Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

Rajiv and others, please listen clearly. I am not bashing gurus or their methods.  I am bashing the words they use.  It is words read 100 or 1000 years later by someone in Buffalo N.Y. that can trap that person into an idealization of both Ramana, the picture painted of him by many disciples, and his teachings about consciousness.  This poor guy or girl may have nothing else to go on for years but being trapped in these concepts and projections flowing out of a need for security and projected onto this idol. 

Then later, he or she discovers the spiritual marketplace and finds it overcrowded with competing visions, teachers, workshops, paid skype sessions, and more than anything else, the concepts gurus teach, concepts about everything from love, to awakening, to “full-realization,” the need to be in Nirvakalpa Samadhi for 12 years with a guru until you awaken, Turiya, awareness, and a trillion other concepts and methods.

I knew Robert really, really well.

He used concepts to entertain and keep people coming back to Satsang to be in his presence.  It was not his words that that changed me or anyone else, it was his presence.  In his presence I was transformed.  It was his stillness, his lack of teaching that transformed me.  He was not of this world and I felt an intuition of that world when I was with him.

Therefore my teaching has nothing to do with any concepts, even those from my beloved Nisargadatta, and even less so from Robert or Ramana.  I worship Nisargadatta, and I have taken Robert into my heart and he is I.  I feel their grace constantly, and do not feel they would have felt betrayed because I say they often spoke bullshit.  I think they would smile to hear me say that.

If they were alive, I would tell people, “Go to Nisargadatta and Robert.  Just sit in their presence and listen.  Don’t judge or form concepts. Just listen and try to feel them with your beingness, with your heart.” 

I do not bash them, I bash their concepts.  I do not bash their methods, I embrace them and expand on the process of meditation on the I Am, and even use the concepts of the four bodies as a heuristic tool. 

But what I see in almost all of my students is being stuck in their everyday, personal life, trying desperately to get unstuck by following gurus, doing practices, and mostly reading books, which just crowd their minds with additional concepts which even more hide the truth of emptiness.

So my message is “Do not get even more stuck by becoming captured by a tradition or set of concepts that are not relevant to that which you know for certain.  What is it that you know without doubt? Is there anything you know without doubt?”  This will take them immediately to the conclusion, “I know nothing for certain.”  What does this get you?  Fear? Insecurity? A sense of loss? What does this give you?

It allows you to be open to your own truth. What do you know with complete certainty?  Don’t you see, this has plowed the field of your mind to be free of all conceptual weeds and allows space for your own truth, verbal or non-verbal to sprout and grow.

At the deepest level you need to trust the guru—if you are to follow that path—with your life.  You turn everything over to him or her.  You see he only wants your freedom and exhaults in your success every time you break a little more free, whether from a sickened family situation, to freedom from some guru or guru-teachings which are not helping you.

The guru/chela relationship is extremely close, personal, and painful for both the teacher and the student as you well know Rajiv.

Take Lila.  Her way started in Christianity and about three years ago she discovered Robert. She listened to him, every talk, many, many times over two years.  She listened to all 245 talks many times, and even listened to them through the night on her Ipod Nano. She practiced self-inquiry incessantly.

The result? She became suicidal.  Her whole world had lost its juice and she saw the emotional poverty of her life locked in a loveless marriage.  This made her even more depressed.  At that point we became closer and I helped her see through the concepts that trapped her in that dead marriage as well as the truth behind Robert’s words, which were really meant just for public dissemination, and surely are not the words a living guru would give to you if he or she were guiding you in everyday life, real time.

AND she began to flower!  She began to take control of her life and not stay a doormat to an overly controlling husband in a loveless marriage.  She began to experience intense love and intense emotions for the FIRST TIME IN HER MEMORY.  


This allowed her even more to break free and see the life-freeing value of love. With this, like with many women, she began to experience intense energies, intense emotions, intensely flowing kundalini-like energies raging through her body, burning away attachments and concepts because her intensity and focus made all the conceptual traps in her life, all the assumptions, etc., clearly seen as walls of a prison.  The traps, the beliefs in the nuclear family, HER nuclear family, the belief in Robert’s words, her Christian morality of always being the good girl, the pristine feminine factor, enforced meekness, were all blown away by the energies and freed emotions coursing through her body and through her sense of presence, until she was clearly able to see she was not her body, and the mind was seen to be like a clear bubble filled with junk.

You see, it is this kind of student I look for, someone hell bent for freedom.

Rajiv was different when he came to me. He had 12 years of intense meditation practice before we first talked.  He was almost at awakening.  It took just a little push.  And his awakening process continues as does my own.  It never stops.  There is no end, no final state.  Rajiv’s way had less drama, because basically he was a Jnani.  He is continuing to unfold now on a Bhakti path.  Lila was/is a good mixture of Jnani, as a teacher, but even more so as a Bhakti.  

Thus her way is more painful, disruptive, filled with drama, intense feelings, devotion, and increasingly, ecstasies.

Deeya is another one who is almost totally a Bhakti.  Her awakening is filled with events of strife, mental trauma, fears, but also is a path of deep love and devotion. How many are willing to traverse her path of continuous fear and emotional pain to get where she is?  Not many.

So, really I speak to the rare ones ready to go over the cliff.  For others I say, “Just don’t get caught by concepts, whether those of society, or Ramana.  Develop a clear mind.”  But this message is usually lost on beginners who need to cleave onto some set of beliefs, concepts, or to a first guru who appeals to them.   I am not really speaking to them.