What was the first thing you did when you opened your eyes?
You should have been aware that the I-thought has traveled from the heart center to the brain, and now you are awake,
and you feel your body and you feel the world. You should not go any further.
You should now attempt to work on yourself, where you send the I-thought back from the brain, back to the spiritual center, the spiritual heart. You should immediately attempt to do this.

In other words, you should not continue the game of the I-thought telling you things about your body, about the world. And you should not flick on the TV and watch the world news, for that pulls you further into illusion. But you should immediately begin to inquire, “What happened to the I? Where is the I? Apparently it must be in my head, for I am aware of my body and the world, and I am identifying with it.” This is the way you should talk to yourself, and you ask yourself the question, “But how did that I-thought get to my brain?” and you stop.

As you begin to think about this, you are abiding in the I, and if you’re really abiding in the I, the I-thought begins to travel backwards. It begins to leave your head and begins to travel backward to the heart. But you have to catch yourself.
This is the first thing you should do when you awaken. I know most of you forget. Yet you should have some clue that tells you, “It is time for me to abide in the I. I’m not going to allow the I to bring all of these thoughts
into my head.”

You forget about your work for a moment, you forget about getting dressed, you forget about the time, and you realize the reason you’re thinking about your body or about anything else, is because the I-thought has gone into your brain, and it now forms the body and the mind. You begin to see that the mind is nothing more than a
conglomeration of thoughts. If there were no thoughts, there would be no mind. Can’t you see what you’re doing? As you begin to think this way, the I-thought begins to return to its source, by itself. In other words, you don’t really have to send the I-thought back to the self or to the heart center. You simply have to inquire what the I-thought really is. You’ll come to the conclusion it is, after all, only a thought. If the I-thought really does not exist, then my body and the world does not exist. Just thinking about these things, you begin to feel peaceful, happy.

I know you’re saying, “Well, I don’t have the time to do this every morning. I’m late for work. I’ve got to get dressed.
I’ve got to eat breakfast.” But again I say to you, this is not yoga or meditation, where you have to take time out to meditate and then go about your business. This is the superior method of self-inquiry, and if you just begin to practice this self-inquiry, you will notice that when it’s time to get dressed, eat your breakfast and go to work, your
body will do this in record time. You will not even be thinking about these things, but yet your body will shower, do what it has to do, and you’ll be out of the house and you’ll feel great.

This is the difference between self-inquiry and meditation. You are not meditating on anything. You’re simply inquiring about your I-thought, and each step will come by itself. You will not have to think about what I’m going to say next. For instance, as you’re working on yourself this way and thoughts come to you, something within you will
immediately say, “To whom do these thoughts come?” You’re not planning this. You have not rehearsed.

And by the way, never rehearse, never plan the night before, what you are going to do in the morning. Unless it’s spontaneous, it will not work. Remember this. Self-inquiry should be spontaneous. It should not be a drudgery. It should not be something you planned. You simply begin to look at yourself. You open your eyes when you wake up.

You begin to realize that just before you woke up you were in a total state of peace, in a no-thought state. You were in an effortless, no-thought state. But now you have allowed the I-thought to go to the brain, and you’re thinking about your body and the world.
So the thought comes to you, “How do I get back to the effortless, no-thought state?
By abiding in the I. Where did the I come from? Who am I? Surely the I must have a source. That source must be quite a powerful thing in itself, whatever it is.” In other words, I’m assuming that you don’t realize that the source is the self. But just by thinking that the I-thought came out of it, it must be something powerful.
“Then why did the I-thought come out of it? What is the I-thought? I keep calling it the I-thought. It’s a thought. There is no I.” This gives you a clue. It makes you happy, for you realize you’ve got nothing to fight. As a matter of fact, some people just become still and they say nothing else.

In other words, when you realize the I is a thought you become still, and the I will immediately disappear. There will be no thoughts. You will feel wonderful.
Then you can get dressed and go to work. But the momentum of what you did this morning will follow you through the day. It is true you will get involved in the world, yet you will find that you have time to think of your self. You will abide in the I. It’ll happen all by itself and you will find in your work, whatever you do, you’re making the right
decisions without thinking, Things do not disturb you. You are at peace with the world. You feel blissful.

Then you can begin to see what I was talking about before. You have no desire to tell people about this. People have to be ready. They have to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps. People have to be prepared to be able to practice self-inquiry, and the preparation was usually made in a previous life. Therefore something tells you it is a waste of time to write books, to go on public television, to try to expand the teaching, to do anything.

You simply live your life in a wonderful way. Everything takes care of itself, and you notice that your consciousness is expanding. It began by thinking of yourself, and now it is expanding to take in the world, to take in the universe.
And then you begin to see everything in this universe as an image on the screen, and you are the screen. You never worry again. You never fear anything again. You understand the wholeness of everything, that there are no mistakes, all is well, nothing is wrong.

But you have to do these things every day, especially in the morning when you first open your eyes. That is the time to really work on yourself. If you wait until later, then maya becomes too strong and grabs a hold of you, causing you to get really involved in the leela, in the game of life. But as you work on yourself every morning, the body
takes care of itself, the mind becomes extinguished, the ego turns into humility, you become happy. There is nothing
you have to do.
And again, your body will do whatever it came here to do, but you have nothing to do with that. You are at peace.

Robert Adams. The Collected Works.

You have to be ready to turn away
from the worldly things. You have to
be prepared to jump within yourself.
To dive deep within yourself. And
to sort of ignore the world
for a while.

This doesn’t mean that you have to
give up anything. It means that while
you are going through your daily chores,
while you are doing your work in this
world, you simply have to become aware
every once in a while that everything is
Consciousness. Just by being aware of
these things [pain, sorrow, happiness, joy,
etc.], you awaken. You become free. Just
by being aware. By thinking to yourself
when you get up in the morning,
“Everything may appear real to me, but
all is Consciousness. Everything is
Consciousness. Consciousness
is space, pure choiceless
Awareness.”

Robert Adams

“True silence has absolutely nothing to do with the world. True silence is omnipresence, is all-pervading. Your real nature is silence. Always remember, it is different than just keeping still. Anyone can keep still for a while, maybe a couple of seconds, before the mind starts attacking you. But true silence is when you go deeper, where you forget about your body, you forget about your affairs, your mind, your world, and you enter that atmosphere where there is bliss-consciousness.

True silence is the nature of creation. The planets turn on their axis, the galaxies spin through space. … Everything is in a state of flux. Everything moves. Yet, it’s all very silent. You do not hear a thing. If you get up at four o’clock in the morning and go outside and look, what do you hear? You hear silence, deep silence, total silence, beautiful silence. It is not hard to get into that type of silence. You simply begin to sit still and become oblivious to everything.

It will happen by itself. You will go deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and deeper, until you’re no longer aware of your body or your surroundings. The true silence can be kept up at all times. You do not have to sit to go into the silence any more. In the beginning stages you do, for you’re learning how to keep silent. But as time goes by, you can be shopping in the market place, you can be working in the factory, you can be washing dishes, you can be doing all kinds of things, and you will be in the silence.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)