Robert: Peace, shanti, shanti, Om, Peace.
Greetings and salutations from the land of the jnanis. The land of the jnanis is where you live. You are all jnanis, but some of you believe you're a body. And as long as you believe you are a body, you separate yourself from the land of the jnanis. You believe you belong to the earth, and if you're earthbound, you have to partake of all the problems, sufferings, happiness, joys, that come from the earth. You have to choose whom you shall follow, if you should follow the divine urge that tells you that you are absolute consciousness, or the call of mammon, which is the world. You have to make that choice.
The choice you make determines what happens to you from here on. It's very simple. You either realize that you are not of this world, that you are absolute reality, your divine nature is pure awareness, and you rest in that, or you worry, and you fear, and you try to make things happen, and you're always scheming, and planning, and looking at the future with dismay, worrying about the past. The choice is really yours.
And even when some of you say, "I am absolute reality," you’re still referring to the body, for you are saying, "I am," and you don't know I am as consciousness. You're saying, "I am absolute reality," meaning that your body, your ego, is absolute reality, and this is a great mistake. You have to understand when you say, "I am absolute reality," I am and absolute reality are both synonymous. You're declaring the highest truth. You can say it this way, you may say, "I am is absolute reality," for if you’re having problems, if you think something is wrong, and you say "I am absolute reality," you're really saying my problems, and my negative thinking, is absolute reality. That's what you mean by I am.
So remember what I am really means. I am is God. I am is nirvana, emptiness. I am is consciousness, and that is your reality. So there’s no real difference between me and you. Absolute reality, consciousness, is all-pervading. If it's all-pervading, how can you be something else? You see the folly of your thinking? There is only absolute consciousness. There is only the reality. It is all-pervading. There’s nothing else.
Just being aware of this, your thoughts stop. There is nothing to think about. There is no thing you have to do. There are no mantras you have to keep chanting. There are no formulas that are going to turn you into a jnani. There are no yoga practices that you have to keep doing. You simply have to be aware that absolute reality is omnipresent, all-pervading, and there is no room for anything else.
I am is Brahman. It goes further than that. I am is Parabrahman, beyond Brahman. It's unpronounceable, unfathomable. You are that. You are that consciousness, and there is absolutely nothing to think about. There is no thing you have to get rid of. There is no special reading you have to do. There is no one you have to really see. You simply have to be aware of the fact that absolute reality is all there is. There’s not even room for a thought, for a question, for an answer. There’s no room, because the absolute reality takes up all the room.
There is nothing to wonder about. You do not have to be worthy. You do not have to deserve it. There is no use thinking about your past, because your past never existed and never will exist. The past and the future are just dreams. Awaken from the dream by realizing absolute reality is the only power. It is everywhere. There is not the world and absolute reality, and then you have to overcome the world to find your reality. There is no world to overcome. There is no God to pray to. Brahman is yourself. Shiva is your consciousness. You are that.
What else is there to know? You do not have to be a scholar of the Upanishads. You do not have to memorize various passages. You have to become like a little child and stay centered in the present. No one exists but you. You are the only existence. There is no other existence.
If you took this room and everything in it, the tape recorders, the bodies, the flowers, the carpet, and began to melt it down to its most minutest particles, you would get pure energy from everything. Everything will come from the same source. That source is absolute reality. It is the substratum of all existence. And that source is you. You are that. You are nothing else. Everything else is a lie. You’re searching, and you’re striving, and you’re looking for this, and you're looking for that. Give it up. Stay put. Do not allow your mind to think past your nose. Catch your mind. Observe it thinking, and laugh.
Where do the thoughts come, that you think about? They are formed by habit. For years you've been using your mind to think, and you believe the only way you can survive is through thinking. But now you are beginning to understand that what you call your mind is not really your friend. It is an optical illusion that keeps you earthbound, and makes you worry about your affairs, and concerns you with the ways of the world.
But what if you understood that the world doesn't exist? The world is like the water in a mirage. It appears to exist, just as your body appears to exist, but when you investigate you will laugh, for there is nothing at all that exists. If you wish to listen to your mind, you're going to have a hard time on this earth, for you will find that some things go good one day, and seem to go bad the next day. And then you're happy when you get things going your way, and you become miserable when they go the other way.
This is the way of the world. It plays games with you. You have to awaken. You have to surrender all of your games, all of your mental attitudes, all of the past and future, all of your beliefs and conceptual thinking. All of these things must go, all of your objects and subjects, all of your so called human intelligence, everything you've learned. It has to be transcended and then you'll be free.
But as long as you hold on to the slightest thing… It may be that you're in love with the rose. If you look at the rose and believe in the rose, it will keep you earth-bound. You are the rose. The rose exists because you exist, just as the world exists because you exist. When you cease to exist, the world ceases to exist. When you cease to exist, there's only the reality, and you become absolutely free.
(Musical interlude.)
Many people still can't understand why people who become self-realized seem to suffer, physically or otherwise. A week doesn't go by when somebody doesn't ask me this question, "How can a person who claims to be self-realized like Ramana Maharshi and Ramakrishna and many others, die such horrible deaths? Is it worth going after freedom like that? Is it worth becoming liberated when you're going to die a horrible death of cancer, or something else?"
Now this kind of question is completely ludicrous to me. It's ludicrous to me because who asked the question, the jnani or the ajnani? Who suffers? Can't you see by now, that what you see is only in a certain dimension. Where most of you are right now, you see birth and death, sickness and health, poverty and riches. You see duality. So naturally your body was born to die if that's what you see, and that's what you're coming from, and suffering appears to ensue. But from the jnani's viewpoint, there is no one who was ever born, and no one suffers.
Ramakrishna appeared to be wasting away, and some of you say, "How can you say that? Look what happened to him? We witnessed it. We saw it. We read about it." Who’s this we? Who are you anyway? If you consider yourself a human being, naturally you are going to witness suffering. But did Ramakrishna admit he was suffering? Did Ramana Maharshi admit he was suffering? They were laughing all the way to hell. No one ever suffered, and no one will ever suffer.
It's the way you see things. You have to lift yourself up, and you have to see things from a different viewpoint. You did not come to this earth. You were never born. Your body is not even maintained and sustained. Neither is the world. There is only the absolute reality.
So many of these sages, to make the public feel better, they say what happened to these people is they took on the karma of their devotees. Now that's a lie. It's a lie because there's no karma. There is nothing to take on. It appears like this to the ajnani, who beholds, with his or her eyes, somebody suffering.
Now I don't want you to go out and laugh at the people in the hospital who are dying, or go to a dying person and say, "You're not suffering. You're just making believe." That would be nonsense, stupidity. When you realize a person believes that they are suffering, you should never tell them they're not, because at that stage of life they don't know what you're talking about. It is therefore your duty to help. It is your duty to come to the aid of everyone in trouble, as long as you believe you are human, and you are the body, and you go through experiences. So does everybody else that you see.
But when you come to the life of a sage, it's a completely different ball game. The sage doesn't see the same things that you see. A good example of that is the chalkboard. Imagine the sage as the chalkboard, and you draw a picture of a human being suffering, dying of cancer, wasting away. Everyone who looks at the chalkboard will relate to the human being drawn on it. They will not relate to the chalkboard. They will relate to the picture, especially if the picture looks real and covers most of the chalkboard. But did anything happen to the chalkboard? Did the chalkboard get hurt? Was the chalkboard born? Did the chalkboard grow old and die from cancer? Now you can erase the picture and the chalkboard is all the same, as it was before. No change.
Therefore do you see yourself as a dying individual, who gets older, and has problems, and might catch a disease? Or do you see yourself as the substratum, as consciousness, as pure awareness, and a so called problem is merely an imposition upon the self ? How do you see it? Ponder this. How do you see all the situations in the world? Think of a gigantic chalkboard if you will, and now someone is drawing pictures of the whole world on the chalkboard, the whole universe, galaxies, planets, people, places, things. The whole chalkboard is covered with images. Does the chalkboard feel this? Does the chalkboard feel the good images and rejoice with it, and cry over the bad images? The chalkboard remains ever the same. New pictures come, old pictures go.
And so it is with most of us. Your life is planned on the chalkboard, and then when you appear to drop your body, someone appears to draw a new one on the chalkboard, and that's called reincarnation. And the picture that is drawn on the chalkboard of your new body, goes through those experiences in accordance with karma. That's part of the grand illusion. But nothing ever happens to the chalkboard.
A sage is like the chalkboard. His or her body may be appearing to decay, to waste away for one reason or another, but the sage is not identified with that. To others it may appear that way, but the sage is absolute reality, all-pervading. There is nothing but the sage. There’s no room for anything else. There’s no place for anything else. The sage is the self. The self is all there is.
You must subsequently awaken. When you hear these words, chew them up, assimilate them. Let them go into your spiritual heart center. Understand what this means. You are free. You have always been free. You have no bondage to anything. Do not believe what your eyes show you. If I make hospital visitations, if I help the homeless, it doesn't mean that I'm agreeing with this or accepting it. It is just being done. Again, I do not become arrogant. I do not become cynical. When I see a homeless person I do not say they are not really suffering. Of course they are, because they are the images on the chalkboard.
This is the maya. This is the illusion. This is the dream, and they’re caught up in that dream. It's all prearranged, preordained. That's the experience they're going through now. But when they wake up, then there's no such thing as anything being prearranged or preordained. That all goes out the window with everything else, into the garbage. Then there’s only pure awareness, ultimate oneness, and there's nothing else.
This is what you have to work on, to clear up your idea of what's going on. And the easiest way to do this is, no matter what you see, or what you believe, or what feelings come to you, simply say, "To whom do they come?" Find out. To whom do these images come, these chalkboard images? Who sees them? Who identifies with them? Who becomes angry over them? Who sees disease, poverty, lack, limitation, man's inhumanity to man? Is this reality?" And then you'll realize they are chalkboard images, that's all they are, and you'll be able to erase them.
You begin to understand that all these images belong to the personal I. Imagine a string, and you tie onto the string everything in the world, and everything in the universe. It's all hanging on to the string. If you get rid of the string, there’ll be no place for these things to hang onto, and they'll have to dissolve. It is the string that gives them their power. The string is your personal I.
When you wake up in the morning, the personal I comes out of your heart center and runs up into your brain. You then identify with the body, and when you identify with the body, the I expands and you become the world, and you say, "I see the sky, I see the moon, I see man's inhumanity to man, I see love," and you see all these human things, which you gave birth to.
Can't you see now, they all came out of you. They came out of your mind. This is what the teaching of no-mind means. When there is no mind, there is no existence. So the idea is to transfer them back to whence they came, and you do that by tracing the I thought. It's only a thought. You trace the I back to its source. As far as you’re concerned, the source is the spiritual heart on the right side of the chest. Has nothing to do with chakras. It is absolute reality. It is nirvana, your spiritual heart. The I and the whole world goes back into the heart. Then there is only self contained absolute reality and nothing else.
Do not make it complicated. Do not be analytical. Simply realize the source of your problems is I. I belongs in the heart center, not in my head. As long as I is in my head, I relate to the world. When I abide in the I, hold on to it, and you do that by inquiring, "For whom does the I come?" or "Who am I?" the I will finally disappear, and only the source, or Brahman, will be left. That's what you are. That is your real nature.
Abide in it. Love it. Be it, and be happy.
Greetings and salutations from the land of the jnanis. The land of the jnanis is where you live. You are all jnanis, but some of you believe you're a body. And as long as you believe you are a body, you separate yourself from the land of the jnanis. You believe you belong to the earth, and if you're earthbound, you have to partake of all the problems, sufferings, happiness, joys, that come from the earth. You have to choose whom you shall follow, if you should follow the divine urge that tells you that you are absolute consciousness, or the call of mammon, which is the world. You have to make that choice.
The choice you make determines what happens to you from here on. It's very simple. You either realize that you are not of this world, that you are absolute reality, your divine nature is pure awareness, and you rest in that, or you worry, and you fear, and you try to make things happen, and you're always scheming, and planning, and looking at the future with dismay, worrying about the past. The choice is really yours.
And even when some of you say, "I am absolute reality," you’re still referring to the body, for you are saying, "I am," and you don't know I am as consciousness. You're saying, "I am absolute reality," meaning that your body, your ego, is absolute reality, and this is a great mistake. You have to understand when you say, "I am absolute reality," I am and absolute reality are both synonymous. You're declaring the highest truth. You can say it this way, you may say, "I am is absolute reality," for if you’re having problems, if you think something is wrong, and you say "I am absolute reality," you're really saying my problems, and my negative thinking, is absolute reality. That's what you mean by I am.
So remember what I am really means. I am is God. I am is nirvana, emptiness. I am is consciousness, and that is your reality. So there’s no real difference between me and you. Absolute reality, consciousness, is all-pervading. If it's all-pervading, how can you be something else? You see the folly of your thinking? There is only absolute consciousness. There is only the reality. It is all-pervading. There’s nothing else.
Just being aware of this, your thoughts stop. There is nothing to think about. There is no thing you have to do. There are no mantras you have to keep chanting. There are no formulas that are going to turn you into a jnani. There are no yoga practices that you have to keep doing. You simply have to be aware that absolute reality is omnipresent, all-pervading, and there is no room for anything else.
I am is Brahman. It goes further than that. I am is Parabrahman, beyond Brahman. It's unpronounceable, unfathomable. You are that. You are that consciousness, and there is absolutely nothing to think about. There is no thing you have to get rid of. There is no special reading you have to do. There is no one you have to really see. You simply have to be aware of the fact that absolute reality is all there is. There’s not even room for a thought, for a question, for an answer. There’s no room, because the absolute reality takes up all the room.
There is nothing to wonder about. You do not have to be worthy. You do not have to deserve it. There is no use thinking about your past, because your past never existed and never will exist. The past and the future are just dreams. Awaken from the dream by realizing absolute reality is the only power. It is everywhere. There is not the world and absolute reality, and then you have to overcome the world to find your reality. There is no world to overcome. There is no God to pray to. Brahman is yourself. Shiva is your consciousness. You are that.
What else is there to know? You do not have to be a scholar of the Upanishads. You do not have to memorize various passages. You have to become like a little child and stay centered in the present. No one exists but you. You are the only existence. There is no other existence.
If you took this room and everything in it, the tape recorders, the bodies, the flowers, the carpet, and began to melt it down to its most minutest particles, you would get pure energy from everything. Everything will come from the same source. That source is absolute reality. It is the substratum of all existence. And that source is you. You are that. You are nothing else. Everything else is a lie. You’re searching, and you’re striving, and you’re looking for this, and you're looking for that. Give it up. Stay put. Do not allow your mind to think past your nose. Catch your mind. Observe it thinking, and laugh.
Where do the thoughts come, that you think about? They are formed by habit. For years you've been using your mind to think, and you believe the only way you can survive is through thinking. But now you are beginning to understand that what you call your mind is not really your friend. It is an optical illusion that keeps you earthbound, and makes you worry about your affairs, and concerns you with the ways of the world.
But what if you understood that the world doesn't exist? The world is like the water in a mirage. It appears to exist, just as your body appears to exist, but when you investigate you will laugh, for there is nothing at all that exists. If you wish to listen to your mind, you're going to have a hard time on this earth, for you will find that some things go good one day, and seem to go bad the next day. And then you're happy when you get things going your way, and you become miserable when they go the other way.
This is the way of the world. It plays games with you. You have to awaken. You have to surrender all of your games, all of your mental attitudes, all of the past and future, all of your beliefs and conceptual thinking. All of these things must go, all of your objects and subjects, all of your so called human intelligence, everything you've learned. It has to be transcended and then you'll be free.
But as long as you hold on to the slightest thing… It may be that you're in love with the rose. If you look at the rose and believe in the rose, it will keep you earth-bound. You are the rose. The rose exists because you exist, just as the world exists because you exist. When you cease to exist, the world ceases to exist. When you cease to exist, there's only the reality, and you become absolutely free.
(Musical interlude.)
Many people still can't understand why people who become self-realized seem to suffer, physically or otherwise. A week doesn't go by when somebody doesn't ask me this question, "How can a person who claims to be self-realized like Ramana Maharshi and Ramakrishna and many others, die such horrible deaths? Is it worth going after freedom like that? Is it worth becoming liberated when you're going to die a horrible death of cancer, or something else?"
Now this kind of question is completely ludicrous to me. It's ludicrous to me because who asked the question, the jnani or the ajnani? Who suffers? Can't you see by now, that what you see is only in a certain dimension. Where most of you are right now, you see birth and death, sickness and health, poverty and riches. You see duality. So naturally your body was born to die if that's what you see, and that's what you're coming from, and suffering appears to ensue. But from the jnani's viewpoint, there is no one who was ever born, and no one suffers.
Ramakrishna appeared to be wasting away, and some of you say, "How can you say that? Look what happened to him? We witnessed it. We saw it. We read about it." Who’s this we? Who are you anyway? If you consider yourself a human being, naturally you are going to witness suffering. But did Ramakrishna admit he was suffering? Did Ramana Maharshi admit he was suffering? They were laughing all the way to hell. No one ever suffered, and no one will ever suffer.
It's the way you see things. You have to lift yourself up, and you have to see things from a different viewpoint. You did not come to this earth. You were never born. Your body is not even maintained and sustained. Neither is the world. There is only the absolute reality.
So many of these sages, to make the public feel better, they say what happened to these people is they took on the karma of their devotees. Now that's a lie. It's a lie because there's no karma. There is nothing to take on. It appears like this to the ajnani, who beholds, with his or her eyes, somebody suffering.
Now I don't want you to go out and laugh at the people in the hospital who are dying, or go to a dying person and say, "You're not suffering. You're just making believe." That would be nonsense, stupidity. When you realize a person believes that they are suffering, you should never tell them they're not, because at that stage of life they don't know what you're talking about. It is therefore your duty to help. It is your duty to come to the aid of everyone in trouble, as long as you believe you are human, and you are the body, and you go through experiences. So does everybody else that you see.
But when you come to the life of a sage, it's a completely different ball game. The sage doesn't see the same things that you see. A good example of that is the chalkboard. Imagine the sage as the chalkboard, and you draw a picture of a human being suffering, dying of cancer, wasting away. Everyone who looks at the chalkboard will relate to the human being drawn on it. They will not relate to the chalkboard. They will relate to the picture, especially if the picture looks real and covers most of the chalkboard. But did anything happen to the chalkboard? Did the chalkboard get hurt? Was the chalkboard born? Did the chalkboard grow old and die from cancer? Now you can erase the picture and the chalkboard is all the same, as it was before. No change.
Therefore do you see yourself as a dying individual, who gets older, and has problems, and might catch a disease? Or do you see yourself as the substratum, as consciousness, as pure awareness, and a so called problem is merely an imposition upon the self ? How do you see it? Ponder this. How do you see all the situations in the world? Think of a gigantic chalkboard if you will, and now someone is drawing pictures of the whole world on the chalkboard, the whole universe, galaxies, planets, people, places, things. The whole chalkboard is covered with images. Does the chalkboard feel this? Does the chalkboard feel the good images and rejoice with it, and cry over the bad images? The chalkboard remains ever the same. New pictures come, old pictures go.
And so it is with most of us. Your life is planned on the chalkboard, and then when you appear to drop your body, someone appears to draw a new one on the chalkboard, and that's called reincarnation. And the picture that is drawn on the chalkboard of your new body, goes through those experiences in accordance with karma. That's part of the grand illusion. But nothing ever happens to the chalkboard.
A sage is like the chalkboard. His or her body may be appearing to decay, to waste away for one reason or another, but the sage is not identified with that. To others it may appear that way, but the sage is absolute reality, all-pervading. There is nothing but the sage. There’s no room for anything else. There’s no place for anything else. The sage is the self. The self is all there is.
You must subsequently awaken. When you hear these words, chew them up, assimilate them. Let them go into your spiritual heart center. Understand what this means. You are free. You have always been free. You have no bondage to anything. Do not believe what your eyes show you. If I make hospital visitations, if I help the homeless, it doesn't mean that I'm agreeing with this or accepting it. It is just being done. Again, I do not become arrogant. I do not become cynical. When I see a homeless person I do not say they are not really suffering. Of course they are, because they are the images on the chalkboard.
This is the maya. This is the illusion. This is the dream, and they’re caught up in that dream. It's all prearranged, preordained. That's the experience they're going through now. But when they wake up, then there's no such thing as anything being prearranged or preordained. That all goes out the window with everything else, into the garbage. Then there’s only pure awareness, ultimate oneness, and there's nothing else.
This is what you have to work on, to clear up your idea of what's going on. And the easiest way to do this is, no matter what you see, or what you believe, or what feelings come to you, simply say, "To whom do they come?" Find out. To whom do these images come, these chalkboard images? Who sees them? Who identifies with them? Who becomes angry over them? Who sees disease, poverty, lack, limitation, man's inhumanity to man? Is this reality?" And then you'll realize they are chalkboard images, that's all they are, and you'll be able to erase them.
You begin to understand that all these images belong to the personal I. Imagine a string, and you tie onto the string everything in the world, and everything in the universe. It's all hanging on to the string. If you get rid of the string, there’ll be no place for these things to hang onto, and they'll have to dissolve. It is the string that gives them their power. The string is your personal I.
When you wake up in the morning, the personal I comes out of your heart center and runs up into your brain. You then identify with the body, and when you identify with the body, the I expands and you become the world, and you say, "I see the sky, I see the moon, I see man's inhumanity to man, I see love," and you see all these human things, which you gave birth to.
Can't you see now, they all came out of you. They came out of your mind. This is what the teaching of no-mind means. When there is no mind, there is no existence. So the idea is to transfer them back to whence they came, and you do that by tracing the I thought. It's only a thought. You trace the I back to its source. As far as you’re concerned, the source is the spiritual heart on the right side of the chest. Has nothing to do with chakras. It is absolute reality. It is nirvana, your spiritual heart. The I and the whole world goes back into the heart. Then there is only self contained absolute reality and nothing else.
Do not make it complicated. Do not be analytical. Simply realize the source of your problems is I. I belongs in the heart center, not in my head. As long as I is in my head, I relate to the world. When I abide in the I, hold on to it, and you do that by inquiring, "For whom does the I come?" or "Who am I?" the I will finally disappear, and only the source, or Brahman, will be left. That's what you are. That is your real nature.
Abide in it. Love it. Be it, and be happy.