Robert Adams

[Tara5]

Watch yourself become depressed.
Watch yourself become angry.
Do not deny it, but observe it.
And if you observe yourself correctly in that calm way, you can ask yourself,
"Who becomes angry?
Who is feeling depressed?"
And follow it through.
Do this over and over and over again, as many times as you have to.

Robert Adams

[Tara5]

Your Self is like the screen.
It is never affected by problems of any kind or any sort.
The problems come upon the screen,
they come and they go,
but you remain the Self forever.
You never change.

How do you begin to become this way?
Every time you think you have a problem you must ask yourself,
"To whom does the problem come?
After all, I am not the doer.
I am not the body. I am not the mind.
So to whom does the problem come?"

And of course the answer will be, "To me.
I feel this problem.
The problem comes to me."
You hold onto the me,
you abide in the me and you go deeper, and deeper, and deeper within yourself, abiding in the I-consciousness.

As you keep doing this everyday,
every time a problem appears,
the day will finally come soon when you transcend your sense of I.
You totally transcend it.
The sense of I disappears and you will become pure consciousness.
That's it.

Robert Adams

[Tara5]

How do you react to life? When a person displeases you, what do you do? Curse him or her, become angry or violent? How do you handle it? How do you react? Be honest with yourself. It’s the only way. Start from where you are. No human being is perfect. We all make mistakes. Do not feel sorry for yourself, but start from where you are. Where are you? You are consciousness. This is your true nature. Learn to love everything. Learn to see only the good. Realise there’s a reason for everything. If a person displeases you, simply look the other way and forget it. Learn to stop your mind from thinking. You do this by immediately catching yourself when you react to a condition, and enquiring within yourself, ‘Who is becoming angry? Who feels out of sorts?’ ‘I do. “I”.’

Realise you’re dealing with the personal ‘I’, and that all the anger, all the frustration, all the karma, all the samskaras are all attached to that personal ‘I’. Consequently, when you get rid of the personal ‘I’, everything else will go with it. So, don’t try to solve your problems. Do not try to become a better person. Do not try to run away from your life. Simply see who it is who is running, who it is who needs to be a better person. Who has all these problems? ‘I’, ‘I’, always ‘I’. Hold onto that ‘I’ with all of your might, but do not concentrate on the ‘I’. You concentrate on the source of it, which is consciousness, God.

Robert Adams

[Phaelyn]

You can only know by finding out what it is not. Robert Adams

[Tara5]

“We have names for everything.
What if we forgot about those names?
And we stopped seeing things as something?

What if we just observed things, watched things, without giving them a name, without coming to a conclusion?
What do you think would happen?

You would transcend everything.”

Robert Adams

[Tara5]

Removing the ‘I’

The time has to come in your life when you begin to understand that I has never existed and I will never exist. This is the reason we practice atma-vichara, self-inquiry. This is the only reason we practice this because the more you practice this the more you will not get caught up in the I.

Now you know that the only thing you have to do is to remove the I from your life and you will be totally liberated. Try tomorrow not saying “I” for the whole day. See if you can do this. Most of you will not be able to have a conversation. You will have absolutely nothing to say and that will be wonderful. It would be the best thing you've ever done. To shut up.

For you have been talking all of your life and where has it gotten you? Since you were born you've been talking, talking, talking, talking, talking and where has it gotten you? This is why you hear about some Sages who are totally silent and never say a word. For the voice has been given to the I. It is the I who talks. It is the I who has a chip on it's shoulder and always has something to say. The voice box is connected to the I. But if you practice not saying I, removing the I you'll have very little to say and everything will take care of itself.

This is why self-inquiry works so wonderfully and why we should all practice it. The best time to practice it is when the I overwhelms you. When you start to say all kinds of things to yourself like, "I feel rotten today. I feel bad. I feel this. I feel that." Catch your- self and inquire, "Who am I?" That is what you must do. What you are really asking is, "Where does this I come from? Who am I? Who am I?" Never answer that question. For it'll be your ego answering. The ego, the I, the mind are synonymous. They're all the same. If there is no I there will be no mind, no ego. So the practice is to remove the I, to eliminate the I. At the same time we're killing the ego and the mind.

So every time the I shows it's head you inquire, "Who am I? Where did you come from I? What gave you birth? From where did you originate?" You have to talk to yourself this way but not loud. Somebody hears you, you'll be sent to the funny farm. Keep this to yourself. But do it! "Who am I?" The mind will start thinking again. Thoughts will come, "What am I doing this for? I must be crazy?" You're back to I again.

If you can only catch yourself this will be a great start and it will take you further. Catch yourself when you say, "I." Keep catching yourself always. "Who am I? Who is this I?" That is all you have to do. Is search for the I, the source of the I. And you search for the source by inquiring, "Who am I?" That is how you search for the source of I. When the source reveals itself to you there will be total liberation. For the I will be gone.

And so to be liberated you simply have to get rid of the I. But the good news about this thing is as you practice this it has positive results in your life, in your personal life. As I mentioned earlier you will find that you're becoming more peaceful. The things that used to disturb you will stop disturbing you. You will develop power within yourself. You will feel happy and good. This is a side effect of practicing self-inquiry.

Robert Adams

[Tara5]

My friends, your true nature is like the screen. You are not the image that appears to go through different trials and tribulations, or appears to be enjoying life to the utmost.
They're both impostors. You are like the screen. There never really was an image. The image appeared for a time. It appeared. It appeared due to the fact that if you try to grab the image on the screen, what would you grab? The screen.
That's why it is an appearance.

It is hard to believe that your life, what appears right now, is unreal, simply be-cause you have identified with it strongly. This is what is called maya, the grand illusion.
You have strongly identified with your appearance of life, and you are reacting accordingly. Every time you react you are accruing karma. Accruing karma simply means the image is continuing again and again, the ego becoming stronger and stronger. And even when you leave this body, it continues into another body. There's no end.

You go through many cycles, some good, some bad. You have all kinds of experi-ences. But until you realize that you are not the experiencer and there's no experience, you will go through the cycles of karma again, again, again, ad infinitum, no end. It is only when you get tired of playing the game called maya, playing a part called leela, that you decide to find the answer to your existence. You have to go through the game over and over again, and finally begin to search.

You become a seeker. You begin to read spiritual philosophy. You may find a
teacher and you're on the path. Depending on what you do, this determines where you go from there. When you come to a meeting like this, when you attend a satsang like this, you can rest assured that you have done spiritual work in a previous life. You deserve to be here to understand the reality, to understand how to transcend the mind, the ego, the personal self.

As you begin to practice self-inquiry, witnessing, the I am meditation, things begin to happen. You're searching for self-realization, whereas all this time, self-realization has been exactly where you are. You have always been that, yet you believe you've got to search, you've got to read books, deep philosophies, when all you had to do was to wake up. All you had to do was awaken, just as when you awaken in the morning from your dream, you awaken. It's the same thing now.
You simply have to awaken.
Yet what is keeping you from awakening? Your attitudes. You are attached to your emotions and you are seeing things in your life that either appear wrong or either appear right. As long as you have a concept of right or wrong, you can never transcend your body and become free.

Some people ask, "But things are right and wrong in this world. I have to take a stand." My question to those people are always the same. "To whom is there right and wrong? Who feels right and who feels wrong?" Only the ego. In reality there's no right and there's no wrong. There are just experiences of a dream unfolding. Yet the dream doesn't exist. It never did. The world, as it appears right now, does not exist. It never did. The way you believe you are, does not exist. It never did.

There is only one and you are that. There never were others. There's only the one.
Yet most of you cannot feel this. You're so identified with maya that the world of appearances cause you to feel emotional. You therefore have to work on yourself. You have to do something to yourself, to help you become free. If you leave yourself alone, and you do nothing, you'll go through life, after life, after life, on various planets. You'll have various bodies, female, male, maybe other bodies. It will never end for you.

Therefore you begin to question your existence. That is the first step. You question your existence. You question your existence by inquiring,
"Who am I?
Where did I come from?
What is my real nature?"

Robert Adams

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by Tara5

“We have names for everything.
What if we forgot about those names?
And we stopped seeing things as something?

What if we just observed things, watched things, without giving them a name, without coming to a conclusion?
What do you think would happen?
You would transcend everything.”
Robert Adams

That is one of the first practices In the Workbook of 'A Course of Miracles'.
By the 28th day my mind had made a 'shift' to see things differently.

[Unseeking Seeker]

***

“I am sitting here telling you that your life is like a dream and not to worry, not to fear. But to be still and know that I am God. To understand that you are consciousness. That you are pure awareness. That you are absolute reality, that you are parabrahman, that you are sat-chit-ananda, but you don't believe me. You think you're mortal. You identify with your body consciousness. You identify with events in this world.”

Robert Adams

***

[Unseeking Seeker]

***

“Everything else about you is preordained. Everything else about you is prarabdhic karma. Even when I lift my hand like this, it's karmic. But what have I got to do with my hand? I am not my hand, I am not my body, I am not my mind, I-am that I-am. Absolute awareness, pure intelligence, absolute reality, parabrahman, nirvana. I am spaceless, I am birthless, I am deathless. Water cannot drown me and fire cannot burn me. That is my true nature. Find your true nature my friends and you'll always be happy. Om shanti.”

Robert Adams

***