go easy on yourself - adams

Robert Adams
Excerpt from: Satsang
Go easy on yourself

I brought a picture for you of yourself in the future. Here it is. (students laugh). This is you. This is what is going to happen to you whether you like it or not. (laughter) You're going to look exactly like this. (more laughter) No matter what you do or don't do. No matter whether you're happy or sad, rich or poor, sick or healthy, you're still going to turn into a bag of bones. This is what happens to the average person. That’s what I have to look forward to but if you would only go within yourself and know the truth about yourself then this becomes a mirage.

When you discover you have eternal life that you've never been born, you can never die, when you discover bliss is your real nature, bliss. You were meant to be blissed out every second of the day. Happiness, true happiness that does not involve person, place or thing. When you understand this truth you become free in it. And you will always be alive, always. The body becomes like a bubble in the ocean. Bubbles come bubbles go, bodies come bodies go, here today gone tomorrow.

Many of you want to have fun all day, enjoy things. There is nothing wrong with that but it must come to end. Everything comes to an end. All of your enjoyments, all of your pleasures. Everything you've earned, worked for, strived for comes to an end. Everything must end. When you're sort of young you don't think about these things. You think about having fun all the time, enjoying, holding on to the world making something of yourself. Well you've made something of yourself, you've made a mess of yourself. By believing you are the mind. By believing you are living in reality.

Whereas in truth the only reality is the reality you don't know. The reality that is beyond time and space, beyond worlds, bodies. But you cannot taste this reality that I'm speaking of unless you virtually give up your life. I don't mean you have to kill yourself. I mean give up the life that you're living, mentally. Stop believing that the life that you're living is important, that there's something you have to do, something you have to accomplish. Your true life is within. The real world is within yourself. Free of all pain, sorrow. Free of man's inhumanity to man. Free of everything.There is a world like that you know. A real world, that is full of happiness and joy and peace. A world that has no beginning and no end. That world is you! You are that! But we're going about it the wrong way, most of us.

I have been receiving a lot of telephone calls from Santa Cruz during the holidays. Santa Cruz must be completely enlightened because everybody that calls me from there tells me they're enlightened. (students laugh) This has been going on for about two or three years. They want a confirmation for their enlightenment. I usually give the same answer. I say, "If there is anybody looking for confirmation, kill that somebody. Who needs a confirmation? Does the Self need a confirmation? The ego wants a confirmation."

But last night I got a call from Santa Cruz from a lady who got a hold of my transcript. And she tells me, "Robert for twenty-five years I've been reading Advaita Vedanta. I've read everything there is to read, everything, every book. I sit in meditation four times a day. I travel the world. Met all the Jnanis. Seen all the holy places but nothing has happened." This is what I told her and this important for us too.

I told her, "You are doing everything backwards. The more you read, the more knowledge you gain. And who profits by this? The ego, every book that you read gives you more intelligence. Who has intelligence? The ego, every time you think you have to meditate, it is the ego that is meditating. Does the Self have to meditate? Does reality have to meditate on reality? All of the gurus you've seen, everything that you've done has actually put you back in time, not forward but back."

The whole idea in Advaita Vedanta is to remove everything we've ever learnt. To get rid of all the things we've learnt, not to add to it. Not to add new knowledge to the old knowledge, but to become like little children so-to-speak. We do not wish to know something, we wish to know nothing. How can you know nothing when you're reading and reading and reading or when you're meditating your life away? When you're searching for new teachers all the time? All you are doing is filling yourself up with knowledge, more knowledge and more knowledge and more knowledge. The only thing that could happen to you is you become a walking encyclopaedia. You'll be able to cite aphorisms, sutras, if you have a good memory you'll memorize the bible backwards and you'll have a lot to say.

This is the mistake most of us make. A true spiritual aspirant hardly has anything to say. There is noone to debate. Nobody to argue points of spirituality. Noone to say, "I'm right or you're right. This is right and this is wrong." A true spiritual aspirant is very quiet, very still. Does not make a lot of waves but watches, looks and does nothing. Everything that has to be done will be done through the person. It's so easy to live a life like this.

It's so easy to be still and allow the power that knows the way to move you in the right direction, to lead you. You do not have to raise a finger. And there is absolutely nothing that you have to do. Why will you not trust yourself and stop fighting? Stop having a battle within yourself. Leave yourself alone. Remember I told you before you have to learn to love yourself? To really really love yourself. If you can really love yourself you can trust yourself. Go easy on yourself. Develop loving kindness, compassion.