– Transcript 72
R: It’s good being with you again. I welcome you with all my heart.
Someone in the group asked me to speak about suffering. I don’t know if they want me to tell you how to suffer, or how to get rid of suffering. They said say a few words about suffering.
There are only a few words to say. Who suffers? I know some will say the ego suffers. But that is not true. What is the ego? The ego is the I-thought. This I is only a thought. The I does not exist. Therefore the ego does not exist. So who suffers? Your real nature is absolute reality, consciousness. Who is left over to suffer? Consciousness pervades all. There is not consciousness and something else. There is only consciousness.
Therefore how can you suffer? What you mean by suffering is that the world is not turning the way you want. Things are not going your way. Does an animal suffer? Even when an animal is sick or dies it is just an experience in consciousness. So no one suffers. We have all been brainwashed from an early age to believe that certain things make us happy, and other things make us suffer. It is the belief, like hypnosis, that makes you think you are going to suffer.
If you think you are suffering because you are dying, that is a mistake. Nobody dies. There is no such thing as death. There is only eternal life, and you are that. Therefore, suffering does not exist. It never existed and it cannot exist. If you live in the now, and you are spontaneous, and you do not react to conditions, how can you suffer? It is only when you react to conditions that come your way that you suffer. As long as you believe you are the body you will have to deal with conditions. When you realize you are not the doer, you are not the body, you are not the mind, there is no one left to suffer, there is no one left to be unhappy. Consequently, you have to identify with reality, and then lose your identity in reality. Then you will never suffer.
As long as you believe you are the body, then the world is also real, the universe is also real, and God is also real. Then you have to pray to overcome your suffering. If you pray correctly, God may have mercy upon you and take away your suffering. But what kind of God is that? If God can take suffering away, he can give suffering. A God like that does not exist.
God, guru and Self are one. You are that yourself. If you cannot accept this you have to deal with the world. Dealing with the world always leads to so-called suffering.
That is how it appears.
The I-thought has made you believe there is an ego, a mind, a body, a world, a universe and a God. You have to put up with all those things because you didn’t follow the I-thought back to the heart. Do you see that? You won’t follow the I-thought back to your heart center. If you do not trace the I, you will always suffer. The I identifies with worldly phenomena.
When you are suffering, you will look for someone to relieve you of suffering. So you look for a guru, or a healer, or someone who will take away your misery. But if you take this approach, when one misery is taken away, another ensues. There is no end to it.
Samskaras from past lives will attack you. All kinds of things will attack you from all directions. You will never know what will happen next. If you try to alleviate suffering, you are doing the wrong thing, because you are trying to alleviate something that never existed! You are creating the problem situations.
It Is as if you had a tumor on you arm, and the doctor, instead of looking for the cause, cuts out the tumor. Next month it grows back on your other arm. Then the doctor cuts off your arm. It grows on your leg. The doctor cuts off your leg. It grows on your head. And you are no more. The doctor did you a favor.
That’s how it is when you look to alleviate your problems. You are playing games.
It is all part of the great Leela, the Maya. You become entangled with Maya, playing games with yourself. How should we go about it? We should ignore the pain, the suffering, the problems. Don’t deal with them directly. Rather, search for the Self, which is what you really are. When the Self is uncovered, so-called problems and suffering will no longer be there. You can’t have the Self, which is all pervading, and problems. There is no room for both. There is either one or the other. You either identify with pain, suffering and illusion, trying to control things through external channels, or you forget about those things and turn within, diving deep into your heart center where there is peace. The choice is yours.
The choice is always yours.
When we hear about healers, such as Jesus or others, we never know what happened to these people after they were healed. How long did they stay healed? From what I understand, after a couple of months, they became worse. Healing is kindergarten activity.
Everyone wants to be healed from something. Why? We think we cannot put up with it.
We think it is unbearable. Who thinks it is unbearable? What you really have to do is get rid of the thinker, not the problem, but the thinker!
You have be trained from childhood to believe that certain things are unbearable, and unless your life goes a certain way, nothing is right. Think for a moment what would happen if a child were brought up to believe that cancer is good, that it is a blessing. Strive for it. Try to get cancer. If a child believed this it would never suffer, even if it attracted cancer. The mind has ruled out suffering.
So it is with all your pains and problems. They are mental things that seem to be attached to your body. But there is no one who really suffers. When all is said and done, you will still be functioning, without a body or with a body, it makes no difference, and you will be free.
In the meanwhile, you are wasting you energy if you try to alleviate your problems. By your activities you are saying to yourself that the problems really exist. Therefore you have to find a way to get rid of them. Realize that the problem is a figment of your imagination, even though it appears real.
If you think of it as a dream and in it you are dying of cancer and I tell you, “You don’t have cancer, you are dreaming about this. Do not identify with the cancer, identify with consciousness, with the Self. Wake up to reality.” You tell me, “You’re crazy Robert!
Look at the tumors on my body. The doctor told me I have five days to live, and you are trying to tell me I am going to be well?” I say, “I am not telling you, you are going to be well. I’m telling you, you are going to wake up. When you wake up, there is no such thing as being well or being sick.” But you don’t understand what I say to you, and you go to different doctors, taking colonics, going to healers all over the world. What you should be doing is searching for the Self. Then you wake up. It was all a dream. The cancer did not exist. The searching for relief did not exist. The doctors did not exist. I did not exist. You are free.
So it is with your life now. Whatever is happening in your life comes from your mind. Your mind has created the external world, just as in a dream, where the dream is going on within you, and yet it appears external to you. You may ask, “How can the whole world that I am dreaming about be within myself? How can I create the dream?” Yet, you know you do. You won’t argue about that.
But when I tell you that you are creating the world as it appears within your mind, you are ready to argue with me, saying, “How can I possibly do that? I cannot do that, the world is there. I see it!” When you are dreaming, don’t you also see the world?
You see the world just like you do now. You have experiences of it just like you do now.
There is no beginning to your dream and there is no end, is there? You don’t begin your dream with Adam and Eve. You just begin dreaming. So it is with this dream. You have attached yourself to an illusion. The world appears real. You make the illusion greater and greater every time you identify with it. Every time you attach yourself to a person, place or thing in an emotional way, you are really saying the world is real. The world becomes more real and you will feel it’s problems to a greater extent because you have become dogmatic in your views. No one can tell you the world is not real.
You say, “I see the world there!” I always point out you see your dream also. There it is! You respond, “But I wake up from a dream, but I don’t wake up from this dream.”
Who says you don’t? This dream just appears to be a little longer. Yet you can awaken before you leave the body, so-to-speak, simply by identifying with the Self, by becoming the Self, by realizing that you were never anything else than Sat-Chit-Ananda, Brahman, pure awareness, emptiness. This is your real nature.
So what do we do? We leave the world alone. We inquiry within, “To whom has this come? To whom has this illusion come?” That is what you must do with every problem, with every tummy-ache, with every unhappiness and with everything you see in this world. In other words, who sees this? Who is experiencing this? Of course the answer is, “I am.” I am. Who is this I? Who is the I that experiences this illusion? Where did the I come from? Who gave it birth? What is it’s source?
The word source is important. The I has a source. It didn’t come from nowhere. In reality it does not exist. The I is a thought. As you trace it back, you will trace it back to the heart center on the right side of the chest. That is the abode of the Self. It appears as if the I arises from the abode of the Self. That is how it appears. Try to catch it.
You will begin to realize that in deep sleep there is no I. What happened to the I when you are in deep sleep? There is no one to say, “l am asleep.” Where did it go? Yet when you awaken you say, “I slept. ” Where did the I come from?
If you watch it when you wake in the morning, you will notice the I comes out of your chest, and goes to your brain. Then it identifies with the body and the mind. Then the world comes into existence. You then say, “I see the world. I am my body. I am my mind.”
When you go to sleep at night, just before you fall asleep, you will notice that the I becomes weaker and weaker. It loses it’s power because it is returning to the heart center from whence it came. Then you sleep.
But what would happen if you didn’t fall asleep and the I returned anyway?
What would happen then? You would be pure consciousness. You would be like the chalk board on which images are drawn and erased. The chalk board never changes. The images change. If you allowed the I-thought to sink into the chest, into the spiritual center, you would awaken to reality. You would be liberated. You would be awake. That is the real awakening.
This happens by inquiring, “Who am I?” When you inquire, “Who am I?” or “What is the source of the I?” it is like following the I-thread back to it’s source. You awaken without going to sleep. When you awaken to consciousness you are in a new dimension of life after sleeping, dreaming and normal awakening. This is called the fourth state of consciousness. In that state you are in samadhi all the time. Not nirvikalpa samadhi, but sahaja samadhi, which means you are continuously awake. In nirvikalpa samadhi you have to meditate for years before you reach it. As long as you are in samadhi you feel happy and blissful. But when you come out, you are a normal human being, so-to-speak, and you partake of the world and all it’s fantasies. When you are in sahaja samadhi, there is no longer any meditation, there is no going or coming. You rest in that state permanently. You appear to be a normal human being, but you are like the chalk board. The whole universe, people, places and things, are superimposed on consciousness, which is yourself. You are home free.
You have to choose. You have that freedom, to react to the world and try to solve problems in a worldly manner, or to go within. Solving problems cannot be done. Historically, no one has ever been able to solve their problems. They appear to succeed for awhile, but new problems always arise, like the tumor on your arm. You cut it out and
another grows back. You get rid of one problem and you find yourself involved In a new set of problems. It never ends.
Self-inquiry is a way to recognize that you are not the body, the dreamer, the mind nor the world. You have nothing to do with this universe. Yet you appear normal, like everyone else. Everything is attached to the I-thought. Get rid of the I and everything else will go with it.
So how do I stop suffering? Realize that no one suffers. Suffering is in the imagination. When the imagination is transcended, there is peace and harmony. The way to attain this, is to question yourself, “To whom does it come?” Follow it through. Do not work on your problems, do not try to solve them. Do not even think about them. If you start thinking, catch yourself. The mind has to become quiescent. When there is a quiet mind, no one suffers. There is no room for suffering. Where the mind identifies with the body and world, suffering increases.
You know what you have to do, now do it.
(chanting.)
You must have a lot of questions, so go ahead and ask.
Student: You seem to equate suffering and pain. But help me understand this if you will.
An animal in a trap feels pain and tries to escape. It doesn’t appear to be just an experience in consciousness?
R: An animal feels pain just like we do, but they don’t have the emotions we have when we feel pain. Therefore they feel the pain. It is an experience. When we feel pain we imagine all kinds of things, such as of death or of surgeons cutting us up, which is what causes the problem. If you were able to feel pain without thinking, the pain would not be intense, no matter what it is. Even if your arm were being cut off, you would feel it, but not intensely. The intensity comes from the mind. The mind has built associations with emotions from a very early age.
S: What about a baby, it wouldn’t have built associations.
R: A baby doesn’t suffer, it feels pain. We feel it more intensely because we have a mind, so-to-speak, that thinks about it. If the mind did not think about the pain you’d sail right through it, even if you died. You’d go right through the pain. This is why some people, like Ramana Maharshi, could have his tumor operated on without any anesthetic. He would say, “I feel a little pain,” but it wouldn’t bother him that much. So pain can be felt, but not as acutely as we feel it as human beings. It is the mind that causes all these problems.
S: If the Self is the only things that exists, there can’t be any volition or choice.
R: Correct. Volition and choice are for the ego. (S: Which is imagination.) Yes. Everything is preordained. Everything happens the way it is supposed to. It appears that only choice we have is to turn within and to not react to anything. That is the appearance. That is what a human being can do. When they turn within, they awaken to their Self. When they are their Self, there is no volition, no choice. There is just all pervading beingness.
S: How can there be choice to turn within, but no volition otherwise?
R: Because choice is at a human level. At the other level you are awake and there is no one to choose. To have choice, you have to have an I. When the I is eliminated, there is no one left to choose and you are free.
S: You are saying there is no choice because, in reality, only one exists and the individual, with individual actions and decisions, doesn’t exist.
R: It is like the water in a mirage. The water appears to exist, but on close investigation, you find it doesn’t exist. The body and mind appear to exist. However, if you investigate by practicing self-inquiry, you will discover that the body and the mind never existed. As in a dream, it appears to be, but upon awakening you realize it never existed.
(S: The body never existed?) No. It was never born, it can never die. (S: The body?) Yes. It doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as a body. You can come over here an pinch me, and I will say, “Ow,” but you can also do the same thing in a dream, a dream pinch. Then you wake up.
S: Robert, I want to spend time meditating and being with spiritual people, but the world just keeps grabbing me and makes me focus on this and that, and I don’t want to deal with anything. How do I get out of this trap?
R: Watch your mind thinking. Become the witness to your thoughts and ask, “To whom do these thoughts come?” Then watch what your mind does. Become aware of your thinking processes. Every time the mind brings the world into existence for you, ask yourself the question, “Who is doing this? Who makes me think this way? Who is attaching me to the world?” The answer is always I. Then one day you will realize that all you have to do is get rid of the I. The I is the culprit. Do not allow the mind to dwell on things. When the mind turns, stop it by asking, “To who does this come?” Always you will come to the I.
As soon as you get rid of the I, you will be free.
S: You have said that there is no past, but things seem to have continuity, a cause and effect relation. Is this also a dream?
R: Duality is a mental concept. When the mind draws itself inward and becomes the Self, there is only ultimate oneness. As long as the mind is active, there will be duality, past and future. Make the mind one pointed, through chanting, meditation, pranayama, whatever. When it becomes one-pointed, you pull it in by inquiring, “To whom does this come?” The mind will go inward, deeper and deeper into the Self. (S: Even old concepts, such as yin and yang or divine balance…) All are duality. All systems are part of the mind. (S: Until we awaken, aren’t we governed by these dualistic concepts and forces?) Only if you believe you are. Until you are awakened do not think that anything governs you. Just ask, “To whom does it come?” Do not think you are stuck in Maya and it is difficult to get out. Ask, “Who is stuck in Maya?”
S: What is the next step in the sequence after asking, “To who does this come? It comes to me. Who am I?’ What’s next?
R: The way you are saying it sounds like you are disgusted with the whole thing.
You have to have a little more emotion than that. (S: Asking, “Who am I?” is to establish the mind in silence?) Yes. (S: The mind doesn’t want to accept that.) Then you have to inquire, “What mind does not accept this. Where did it comes from? It came from I.” Do this again and again and again. (S: This seems like a very intense activity.) Nooo…, do it in a comical way. Laugh, make a game out of It. Don’t take it too seriously.
S: Didn’t Ramana say inquiry was an intense activity?
R: He might have said that, but it is not that intense. He might have felt intense when he said it.
Just do it in a calm peaceful way, as if you know what you were doing. No matter how many times the thoughts come back, no matter how many times the world closes in on you, go back to asking, “To whom does it come?” All these practices help tremendously, even if you don’t know It. There is more going on within you than you can ever know. Just keep the practices up, something will happen, it has to.
S: Why is it that certain Jnanis have nothing to do with money, while others, like Ramesh Balsekar and Jean Klein have large organizations? What is the reason other Jnanis have nothing to do with money, workshops, publishing books, selling tapes and have no organization to support them?
R: What does the word Jnani mean? It means absolute wisdom. One who is established in Jnana has transcended the I. If there is no I or no ego left, then why would they go out of their way to do workshops, to travel all over the world. There has to be some ego left who wants to do these workshops. The I must want to travel.
S: Couldn’t it just be compassion for seekers?
R: The Jnani is compassion itself, and the Jnani is omnipresent. So if a person is in China, and thinks of a Jnani, they are saved. Therefore the Jnani doesn’t have to go anywhere. The Jnani is all pervading. There is no one to go anywhere or to do anything. I never started this class. I never wanted to do this. It just grew and happened. So I am here.
It makes no difference to me if one person comes, no one comes, or if ten people come. But if more than fifty people come, I’ll act stupid, and they won’t come back.
S: Why?
R: Because the masses are a joke. The masses are seekers. They go from guru to guru, and they never get anywhere because they don’t follow one procedure. Having one procedure, one guru, or your Self, is like having a magnifying glass. Sunshine is everywhere, but with a magnifying glass you can concentrate sunlight and start a fire. Having many gurus is like dissipating the sunshine, it becomes many, and it becomes weak. One guru concentrates it and becomes very powerful. A true Jnani has no ego, no I, no ambition, no desires, belongs to no one, and is totally free.S: When Paramahansa Yogananda came to the United States to teach and go before great audiences, was that ego?
R: I do not discuss other gurus. (S: That sounds like a yes.) That’s what you say, I didn’t say that. I never discuss other people. You have to come to your own conclusions.
(S: Why do you limit the number of people who come here to fifty people?) Because I don’t need it.
It’s a bummer. Just think if we had twenty five more people how many more questions they would ask me. We’d be sitting here all night and all day answering questions. If it happened by itself, and it happened in the right way, it might work out. But, they wouldn’t fit in here anyway.
S: Back to the question about money. Why is it that some gurus elevate themselves and charge a good deal of money, and charge $400.00 for a weekend intensive for esoteric knowledge, and others do not charge? Does the money just come?
R: OK, O.K, we can talk about this a little. Every teacher should be supported. For some teachers it is the only income they have. There is nothing wrong with supporting the teacher, but that should be done in silence. Those who understand will always take care of the teacher.
When it comes to advertising, when it comes to expansion and having ashrams all over the world, that is a different story. The more you organize, the more money you need to make the organization grow, and the focus is on growing. It is like having church buildings. You are always adding new or bigger buildings, and the guru has to have a Rolls Royce. It gets out of hand.
Your heart should tell you what is right. The Rishis of old never charged for anything. There should be no charge for truth. Truth is free. As far as intensives are concerned, most of the Indian teachers laugh at westerners, because most westerners believe that if they have a three day intensive they will become self-realized. It doesn’t work like that. So there are intensives where you are charged four, five, six or seven hundred dollars, and everybody runs to them and nothing happens. I have no more comment on those things.
Your heart has to be your guide. If you are sincere, you will know where to go and what to do. If you are working out of your ego, you will find fault with everything.
Ask yourself for those answers. I can tell you this much, everyone is in their right place.
There are no mistakes. None have been made, none are being made. Those people who are with certain gurus belong right where they are, for the time being. Turn within and your heart will tell you where to go.
S: Isn’t inquiry a form of seeking, indicative of an ego?
R: You have to use your ego to destroy your ego. You use your mind to destroy your mind. In the beginning the mind is very powerful. As you inquire, the mind becomes weaker and weaker until it disappears. (S: Then there is no seeking after a certain point?) All seeking stops. (S: Why can’t we do that at the beginning?) You can, why don’t you?
(tape ends)
Absätze ohne Sprecherpräfix gehören dem zuletzt genannten Sprecher — so steht es im Buch, wo der Präfix nur den Anfang einer Rede markiert. Die Zuordnung ist eine Folgerung dieser Ausgabe. Namen in Klammern sind aus dem Text erschlossen: sicher belegt sind SM = Mary, SF = Fred, SJ = Jay, SC = Nate, wahrscheinlich SG = Glen, SR = Jorge. Alle anderen Kürzel bleiben stehen, weil der Beleg nicht trägt.