Transcript:

This transcript was created automatically from the audio recording and has not been proofread yet. It may contain errors, especially with Sanskrit terms and with questions from the audience. Please get in touch if you would like to help improve it! https://robert-adams.de/contact/

Good afternoon. Happy Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is when you send a card to somebody you love, but can you love the whole world? Unconditionally. Can you love people who despise you, who use you, who step on you, when you only love the people that give you things, give you what you want, try to make you happy? Anybody can love those people. But to love unconditionally, to love everybody, without respect for creed, color, race, just to love, that’s hard to do for most people. Yet, if you only knew who you were, you’d be able to do this, for you are love. Your real nature is love, and when you learn to love yourself, you can love everybody, but you have to learn to love yourself first. You really have to love yourself. And then the ego, or the person who makes mistakes, or the person who does all kinds of mischievous things. I’m speaking of loving the self, your real self, your true self, which is a substratum of the ego, which is beyond person, place, and thing. The beginning, of which this world is but a shadow. When you begin to feel the real light of love, there’s all pervading omnipresent you can let everybody but you have to discover this for yourself I welcome you with all my heart it’s good to be with you again we have a few new faces here let me just say that I’m not a preacher I’m not a philosopher I’m not a public speaker I’m not a teacher where am I?

There’s no answer know yourself and you’ll know me you can’t have jnana without bhakti, or you can’t have wisdom without devotion. Ponder this. In order to have jnana, which is the highest state, you have to have bhakti also. Otherwise, just to have jnana will make you cynical, obnoxious, irreverent, and all the rest of these things.

To have bhakti without jnana makes you passive and ignorant. It makes you into a being that believes he doesn’t have to do anything, you just sit around doing nothing all day, people step all over you, you become a doormat for people. That’s having boxing without jnana. They both come together, boxing and jnana. They’re both the same. There’s no difference. It’s like a man and a woman coming together. The man is jnani, the woman is a boxer, and they produce a child called self-realization. The Jnana by himself cannot do this, and the Bhakti by herself cannot do this. There has to be a union for self-realization to appear.

Ponder this. To become totally free and liberated, to be in a state of unalloyed happiness, without change. Jnana and Bhakti have to come together.

You can’t have one without the other. For instance, many people who read books, let’s say by Nisargadatta, Maharaj, books on Jnana, become very sarcastic. arrogant. When you take words out of these books they sound great, they sound good. They tell you that you are absolute reality. You are pure awareness.

You are bliss consciousness. This is the truth about you, of course. But when you take an egotistical person and feed them this information, your ego increases tenfold.

That’s why spiritual life is dangerous. without a teacher without someone who can point away to you now what is bhakti really? we don’t know bhakti is devotion but what does it really mean?

It means total surrender of everything your body your life, your affairs total surrender to the self complete absolute surrender this is what bhakti really is understand that you’re not a doer you give everything up to God the self It means that anything that you’ve ever done in your life has nothing to do with you whatsoever. It is all God’s Leela. So you’re not responsible, really. I’ve got to be real careful when I use these words. Because when I say you’re not responsible, it means for some people that you can do anything they like. It gives them license to be rude, arrogant. When really a person is free on a spiritual path, realize by themselves that they have no life of their own, it is God playing your life. When you realize this, when you have an inclination of what I’m talking about, and you can feel it in your heart, your heart will open, and you will laugh. When you realize from the moment you were born, it was really God that was born. Consciousness that was born. You have been consciousness all this time. You were never the body, all the affairs that you went through, all the experiences that you’ve had. It is God that is experiencing these things after you. You have absolutely nothing to do with this. To illustrate this, there’s a story about Rama and Sita walking through a forest. They see a beautiful lake. Sita tells Rama, let’s go skinny dipping.

So, this is okay, and he takes off his bow and his arrow that Rama always wore, and he sticks his arrow in the sand next to the bow and goes for a swim. When we come back again, Rama gets dressed and goes for his arrow, and he’s stuck in the sand. When he looks, he notices that he pierced a frog, and he sticks the arrow in the sand, and Rama said, Mr. Frog, why don’t you complain when I suck you? Why don’t you cry out in pain?

Why don’t you just allow me to stick you with the arrow? Why don’t you complain about this? And the flock said, Grandma, I have taken refuge in you.

You are my mother. You are my father. You are my children. You are the whole universe. I have no life of my own. It is your life I am living.

And you are all pervading. Therefore, the arrow you pierce me with is really you. So why should I cry out? Why should I be in pain? Why should I complain? when you feel love that you’ve given me, for you are the embodiment of love.”

This is Bakshi. To have that kind of attitude. An example of Jnana is a story about the man who had five children, five sons. He loved the sons very daily. He played baseball with them,

Took them fishing, took them hiking. He was very close to his children, to his five sons. One day there was a big earthquake and the five sons were killed. So Jnana arranged for the funeral. he didn’t become emotional, he wasn’t sad or depressed and the wife was watching him the day of the funeral, everybody was there all the relatives were crying and screaming one of the five sons and then he just smiled and got upset after the funeral the wife said to him you bastard how can you do this to your sons you didn’t shed one tear you loved your sons you grew up around them they grew up around you you’re so close to them and they look as if you don’t even care about them so then he smiled obediently and he said to his wife darling, last night I had a dream and in the dream I was a king I had five sons also in the dream I loved them daily one day there was a war and my five sons had to go fight in the war and they were all killed and I woke up so my question to you is for whom shall I grieve? As far as soon as I was in the dream, and as far as soon as I was in this dream. If we call this life simply a dream, it just appears to be a little longer than the dreams we have when we go to sleep.

If Jnani didn’t have any backseat, it would be a sorrow state. But Jnani was filled with love, compassion, and wisdom. And let’s look at our lives, where we live. Every day we find something wrong with our life. Every day we feel that there’s something going on we don’t like, somebody trying to hurt us, somebody trying to do something to us. Is this true? Can anyone really do anything to you? If you understood that you were dreaming, would you react? Would you react to things? If you really knew that you were dreaming, just like in the dream you have at night, if you knew you were dreaming you would laugh at the whole situation going on. if you were aware of your dreams at night would you go out and do things that hurt people or try to save the world or do all the things that you do you would realize this is a dream I’m going to wake up you would understand that you’re dreaming it’s not real and yet most of us refuse to look at this world the same way anything that is real is permanent the definition of reality is non-change things that have not changed yet can you think of anything in this world that has not changed Can you think of anyone that has not changed? A person, a place, a thing, an animal, a bug, insect, metal from the sky. Everything changes. Everything is in a state of flux.

Nothing is ever the same. So how can you say the world is real? You were simply born, you believe you were born, and you’ve been brainwashed into thinking things like they are. Nothing is the way it is. Nothing. when you just explain everything in the state of flux, everything is moving, constantly changing, changing, changing. You’re not the same person you were 10 years ago. Your features have changed, your ideas have changed, all kinds of things have changed. You’re totally a different person.

So the question is, if the world is not real, if the dream is not real, is who am I, where do I belong? That is the ultimate question. And you never answer that question.

You simply pose the question to yourself, but you never answer it. What is beyond mortality? Beyond finite understanding? Just to dwell on this question is sufficient.

Just to dwell on who am I? Where did I come from? What is my source? Is sufficient. That’s what you have to do. But the network for NASA.

Remember, whenever you have an answer for the question, it is your ego that’s answering. and ego is playing games with you, making you think there’s a solution to this problem and you know they’re happily ever after. It doesn’t happen that way. The person that’s happily ever after is the person who knows that he’s in the body, he’s in the mind, he’s in the world. And the person who identifies with the world, with the body, with the mind goes through all kinds of trials and tribulations. Everybody’s looking for happiness. Everyone’s looking for animal-wide happiness. But you’re going about it in the wrong way. You believe things will make you happy, external things, people, places. So you run here, you run there looking for the right teacher, looking for the right book, looking for something external to give you happiness and realization. How disappointed do you become when it doesn’t happen that way? It can happen that way. It’s impossible. When you’re going after the world of change. Everything that’s changed in this world is that you’re chasing something that will change eventually. It will not be the same, and you’re chasing that to find your happiness. I’m sorry. Your happiness is always within yourself. There’s no way you had to go. There’s no special book you had to read. There’s no special feature you had to find. It’s always been within you. And it makes no difference who you are, where you are. You You can be working in the marketplace, you can be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a chief, a baker, a shoemaker, a meatball.

It makes no difference what you are. You know the truth and the truth will make you free. Unfortunately, the road has to be pulled out from under us many times before we wake up. We refuse to awaken to the reality. We always think the grass is greener on the other side. So we keep chasing people, we keep going after people, after things, until the day comes when you are suffering so much, everything has been taken from you, you feel naked, then you will do something constructive.

And then that you will say, what has happened to me? Who am I really? What am I doing here? Who are these people that I see?

What’s the reason of my existence? Why was I born? When you start asking these questions to yourself, not to other people, but to yourself, then the answers will begin to come. The answers have always been within you. You’ve always been there. That’s the only place they are. If you’re up in the sky, or in Tibet, or in Japan, you’re right where you are right now. Everything you’re looking for is right where you are right now. Everything. If you refuse to believe it. Because as you know, as you leave this afternoon and go home, most of you will be right back to where you were before. Believing that things affect you from the outside, believing that you’re trying to do something constructive, to make this place a better world, seeking out for your rights, fighting for survival, and pretty soon you’ll find that you’re 70, 80, 90, 100 years old, you’re bewildered, flustered, You have no idea what life is all about to pass you by so fast, and it’s time to leave your body. But there are some of you who hear what I’m saying, and that’s with your mind, with your heart, who are willing to do something about it, and that’s something to dive within, deeper than you’ve ever gone, without looking at time or space or hours, but living spontaneously in the world living in the moment finding this moment is eternity being still not talking too much never arguing or debating for a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion itself

You start trying to convert people to make people do what you want instead you begin to leave everybody alone leave things alone leave yourself alone you begin to inquire who am i you go about about your business, your business escape itself, your ego begins to surrender itself, you feel happier every day for no reason at all, no one can ever take this happiness away from you, it never came to you, you’ve always had it, how can people take away what you are, what you’ve been, they can’t, so find out about yourself, really find out about yourself, what you really are, you’re really a man or a woman, you really have to try to Satan’s world out. The one who made this world, so to speak, know that I’ll take care of it without any help from you. Look at people beating their brains out, trying to do this in the world, that in the world, trying to change people, trying to change things. This has been going on since the beginning of time, and no one’s ever changed anything. Things aren’t falling the way they’re supposed to. Things aren’t happening the way they’re supposed to. Your duty is to align yourself with reality, with truth, and that’s the things in this world and say I have to change them. Because if I don’t do it, somebody else will.

And if nobody did it, the world would become rotten and spoiled. On the contrary. The world becomes rotten because you’re dealing with it in your way. When you stop trying to change the world, you’ll see that everything is in its right place and falling away as it’s supposed to be. So I know mistakes. No mistakes have ever been made, none of them being made, none of them will be made the universe emanates from you you have created everything that you see comes out of your mind your gods your mountains your sky everything that you behold comes out of your mind it’s your creation it doesn’t exist when you’re sleeping only exists in your waking state when you’re sleeping you know there’s no world going on or you can say well the world is still there you know i’m sleeping how do you know When you’re asleep, you’re dead to this world. So nothing is the way you think it is. Everything seems so confused sometimes. You don’t fall into the trap of being a worldly person. Do what you have to do to awaken to your real self, to your real nature, and then see what you see in this world. Then see if you’ll be judgmental. Then see if you’ll complain about anything. Then see if there are good people and bad people in this world. In other words, first know yourself, then see who will judge the world. And to me, the easiest way to do this is to find out who you are, to practice self-inquiry, to inquire to whom do these things come, who’s feeling these things, when you first get up in the morning,

The first feelings that come to you, the first thing that you see. Ask yourself to whom does it come, who feels this, who sees it. And you will answer, I do. Realize that you’re not the I that sees all these things. It’s not you, you’re not the I. If I’m not the I, who am I? Who am I if I’m not the I? You never answer this question. But keep still. As you keep still, other thoughts will bombard you. Go back to the beginning again and say, to whom do these thoughts come? Who is thinking these thoughts? Again, remember, I is not you. I accept it from you. And you’ll feel, whenever you say, I am this and I am that, I feel sick, I feel depressed, I feel hungry, I feel hungry, I feel this. You’re not speaking about you. You’re speaking about I. I have nothing to do with you whatsoever. Continue to inquire, what is the source of the I? Who am I? I’ll do this over and over again. And one of these days you will awaken to the truth and be free. You can alternate this with the I AM meditation. For those of you who are used to meditating, the I AM meditation is very powerful. It causes reality to be envisioned by you. And the way you do this is to do it right now. You make yourself comfortable, you close your eyes, you become cognizant of your breathing,

Listen to your breath for a wild practice of apostate meditation, observe the feelings in your body, observe the source in your mind, but do not try to change anything. You have become the witness to your thoughts, your feelings, and your emotions. You are the witness, you have found watching yourself, you’re observing yourself totally, completely. You’re observing the feelings in your body, you’re observing the source in your mind, you’re observing your breath. Ask yourself a question, what is the source of the observer? And you answer it by saying, I am. When you see desperation, you inhale, you say, I am. You exhale, you say, I am. This makes you very peaceful, very relaxed. It brings out the reality from deep within your heart. And you keep doing this over and over again, you’ll find something interesting happening to you, you’re growing spiritually, you feel happier than you’re felt, you feel a little joy emanating from you. You inhale, you say, I, you exhale, you say, I am. It’s now time to pray. All right. We put a swim together every week. We write down questions and pass it around. Do you have any questions? You never have any questions. There’s a question in the back, can it possibly be permanent, but it changes, it keeps on changing all the time. Anything that’s real is permanent, a lot of what you really have is yourself, the self that you are is permanent, it never changes, but anything else is strange, so once again you’re searching for yourself which is permanent, you have to search for it everywhere, within yourself. Either it is by diving deeply within yourself, by practicing yourself on querying, by kind of assessing, finding the self, which has always been, always will be, and never changes. Anything else does change. The whole world changes. Can you see anything does not change? Everything changes constantly, continuously. So by identifying with changing things, you always become disappointed. So you go searching until you find reality, but you go into search search outside of yourself. Everything has changed out there. Where do you go?

But what you really are never changes. Pure awareness. Absolutely healthy. This never changes. This is eternal. This is what you are. This is your real nature. You have to find yourself and be free. You’ve been making sense. Because it’s not supposed to be healthy as far as you know. But find out for yourself. Go within yourself and see. Where is consciousness? Where is pure awareness? Nothing you can find for yourself. Nothing you can explain to you. It’s the only explanation. In the sense that it can be experienced. Nothing you can talk about. So experience it for yourself. You don’t have nothing to say. It’s all true. What is… If we experience pure consciousness for a moment, what force is it that compels these imprints to continually arise in the mind? We want to experience what consciousness is and be established in that, and yet when we try to do that, when we do that for a second, it’s like weeds continually coming up. You cut them out and you have a second of that, and then continuously there’s this force of these imprints, these motions of mind. This is called false imagination. You say this is going on, but it’s really going on. Why have you been hypnotized and believed it’s going on? And why are you saying you’re trying to be real and you’re true? But it’s experiencing pure consciousness. It appears to be obstructed, but it’s really obstructed. The truth is there’s only pure consciousness, there’s nothing else.

What force makes this appear to be obstructed? No force whatsoever. It’s arising. To whom is it arising? It’s arising from pure consciousness. No, that’s pure consciousness. Pure consciousness is aware that it’s arising? Pure consciousness is aware of itself.

It itself contains absolute reality. That’s pure consciousness. But awareness is aware that there’s thoughts sprouting up. Pure awareness is aware of itself as pure consciousness. It’s absolute reality. It’s aware of itself as a material, relative world goal. The relative world is just something for you. To us. But the world does not exist in consciousness. But how can the mind be aware of itself? Are you saying that the awareness… Isn’t it awareness that’s aware that the mind is moving? No, awareness is only aware of itself. In the world that you’re talking about. So does the mind have awareness? The mind has no awareness whatsoever. There’s no awareness in the mind. There’s no mind. So what is it that’s aware of the mental imperfection? It’s illusion, that’s all. Isn’t the mind like using awareness, using the energy of awareness, to be aware of it? No. There’s no mind, no energy, there’s nothing like that happening. Anything that’s going on is pure awareness, and pure awareness is beyond anything unimaginable. It’s beyond the thinking, beyond the analyzing, it’s beyond everything that you can ever imagine. Or somehow we become hypnotized. We’re hypnotized into believing that this is all real. The only thing that you’d explain to me is all hypnosis. Mass hypnosis. Everybody would do the same thing. But nothing exists like this. It’s like the snake on the rope. When you think you see a snake, it’s really wet. It’s like the water in the mirage. You see water in the desert and it’s not where it all is in the mirage, it’s the same.

But you see the water. The sky is blue. The sky really isn’t blue. If you go up into the sky, it’s black, but it appears blue as it is. It’s like a cloud resting on top of a mountain top, but upon coastal examination, it doesn’t necessarily mount up at all. It’s like watching the railroad tracks turn into one track, if you’ve ever done that. There are two tracks and you look down on railroad tracks and turn into one track. All these things are optical illusions. They appear real, they think they’re real, but upon certain investigation you find that it doesn’t exist, and so is what you’re talking about. There appears to be hindrances in our realization, there appears to be a mind that keeps stopping us, it keeps causing things to happen to us, but it’s an appearance, it doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion, it’s an outside illusion. My own wood doesn’t exist by diving people through yourself. That’s the only way you can ever find that, by diving through yourself. But when the mind appears to arise, just ignore it? Of course. Don’t even be concerned with one bit of it. When you’re concerned with your mind, you’re saying it’s real. You’re giving it credit to be real. So it becomes more powerful. And we go in fights. But when you just look at the mind, when you just observe the mind, not giving any credit, not giving any words, giving any thoughts. Just observe the mind, the mind is looking back in a combination of thoughts. The mind is a bunch of thoughts, sorts of the past and sorts of the future. When you just observe the mind and look at the mind without trying to drain into it, it becomes weaker and weaker and weaker, until it disappears in order from typing. Then it goes away and then it comes back.

So nobody has the mind. Find this. There’s a thought. Illusion. Something that comes to you doesn’t really exist. And again, like around the world, there’s a sound. There’s a sound, a silent sound that only you’ll hear. You don’t go deeper, you won’t hear it. Because within yourself, you won’t hear the sound. I don’t even hear a sound like this. Ever since I met you. You know, hopefully you’re finished. Well, it’s a motion. It has to be a sound. What is sound? Sound is vibration, motion. So there’s motion arising somewhere, like superimposed on consciousness, there’s some motion. Go further. Where does the sound come from? Where does the motion come from? Who created the motion? Who created the sound? Where did it come from? It comes out of you. Emptiness. You can’t even mention this. Why can’t you hear this crazy sound? It comes out of your mind. You hear this by dying people soon. When I’m quiet, here does it come. Who hears the sound? Why can’t you sit for the hospital? I am, that’s why I’m here. You’ve got the wrong address. It takes a little time. You can call for others, too. You don’t want to ask them to hear us? Everybody’s insane except the man who’s awake, right? The man who’s awake is more than sane than anybody else. According to human standards. No, according to reality, he’s the only one who’s sane. Everybody else is insane. Same thing, what’s the difference?

Same thing. How does your wife manage to live with you? She doesn’t. We shall please a moment.