“The ultimate reality is part of us already. But yet we go through all kind of practices, meditations, sadhanas, trying to awaken the kundalini, doing all kinds of Tantric exercises, learning the Kabbalah, practicing Taoism, doing all these things that are completely unnecessary and ridiculous. … They’re not a waste of time because if you didn’t do them, you wouldn’t be here, you wouldn’t be in a class that teaches Advaita Vedanta.

You wouldn’t be seeking complete freedom. Everything you’ve done has led you to this. Yet, it is all a bunch of nonsense. How can they both be correct? How can it be necessary and also be a bunch of nonsense? As long as you refuse to awaken, and you refuse to see yourself as no body, you’re going to go through all these rituals and all these experiences, and practice all these teachings, and memorize the bible, and the sutras, and everything else.

You’re going to go through all kinds of teachings again, and again, and again, and again, perhaps for many, many lives, until you awaken to the fact that it is not the teaching that’s going to awaken me, … it is no person, place or thing that can ever awaken me, and free me from bondage to myself, from bondage to maya [illusion], to the universe, to the world.

And this is the beginning of wisdom, when you realize this.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)