There have been those few people in the world who have gone beyond birth and death. There have been those people, very few, who know the secrets, the answers to life, to the mysteries of life. Yet they can do nothing for you until you can find out yourself who you really are, what you really are, what you’re all about.

For if you believe you were born you begin to accumulate knowledge, as soon as you’re born. You become aware of your environment, then you become aware of other people. Your parents feed you all kinds of knowledge and all this does is expand your ego. Your ego begins to live. It’s fattened up by thoughts, knowledge. Just like the body is fattened up by food. When you’re about four or five years old you go play out in the street with your friends, you acquire further knowledge. You go to your particular church or school, you acquire further knowledge. And the more you grow up the more knowledge you receive. And the ego expands and expands until you believe you know something. When you believe you know something the ego has taken over completely and you become an ego. So when some of us believe there must be an answer, or this is not the answer, there must be an answer to the riddle of life, we start to give ourselves further knowledge by reading books, searching out teachers, listening to lecturers and we receive further knowledge. It appears to help but it’s fooling you. The appearance is a lie.

You become intellectual, you’re able to debate, you acquire more knowledge at university, you study philosophy and soon you become a walking encyclopaedia. You’re now filled with knowledge, filled with relative knowledge, worldly knowledge. Has this done the world any good? Look at the precarious condition the world is in. Has all the knowledge of lawyers, politicians, doctors, indian chiefs done this world any good? Knowledge seems to be destroying this world not making it a better place in which to live. The great secret is we have to unlearn everything we’ve learnt if we wish to become free and liberated. No matter how many times I say this to you, you’re still acquiring more knowledge, some of you. Think of the books you read recently. The news you’ve watched on TV. The newspapers you read. Aren’t you acquiring more and more knowledge? What is this knowledge doing for you? Expanding your ego and your ego grows and grows and encompasses the whole world, the whole universe. You have complete knowledge of the universe, of the world in which you live and you think this is going to free you. Freedom comes when you’re empty, when you know nothing.

Robert Adams