of a scientific standpoint that everything is constantly in flux, although we don’t see the changes from moment to moment, the things that you’ve said of course. We want to hold on to this idea of an identity which simply has no reality, personal identity. R: On the mental plane everything is in a state of flux, nothing is solid, everything moves. For it doesn’t exist because it’s non-duality, non-duality exists. Duality is when everything is in a state of flux, then there are atoms, there’s energy, there are molecules, and there are things and they’re in complete motion. But if you go beyond the molecules and the atoms and the energy then you’ll have nothing, emptiness, and that’s reality. It’s like the story I tell of the monk, who is asking the Master, “What is reality, what is reality,” and the Master said go pick a fig. And he picked a fig off a tree and the Master said, “open the fig” and the monk did. And the Master said, “Cut open the seed” and he cut open the seed and he said, “what do you see?” And the monk said, “Emptiness,” and the Master said, “that’s true, everything comes from emptiness,” because in the fig seed there is a hollow, there is nothing. So out of the nothingness came the fig tree and so has everything else. (pause) Remember I love you all and I always think about you, but remember to love yourselves, to pray to your Self, to bow to your Self, to worship your Self, because God dwells in you, as you, peace. See you again next time, God bless… (tape ends as students organize to go to restaurant)