– Transcript 169
R: Good evening. It is good to be with you again. I hope you were meditating instead of thinking. Most people like to think. It is your thoughts that keep you back from reality. There’s absolutely nothing to think about. All is well forever.
To attain self-realization, there is really nothing you have to do. It does not require puja, it does not require meditation, it does not require prayer, it does not require yoga. It does not require anything, for self-realization is your natural state to begin with. Therefore there is nothing you have to do to attain it. It’s simple. Yet there are three things that you should remember. One is just to be here. Two is to listen to the words with discrimination and intelligence. Three is to listen to the silence between the words, which is the highest and best teaching.
When I say just be here, this is exactly what I mean. Just be here. You are already enlightened, you are already realized. There’s nothing to think about, no one to see. Just be here. When you are here, the no thing of the Sage becomes the no thing of you. In other words all things dissolve. All things evaporate. By things I’m referring to thoughts, emotions, fears, doubts, superstitions. They all evaporate when you’re here. There’s really nothing you have to do.
When you hear me speak the words, try to discriminate correctly. Try to understand what the words really mean. If you are able to discern the words and discriminate correctly, you will be awakened, liberated. And of course, the silence between the words are the most important. For it is in the silence that reality exists. Reality is the silence.
There’s nothing else.
You believe you have to go through rituals and perform spiritual disciplines, practice yoga, meditate. For whom are these things? These things are not for you. They’re for the ego, for the mind. Forget about all that. Simply do not think about the past or the future. Stay centered in the now and be yourself. There is nothing profound in the whole universe that you have to learn. There are no special classes, or special meaning to words, or sacred hymns, anything else you have to remember. All you have to do is be your Self.
When you are yourself, fear and doubt leave you. When you are yourself, superstition melts away. When you are your Self you are extremely happy all the time. You have peace.
You have joy, forever, unending.
This is what you are really looking for, isn’t it? We’re really searching for peace and joy and happiness, that does not come to an end. Yet when I tell you this is your real nature, this is what you really are, you do not quite understand this.The substratum of all existence, the source of all creation, is consciousness. Consciousness is simply another word for eternal happiness, for eternal peace and joy. That is you. You are that. You never were anything else.
Yet, because you think, you continue to express certain emotions, you always want to take some kind of action and do things, this is what keeps you back. Desire for anything covers self-realization, hides liberation, like the clouds hide the sun. A mirror cannot see itself. It can only see its reflection. Therefore you cannot see yourself, but you see yourself in others. When you look at your world, you’re seeing yourself. It is simply a reflection of you, nothing more and nothing less. Therefore, if you’re feeling love, if you’re seeing peace, if you’re seeing and feeling harmony, you’re seeing yourself. You can only see in the world what you are, nothing else.
So think for a moment. What kind of world do you see? What kind of world are you involved in? It is always you, for you are the only one that exists. No one exists but you. There is only one, and you are that.
Now you ask, “But what about everybody else? How can I be the only one when I see millions of people? I see all kinds of animals, everything. How can I be the only one?”
Well, when you go back to the dream state, there’s only one person dreaming, isn’t there?
And in the dream you see thousands of people. You’re involved with millions of people perhaps. You are involved with places, persons and things, but you’re having the dream, aren’t you? When you wake up, they’re gone and you are yourself.
Liberation is like that. Right now you believe there are many people, there are others, all kinds of things going on in this world, good and bad, right and wrong, happy and sad, rich or poor, healthy or sick, and what is happening is you become attached to these things. You’re identifying with the wrong things. You are identifying with the external dream instead of identifying with the Self.
Identifying with the Self is like waking up from the dream. When you’re having a dream, and people are getting killed in your dream, perhaps you’re a soldier or a nurse, or doctor, or a maid, they have all kinds of experiences. But when you awaken it was all a dream.
Such is this kind of life that you’re living now. You believe this is your life and you’re living an external life. You’re involved in all sorts of things. You react to these things, as if they were real. The greater you react to things, the greater you’re pulled into Maya and the illusion of this universe, and you get deeper involved, deeper involved, deeper involved, until the time comes when you become tired of this whole game. You start to search. You start to look. You search within yourself. You begin to inquire, “To whom does this illusion come?” You begin to inquire, “Who’s having these experiences?
Who’s going through all these things?” And you inwardly realize you are, “I am.” So you inquire further, “Well, who am I? Who am I? Am I these experiences I am having? Am I my work? Am I my body? Am I my mind? What am I? Where did I come from?” As you inquire deeper and deeper, you will one day feel something deep within you as an ineffable light, where the whole world will be gone, and you will be home free.
When I say you’ll be home free, I mean you will appear to be the way you are now today, but your entire reasoning system has changed. You no longer feel yourself as being the person you were, even though people see you as the same person. You have become the mirror instead of the reflection. You are identified with the mirror or with the Self, knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything in this world, everything in this universe, is a superimposition upon the Self.
It is like paper and the print on the paper. When you read a newspaper you look at the print. You do not think of the paper which the print is on. You were concentrating on the print only, the words. Yet without the paper, there would not be any print, don’t you see? So it is with the Self, with reality. Reality is like the paper. The print is like the people, places and things on the paper. Only you are the paper and you identify with the paper, you know you’re the paper, and the print has nothing to do with you. It cannot influence you or do anything to you, for you know without you there’s no universe, there’s no ink, there’s no words, there’s no alphabet, no alphabetical letters. You have become free.
Now why do we want to become free? Again look at the experiences you’ve had in this world, good and bad, happy and sad. You’re growing older all the time. There will come a time in your life when you give up the body, and you have no idea what’s going on. But when you know who you are and you realize this truth, you will know, not believe, but you will know you were never born, you’ve never had any experiences, and you do not dissolve, when you die, so-to-speak.
You’ll understand that you are pure awareness, effortless, choice-less, pure awareness. You are consciousness, the absolute reality, the Brahman, the ultimate reality, the I am that I am, bliss. You will feel an ineffable bliss that is beyond description, an unalloyed happiness that you can’t even imagine exists. Yet all the words that I’m using will not really come into your mind, because you’ll have no mind. There will be no words. You will just be these things that I am talking about, and you will be that forever.
When you drop your body, as far as you’re concerned, there never was a body to drop, a body never existed for you. But to others they’ll see a body dropping. Others will see all kinds of things, human things, physical things, mental things, but you have overcome. There’s no longer anything that you have to experience. You are free, totally, absolutely free, free in beauty, free in love, free in joy, free in happiness, total freedom. Yet you will not use these words. I’m using the words because I have to explain to you what happens, but these words are inadequate. You are God, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.
I’m not referring to the you that you feel you are right now, the human being.
Never think of yourself as a human being, being God, for a human being can never be God, it’s impossible. But the truth about this is you’re not human. You’re inhuman, and you take the mind off yourself, your body, and its manifestations, and you start to identify with consciousness. And you do this by inquiring, “Who am I? What am I? Where did I come from?”
Yet as I started the meeting today, I said there’s really nothing you have to do.
There’s really absolutely nothing you have to do. All this talking is to make you see that. It is only when you do not understand what I’m saying to you, “There’s nothing you have to do,” that you have to practice self-inquiry. You have to practice going within. But if you could only listen to my words when I say you’re already free, there’s absolutely nothing you have to do, it is effortless, choice-less.
Feel this right now. Feel the nothingness which you are. By nothingness I mean there’s no thing going on within you. There’s nothing happening. There is no you, there’s no mind, there’s no body, there’s no thoughts, there’s nobody wanting to become enlightened, there’s nobody wanting anything. Feel this. As you let go, let go of all your thoughts, that have been hounding you for years, past experiences, karma, samskaras, doesn’t exist any more for you. There is nothing. Feel that nothing.
(silence)
Feel free to ask questions.
Fred (SF): I had an observation I’d like to check on. It seems that everything in duality is a creation of the mind, since the mind is unreal, all creation is unreal. And of no great value. And if this is so my observation also is in duality. The creation of the mind, it’s unreal has no value and so that puts me right back on square one?
R: On the contrary. As you begin to observe and watch yourself thinking about these things, as you observe yourself and doing what you just said, you will begin to realize that there is something watching you doing what you’re doing. There is something beyond that in other words. It allows you to do what you do.
That something is consciousness. It observes you reacting in this way to the things we’re talking about. But in reality there is only consciousness. And you do not exist, nor does the object exit. There is only one. Which is beyond words and thoughts. There is only the one who appears to be the witness. So your reaction, it sees the objects of your reaction. So when you get the mind thinking about consciousness by not thinking at all, by just being, everything clears up, everything is transcended and you become totally, absolutely free.
Every experience that comes to you is of the mind. Everything that comes into yourself is the mind. We want to annihilate the mind. We want to destroy the mind. The mind has to be completely annihilated, totally transmuted and destroyed. And you do this by doing nothing, just being yourself, by spiritual discernment, by discrimination. By pondering the things I’m talking about. And if that is too easy for you, then practice self-inquiry.
Inquire, “Who thinks this way? To whom do these thoughts come? Who wants to know these things?” And you will say, “I do.” Then inquire, “Who am I?” What you are
really saying is, “What is the source of the I? What is the source of I who has these experiences?” As you inquire this way the I will disappear, dissolve and you will be home free.
(silence)
Mary would you like to read the Jnani? (SM: Sure Robert.)
(Mary reads the Jnani refer to beginning of this book for text) R: Thank you Mary. We have prashad. Who else? The entire teaching is in the prashad. So anything that you didn’t get you will get when you eat the prashad.
SH: Here have some, have the entire teaching.
R: We have chocolate orange snaps…
(general prashad talk)
Introduction - It’s all A cosmic joke
by Edward Muzika
Ed: Robert was a very unusual spiritual teacher. He did not want to be one at all. He liked being left alone to walk with his little dog Dimitri or sit in his backyard doing nothing. Yet he was forced to teach. His Parkinson’s disease progressed to the point he could not do physical work any more. And needed more and more to be taken care of.
Twice a week we’d have satsang. This talk occurred sometime during July of 1990. We were meeting at the house of Henry Denison in Hollywood hills at the time. Robert’s satsangs had grown from maybe 7 or 8 people in 1989 to approximately 30 at the time of this talk. Satsang never got much bigger than that until the year before he left for Sedona in 1995. The following talk is a mere shadow of the actual satsang. As many as 4 or 5 people would be recording Robert’s talk at the same time. He would be covered with microphones and wires.
He once joked that he felt that he was an electric chair.
Several places in the tape you will hear several tape recorder popping sounds as tapes are being changed.
Each satsang usually had the same format. A twenty minute period of Hindu style chanting which Robert loved. A reading from the Ashtravakra Gita. The talk itself, usually on a theme. A question and answer session which Robert called, “Stump The Guru.” Then more chanting and another reading from the Ashtravakra Gita or from Roberts own, “Confessions Of The Jnani.” Finally there would be Darshan. Where each attendee would go up to Robert in traditional guru-disciple fashion, as was done around his own teacher, Ramana Maharshi fifty years before. During darshan desert would be served called prashad.
None of this non-talk period was usually recorded. We were recording to make transcripts without thoughts in mind to preserve the ambience of the entire satsang as a whole.
However, as words in Robert’s mind was the enemy in a sense what is preserved here is only the outer teachings. Not the immediacy of his presence in immersion in the silence and sweet chanting of the satsang. Nor does the tape provide any indication of the power of darshan and looking into Robert’s intense gaze.
Robert’s talks would vary from being intensely serious to intensely humorous. One never knew what might happen. This is one of his more humorous talks which I entitled, “Cosmic Joke.” It is shorter than most of his talks which would only mean that not all of the question and answer section was recorded.
Usually satsang lasted about two hours. The talk that you are about to hear is forty five minutes long and to me in retrospect this is not the most powerful or interesting forty five minutes of that satsang. The transcript of my introduction can be found on: http://www.itisnotreal.com.
You can find other talks there as well as his biography.
by Edward Muzika
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.