– Transcript 135
R: Good afternoon. (Good afternoon Robert.) It is wonderful to be with you again. Is it really wonderful to be with you again? Sometimes I wonder. (students laugh) But here I am. Like it or not. On this auspicious occasion. Is this an auspicious occasion?
Sure it is. Why not?
SH: Why?
R: Because. (SH: We can go around in circles here, can we? Go on with your talk.) (laughter) Just for that I’m going to keep quiet. (SH: That’s great! That’s better! Finally silence at last.) Throw him out. (laughter) For the new people here today, God help you. (laughter) Always try to remember that I am not a guru. I am not a teacher. I am not a yogi. I am a nothing. I am not looking for name or fame. I do not want to go on TV or write books or go on the radio. There is nobody left to want to do these things. There is absolutely nothing I want. And because I do not desire anything from you, I can say what I want. I can insult you. I can do anything because I don’t want anything from you. But all is well.
It is the ego that keeps you in bondage. It is the ego that makes you believe you are what you are. It is the ego that causes all the problems to come into your life. The ego is your worst enemy. Therefore you have to do everything in life that you can do to annihilate the ego. The ego must be annihilated, totally removed, totally destroyed.
The ego is like the uninvited guest that comes to the wedding party. Perhaps you have heard this story before. There is a wedding reception going on in a beautiful home.
Everybody is totally blissful and happy and cheerful. There is singing, there is dancing, there is merriment, there is music. An uninvited guest comes into the party and tells everybody that he is a friend of the bridegrooms father. And he starts taking control of the wedding reception. He tells the waiters where to put the food. He tells the musicians what songs to play. He wants to sit everybody in certain places. He gets drunk, he drinks, he eats. The brides father becomes suspicious and inquires to the bridegrooms father and inquires and says, “Who is this person? How did he get here? Where did he come from?
What’s his status? Who invited him?” The uninvited one heard this going on and he started to slowly move away, until he was out the door and gone forever.
The wedding reception is the Self, absolute reality. The uninvited guest is the ego.
That comes along and tells you, “You are this and you are that and you need this and you are that and you need that.” The ego that tells you all of these things, what to do, how to live.When you sleep at night the ego resides in the heart center in the Self where it can give you no trouble. But as soon as you wake up in the morning the ego jumps from the heart to the brain and you become cognizant of the body. You say, “I am the body,” or “I am a man, I am a woman, I am sick, I am happy, I am hungry, I have to go to work,” not realizing that the I am that you’re talking about is pure awareness, absolute reality. But believing the I am is individualized.
You say, “I am this. I am that. I am an Albanian looking for my cow.” You believe all the things that you are what you really are not. This is the ego. If the ego were not present you would be a delightful being. You would be so happy, so blissful, always. You would not look for outside stimuli. You would not need anything in this world to make you happy, for happiness would be your nature.
It is the ego that tries to tell you are happy only when something good happens to you from outside, if you acquire a new home, a lot of money in the bank, or if you acquire possessions, cars, that will make you very happy. And it is true you are happy for a while.
But then this changes. You get used to this situation, you therefore need new things. You need new people in your life. You need new playmates, new toys.
Therefore since the beginning of time there have been those beings in this world who have understood this. There was nothing special about these beings. It is we who have not had realization that gives them names like Sages and Saints, teachers of wisdom.
Yet these Sages, these Saints so-called are simple people. Who have only realized the truth.
The truth that the ego is not you. The body is not yours. The mind is not yours. Your true nature is absolute reality, Sat-Chit-Ananda, nirvana. This is what you really are. Yet you appear to be a body functioning in this world. Like everyone else. This only happens because you believe you are a body.
When you wake up in the morning and you say, “I am the body,” then there are also other bodies. For when there is one body there are millions of bodies. When the idea of being the body disappears then there is only one, that one is Brahman, the pure awareness and that one is the chalkboard where all the images of this world are put on the chalkboard. Erased and more images put on the chalkboard. Erased and more images are put on the chalkboard. The images come and go the chalkboard stays.
The chalkboard is the Self, the absolute reality. The images are all the people. The planets the trees. The ego. The ego creates all the images. And you believe they’re real. So you react to them. You try to fight them, you try to change them, you do all kinds of things in this world. And you waste your energy by trying to change conditions. The conditions as most of you know are actually part of the individual self. Not the real Self, the individual self. Which is nothing but an I-thought. You no longer change conditions, you change yourself by inquiring where the I-thought comes from. Trying to understand the I-thought when you say, “I, I, I, I,” is the whole problem. “I am this and I am that,” that’s your problem, not the conditions of this world. You have absolutely nothing to do with this world.
What we call God knows how to take care of this world without our help.
Therefore you do not need to try to bring peace to this world. Try to solve the riddle of wars and man’s inhumanity to man. What you do is solve the riddle of yourself.
You try to understand who you are. What you’re doing here? Where you came from? What is your objective? Who are you?
You’re not who you think you are. For someone gave you a name when you were born and they told you were a girl or a boy. It’s all words but who are you really. Where did you come from? They could have called you a dog. (Some people still call you a dog, I guess.) They could have called you a cat, a leaf, a saucer and you would have answered to that. But you were born, they gave you a name and called you a girl or a boy. It is we who put labels on everything. It is we who label the entire universe. It is we who say things are good and things are bad and things are this way and things are that way. We do all of this.
Is it any wonder that we suffer? Nothing is real. Nothing is the way that it appears.
The beginning of wisdom is when you plead divine ignorance. When you begin to see that you do not understand anything in this world. You have no idea what anything is.
They’re just born into this world and they give it names and you have accepted this.
The time comes in certain peoples lives when they do not wish to accept this any longer. They want to find out the truth. Who am I really? Who am I? I cannot possibly be this body because it changes, changes constantly. Look at yourself you are not the same person you were ten years ago or twenty years ago. You’re not even permanent. You were born to die. There is no question about this. As soon as you’re born you begin dying. This is true of everything. Animals, vegetables, minerals, with the appearance of anything on this earth it goes towards death, towards disappearance.
So what is this truth? There really is no truth. For when you speak of a truth you’re speaking of something that somebody told you. Something you read in a book. But if you had a direct experience of the truth. Have you understood for yourself what you really are? Or have you just accepted what the world has told you?
You have to grow up sometime. And growing up means giving up attachment to person, place or thing. I’m not saying giving up friendship, I’m saying giving up attachment. Letting go of all the things that you have memorized. All of the things that you have learnt in school. All of the things you have learnt in church. To be totally free everything has to go. You cannot hold onto one thing.
A good example of this is when Ramana Maharshi arrived in Tiruvannamalai.
When he was 17 years old. He threw away the last bit of money he owned, took off all of his clothes and started a new life. Of course I wouldn’t suggest that you walk down the street and drop all your clothes and say, “I’ve come to know God.” They’ll put you in the funny farm. Yet you do these things mentally. Everything is done mentally. You mentally give up attachments. You mentally give up possessions. You mentally give up good and bad. And you allow whatever happens to happen.
This is a point that most of us are a little confused. When I say, “You allow whatever is to happen, will happen,” what I’m talking about is simply this. There is something that takes care of this entire universe in the right way without any help from you. You therefore do not have to take care of your body. What appears as your body will take care of itself. I know this sounds strange to some of you because you still believe that unless you take care of yourself, you will never be able to take care of yourself unless you do it yourself. But this is not the ultimate truth.
The ultimate truth is, the same power that knows how to grow oranges on an orange tree, knows how to grow wheat, knows how to grow mangoes and roses and flowers and everything else, knows how to take care of what you call your body, without any help from you. You simply interfere for you are the ego it appears. And it’s the ego who tells yourself how you’re supposed to live and what you’re supposed to do, whom you’re supposed to be with, so forth and so on.
If you will only surrender yourself. If you would only surrender your body, surrender your fears, surrender your nose, surrender everything then the current which knows the way will become activated and you will find that you’re doing beautiful things on this earth. You will find that you’re well taken care of.
It also sounds sort of strange when I tell you if you have a disease, if you have physical problems, if you have problems of lack or limitation. Do not attempt to correct these things. Whatever problem you may think you have do not attempt to correct these things at all. Become the witness to the whole play of consciousness. Merely watch, observe, look intelligently at everything that appears. Whether it’s in your body or in the world or in the universe or wherever.
When you surrender like this something will give way and lead you where you’re supposed to be at this present time of your incarnation going through the experiences that you came here to go through. As you begin to trust and have faith in the powers that be you find that you’re becoming happier and happier and happier. Fears begin to leave you, anxiety, tension begin to disappear. For you no longer have anything in this world to rely on. Yet you are functioning, things are happening and you’re at peace.
(short pause)
Notice how the thoughts come to you when I stop talking. You begin to think. All of these years you have believed in your thoughts. Whenever there is silence, whenever there is quietness thoughts begin to do their work. Watch.
(short pause)
You see what I mean. The thoughts are telling you things. What are these thoughts? They’re experiences of the past. That is all the thoughts are. And worries of the future. The thoughts are not your friend. You must grab them when you begin and choke them to death. You can do this by inquiring, “To whom do these thoughts come? The thoughts come to me. I think these thoughts. Well, if I think these thoughts what is the source of the I? Who am I?” And keep still or you become the witness and observe all your thoughts going on in your mind.
Actually when I say your mind it’s a misnomer because the thoughts are your mind. There are no thoughts and the mind, there are only thoughts as the mind.
Most people are totally controlled by their thoughts. Watch the way you react and see if I’m not right. Every-time you react to person, place, or thing you’re doing so because your thoughts are telling you something, are they not? Your thoughts are telling you I’ve been insulted. I have been hurt. Something has been taken away from me. Something is not right. Something is doing this and something is doing that. It is your thoughts that tell you this.
If you weren’t able to think, again you would be totally happy. You would be blissful. For the nature, the substratum of everything is total happiness, total bliss.
It is your thoughts that cause you confusion and problems. Make you miserable, make you want to change things. You should be able to stay in one place forever. Without any desire to go any place or do anything.
You may say, “That’s not fun, that’s boring.” For whom is it boring? For your thoughts. It is your thoughts that tell you, you’ll be bored unless you go here, unless you do this unless you do that. Your thoughts tell you this. But I can perfectly assure you that if you didn’t have any thoughts you would be the entire universe. Therefore there would be no place to go. You would become all pervading, omnipresent. The whole universe would be in you and you would be in the entire universe.
Consequently there’s nothing you have to do. There is no place you have to go.
For the happiness that most people are trying to achieve by running all over the place you already are, you already have, it’s you. You’re at peace with yourself and peace with the world.
Your job is to stop thinking. To remove the thoughts. The thoughts are your Master now. That make you feel sad or happy, good or bad. Why do you feel this way? For your thoughts since you were a little kid have been impressed by the world conditions, by your parents, by your school, by your church and they have convinced you and programmed you to believe this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong. Only when you have this are you successful. If you don’t have certain things you are a failure. It is the thoughts that tell you these things. Again if there are no thoughts there is no one left to tell you anything. This is called liberation, moksha, freedom.
You begin where you are now. You begin with yourself. You question yourself. You inquire, “Who am I?” You sit in the silence. If thoughts come you inquire, “To whom do they come? You become still.” You try not to get involved with people who talk too much.
You live in the moment, in the present. You forget about yesterday, last week, last year, dead wood! Doesn’t exist. You do not worry or think about tomorrow. For what you are today will become your tomorrow. You make your life simple. By not getting involved with too many things and you watch, you observe, you look but you do not react. As you keep this up one day everything will just explode into light. And you will find peace, joy, total bliss and total happiness. Unfortunately most people have to be kicked around by life a good deal before they decide that life is not for them. Unfortunately most of us have to go through many experiences before we’re willing to try something else.
Most of you came in here today to listen to a talk, to listen to a lecture and then when I’m finished and you go home you continue in your lifestyle that you’ve always had.
It is this lifestyle that has to be surrendered. It is what you believe you are that has to be surrendered. The idea that you are young or you are old, that you are poor, that you are rich, that you are healthy, that you are sick all of these things have to go.
You try your best to keep from thinking. You follow your breath. You become cognizant of yourself. You become mindful of all of your experiences of everything that goes on in your life. You’re doing something. You’re not just allowing the vicissitudes of life to hit you square in the face and cause you to react any longer. What does it matter what’s going on? Leave it alone do not fight it, for this too shall pass.
(short silence)
It is that time again to play stump the guru. We have questions, and I have to get prepared for this let me take my jacket off.
Q: (Robert reads) How is it that we have to be attune with you from 6am to 9am and 12 to 2am? What if we are at work between 6 and 9 and normally sleeping between 12 and 2?
A: (Robert answers) That’s your tough luck. (students laugh) SB: Then we’re doomed. (SF: Is it 12 and 2?)
R: It’s 12 and 3am. (Robert continues his answer to student) It means you’ll come back twenty thousand more incarnations… (laughter) (SH: Scare the hell out of him.) …until you’re ready to sit still. And stop sleeping so much. (laughter) SD: What is the origin of those times Robert?
R: There is no origin. Just something I’m doing. (laughter) We always want origins.
It’s better to want oranges. (laughter) So it’s advantageous to sit in the morning between 6
and 9 and the wee hours of the morning between 12 and 3. For some strange reason I sit at those times. I don’t do anything I just sit. Just like I’m sitting here. Therefore if you wish to sit at that time, you can say it’s like a radio. You tune into the proper channel and you get a clear sound. So people tell me that when they sit with me like this clarity comes to them.
Then they’re able to understand things. So if you wish to do this be my guest. If you don’t a thousand curses on you. (students laugh)
Mary (SM): Robert that was the only question.
R: That is the only question, good. I’m sure we have more questions that you’d like to ask. Things you’d like to say. Songs you’d like to sing. Speeches you’d like to make. Feel free to do so. (SE: All at once?) Sure. (Robert has a drink) Is this prune juice? Tastes like prune juice. (pause) So what’s cookin’.
SH: The ego. (R: Boil it!)
SD: I have a question Robert, if one were unable for whatever reason to sit with you at those times that should not preclude their sitting in meditation at other times should it? (R: No.) I mean they still have the opportunity to sit in the silence other hours?
R: That is up to them, of course. You can do whatever you like with your body.
You can sit, you can lie down. You can run around the block. You can do whatever you like. (SD: But I’m referring more to - isn’t there a value to sitting in meditation or in silence regardless of the time.) Of course. There is always value when you sit by yourself and you leave the world alone.
Glen (SG): Robert you were saying the other night about dropping it. Things started to speed up, all through what we’re doing and what I noticed myself is this feeling things are getting away from me because, since I’m getting involved in things, and getting involved in more movement the mind starts moving faster. At those particular times I suppose this demands the command, “Drop it!”
What happens if it seems futile at that particular time? That’s when the most is at stake.
R: Umm, just make the statement “drop it!” and forget about everything. Do not think what you are thinking. Do not allow yourself to have those thoughts. When the thoughts come, when you feel futile say, “Drop it!” If you make the statement as an exclamation, just say, “Drop it!” Something will happen to you, you will feel a peace, you will feel radiance. You will feel free.
But don’t do like a mimsy-wimsy and say, “Drop it.” (laughter) Say, “Drop It!” That means everything can go to hell. The whole world, the whole universe, everything. All my problems. All my fears. You have dropped it, it’s finished, it’s gone. It’s like what I did one Thursday night I said, “Wake up!” Same thing. You are dropping all your theories, all of your knowledge, everything. You drop it and let it go. But do not analyze it. Do not think about it. Do not put it in certain category.
Glen (SG): Well when you see nothing happening and totally regard it as a dream but what I’m wondering is when you do that and you’re regarding it as a dream fails, you’re regarding it as unreality. But it is my understanding that there really can be no opposite to reality. There is no such thing as unreality. There is simply reality. Reality and since it encompasses everything can’t have an opposite because that would imply that there is two. (R: So what is the question?) How are we able to regard, you know — it seems like it’s nice to regard this as a dream, yet at the same time it’s inclined if it’s all unreal. If at the same time that seems to create a duality, regarding something as real and something else as unreal.
R: It is because you want to feel that something is real. There is no reality and there is no unreality. They’re both impostors. Reality when I use that term is totally ineffable. It is beyond concepts. When you use the term reality you are thinking of certain truths. Whereas those things do not really exist they’re only words.
So unreality has to go, reality has to go. Drop both of them. When you drop both of them you feel free. For there is nothing that has to become real. No one has to become real. No one has to become. There is no one. Doesn’t that make you feel good? (SG: It simplifies it.) There is no one to become real. You’re not trying to trade an unreality for a reality.You’re not looking to make a trade. You’re looking to empty your mind of both feelings of reality and feelings of unreality. You want to become totally empty. When you’re empty you become nothing, when you are nothing you become everything.
I took off my jacket, Glen you put on yours?
SK: Keeping the balance. (laughter)
(short silence)
SY: Robert when we do sit in the morning with you from 6 to 9 do we just clear our thoughts? What would be the best?
R: You do absolutely nothing. (SY: We don’t try to think anything.) No. Just sit. (SY: Be still.) Just sit and watch. (SY: Observe?) Observe. But don’t voluntarily observe. Let the observation come by itself. Everything will happen of its own accord.
(silence)
Now let us practice some self-inquiry together. What you do is make yourself real comfortable. Close your eyes. As the thoughts come inquire, “To whom do they come?”
Then you say, “Well they come to me. I feel the thoughts.” Then you further inquire, “Who is this I? Who is this I that feels the thoughts? Where does it come from? From where does it arise? What is its source?” Just like the uninvited guest at the wedding.
As you keep inquiring about the I where it comes from it will gradually slip back into the heart center into the Self and you will become totally free. You keep still. As thoughts come into your mind again you repeat the same thing all over. “To whom do these thoughts come? Who is thinking these thoughts? Why I am. I am thinking these thoughts. What is this I? How did it originate? What is its source?” And you keep silent.
When more thoughts come you do the same thing. Let’s practice this for a while.
(long silence in self-inquiry practice)
R: Do we have announcements?
Mary (SM): Yes Robert. I have a few more transcripts to hand out…
(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.