– Transcript 97
R: Good evening. Some of you fell asleep before I started talking. You’re supposed to fall asleep when I talk, and not before. (laughter) There are many of us who are still looking for words. They come here looking for a lecture, a talk. This is what they expect. Words have their importance. If you’re a doctor or a lawyer you do a lot of talking. But in true spiritual life most words are fruitless, especially in satsang. Satsang is consciousness, and your true nature is consciousness. Therefore when you come and sit in the lap of consciousness, something begins to happen to you. Your karma, samskaras, become transcended and you become free, just by having the right attitude at satsang.
This means you have to open your heart. You have to have love and compassion.
You should never think what you’re going to get out of satsang. You should only think what you’re going to surrender at satsang. You’re going to surrender your body, your mind, you’re so-called problems, all the things you think about most of the day. At satsang you give them up. You become an empty receptacle so that consciousness can shine forth.
Why do most people want to become self-realized? They have wild ideas what self-realization is. They believe their life will become easy, they’ll never have to work again, they can perform magic rites, have occult powers. As you know, none of this is true.
Self-realization, consciousness, is all pervading absolute reality, pure intelligence. It is a state of knowingness. Not knowing something, but just knowing. End. Not even knowing itself. Just knowing, being. It is a state of bliss, happiness. This is your true nature, total happiness.
You have always been total happiness. There never was a time when you were not total happiness. Yet somehow you got mixed up with Maya, illusion, and you came to believe that you’re a mortal being, separate from everyone else, having to go through experiences to become enlightened. That’s really funny. You left your true nature, got pulled into Maya, and now you’re trying to get out of it.
The truth is, there’s no Maya. There’s nothing to get out of. You are already that, and all is well. We begin to feel that there’s a living presence within us. As we work on that feeling, that living presence turns out to be us. It turns out that we are not the body, or the mind or the doer. We are that living presence. There’s no name for it. It is beyond words and thoughts. But it is there, shining in all it’s glory. You feel the freedom, the love, the joy of it. When you get to that state, the world can no longer hurt you. The world has no longer any effect on you. It cannot show you anything, in order for you to react. You just no longer react to anything. You have become that.
Yet most westerners want to become that living presence without giving up their old beliefs, their conceptual thinking, all this stuff that made them human. They simply want to add self-realization to the top of everything. This is why most westerners never awaken in this life, for they refuse to empty themselves. All of their preconceived ideas, their feelings, they have to be worked on.
That’s why I passed out those booklets today, “At the Feet of the Master.”
Krishnamurti wrote that when he was sixteen years old. It explains to you what you must do. We hit upon this a little last week when we were talking about discrimination and dispassion.
There is something else that is very important for you to understand in order to become self-realized, and that is faith. You have to have faith in something that you yet do not understand. Faith is a powerful tool you use to climb the ladder to self-realization. You have to have faith in yourself, faith in the teaching, faith in the teacher, faith that something wonderful is about to happen to you.
Yet I meet so many people that are so dogmatic, opinionated in their views. They have doubts, suspicions, all kinds of negative symptoms going through them, and they want to become self-realized. It is true you can go a long way with all of your bad habits.
But I say to you, you can never awaken fully until you give them up, and faith helps you to give them up.
There’s a story about Makunda, one of the Rishis, Sages, of old. For some reason he decided to get married. He wanted to have a child. But no matter how he tried, his wife couldn’t conceive. Two years passed, and he said, I’m going to pray to Shiva, one of the Gods.
He prayed to Shiva and he said, “Lord, your will is my will. I don’t really know what’s good for me, or what I really want. But you know what I want in my heart, and if it’s right for me it will happen. If it isn’t, it won’t. But I have total faith in you that whatever happens is your will and it’s good.” He prayed like this for many years. Finally Shiva appeared to him and said, “My son, never have I seen such faith. You forgot all about yourself, about your family, and you just wanted me. So I have appeared to you. Your desire will come to pass. You will have a child, but you must make a choice. You may have a child who is a half idiot and will live a long life, or a child with a fine intellect who will live a short life. You have to choose.”
Makunda said, “1 will choose the latter, the one with the sharp intellect.” And Shiva said, “He will live to be sixteen years old and then he will drop his body.” Makunda accepted and the time came to have the baby, they did.
And at a very young age the intellect of the child was astounding. He was able to memorize all the Vedas when he was five years old. He was able to speak five languages.
He was an astounding poet, writer. As he grew older his father became sadder and sadder.
Finally he asked his father, “Father, what’s wrong? Why do you become so sad every time I have a birthday?” And Makunda explained to him the deal he made with Shiva. “You’ve only to live to be sixteen, and then you must go.
The youth said, “Shiva listened to you. Perhaps he’ll listen to me,” and he started to pray to Shiva every day. “Lord, I am yours, and do with me what you want. I have no desire. I know only that you brought me here, and when your ready you will take me back. Do with me as you will. Your will, not mine, be done. I am yours.” And again he said that prayer every day for a year.
Finally Shiva appeared to him also and said, “My son, you have the faith of your father. When someone prays to me thus, I have no option but to help him. So because of your faith, when you reach the age of sixteen, you will stay at that age forever.”
Now the moral of that story is the faith. Remember, Makunda was very advanced spiritually, and yet he had faith in a power and a presence, that he didn’t see or feel. He surrendered to that power and that presence. That’s what it takes for us to awaken.
This is why people like Ramana Maharshi always said that devotion, faith and self-inquiry are the same thing. You can’t just have dry self-inquiry. You have to feel love.
You have to feel devotion. You have to put God first. Unless you put God first you’re going to just have dry words, and the words will give you a sharp intellect. You will be able to recite all sorts of things, memorize books, hear lectures and remember them, yet you will never really awaken. This is why sometimes Advaita Vedanta can be dangerous to some people. Yet if they really read the books on Advaita Vedanta, they will understand that they have to develop a tremendous faith.
Think of some of the teachers that you know or heard about. Nisargadatta, he always prayed. He realized that he was consciousness. He was self-realized, but at the same time he chanted, he prayed, he had devotion. It sounds like a contradiction. For you may say, “If someone is self-realized and knows himself or herself to be all there is, to whom do they pray?” Try to remember that all spiritual life is a contradiction. It’s a contradiction because words cannot explain it. Even when you are the Self, you can pray to the Self, which is you.
Ramana Maharshi always had chanting at the ashram, prayers, devotional hymns.
These things are very important. Many westerners, who profess to be atheists, come to listen to lectures on Advaita Vedanta, and yet nothing ever happens in their lives. As long as you do not have devotion, faith, love, discrimination, dispassion, it will be very difficult to awaken.
Therefore those of you who become bored with practicing self-inquiry may become very devotional. Surrender everything. Give up your body, your thoughts, all the things that bind you, whatever problems you may believe you have. Surrender them to your favorite deity. You are emptying yourself out as you do this. Do a lot of it. Become humble. Have a tremendous humility. If you can just do that you will become a favorite of God and you’ll not have to search any longer. But of course the choice is always yours.
What are you chasing in life? What are you going after? What are the things that interest you? Whatever you put first in your life, that’s where your heart is. All of the things that have transpired in your life up to now, forget them. Be aware all of the time that there are no mistakes. There is nothing from the past that can interfere with your life if you become devotional and have faith in God. You’ll be automatically protected from anything. And if you have enough faith, you can totally remove all karmic aspects of your life. You can transcend all of karma. You can make life easier for yourself, if you have faith.
There are many people who practice Advaita Vedanta, and some people are here tonight who really do not like to hear these things. They just want to hear me say that you are consciousness. All is well. You are absolute reality. You are really not your body or your mind-phenomena. Yet once they leave this room they turn back into their rotten selves, with all the negatives and all the anger, and all the hurts, and all the suspicions, and all the things that they’ve had inside of them for years.
Some of these people call me. They say, “Robert, I feel so good when I’m with you in class, but when the world gets a hold of me I revert back to my old self.” I always ask them “What practice are you doing?” and they usually answer “I’m trying to practice self-inquiry.” So I say, “Do you have devotion? Do you have compassion? Do you have humility? Do you have dispassion?” and they usually say, “I don’t care about those things. I just want to become self-realized.”
That’s real funny, for self-realization means you have given up all of those things we just mentioned. Self-realization means that you have emptied yourself. You no longer have any fear, anxiety. You’re not that interested about your body. You love God.
How do you love God? By loving everything in the universe, by reconciling yourself with the whole universe. You start with the mineral kingdom, and you want to see if there’s anything in the mineral kingdom that you dislike. When did you kick your car last?
Anything in the mineral kingdom, remember everything is God. God is not a person.
Next you go to the vegetable kingdom, and you consider whether there’s anything in the vegetable kingdom that you dislike, poison ivy, turnips, anything, for everything in the vegetable kingdom is God, and you have to reconcile yourself with that. It doesn’t mean that you have to like turnips or poison ivy, but you’re not to dislike it either. You’re to be neutral. Poison ivy has a purpose. You may not understand it, but there’s a valid reason for everything. Everything has it’s place.
Once you’ve reconciled yourself with the mineral kingdom and the vegetable kingdom, you can go higher to the animal kingdom, and that’s a tricky one, for animals are just a notch away from humans. When I speak of the animal kingdom I’m referring to bugs, insects, everything. It becomes very touchy if you’re a meat eater. Perhaps you’ve never seen what the animals go through before they’re slaughtered. You have to reconcile yourself with the animal kingdom.
Then you go to the human kingdom, and you consider if you’re still carrying old hurts around. Somebody that hurt you and you resent them. You think about these things, and you see that it was all karmic to begin with. No one has ever hurt me. Whatever has happened in my life has been right. And you send thoughts of love and peace to every human being. You forgive everyone. You also forgive yourself for all the things you have done. When you’re able to do this you have come up very high, for you have freed yourself from the consequences of karma.
I know some of you say that I keep talking about karma a lot of times. Yet you have to realize that karma is going to exist for you as a reality as long as you believe you are the body, mind and doer. And most of you believe this even if you say you don’t. If you want to see what I mean, think back from the moment you got out of bed this morning. What did you react to? What made you feel hurt? What didn’t you like? Who offended you? When someone cut in front of you with their car, did you curse at them? This shows you that you still believe you’re a body.
We’ve got to stop using intellect and stop imagining that we are not the body. You are the body-mind as long as you are reacting to life. That’s why I say you have to have humility and faith. It becomes hard for you, you pray to God. This is basic. You can pray to God and say, “Lord, I can’t stop reacting to situations. Intervene for me. Remove all these things that have been keeping me back from going further on the path. Give me the strength to overcome what I have to overcome.” If you pray like this and you have faith, what you call God will always come to your rescue.
I’ve been with you for quite a while now, with most of you. I am not a teacher that goes around the country lecturing. When you hear of somebody who comes along that you haven’t heard of in years, you become enthralled and you say, “I want to go and see that teacher.” And the teacher can tell you all the good stuff, because you’re not going to see him again until next year. He can tell you, “Don’t worry about anything, your absolute reality, you are pure consciousness, you are pure intelligence, total awareness, Sat-Chit-Ananda, Brahman. That’s what you are. Goodbye. I’ll see you next year.” (laughter) And that’s great.
But when you’re at satsang, with a teacher who sees you all the time, we get right to the nitty gritty. We get into areas where it hurts. For if I tell you all these good things all the time and you keep coming back, you’ll start complaining to me that nothing’s happening in your life. This is not a belief system. We’re not to believe anything. We’re to take action and make it happen. And the action is faith and prayer, developing compassion, humility, understanding deep in the recesses of our heart that we are absolute reality, we are consciousness. Yet we still have to do plenty of work to get rid of the concept of the body-mind phenomenon.
Until recently, knowing that you are consciousness and that you are absolute reality was only given to certain students. It was not given to the world, for, as you know, the world abuses these things, as it’s doing right now. There are so many books on Advaita Vedanta, so many teachers that are teaching Advaita, it’s becoming par for the course.
Somebody is always telling me of a new teacher, and people rush to see that teacher.
What you would rather do, is to work on yourself. Forget about teachers and forget about books. But realize where you are coming from. Be honest with yourself. See the stuff that’s coming out of you, the stuff you’ve got to work on to get rid of, and let the chips fall where they may. But be totally honest with yourself.
If you know you’ve got some bad habits, a lot of anger, resentment, inside of you, you can pray to God to get rid of it. And your prayers will be answered. That’s where faith comes in. When you pray to God, have faith that it will be answered. But never pray for things. Always pray that Gods will be done. Gods will is always good will. And at the same time of your prayer, surrender everything. That’s when you can surrender your body, and your mind, and your so called karma, and your bad attitudes. Give it all to God.
When you do this, something very interesting is going to happen.
I met many people in my travels who are bhakta’s, and they told me, “I have such devotion and love for God for so many years. I never read a book on Advaita Vedanta, but all of a sudden I began to ask myself, “Who am I? Who is this I that has all this devotion?
Is the I separate from myself?” And I came to the realization that all of this time I’ve been praying to the one Self, the one reality. But this came to me only because of my devotion, my faith.”
Isn’t this better than reading books about these things, reading dry knowledge, and then becoming a part of the talking school, where you meet with your friends and you talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk, and talk about Advaita Vedanta, the Self, consciousness? What a waste of energy, you simply have to make up your mind what you really want. Do you want dry intellectual knowledge, or do you want to awaken to yourself?
If you want to awaken to yourself, you’ve got to do something about it from where you are right now. And that doesn’t mean you have to start affirming, “I am absolute reality.” You rather have to start negating all of the stuff that is holding you in it’s grips, all of those things like a bad temper, doubts, anger. You have to begin by getting rid of those things and surrendering them to God. Only then will Advaita Vedanta come by itself. But you have to do it.
I realize some of you do not like to hear these things, for you’re saying to yourself, “Prayer? I gave that up a long time ago.” Yes, but where are you now? What have you gained? Have you become free? You probably have more problems now, also, than you ever had before. And even if you do not have any problems, you are still attached to the world, and you go up and down with the stock market, up and down with the way the world is from day to day. If you hear something good, you’re happy. If you hear something sad, you become miserable. You’re stuck in Maya.
This is what you have to work on. This is what you have to do. You have your work before you. Lets see how many of you can begin to do it.
Please feel free to ask questions.
SL: Robert when you say pray, how do you pray? Like, Thy will be done?
R: That is what happens when you come in late. You missed it, we’ve talked about it. You simply pray like this, “Lord there is nothing I desire, there is nothing I need, there is nothing I want except your grace. Teach me the way. Love me, lead me. I surrender to you my body, my problems, my mind, my heart, take it they are yours. Thy will not mine, be done.” Like that.
SL: You didn’t mention karma just then. Is that part of what is predestined? To let it go. To let things happen that is supposed to happen? (R: I can’t hear you too well.) Is that what that part of it is, predestiny? Is letting your body be what it’s supposed to be doing?
R: Forget about predestiny, simply give everything away to God. (SL: How does that…?) Just surrender yourself completely. Surrender everything. Tell God to take away your predestiny. Give everything away until you become nothing.
SL: So that is another approach to self-inquiry? For you said if we do that then it automatically goes into self-inquiry?
R: When you do that for quite a period of time you will begin to realize, who is doing this? And you will see it is I that is doing this. “Who am I?” Automatically you will go into self-inquiry. Yet again some of you will not have to go into self-inquiry. From total surrender you can awaken. For aren’t you giving up everything like in self-inquiry. You are surrendering everything to God, your ideas, your beliefs, everything. And in self-inquiry you also negate everything. You negate the entire universe in self-inquiry. So you see they’re both the same. The idea is just to give everything up. To have no will of your own.
(long silence)
Om shanti, shanti, shanti, peace, peace…
(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.