– Transcript 204
R: Shanti, shanti, om, peace, peace. Welcome. I welcome you with all my heart. Good afternoon. It’s good being with you once again on this fifth bhandara since we’ve been in Henry’s house. A bhandara is usually for feeding the poor. And for about three years we’ve been trying to feed the poor. But we can’t get the poor to come up the hill. The homeless won’t walk up the hill. So we can’t feed them too well.
But usually what a bhandara is when poor homeless people line up in two rows, they sit down, we give them plates and put food in their plates. So we will do what we did last year. I would like each one of you before Christmas to take ten dollars and give it to a homeless person, without judgment. It makes no difference what you think of the homeless person whether you think they’re right or wrong or whether you think they’re homeless or not, whether you think they’re lazy or whether you think they don’t want to work, it’s immaterial. Give ten dollars to the first homeless person you see. This will be our way of feeding the homeless.
SH: How do you know if they’re homeless?
R: If they look homeless give them ten dollars. (laughter) SH: That’s good, are you homeless?
SE: If they have one of those signs - Homeless need food. (laughter) Robert continues: Have you ever wondered why you do the things you do. For instance when you were a baby you would cry in your crib to get picked up. If you’d want your diapers changed you’d cry. As you grew older you’d want to play with certain toys, be with certain friends. You went to school, you joined certain activities, you played football perhaps or became a cheerleader. Then you finally got married, had children, got divorced.
You’re always doing something but why are you doing these things? Why does a thief become a thief? Why does a person rob a bank? Why does a murderer kill?
The answer of course is everyone is looking for happiness. Everyone wants happiness and this is their way of showing they want happiness. A thief believes if he steals something from you this will make him happy because he’ll have something he never had before. Everything you do in life is to achieve happiness. Ponder this.
In retrospect go over your life and see if I’m not saying the truth.
Whatever you’re doing in life you’re doing it because you want some happiness even though you think you’re helping somebody else or you’re helping somebody, deep down inside of yourself you really want to be happy. So whatever you’re doing you’re doing it for your own happiness.
But what if I told you that real happiness is within yourself. Unalloyed happiness is within you. Pure happiness, eternal happiness, forever happiness, is within yourself it is your true nature, it is your real nature. If you can just touch this happiness you will never depend on the world again for anything. For this happiness I’m referring to is Sat-Chit-Ananda, the absolute reality, the pure awareness.
This happiness is so beautiful, so blissful that you will never react to person, place, or thing again for any reason whatsoever. For you will be fulfilled. Filled with joy, harmony, love. When a person discovers this, this person is very fortunate. To discover they have within themselves the storehouse of happiness. To discover there is eternal happiness within you. Even if you discover it intellectually at first by reading about it, listening to me talk about it. For when you know you have a mission a search to unfold this happiness within you and become free.
Now how do you do this?
The truth about this is you just discover that you are happiness you may hear my words or read a book or read it somewhere else and you’ll awaken to it. You awaken to it by making the mind still and quiet. By not having any conflict with your mental thoughts.
You then discover a great peace, a fountain of joy inside of you that you never really knew existed before. This is the beginning of wisdom. When you begin to feel and think, person, place and thing in this world can never bring me true happiness.
This world is a world of change it can never bring me real happiness. For it’s a world of duality in which we live. For you may be happy one day and sad the next day depending on how things are going. But when you understand that the happiness which you’re searching for is you and you already have it you give up all of your thoughts and emotions, your feelings and abide in this happiness. You do not have to do any mantras or any meditations, any prayers, any chanting, any japa, just become aware of yourself, as unalloyed total happiness, that’s all you have to do. Feel it, become aware of it. It is you, you’ve got it. It has always been yours. If you ponder upon this you will see I am right.
At this time many of you are looking for happiness outside of yourselves. You may think when you go to a movie you’re happy. When you meet the right person you’re happy. When you have a lot of money you’re happy. When you have what you want you’re happy. But these things are limited. They’re not permanent and they keep changing all the time.
The true happiness I’m speaking of is Brahman. The ultimate oneness. The one reality. If you can only imagine that you’ve got such happiness within you there is absolutely nothing in this world that it can show or give you that can equal it and you do not have to go anywhere or do anything to get it. It’s within you, you have it already.
Can you imagine being eternally happy? Happy all the time for no reason whatsoever? Just being totally happy all of the time? Well, you can.
Again there are certain things you have to do and one of them is the practice of divine ignorance. By divine ignorance I’m referring to the fact that you don’t know what anything is in this world. You have no idea what anything is, no idea whatsoever. You think you do.
Your ego tells you this is a glass, this is a radio, this is a dog, this is a cat, but what do you really know about these things? Do you really know what a dog is? You have no idea what a dog is. It just appeared when you appeared on this earth and we gave it a name, dog. We could have named it cat. We could have named it door knob. We could have called it the moon. We have given the animal the name of a dog. So we call this a dog. But if you answer like this you still have no idea what a dog is, do you? They’re just here. The same with a cat, bird, it is we who give names to these people, these animals, these things.
Do you know who you were before you were born? Who are you? Where did you come from? All you know is that you were born and people gave you a name, your parents gave you a name, and you’ve been called that name ever since. What do you know about these things? Absolutely nothing.
You have no idea why a tree is a tree. Why a mountain is a mountain? You have no idea what anything is at all, do you? Be honest with yourself. This is called divine ignorance and this is the first step you have to take on the spiritual path to become free and liberated. In order to discover the divine happiness within you. You have to really realize that you don’t know what anything is. You have no idea where anything came from, including yourself.
That is a great big step for most people. Because most people are so egotistical.
They think they know what everything is, they think they know things, names of things.
But we don’t know anything.
When you admit this to yourself then you can go forward and you go forward by inquiring, “Who am I? What am I doing here? Where did I come from? What is the source of life?” As you begin to inquire about your life, as you begin to inquire, “Who am I?
Where do I come from?” something begins to happen to you, something wonderful, you begin to feel a power and a presence. You begin to feel a peace, a harmony.
Every time you say to yourself, “Who am I?” you are moving a step ahead on the spiritual path. That is all you have to do. “Who am I?” and you will soon discover that the I is not you. The I that you are referring to is not you, it’s not anything. It is merely a thought. It has absolutely nothing to do with you. When you think to yourself, “Who am I?” You keep saying I-I to yourself and the I begins to separate from your body. The I begins to become a different type of entity whatsoever, the I begins to disappear. And you keep thinking about the I, following the I. You follow the I to the heart. Once the I disappears you are totally free and liberated.
So it all begins with you. You are the one. You can either free yourself or put yourself in bondage depending on what you’re doing with your life.As you go through the vicissitudes of life we become aware that we’ve been spinning our wheels all these years. We’ve been wasting our energy trying to accumulate things. We make ourselves happy by accumulating all kinds of goodies, people, places. Yet we’re not happy.
Only when you discover that you are the universal manifestation of consciousness can you be happy. Only when you understand that you’re pure awareness you will be happy. When you begin to see you live in a world of Maya which is like a dream. Why should you react to the dream? Would you react to the dream if you dreamt it last night?
When you awaken in the morning will you react to this dream?
You realize it was only a dream. It has no power over me it cannot do anything.
Even though in that dream I had cancer, I was wasting away, my family died in an automobile accident, it was all in a dream it’s not true, it never happened. So it is with this life now. Things may appear so real to you. Everything may appear so valid. But if you ponder what we’re talking about you will not react to things for it’s like you’re reacting to a dream.
One day you think you will awaken and this dream will be over just like the dream you had last night will be over and you will awaken in the morning. So one day you will awaken to this dream and you will find that you’re absolutely free.
This is a great revelation when you begin to ponder this. When you begin to understand who you really are your true nature, which is eternal happiness you become a totally different person than you were before. You give of yourself freely. For you have the understanding that you are the other person. You are the universe. You are life itself. You begin to see that life itself is you.
Why not awaken from the dream right now. Why not wake up right now. All you have to do is to stop your thoughts. And you do not stop your thoughts by trying to stop them. You stop the thoughts by observing them and not paying any attention to them.
There is a wall between your thoughts and consciousness. In your mind break down the wall and let the thoughts flow into consciousness where they will be totally transcended and consciousness will be your reality. So do not fight your thoughts. Do not try to make things happen. Do not take life seriously. Do not react to person, place or thing. Be your Self! Be the wonderful Self that you are. That you’ve always been. Understand that you have no limitation. There is nothing holding you back, nothing. Only your own thoughts, your own belief system. Annihilate the belief system and you will be free.
So what I’m trying to tell you is that you’ve got all the power within you to do anything you want with your life. All the power is within you. There is nothing in this world that can compete with what you are. You are the power. All of the power. You are that. Feel it.
There is no thing any longer that can come into your way and hurt you or make you fear. There is nothing in the universe that can make you angry or upset. You have become total freedom, total joy, total harmony. Try living this way.
Remember begin by realizing that you are in divine ignorance. You have no idea what anything is, where anything came from, admit that to yourself first. Then begin to question yourself by asking yourself, “Who am I? Where is my source? Where did I come from?” Never answer the question, just ask it. Begin to disassociate yourself from emotions, fears, frustrations, by not reacting to person, place or thing. Just become the observer, watch, smile, but do not react to anybody.
As soon as you begin to practice this for yourself you will see results, very good results. You will start to feel this happiness that I was referring to in the beginning, you’ll feel happier than you’ve ever felt in your life for no reason whatsoever, you will feel that everything is in its right place. That there are no mistakes anywhere. And as you continue this path you will find one day that you are totally liberated, totally free, that you are boundless space and everything in this universe is happening within you and emanating through your mind as the universe.
Let it happen to you now.
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.