– Transcript 91
R: Om, shanti, shanti, shanti, om. Good evening. (Students: Good evening Robert.) I welcome you with all my heart. It’s good being with you again. It’s getting dark earlier.
There are certain things that you should always remember, and that is right identification. You should always be aware that your true nature is consciousness. You are pure unadulterated consciousness. Do not look at yourself as a body. There maybe many reasons that you feel as if you were a body. You may have pain, stress, emotional conflicts, whatever but you must learn to drop that kind of thinking no matter what appears to be going on in your life and realize that you are consciousness, absolute reality.
In other words you must identify with your source. If you identify with your source eventually you become the source. And I’m not speaking of apple sauce. (laughter) If you keep dwelling on your body or your problems and what appears to be real but is not, you simply cause those situations to increase in size and the delusion becomes reality to you. Therefore what seems to appear collectively or individually always remember to remember that you are not the body mind phenomena.
Everything is consciousness. There is only consciousness. In order for consciousness to have knowledge of itself there has to be a form or a body so that consciousness can express itself. Therefore a universal body comes into existence, which is called, “I-am.”
Within this universal body is the entire creation. For when “I-am” is realized creation ensues.
That’s why a Jnani can exclaim, “All this is the Self and I am that! All this implies, the entire universe is within the body of the Sage. When the “I am” wishes to know itself again an individual body comes forth called the personal Self or the I-thought. Then the “I-am” forgets about it’s divine origin, it’s omnipresence and believes it is the personal self.
Then the mortal dream begins. The entire universe becomes externalized and instead of you being omnipresent you believe that you are individual and that the world is outside of you. This is called the mortal dream. You then begin to exclaim, “I am happy, I am sad, I am rich, I am poor, I am this, I am that!” And you create all of these delusions. That keeps you in bondage.
As you appear to go through incarnation after incarnation this way, there comes a time that you begin to ponder to contemplate, to cogitate, you begin to wonder where you came from. And the wise person realizes that the answer is within. The wise person begins to understand that the world which appears to be is a world of constant change. Therefore one cannot find reality in the external world.
So through meditation, through divine remembrance one begins to go backwards, one begins to reverse the entire situation. This is done by beginning to negate the entire universe. You have to get rid of the illusion and you do this by negation. You negate the sky, the moon, the stars, the trees, the earth, you negate God, you negate everything. Then you negate your body and your mind.
After practicing this for many incarnations perhaps, you transcend the body and the mind and become “I am,” once again. You become the universal body. We’re all of creation, everything, everything comes out of your mind, everything is within yourself and you understand that you are like a camera, a moving picture camera. The pictures that are projected as creation is nothing more than emanations of your mind. Everything you understand is a superimposition on yourself. Your body included, your mind included is a superimposition on the Self. When you have reached that point you can be called a Jnani or a Sage.
So how do we get to that point?
There are three types of people who are ready to practice Advaita Vedanta, or atma-vichara or self-realization. The three types of people are the seekers, disciples and the devotees. We have discussed this before but this is a little different. The three types of people are equivalent to the three Guna’s. Tamas, Rajahs and Sattvic.
Tamas means dullness, inertia and this refers to the seeker.
Rajahs is action and this refers to the disciple.
Sattvic means purity and this refers to the devotee.
Now when I say a seeker is dull and that’s the tamas quality, this is from the standpoint of Advaita Vedanta. But a seeker is a very advanced soul compared to the billions of people on this earth who are wandering around in total delusion and they have not as yet become seekers. So a seeker is really an advanced stage. Yet a seeker has a tremendous ego. They run around from teacher to teacher, read tons of books, always looking to find something for themselves. Their concern is only me, me and mine. I want to become enlightened, what can I get in this class, what’s in it for me.
Their attention is on the personal self. They go to one teacher, they hear about another teacher they go to that teacher, they hear about somebody else they go there, but at least they’re seeking. They don’t really go anywhere. They can go through thousands of incarnations. Thousands upon thousands of incarnations as a seeker always looking to themselves. Involved only with themselves. They cannot keep the mind off themselves.
They find fault. They always find something wrong with the class. They compare one class to the next class. One teacher to the next teacher, trying to pull out all of the information they can get from the teacher and couldn’t care less about anything else. Yet if the seeker becomes sincere they evolve to the point where they become a disciple.
A disciple begins to settle down and this is the rajahs quality, action. They begin to act upon what they see. They have an infinity for one teacher and they go to that teacher more than anybody else. They act upon what the teacher says but they’re still external.
They read certain books pertaining to the teachers direction but they’re still not true to the teacher, they’re still interested in themselves but they stay mostly with one teacher. Then if someone real good comes along and they hear the word they go to listen to this other person yet they always come back to the one teacher.
They’re still concerned of themselves. They also become sometimes trouble makers, they gossip a lot, they’re craving excitement. So when things are smooth in the class they look for a way to make a little problem through gossip but they really mean well. If they keep on being sincere they will evolve into a devotee.
Now the devotee has come a long way. The devotee no longer thinks about themselves, they have forgotten about themselves. They don’t even care about becoming self-realized. They have no desire to become liberated. They have no desires whatsoever. They act spontaneously and take one day at a time. They surrender completely to the Sage.
They have no life of their own. They think of the Sage day and night. There is no room in their minds for anything negative.
A devotee never judges. A devotee understands that the Sage is coming from a different consciousness from theirs. So what the Sage does they may not understand too well but they don’t care. The devotees are the people who maintain and sustain the Sage.
They look at the Sage as themselves. What they do for themselves they do for the Sage.
The devotees are the life blood of the Sage and it’s the devotees that become liberated.
In every movement of a high nature. Ramana Maharshi, Rama Krishna, Shankara, many others too numerous to mention, it is only the devotees who become liberated because they don’t care about it. Their personal I is gone. They have surrendered the personal I to the Sage. There is no one left to quarrel. There is no one left to think something is wrong. There is no one left to judge.
Why do I share this with you? Because it’s time that most of you understood this truth and remember it. What are you really here for? You’re here to realize that you are not the body or mind. That you’re absolute reality, that you are pure awareness.
How can you realize this if you have other things in your mind? If you’re thinking about the world and worldly conditions. The world has always been here and the things that the world is going through, it has gone through again and again and again in previous ages.
Everyone’s excited about Russia becoming a capitalistic society as if this really matters in the long run. Things like this have happened thousands of years ago. There have been civilizations on this earth for billions of years that have surpassed where we are now. They’ve all been wiped out.
A person is a fool who becomes involved in the world. Think of these things, what do you really want? What are you really looking for?
What is your true motivation?
You and I both know there are many seekers and disciples who have simply come here to improve their humanhood. When their humanhood is improved that is all they care about and they’re gone. But this is a mystical teaching. This is a teaching of utter delight and harmony. The delight and harmony is your real nature. You are not the phenomenal mind that keeps thinking about these things. Thinking about becoming enlightened will not do it. But surrendering the mind that thinks about becoming enlightened will do it.
There has to be a total surrender of your ego, of your mind, of your body and of your life. The surrender must be to your Self, the real Self. The Self is all pervading and omnipresent. There is only one Self and you are that. Therefore when I speak of surrendering or focusing on the Sage the way devotees do, I’m not speaking of the Sage as a person. Most disciples and seekers always think I’m talking about a person.
The Sage is not a personality. The Sage is omnipresence, absolute reality. The Sage is your true nature. The real Self is the Sage. There is only one Sage, there is not this Sage and that Sage. That’s why when most seekers and disciples talk about various Sages I don’t say anything but I smile. They’re speaking of various Sages as if they are individuals but the word Sage means transcendence, all pervading therefore there is one Sage only.
If you are still seeing the Sage as a human being you will have problems because you will judge the human being according to your standards. You will create the human being in your image. And if the human being Sage does not fulfill your expectations you will be very disappointed and even upset. Whereas if you surrender and let go and stop quarreling and finding fault and believing something is wrong, you will become a devotee and all will go well with you.
The body has absolutely nothing to do with the Sage. Appearances have absolutely nothing to do with the Sage. When I keep using the name Sage I’m speaking of yourself. In other words your I-thought your personal self has absolutely nothing to do with your reality. There is no personal self in reality. There is no doer in reality. There is no one to judge anything in reality. Reality means silence. No thoughts, no evaluation, no trying to understand, there is only a total surrender.
There is no thought or worry about the body. What work it should do. Where it should live. How it should sustain and maintain itself. This has all been worked out for you. When you first imagined that you were a body, even the imagination of the body, the imagination that you are a body has all been preconceived. In other words even the delusion is in your side.
What I’m trying to tell you is you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Nothing to be concerned about. Nothing to react to. Nothing to try to change. Keep yourself still. You will find that your body will do whatever it came here to do. It knows what to do. Your job is to remember that you are not the body. You are not the mind that thinks,
thinks and thinks. You begin to observe your mind thinking. You begin to become the witness to your thoughts. You become the witness to all of your external affairs because you are remembering that all of your external affairs are merely thoughts projected by your mind. When you stop reacting the projection stops and you return to your bliss state.
You have to learn to leave the world alone.
I was talking to a seventy year old man in the park today and he was telling me how he was concerned about the world condition. He’s worried about what,s going on in Russia. He’s worried about the country. I asked him, “How many more years do you think you’ve got left on this earth? What are you doing with your time?” And he said, “I’m trying to improve the world.” And I explained to him that he first has to understand who he is and then see if he wants to improve the world, he didn’t know what I was talking about.
So he walked away from me thinking I was very strange. Of course he was right. (Students laugh) The average person you know doesn’t want anything to do with me. I always seem to say the wrong thing to the average person.
You have to vehemently make up your mind what you’re going to do with the remaining years you’ve got left. If you happen to leave your body tomorrow you’re simply going to continue from where you left off. So if you were a complainer, a troublemaker, finding fault, you will find yourself in a position where you do the same things and it will never end for you. Therefore I say to you, “Forget about everything.” Begin to go backwards into your source. Negate everything. Do not allow any condition to make you feel as if something is wrong somewhere.
Now who has to do these things? The person who believes they are the body. If you can only awaken to the fact that there is no body, there is no universe, there is no God, there is no you, there is no liberation and there is no illusion, you would be home free. But you want to continue playing the game. Why do you want to do this?
Everything I shared with you about consciousness and creation is a lie. It’s only a story to make you keep quiet. So people are always asking me about creation. How did it get here? Why is it here? So we talk about consciousness and how it created everything out of itself. But what is consciousness? Where did it come from? It came from nowhere for it never existed. How can you possibly understand what consciousness is with your finite thinking?
That’s why a devotee doesn’t try to figure these things out. They just give it up. Let go of it. There are no meditation games we have to play. There are no procedures and processes we have to go through. There is no incarnation, there is no karma. There is just nothing.
(tape break)
There is no Fred turning over the tape. (Students laugh)
It doesn’t exist. We think all these things exist and become a slave to them. Think how free you would feel if you weren’t bothered by tape recorders, pencils, by pens, by paper, by thinking of what I’m talking about, just think how free you’d be.
Wake up! Awaken now! That is all you have to do.
When you’re sleeping at night and when you’re in deep sleep, when you have a nightmare or you have a beautiful dream, things are still happening in the beautiful dream as in the nightmare. The only remedy is to awaken. The only remedy for having a dream, bad or a good dream, is to awaken!
If in your dream you meet a yogi and the yogi tells you, “I’m going to teach you a new method of meditation,” and you start practicing the meditation method and the years go by, then you meet a Tibetan Lama who is going to teach you Tibetan Buddhism and you start practicing that and the years go by, then you meet a Zen teacher who teaches you the concepts of Zen, gives you a koan and you sit for hours staring at the blank wall, the years go by.
Were all those things really necessary? All you had to do was to wake up and you wouldn’t have to go through all those hours and years and eons of meditation techniques, various procedures, all you had to do was wake up. You simply had to awaken, that’s all you had to do. But those teachers never told you that. They told you about their procedures and how to hold your breath for twenty minutes and practicing all the siddhas, so you can achieve powers, or you can bury yourself alive for three weeks and still be alive after.
You fall in the trap. You practice all of these things when all you had to do was wake up. You have all kinds of dreams. You’re dreaming your reincarnated and you have a good family then a hurricane comes and kills you and your family and then you’re reincarnated again and this time you’re a Tibetan monk and you die of old age and you’re reincarnated as a street peddler, you go through all kinds of experiencers. It’s all a dream.
So one day you meet a Sage and you ask the Sage, “Sir what is the fastest thing I have to do to become self-realized?” and the Sage says, “Wake up! That’s it!” So you wake up from your dream and you find yourself in this dream. It’s the same thing! This is a dream! And I’m telling you to wake up! Those who understand will awaken now.
(long silence)
Fred (SF): (tape starts abruptly with end of students question) …I’ve had some observations about spiritual matters and one of them it says that through the vedas and the sutras and they reach a point where this life is a living dream. But then it goes on to say, why do I think I am the dreamer and not the dreamed? Comment on that proposition? (R: In truth…) Sir?
R: In truth you are neither the dreamer or the dreamt, you are neither one. (SF: Yeah.) You are beyond the dreamer and beyond the dream.
Fred (SF): And I’ve got a tape of Krishnamurti in which he says, “Do not accept what the speaker is saying. The speaker has no authority whatsoever. He is not a teacher, he is not a guru. For if he is a teacher you are the follower and if you are the follower you destroy yourself and you destroy the teacher.”
R: This is very true, I agree with that. This is why I say, “The Sage is not a person.”
(SF: Thank you.) The devotee is actually an extension of the Sage. But for your own benefit Fred you always quote these beautiful things and they’re beautiful but what about yourself. What do you know yourself. How far have you gone on the path?
Fred (SF): I’ve been thinking about scripture, there is nothing the matter with scripture itself it’s the way it’s interpreted and even then it’s interpreted by the mind and the mind itself is a myth.
R: This is true but what about Fred? Where is Fred coming from? Do you see what I mean? (SF: Yes sir.) The time comes when you have to stand naked before God. That means all the beautiful scripture that you memorized, the beautiful cliches, all of the books, the remembrances of what you read have to be given up and you have to be completely empty. It is only when you’ve emptied yourself entirely that your true nature is revealed. But as long as you’re filled with beautiful cliches, saying of scriptures, memorizations of book passages and those are very good, yet you can only go so far with them.
They come from the mind and the mind is what’s keeping you back from becoming totally free. So the mind has to be completely empty. You have to become a nothing. Then you’ll become something. (SF: Sri Bhagvan said, “Submit to me and I will straighten out the mind.”) This is true but that is what Sri Bhagvan said, but what do you say? (laughter) SF: Okay. (SH: You give up?) Got me right back where I started. (laughter) R: These people say beautiful things and they were beautiful people but as far as we’re concerned they could have all been liars. We don’t know. Perhaps Jesus was the biggest fraud that ever lived. Perhaps Buddha was a liar. Find out for yourself. See if you can come to the same conclusion as they did by becoming your real Self. (SF: Becoming my own authority.) Becoming your Self. Not your own authority as a person but by transcending the personal I and becoming the Self, by just awakening to your Self. Or else I’ll see you here fifty thousand incarnations from now. (laughter) And you’ll still be caught in the scriptures. (SF: I’ve said I’ll forget them but I haven’t been able to.) (laughter) I know Fred how it feels to give up all the stuff you’ve been hanging onto all of these years. For so many years these passages of scripture have been your security blanket and I can see how hard it is to give them up because what will you have then? You will appear to have nothing but nothing is consciousness. Nothing is your real Self. Do not fear giving up something. You come into… (SF: It’s in the mind. In other words, unconsciousness before it becomes conscious again. But that is a mind thought too.) It’s all a mind thought. (SF: All psychological.) Because it is easy to say that consciousness is this before it becomes conscious but what do we really know about consciousness? Why does consciousness become anything? Does consciousness really exist? We have no idea. Find out.
SH: No idea would be valid if you had it?
R: Right. (SH: Why bother?) Don’t bother. (SH: I won’t.) Good. (students laugh) Henry you’re hopeless. (laughs) (SH: I know.) You are a good for nothing. (SH: That’s my true beauty.) Yes it is. (SH: Glad you recognize it.) You are a real good for nothing. (SH: Righton. The most beautiful thing you ever said. (laughter) You see me clearly.) Yes Henry I know you’re good for nothing. (SH: Right on.)
R: Feel free to ask any question you like.
(long silence)
R: Om, shanti, shanti, shanti, om, peace.
Do we have any announcements?
Mary (SM): There are some transcriptions on the table, a bit more coming in on Sunday.
R: There are some transcripts on the table for 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.