All posts by Dr. Robin Starbuck

About Dr. Robin Starbuck

Professor of English 1973 M.A., New York University 1989 Ph.D., New York University Linguistics

Letter for YOU

If I have ever been heavy-handed

please forgive me.

I know what it feels like when someone comes on much too strong

as if their way were the only way.

We’re all in this thing together:

this thing about wanting to awaken fully.

Sometimes I meet a new level of exhilaration

and want to give it toeveryone instantaneously.

In fact I too had to go through much preparation, heartache and doubt

to reach positions you may have been

wanting me to see long ago.

Some things take 500 minutes – others 500 years –

We’re all in this together <3 .


RJS

Written a few years ago

Sacrifice suffering -Gurdjieff

Gurdjieff & Ouspensky

*Suffering

Another thing that people must give up is their suffering. It is very difficult also to sacrifice one’s suffering. A man will renounce any pleasure you like but he will not give up his suffering. Man is made in such a way that he is never so attached to anything as he is to his suffering. And it is necessary to be free from suffering. No one who is not free from suffering, who has not sacrificed his suffering, can work. Nothing can be attained without suffering but at the same time, one must begin by sacrificing suffering. Now, decipher what this means.

— Gurdjieff, in P.D. Ouspensky’s ‘In Search Of The Miraculous’

World of duality will always be -RAdams

Adams, Robert

“People are always trying to change the world. They don’t realize the world is what it is, and nature takes care of it. We live in a world of duality, maya [illusion]. It will always be like this. Some people are dreaming about an Aquarian age. Some people are dreaming about the age of enlightenment, where everybody is at peace with one another. It will never happen. This is not the kind of world we live in. Perhaps there are planets where there is peace, but this is not one of them.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

INTRO to Vedanta, Swami Sarvapriyananda

Non-duality, Swami Sarvapriyananda
Part 9

Part 10
Part 11
Part 12 (30 min FINAL)

Ve·dan·ta  (vĭ-dän′tə, -dăn′-)
n. Hinduism
The system of philosophy that further develops the implications in the Upanishads that all reality is a single principle, Brahman, and teaches that the believer’s goal is to transcend the limitations of self-identity and realize one’s unity with Brahman.
[Sanskrit vedāntaḥ, complete knowledge of the Veda

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=101832791164197&id=101555934525216&extid=jdhQ0TcmRRpbltJb&d=null&vh=e

Nobody is dying, because nobody was born -NM

Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Please understand that there is only one thing to be understood, and that is that you are the formless, timeless unborn. It is because of your identification with the body as an entity that your consciousness, which is universal consciousness, thinks that it is dying.

Nobody is dying, because nobody was born. The millions of forms are the manifestation of consciousness. It is the millions of forms which get created and destroyed, but universal consciousness itself is unborn and undying.”

~ Nisargadatta (20th century Indian Advaita mystic)

Everyone is me -RAdams

Adams, Robert

I OFTEN MAKE THIS MUCH-NEEDED CORRECTION IN MY THINKING (WOULD THAT IT WERE 100% OF THE ‘TIME’ !!!)
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When you see a homeless person on the street most of you think, “Poor guy I’m glad I’m not like that. I’m glad I have this nice car to drive and a home to live in and food to eat. I feel sorry for that person but I’m glad I’m not that person.”

In truth, you are that person. That person is you, all this is going on within you and your beliefs, your thoughts simply are about yourself. Everything that you think about others is about yourself. For there is only the one Self and we are all that Self. So the beginning of wisdom is when you stop seeing the world as separate from yourself. For you begin seeing yourself as all, as everything.

Then you will inquire, “Then to whom do these things come?” In other words then who is seeing these things, who is feeling these things? And one day you will realize it is the I. “I feel these things. I see these things. I feel hurt. I feel confused. I feel upset. But what is this I? And where did it come from?” You will begin to understand that by only getting rid of this I you will become free. It is the I that is giving you all of this trouble over these years. Not the condition that you behold. Not other people. Not other places and persons and things. It is the I that has caused you all of the problems in your life.

~ Robert Adams
Transcript 176
Forget About Self-Realization
6th August, 1992

“Me” is fictitious -JK

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

What is this “me” that says, “I must be,” “I must meditate,” “I must find God,” “I must realize,” “I must be happy,” “I am lonely,” “I must be successful,” “I am frightened,” “I must be told”? Is it not the name, Mr. So-and-so, the form, the form being the body that you see in the mirror, and all the associated memories, all the concepts about yourself, the image about yourself, the image that says, “I am much better than you are”? Are they not all put together by thought? Thought itself is a fragment, and the activity of that fragment is not only the “me,” but the fragments it has created all round you—separate nations, separate classes, wars, the whole of that. And thought is a material process in time. Thought is the response of memory, experience, knowledge, stored up in the brain.

So the “me” to which we cling is fictitious. That may be the root cause of fear, clinging to something that is nonexistent. So, there is the fictitious, imagined me, a picture, a symbol, an idea, an image, put together by thought in time, which is a material process, measurement. And that “me,” being uncertain of its very existence, deeply, in the very depths of one’s being, may be the deep fundamental cause of fear. That doesn’t mean that if you have no “me” you cannot live in this world. On the contrary.

Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti
Krishnamurti

Meditation finally clarified -JK

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

MEDITATION FINALLY CLARIFIED !
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Question: Can the religious mind be acquired through meditation?

KRISHNAMURTI: The first thing to understand is that you cannot acquire it, you cannot get it; it is not to be brought about through meditation. No virtue, no sacrifice, no meditation—nothing on earth can buy this. This sense of attaining, achieving, gaining, buying must totally cease for that to be. You cannot use meditation. What I have been talking about is meditation. Meditation is not a way to something. To discover in every moment of daily life what is true and what is false is meditation. Meditation is not something to which you escape, something in which you get visions and all kinds of thrills—that is self-hypnosis, which is immature, childish. But to watch every moment of the day, to see how your thought is operating, to see the machinery of defense at work, to see the fears, ambitions, greeds, and envies—to watch it all, inquire into it all the time, that is meditation, or a part of meditation. Without laying the right foundation, there is no meditation, and the laying of the right foundation is to be free of ambition, greed, envy, and all the things that we have created for our self-defense. You do not have to go to anybody to be told what meditation is or to be given a method. I can find out very simply by watching myself, how ambitious I am or not. I do not have to be told by another; I know. To eradicate the root, the trunk, the fruit of ambition, to see it and totally destroy it is absolutely necessary. You see, we want to go very far without taking the first step. And you will find if you take the first step that it is the last step; there is no other step.

The Collected Works of
J. Krishnamurti -Volume XII 1961
There Is No Thinker, Only Thought
Jiddu Krishnamurti

A seeming contradiction -rjs

Definitions

MY GREATEST CONTRADICTION TO EXPLAIN (I’ve actually gotten quite okay with it) is
(1) We need do nothing VS.
(2) There is so very much that an initiate can – and i.m.o. should – do.
This is really very easy to explain but people still insist on confounding it: There’s wonderful study AND APPLICATION that can be done to fully understand the entire magnanimity of Spirit, God. This can and should take many, many years, but, so what?! It’s the application part that people try to ignore which leaves them with nothing but a word-salad. The spiritual fact that nothing needs to be done to become all that God is becomes obvious and self-evident, but learning – THROUGH LIFE EXPERIENCE is what is sorely lacking. It’s not an issue of popularity or remuneration: it’s an entirely different dimension!!!!
drrobinstarbuck

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There will be contradictions galore as we extract ourselves from the hypnotic pull of world mind.
We can’t force our exit using stubborn human will but we can simply choose to let God live our lives AS us.
The world mind wants to water down real breakthrough messages at every possible turn. Great humility is sorely needed as we cannot … I repeat, cannot … take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm.
DrRobinStarbuck