” ‘I am’ is consciousness. I am is absolute reality. I am is pure awareness. And that is always with you. How can it not be? For after all, you only exist because I am exists. Or you may call ‘I am’ God, if you desire. … You are That. There is no God or I am apart from you.

You are a wonderful being, a pure being, a spiritual being, a God-like being. Yet, what do you think of yourself? You worry, you fear, you think you have problems. What kind of problems can God ever have?”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

Whenever you float away in thoughts,
keep remembering to catch yourself.

Robert Adams

TO WHOM DOES THE FEAR COME ?

When you are on the path to liberation, one of the first things that you experience is the removal of fear. All fear leaves you. And when there’s nothing to fear, there’s nothing to fight.

You simply have a chip on your shoulder and you react to life negatively because you fear. There is some deep imbedded fear in your subconscious. You may not be aware of it, but you have a deep fear, and you react by having a chip on your shoulder, and you’re always ready to fight life. As you inquire “To whom does this fear come?” as you begin to see that the fear belongs to the personal I and not to you, the fear begins to become weaker and weaker and weaker. The fear begins to flee as you self-inquire, as you ask
“To whom does the fear come?”

As you continue on the path to self-realization, the next quality that comes to you is a feeling of great peace. You’ve
lost fear and now you become peaceful. You become very peaceful. The world, things, ceases to disturb you. There is no reason why you feel peace. In other words things have really not changed dramatically in your life. You’re still aware of man’s inhumanity to man. You still see all the dastardly things on television that used to cause upset inside of you. You used to become upset something awful. And now for some reason you no longer become upset.

People used to look at you the wrong way, you are ready to fight. You’ll always find some fault some place. You go to a restaurant and you always believe that the waitress or the waiter is cheating you. You go to a supermarket at the checkout stand, you count everything you bought. You’re afraid of being cheated. All that stops. The fear is gone, and you feel peaceful. You have a deep conviction that nobody wants to hurt you. The feeling that there are people in the world who still can cheat you, mug you, rob you, disappears, even though those people may still exist. But
you have risen. You have risen. You no longer feel these things. You feel an unalloyed peace, for no reason, that has
nothing to do with person, place or thing.

The next quality that comes to you on the path to self-realization is happiness. Something within you is always happy. This doesn’t mean that you’re laughing all the time, or you always have to have a smile on your face. That’s just an outer appearance, a put on. You just feel happy for no reason whatsoever.

Eventually as you continue on the path, you feel a bliss, a bliss that is beyond understanding. The world can no longer hurt you. You haven’t come to a 100% conclusion that the world doesn’t exist, but for some reason you feel that the world can no longer hurt you, and you feel blissful all the time. Other people cannot see this. You want to share it with them, but you cannot. You can only point the way to self-inquiry.

As you continue on the path and you go deeper and deeper, the peace, the happiness, the bliss, become transcendent.
You become the self.
You become the substratum of all existence. You function as consciousness, yet you appear to people as a body. Your form becomes a transmitter for divine grace to those mature disciples and devotees who are ready to receive it, but you are doing no thing. You are not saying that I am something, and I transmit something. If you make a statement like that, there is still somebody left who believes they’re a transmitter. There is no one to transmit anything, yet it appears to happen that way.

So you see, there is a good reason to want to awaken from the mortal dream. You will become totally free, and you will experience joy that cannot be explained.
Now let’s talk about you.
How do you start?

By letting go of all your problems, all those things that have been hounding you, all those things you love so much, mentally letting them go, and inquiring
“To whom do they come?”
Inquiring “To whom do they come?” Realizing “They come to me. I feel these things. I feel hurt. I feel slighted. I feel upset. Yet I am not I.
Then who is I?
Where did the I come from that feels upset, that feels out of sorts?”
You do not answer that query, but you feel that the I carries the weight of the problem, not you.

As you continue to do this day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, who knows? You never know when it may happen. But one day, the I will disappear into the heart during your waking state, and you will see your omnipresence with your spiritual eye.
You will feel a joy, a happiness, that’s beyond understanding.
You will be free.

~ The Collected Works of Robert Adams Volume 1 # Just Being

“You’ve been hypnotized, mesmerized, to the grand illusion, the maya. Awaken to yourself. Awaken to the truth that you are free and you’re nothing but freedom. Total absolute freedom from every conceivable thing you can imagine. Like boundless space you are totally free. Free of all so-called karmas, samskaras, samsaras, past mistakes, everything. You no longer have to suffer. You no longer have to be afraid of anything.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

[Samara = circuitous wandering]

Don’t think you must run away from conditioning or you must run away from your job or you must leave your family or you must do anything like this. Never concern yourself with the body. Mentally learn to let go, to think less. Cut down on your thinking and your thoughts. Some of you still believe that if you do not think about something, it will never happen. This is not true. As a matter of fact, it is reverse. If you do not think, then the true nature of yourself will be revealed, and the true nature of the universe will be revealed. ~Robert Adams

From a satsang during the race riots in Los Angeles in 1992:

“Many of you go home and you begin to think of the world. We fear the riots downtown, the rebellion. We never seem to understand that these things have been happening since time immemorial. There has always been man’s inhumanity to man. There have always been riots, confusion, chaos. But my question to you is, ‘What does this have to do with you?’ You profess to be a spiritual person. A spiritual person understands where the world is coming from. They neither hate it nor love it. They just watch and observe and look. They cannot have feelings for being good or bad because their feelings are steeped in Godliness. Their feelings are always on the reality. The feelings do not go out and say, ‘This is terrible. This is wonderful. This is bad. This is good. This is how it should be. This is how it shouldn’t be.’ These things are the images on the screen.

Begin to see it this way. Your body and your mind and the things going on in the world are the images on the screen that are changeable, never being the same. This is the way of the world. We build things, structures, edifices, monasteries, big buildings, big cities and then they’re all destroyed in due time. And we build them again and they’re all destroyed again. It’s all a cosmic joke, but you’re taking it seriously. As long as you’re taking it seriously you become part of it. You experience it, you go through it. This is why it is written, ‘Whom shall you follow this day, God or mammon? Whom shall you follow? The world and it’s peculiarities – this is mammon – or the Self, the absolute reality. The choice is yours. Do the right thing. “

~ Robert Adams, “The Fear of Death” 3rd May, 1992

“The whole idea is to be silent. Not to add affirmations or words to your garbage pail. It is already filled with garbage. By garbage I mean, preconceived ideas, dogmas, opinions, samskaras from previous lives, you’re filled with these things and you are a reacting machine, you react, that is what you do all day is react, react, react. Therefore when you try to learn more knowledge and you read more books all you’re doing is adding on to the garbage pail.

Of course most of you realize, the highest truth is to delete, not to add. To get rid of the things you believe in now. So empty yourself out totally and completely. All of your ideas, your feelings, all have to be emptied out of you. When you become totally and completely empty there is nothing you have to do to fill it up again. Emptiness is realization. Emptiness is Brahman. Emptiness is the Self. Emptiness is your real nature.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)

[Samskaras = imprints or impressions left on the mind by experience]

If you really want to awaken you must put this first in your life.
How do you put this first in your life?
By learning to be calm and peaceful under all conditions.
By observing everything in your life and leaving it alone.
By allowing people to live their own lives and not judging or condemning.
By beginning to see that the person you dislike, that the condition that you do not like, is only yourself.
Whatever transpires is yourself.
There is only yourself.
If you realize there is only yourself, whatever you do for others or to others you’re doing to yourself.
In other words, where you are coming from in consciousness that is what you see.
If you believe you’re a body, you’re a mind, if you believe in the things of this world
then you see them everywhere you look. You see other bodies.
If you believe in suffering, you will see other people suffer.
If you believe in crying you will see crying wherever you look.
Whatever you believe in your mind you are creating in your life.
But if you go beyond the mind where there is absolutely nothing going on,
you will be in a place that cannot be described.
~Robert Adams -T.232: The Ground Upon Which I Stand
Is Holy Ground.

“Learn to be still. When I say, ‘Learn to be still’ I’m not [saying] to meditate. Remember when you meditate there has to be a subject and an object. When I say, ‘To be still,’ just be still. Be still, do not think of anything special. Just be still, quiet. …

Think of all the noise that some of you made this morning as you got out of bed, the talking, the arguing, the mind chattering. That is what I’m referring to, be still. You can talk to your mind this way, tell your mind to ‘be still!’ When your mind begins to chatter say, ‘Be still!’

When the mind starts telling you all kind of things about somebody else say, ‘Be still!’ When the mind brings things of the past say, ‘Be still!’ That’s all you have to do. You are the power. You can still the mind if you really want to, just by telling it to be still.”

~ Robert Adams (20th century American Advaita mystic)