Transcript:
Robert: It’s good to be with you again. I’m really happy that we’ve got a small group. Not too many people here but more seem to be coming. When Henry first invited me to his house to have this satsang, he told me, “Robert we’ll fill up the room for you. We’ll have hundreds of people.” And I said, “Henry we don’t want hundreds of people. We want substance. We want quality not quantity. We want a few good devotees who want to awaken in this incarnation and become free and liberated.” So Henry said, “Well what would happen if too many people come?” So I replied, “I’ll know exactly what to say, so they won’t come back again.” And that’s what’s been happening. Most people are seekers. They go from one movement to the next, one teacher to the next. One lecture to the next and they never practice anything. How do they expect to get anywhere? We want to do something positive here and make something happen so that you don’t have to come back again and again. And play the game of life over and over again. What is it everyone really wants out of life? What is everyone looking for? What do people really want more than anything else? And the answer is happiness. Everything you do is for happiness. You get married to be happy. You get divorced to be happy. You have a job and you go to work, so you can make money to bring you happiness. But as we learn it is never lasting. What we really want is eternal happiness. Happiness that lasts forever. Happiness that does not change. We want eternal happiness. Think about that, unalloyed happiness. Happiness that never goes away. Now the question is: Is there such a thing? And if there is, how do I get it? Well, the answer to the first question is yes, there is such a thing and you get it by not allowing your mind to go out into the world. By keeping your mind in your heart. When your mind goes out into the world it spoils it. It’s like the sun. The sun is always shining. Sometimes the clouds cover the sun. But do we say there’s no sun? Only the ignorant men will say there’s no sun. We realize the clouds have covered the sun. And after a while the clouds will dissipate and we’ll have happiness once again. For the sun will shine once again. It’s exactly the same thing with happiness. We have allowed our mind to make us believe that external conditions can bring us happiness. We have to learn the hard way, that’s not true. External conditions can only bring us misery. The first thing we have to understand is this: That everything in this universe, galaxies, stars, planets, suns, moons, people, places, cockroaches, animals, minerals are all a manifestation of your mind, even God, are all a projection of your own mind. You have invented your own Gods with your mind. And it’s that God that brings you misery, because you look at this God as a Santa Claus. When your wishes are not fulfilled you become upset. And you blame God. Little do you know that you have created your own God in your own image. Everything, everything, is a projection of your mind. So how do you attain happiness? By allowing your mind to go back within yourself and resting in your heart. Happiness is your divine nature. Happiness is what you are. Yet you can only know this when your mind is quiet and peaceful and still. At that time it makes no difference what’s going on in the world. You will be happy, blissful, peaceful. As an example: A person buys a lottery ticket, he wants to win lottery. Keeps buying lottery tickets every week. The mind has gone out, it has gone into the world and has told you that you may win the lottery. So you buy lottery tickets for years. And you’re anxious, you’re stressful, you’re distraught, you’re unhappy, because you’re buying lottery tickets. Your goal is to win the lottery. After ten years of buying lottery tickets you finally achieve your goal, you win forty-million dollars. After the excitement wears off, something strange happens to you. You feel quiet, you feel blissful, you feel happy and you have no idea what happened. You believe it’s winning the money that has caused you to feel happy like this. But it’s not. What has happened is simply this: Once you’ve achieved your goal, you become quiet. There’s no goal to strive for. Therefore your heart has excepted your mind. Your mind has gone back into your heart. You’re automatically happy. It has nothing to do with the money or the winnings. Now how long does this last before your ego starts playing games with you again? So start thinking to yourself, my relatives and my friends are only coming to see me because they want my money. I haven’t paid the IRS. They’ll probably take half of it and I’ll only have twenty-million left. People may try to kidnap me and hold me for ransom, what am I going to do? So you hire body guards. You build a fence around your home and your happiness is gone. But when you build a fence around your home and you hire bodyguards you feel happy again because you’ve reached another goal. The reason you feel happy again is because your mind has gone back into your Self. And your Self is naturally happy, but you believe it’s because you secured yourself that’s brought you happiness and so it goes. On and off like a yo-yo. You’re happy when you achieve a goal and you’re miserable when you’re searching for something. The external world can bring you nothing but misery. We have to learn that lesson the hard way unfortunately. Here’s another example: A person wants to get married, they want a mate. They go searching and they’re unhappy until they find the right mate. They go from one person to the other, one person to the other. Then they finally go to the right bar and pick up the right person and say, “This is the girl I want or this is the guy I want.” And you think you’re happy. Once you give up thinking and acquiring and searching, again the mind goes back into the heart. When the mind is back into the heart you automatically stay happy. But you think it’s because you found the right mate. Now how long does this happiness last? Your ego takes over again and you start thinking. I wonder if my mate has a new friend, a new boyfriend, a new girl friend. I’m getting tired of him or her, I’ll go searching for somebody else. It’s getting boring living with this person and you become miserable again, until you go get somebody else. When you get somebody else, you feel happy for the moment, or for the day, or for the week or for the month, or for the year. Your mind has gone back into the heart. That is the only thing that makes you happy, because happiness cannot be found in the world. For the world is not what you think it is. The world is not real by itself, but Brahman is real. Brahman is the world. The world is only real when you realize the world is Brahman. Brahman is consciousness. What is this like? It’s like a chalkboard. Imagine the chalkboard as consciousness. You draw pictures on the chalkboard. Pictures of galaxies, of pyramids, of stars, of worms, of people. Are the drawings real? The drawings are only as real as the chalkboard, because without the chalkboard you couldn’t have the drawing. So the drawings represent the universe. The chalkboard represents consciousness. Then you erase all the drawings and you draw a baby. You erase the baby, you draw the baby growing up as a young person. You erase the young person and you draw a young person growing up in their fifties and sixties. Then you erase that and you draw another person dying, same person. But what has happened to the chalkboard all this time? Nothing, the chalkboard remains the same. The universe changes, people change. You’re born, you grow older, you die, but consciousness is always the same. The problem is wrong identification. We are identifying with the images, with the world, with creation. We are not identifying with consciousness. When you identify with consciousness, creation becomes like a moving picture. It comes and goes but you do not react. You do not react to good things and you do not react to bad things. They’re both two sides of the same coin and they’re both impostors, illusions. It’s like a dream. You may say to me, “Robert this sounds ridiculous, how can the world be like a dream?” Well, think of it this way. When you do dream. When you are dreaming, do you not project the entire universe in that dream? In that dream you have a star, you have a galaxy, you have a moon, you have a sun, you have houses, you have people, you have oceans, you have everything in the dream. Where does it come from? It’s amazing how your mind unconsciously when you’re dreaming can manifest all those things. And also you’re in the dream yourself. You see yourself in the dream as a baby. You grow older, you join the army, you get into a war, you get wounded, you come home in a wheel chair and then you get married, you have children. All this is happening in the dream. Then one day there’s an earthquake. Buildings are falling, the ground is opening swallowing up people and you’re screaming and then you see me. And I’m very calm and I say, “Don’t worry my friend, this is only a dream.” But you look at me like I’m crazy. You say, “What are you talking about, can’t you see what’s happening? The earth has opened up and it’s swallowing people and you’re telling me this is a dream? You must be out of your mind!” So I say, “My friend be calm, it’s only a dream,” but you don’t believe me. Then the earth opens up where you are and it swallows you up and then a funny thing happens. You wake up! What happened to all my problems? What happened to my crippled body? What happened to the earthquake? You have awakened. It’s no longer a dream. Now I am sitting here telling you that your life is like a dream and not to worry, not to fear. But to be still and know that I am God. To understand that you are consciousness. That you are pure awareness. That you are absolute reality, that you are parabrahman, that you are sat-chit-ananda, but you don’t believe me. You think you’re mortal. You identify with your body consciousness. You identify with events in this world. And your mind is always plotting, always planning, always wanting to be bigger than you are. Thinking of something wrong and you’re going to correct it. You have arrogance and belligerency. For you don’t believe your true nature and this is because your mind again, has gone out into the world instead of you letting your mind rest in your heart. Here’s another example: Imagine if you will a man going into the sun. And the sun is 140 degrees. Now the sun and the heat represents your mind going out into the world. You start to burn, you see a shade tree. You run underneath the shade tree and you feel comfortable, relaxed and peaceful and happy. But after a while you forget about that and you want some more sun. So you go back out into the sun. And you’re burning and sweating again. This is equivalent to you setting out your mind into the world and getting caught up in the worlds events. Getting caught up in your personal problems, believing your life is important as it is. But then you see the shade tree again and you remember how good that felt and so you go back into the shade tree and you sit beneath it and you feel cool again, refreshed and calm and happy. But only a fool and ass-hole would go back into the sun and burn and then go back into the shade and be calm. And then go out into the sun and burn. Only a fool would do that. The wise person would stand under the tree and be calm and cool. Now let’s take a look at your life. How many problems do you think you have? Do you believe anything is wrong with your life because you want more of something that you’re not getting? The only reason you think you have a problem is because the world is not turning the way that you want. It’s wrong identification. You have to begin to identify with consciousness, with absolute reality and not with your everyday affairs. So how do you attain happiness? How do you keep your mind from going out? Simple. You do not react to anything. You do not think further than your nose. You do not allow your thoughts to grab hold of you and tell you anything. Even if it appears right. When you see a situation, good or bad, you do not react. If you win the lottery and you win forty-million dollars, you do not react. For you realize it will bring its own effects. We live in a world of duality. For every good there’s a bad. For every bad there’s a good. For every up there’s a down. This is the way of the world. If you come into extreme what you call good, you will have to experience the equivalent which is bad, what you call bad. In reality there is no good and there is no bad. But your mind makes it so. So the first step is you do not react, you become the witness of the world unfolding. You realize that everything is the Self and I am that. You witness everything in the world, but you do not get involved. When I say you do not get involved I don’t mean you just stay home and sit in the bath tub and do nothing. I mean your body came to this earth to do something. And your body is under its own laws of karma. But for whom does karma exist for you or for your body? Only for your body. Therefore if you identify with your body you suffer. If you identify with your Self, which is consciousness, you are always happy. Now if that gets difficult for you, you practice atma-vichara, self-inquiry. When your mind starts thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking about good and bad, you simply ask the question, “To whom do these thoughts come?” You do not answer you simply pose the question to yourself. Everything happens within yourself. “To whom do these thoughts come?” The answer will eventually come to you. “These thoughts come to me. I think them. I think them? I do? Who is this I. Well what is the source of the I?” You hold on to the I, but you do not concentrate on the I, you concentrate on the source. “Well what is the source of the I.” For it seems that all of my problems are attached to I. For I say, “I feel bad. I feel upset. I feel angry. I feel cheated. I feel emotional,” or even “I feel good. I feel happy,” that’s human happiness. You feel happy because somebody gave you something you like or somebody did something for you. That’s just as bad as feeling depressed. I feel this and I feel that, I feel that I am a Jnani, I feel that I am not a Jnani, I feel all kinds of things. But there’s always I, I, I. If you investigate you will find that everything is attached to the I. And if you get rid of the I, all of your problems, the whole world, the whole universe, God and everything related to it, will disappear. And the source will be your true Self which is pure consciousness, ultimate oneness, nirvana, emptiness. This is your true Self. And you will look at the world as your Self. You will still see the world but you will see it differently. Nothing will ever upset you again. For you will realize that the world is your Self. How can you be upset at your Self? You have become an embodiment of divine love, bliss, pure intelligence, ultimate awareness, sat-chit-ananda, parabrahman, that is omnipresence. So how can you be angry or upset over anything if you are pure consciousness, you just cannot. Do you see what I’m saying? If you learn to identify yourself with consciousness, you will always be happy. If you keep identifying with world conditions or with your body or your mind, you will be miserable and you’ll have short spurts of happiness, when things go your way. But then you will not trust people. You will be suspicious of everybody’s motives and you will feel that there’s something wrong. If you want to know whether you’re a Jnani or not, ask yourself, “When was the last time I saw something wrong? When was the last time something wasn’t right when I had a bad thought when I believed somebody was doing something to me, or when I became angry,” and that will give you a good inclination where you’re coming from. What you see in yourself, you see in everyone else. If you’re self-realized, then you know your Self as omnipresence and you can only see love, peace, harmony and happiness in everybody. The choice is yours. The only freedom you’ve got on this planet, in this universe, is to make the choice to go within and not to react to any condition. Everything else about you is preordained. Everything else about you is prarabdhic karma. Even when I lift my hand like this, it’s karmic. But what have I got to do with my hand? I am not my hand, I am not my body, I am not my mind, I-am that I-am. Absolute awareness, pure intelligence, absolute reality, parabrahman, nirvana. I am spaceless, I am birthless, I am deathless. Water cannot drown me and fire cannot burn me. That is my true nature. Find your true nature my friends and you’ll always be happy. Om shanti. Now let’s do a little chanting and then we’ll eat and our friend Rahul will play for us. Rahul is a great musician. I am honored he’s come today to play with us, in this game called life, before we eat. (pause for music and eating — then Robert continues) R: …about what I was talking about or anything else you’d like to talk about. SB: So if consciousness is all there is and that’s our real nature, so this ego is the refusal of that, a non-acceptance. And the whole structure seems to be a refusal, a defending against this nothingness or this everything-ness that consciousness is? R: Yes, but let me ask you, “For whom is the refusal? Who refuses?” (SB: The ego.) Get rid of the ego and the refusal will stop. Ask yourself, “To whom does the ego come?” and you will realize that you never had an ego, that it does not exist. SB: So ever since we were born, we’re getting education that there is an ego, education is always to the ego. (R: Speak for yourself.) I mean, the whole educational system in the whole of the Western world is presuming that there is this ego that needs to be educated. R: Well, never mind about the Western world, what do you think? Leave the world alone. (SB: I think I’ve been ruined by society. (laughter) Maybe I wanted to know.) Forget about that, leave the world alone. There’s a greater power than you that knows how to take care of the world. Concentrate on your Self. If you understand who you are, you will understand what the world is too. And you will love the world as Brahman, as the Self. SK: Is it more helpful to take responsibility in that way? By acknowledging that we duped ourselves and to go on from there? R: Do not dwell too much on the negative. Concentrate on the source, which is absolute reality, pure consciousness. SK: Sort of like going either way, whether we duped ourselves or the world duped us it doesn’t matter just let go… R: Forget about that, realize all that is attached to your personal I. And follow the I to the source. Where you will become your true Self. At that time everything will take care of itself and there will be no question about that at all. SB: Robert, if consciousness is all there is and we are that and that has to be the case every moment, so in every moment the ego lives this separative consciousness, a separative ego is always created and imposing itself upon pure consciousness? R: Why do you worry about how the ego is being created? You have no ego. Realize that you are egoless. That you are absolute intelligence. And your true nature is shining forth from you right now. Focus on that part. Remove the negatives by not thinking of them. As soon as they begin to come to you, do not react to them, do not fight them, ignore them or witness them. As they become too much for you, ask, “To whom do they come?” and you’ll get right back to the I and you follow the I to the source until it demolishes itself and disappears and annihilates itself. And only absolute reality will be left. Only consciousness will be left. So do not focus too long on the other. You leave the negatives alone, just follow the I. Because all the problems, all the negatives are attached to the I. Get rid of the I and everything else will go with it, then you’ll be free. SB: Most people when they sit quietly, then they feel this emptiness a great fear arises in them, then they refuse that, then they run away from that. (R: Well let them run away and let them do what they want, but what are you going to do?) Well I realize that that’s what I’ve been doing. R: Ask, “To whom does the fear come? Fear of what?” Ask yourself, “Why do I have this fear? Who has this fear? I do, Who am I? Where does this I come from who has this fear?” Hold onto the I with all your might, like you’re holding onto a rope. And follow it down to the source and then let go. And become the source, merge with the source of your existence. Then you will realize that you’ve never existed and you will never exist. You are just pure being, absolute reality, the Self. Don’t worry about the others that’ll take care of itself. SB: When you say, “Hold on to the I,” and when I try to hold on to the I, I only find memory. I only find the feeling of memory even if there’s no thoughts there’s still this feeling of me. This feeling is a presumption of this familiarity of memory. R: Then you have to ask yourself again, “To whom does this memory come? Who feels this way?” And you go back to I again. Everything is around the I. Everything is attached to the I. Memory, fears, frustrations, anger, past lives, everything has to do with the I. As soon as you dissolve the I, there’s no karma, there are no past lives, there is no judgement, there’s no God, there’s no retribution, there’s no Self, there’s no realization, there’s only consciousness. SI: It seems to me that you have to in the beginning, since because I don’t have any idea what consciousness is and I can’t identify with emptiness, that I have to believe this to begin with. I mean, I don’t know, do I? So what I have to do is believe that this is so. R: You should believe nothing that I say. I maybe telling you a lie, why should you believe me at all. But what you should do is to experiment with yourself. The factory of experimentation is within you. Work on yourself, find out for yourself and see what happens. Practice on yourself. Do not believe anything, but practice on yourself and find out what happens, see what happens. Then you will know, the guru, God, consciousness are all within you. You are that. Check it out, find out for yourself. SH: What are you looking at? (R: Who?) You, your eyes are very set, they’re looking outward.) R: I’m not looking at anything. (SH: No?) There’s nothing to look at. (SH: That sounds peaceful.) There’s just space, empty space. (SH: You’re looking into nothingness.) I’m looking into my Self and I see you. (SH: Yeah? That’s your illusion.) (laughter) But I see you as the Self. I see you as me. (SH: Oh that’s okay.) Do you like that? (SH: Yeah, I admire that.) R: Okay lets eat. (laughter as tape ends)