Mind-Adams

Annihilating the Mind
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When I say to keep silence,
I do not mean just keeping quiet,
when your mind keeps thinking, thinking, thinking,
I am referring to quieting the mind.
When there is no longer any noise in your mind, when the mind becomes
quiescent, the reality appears by itself.

Why do you want to experience the reality? Because you have read in books, teachers have told you, the reality is infinite peace and wisdom, the reality is pure knowledge, the reality is immortality, and everyone wants this.
So we practice all forms of sadhana, we go and see various teachers, we read many books.

Now what all these things should lead to is the silence. After a few years it should not lead to further books, it should not lead to further running around the world, looking for masters who can give you the secret potion, so that you can become self-
realized.
It means to be quiet, to cause the mind to become totally still, not to get involved in talking, talking, talking, about nonsense, to talk very little.

Notice as you keep still this way, how thoughts enter your mind, how they begin to tell you things about yourself,
about the speaker, about the room. The thoughts tell you everything that keeps you back from achieving your realization. Thoughts can do you no good, no matter what kind of thoughts they are. They can only take you so far, confuse you.

You have to see this about yourself. You have to be totally honest with yourself, see where you are coming from, examine your feelings, your emotions.
Again, what is going through your mind. Most people cannot sit in the silence even for a second. The mind waves begin to move.

As long as your mind keeps feeding you information, you can never really awaken, for what you call the mind is merely a bundle of thoughts about the past, and about the future and about the present. That's all the mind is. The mind keeps you earthbound. That is its job, to make you part of this earth, to attach you to person, place and thing.

Therefore the wise person, from the very beginning, begins to do things to keep the mind still, to quiet the mind.
What is the highest thing you can possibly do to quiet the mind?
And the answer is nothing.
As long as you're doing something you're using the mind. Therefore the highest teaching is, do nothing.

When you learn to do nothing, the mind will stop thinking all by itself, but when you do something, the mind will accumulate more knowledge, of things that you are doing, and become ever stronger, and stronger and stronger.
Remember you are not trying to acquire more knowledge, and add on to the knowledge you already have. You want
to empty yourself totally, absolutely and completely, of all so called knowledge.

You're afraid to do this, for you think you will become a vegetable. It's hard to imagine a person with no mind. But, when you begin to realize your mind is only an accumulation of thoughts, thoughts from past lives, thoughts from this life, only thoughts, then you begin to see that the mind has to be totally transcended and transmuted.

And those of you who have been practicing sadhana for many years, have come to the point where now you can do nothing.
You no longer have to meditate.
You no longer have to practice atma-vichara.
You no longer have to practice being the witness, Vipassana meditation.
Those things are no longer necessary. They have taken you to a certain point, and here you are.
You now have absolutely nothing to do. You are free.

If you think about this aright, you will see that your body, what you call your body, will still function very well without your thoughts. This is sort of a hard one to grasp, for you have been taught you have to use your mind to function.
You've been taught that your mind uses the body to function on this earth plane.
That's how it appears. But in truth there never was a body, there never was a mind and there was never anyone to function.

When this is understood properly, you become the epitome of compassion, of loving kindness, of peace, of humility,
simply by understanding what I just said. You do not have to earn these virtues. Some of these virtues are actually
yours already, they've always been yours, compassion, loving kindness, peace, happiness. Since they are already yours and you have them already, you simply have to sit still, quiet the mind, and they'll come up to express themselves.

It's similar to the sun covered by clouds. When the sun is covered by clouds, you think there is no sun, the sun has
disappeared. Yet once the clouds dissipate, the sun shines once more with all its glory and splendor. And so it is with the mind. You have believed that the mind causes you to function, to shine, and this is not necessarily true. The mind is here to keep you earthbound.

When you stop thinking, the mind becomes the infinite, becomes God,
becomes boundless space, nirvana, pure awareness.
It doesn't really become that.
You've always been that.
The mind
merely disappears, as a mind, and your true nature is expressed.

Many people try to develop virtues before they try to remove the mind. This is impossible to do. If you have anger, fear, and many of these negative conditions, it is very difficult to make them disappear. It is very difficult to get rid of them, to transcend them. No matter what you do to try to transcend them, to try to give them up, they just becomes stronger.

It is only when you work on the removal of the mind, by quieting the mind, then all of these things we discussed, the fears, the frustrations, the anger, disappears of its own volition.
It's so easy and yet so hard.
The reason it appears hard is because you have become attached to your way of
thinking, you have been attached to person, place and thing for so many years. You're attached to your memories, to your body. This is the reason it appears difficult.

But when you begin to understand and realize there is no body,
there is no attachment,
there is only total freedom,
the mind becomes totally annihilated.

This is something you have to work with yourself. This is something you have to talk to yourself about, something you have to see for yourself.
Seeing is being.
As you begin to see the great truth, that you are the imperishable self,
the mind will automatically run away and become dissolved.

~ The Collected Works of Robert Adams