When you are [enlightened], you have unalloyed happiness all the time. Eternal happiness and eternal joy is always with you, regardless of conditions. For you are no longer conditioned. You are no longer looking for anything. Does it make sense for an enlightened person to look for a healthy body, or for a prosperous body, or for this or for that? Of course not. This is the fact that nobody’s left to look for these things. The ego who does this has been totally transcended.

Look at the world like bubbles on the ocean, bubbles and waves on the ocean. Look at people that way too. They keep disappearing. They keep coming back. The bubbles, the eddies, the waves come and go continuously, constantly. Yet the ocean understands that the bubbles, the eddies, the waves, are part of the ocean. They’re not separate from the ocean. Yet the bubbles come and go. The waves come and go. So it is with us.

Bodies come and go continuously, constantly. You make such a fuss out of life, out of a body that’s so important. They come and go like bubbles in the ocean. New bodies appear every day, old ones fade away, yet the source, beyond everything, is consciousness. The substratum of all existence is consciousness. Consciousness is like the ocean, and all the forms on this earth, in the universe, are superimpositions on consciousness.

In other words, all the forms are like bubbles and waves on the ocean. When you discover who you are, you’re no longer a bubble or a wave. You no longer come and go. You become the ocean. The average person in this world believes they are a bubble or a wave. They identify only with their little self. They’re always thinking about themselves. I need, I want, I hurt, I this, I that, I everything. It’s always I, I, I. This is how the bubble thinks, that it’s separate from the ocean. But the ocean knows it’s not separate.

Robert Adams