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)

“You should not believe a word I’m saying to you. Find out for yourself. You are the one with the answers, yet you keep reacting to life outside of yourself. You keep allowing the world to show you how you should feel. If the world shows you something nice and good you become happy.

If it shows you something that is not nice or good you become miserable. Depending on your upbringing, what you believe is good, what you believe is bad. … Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so. It is your mind that dictates to you and tells you that this is good or this is bad.

It is your mind that tells you that this is right and this is wrong. Where did you mind get this knowledge? From experience. But is experience the truth? No. The experience is not the truth, it’s just your training, how you grew up.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

You have not come to this earth to struggle, to fight, to become anything, to hurt anyone, to be hurt, you are here merely to be. Not to be this or to be that just to be. You allow this beingness to function properly when you get yourself out the way, that is your thoughts, your preconceived ideas.
When you keep the mind still, perfectly still and calm then you will always find that you are in the right place going through those experiences that are necessary for your unfoldment and your fulfillment.
Do not worry about the future or the past. Do not concern yourself with events in the present. Just be! Be the Self that you are. You will be satisfied. Everything will be okay.
There is nothing that wants to hurt you, cause you pain or give you any problems. It is only because you keep thinking continuously, constantly that you have this belief that somebody wants to hurt you, cause you problems, upset you.
There is only one. There are not two or three. There is only one Self and you are that.

Robert Adams

“You can see how foolish it is to become angry over something, to judge something, to think something is good, something is bad, something is right, something is wrong. You are supposedly truth students. Students of the highest truth. You can never get anywhere by judging this world, by coming to conclusions, by taking sides, by feeling angry. All it does is keep you back into humanhood, pushes you back into humanhood, thousands of years back.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

“When I say, ‘All is well and everything is unfolding as it should,’ I mean that literally. If you understand the nature of the universe, you would realize there’s no time or space. It doesn’t exist except for the ego. If there is no time or space then what appears to exist is the one source appearing as, person, place or thing. As we get deeper into this, we realize that person, place or thing never existed and does not exist at all.

Only the one source exists, which is called nothing, Brahman, sat-chit-ananda [existence-consciousness-bliss], nirvana. Consequently, all is well. For the one source is the ultimate reality, the absolute reality. It is bliss consciousness. This is why when I say, ‘All is well,’ I mean it literally.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

“‘[What is your spiritual status?] I’ll give you one little test to see, … one simple test. What have you been thinking about all day long? Have you been thinking about your attachments, your health, your finances, the world, conditions? That’s it. This shows you where you’re at.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

“Remember you do not know how much time you have left in this world. … You never know when you’re going to give up your body. What are you doing with your time? Do you waste it by worrying over nonsense or trying to change person, place or thing, or trying to get your own way, manipulation? You’re only fooling yourself.

You must try your best to let go of this world, if you want to make spiritual progress. By letting go of this world I don’t mean you have to go live in a cave and ignore everybody, I mean mentally. This all begins mentally. You have to mentally make the correction within yourself.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

Everything is Consciousness – everything. I don’t know what Consciousness is, but I am That. Consciousness is a no-thing. It is nothing you can pin down. Consciousness is Silence. Consciousness is Ultimate Oneness, Pure Intelligence.

Robert Adams

“This world can never make you happy, it’s impossible. It may appear to make you happy for a while because you’re gaining something that you want. But it will only last a short time. True happy…true happiness comes from nothing. When your happiness arises from nothingness then you’re really happy, because nothing made you happy and nothing can take it away.

If something makes you happy then if something take it away you will be miserable. But if you learn to achieve happiness from nothing this is everlasting. It will never leave you because there is nothing to change.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)