ROBERT ADAMS
Excerpt from: Satsang
‘Wake Up’
No-Thing शून्यता

Do not put yourself down but be honest with yourself. You can tell by the way you react to life. Where your interest is. If you’re still fiddling in the world and the world is important to you then you know you’re keeping yourself back from experiencing the five steps. You look at your life, you see what interests you. The things in this world that are meaningful to you.

The things that seem to make you happy. The things that make you worry, make you miserable. Those are all handicaps. Whenever you give your mind to a problem, to anything in this world you are keeping yourself back from going forward. That’s why it is written, “Where your mind is that is where your heart is.”

We have learnt, those of us who are here that the world is not what it appears to be. There is no so-called permanent happiness in this world. You may achieve forms of happiness, they do not last. You learn as soon as your mind begins to think, you immediately grab hold of it and change it’s course.

You slow down your mind by any method you can. You see your mind as your enemy. Your mind is not your friend. You do not train your mind, you untrain your mind. You untrain your mind by just observing your own thoughts, by watching yourself think, by not reacting to your thoughts, not reacting to what happens in your world.

As you do this you begin to dissolve. You find peace. You find peace. You become free. You become love. You no longer talk too much. You no longer try to evaluate the world or your position. You no longer find fault anywhere. You become your own experience. You have expanded. You used to be concerned with yourself as a body, with your health, concerned with your affairs.

But now even though you are involved in the world, you are not of the world. The world has no pull on you. The world cannot show you anything. It cannot do anything to you. The world is the same as your body. You are not the body, you are not the world, you are not your mind. You are something completely different. That something different is ineffable.

An example of this is simply when you look out the window. Most of you observe the trees, the hills. When the Jnani looks out the window he sees the space which is the substance of the trees. When the average person looks at the world they see forms, they see things. The Jnani always sees the space. The world itself is resting in space.

That space is what is called consciousness. The forms come and go but the space remains. When you think of your body, think of it as space. The form keeps changing from a baby to a young lady or a young man, to a middle aged lady or a middle aged man, to an old man, to an old lady and soon it’s gone but it’s space remains. The space never changes. A new body come to play, the old body is gone. The new body takes birth in the space.

The so-called secret is to identify with the space. Your real nature has always been space. When you identify with space rather than with the body you have put an end to yourself as a body, as an ego, as a personal self. Space is all- pervading omnipresent. Awaken to yourself. Wake up

Anything that you respond to is a product of your mind.

It is your mind that becomes angry.
It is your mind that becomes stubborn.
It is your mind that wants to get even.
It is your mind that is hurt.

But if you subdue your mind, tell me, where is the anger?
Where is the depression?
Where is the response to conditions? There isn’t any.

When the mind is subdued there is only eternal peace and that peace is the self, consciousness.

Consciousness is always peaceful, always happy. It has nothing to do with conditions. All conditioning comes from the mind.

Therefore I say to you,
do not try to change conditions.
Do not try to change situations.
Simply learn how to control the mind by
making it passive and quiet, and then you will find that things turn out better for you than you can possibly ever hope for.

There are no problems.
There is nothing wrong.
Everything is unfolding as it should. Everything happens in its own time.

Space and time are illusions. They really do not exist. They’re stationary. Causation doesn’t exist either. No thing has a cause, therefore no thing has an effect. Cause and effects are again products of your own mind.

When the mind is quiet, karma ceases. Samscaras are non-existent. There never was a cause for anything. But if you feel that in a previous life you did something wrong and now you are paying the price, or if you think that you did something
wrong in this life and you’re paying the price, then you’ll pay the price, because that’s what you think.
There is virtually no price to pay, because nothing ever happened. If it appears to have happened to you then you have to go through the consequences of having the effect return, or karma will come back to you, because that’s what you feel, that’s what you believe.
It’s all in your feelings and your belief system.

But if you feel as if you’re born at every moment, every moment becomes brand new.
Where is the effect?
There is no time for any effect.
There is no space in which to have the effect. Space and time and causation become one, the present moment.

And if you feel like that then you can look into the future, which doesn’t exist, and see what’s happening.

It all has to do with your mind.
As long as you feel situations you know it’s your mind that’s doing it.

~ Robert Adams
One Self, One Consciousness
January 03, 1991

“Think of the experiences you’ve been having in your life from the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you go to sleep at night. What goes through your mind? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you believe in? What is happening to you everyday?

The worst thing you can do in the morning is turn on the TV and read the newspaper. That is the worst thing you can do.

The best thing you can do in the morning when you wake up is to ask yourself, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I doing here?’

The worst thing you can do at night before you go to sleep is to think about your job or your family or your finances or your sicknesses or … all the other things that have been going on in your life.

The best thing you can do before you go to sleep … is to inquire, ‘To whom do these activities come? To whom has the days activities come? Who has experienced these days activities.’ “

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)