Self-Knowledge and Self-Realization

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING ROBERT

Over and over Robert will repeat relative and absolute truths as he experiences it and as which attempts to convey in words.

He will say you are infinite space, the chalkboard, the absolute, total freedom, Satchitananda, infinite bliss.  He then says believe this and slowly you will become happier and happier, your problems will disappear, and you will gradually experience more and more peace.

This has not been my experience with him.  In my experience you cannot grab onto a concept like infinite space, or the metaphor of being a chalkboard onto which the universe is superimposed, believe this concept, and the belief will take you there.

This is the kind of talk Robert delivered on Sundays before a large group of people, but not the talk he delivered on Thursday evening to the much smaller group of devoted followers who were a bit more advanced.

To these more advanced students, he said you must dive deep within your own consciousness, maybe to follow where the I-thought arises and subsides (which is from and into Consciousness).  Through this practice on discovers one's inner void, mostly totally dark at first, but with the passage of time in self-inquiry, abiding in the emptiness, it becomes lighted, transparent, lit by the light of Consciousnness originating in the Third Eye.

Robert in the earlier instance was talking to people who thought spirituality was purely a matter of understanding lofty spiritual concepts.  In fact, Robert was indoctrinating them into a new world of concepts in order to break people from the network of thought that kept them trapped in trivial and mundane, problem-filled lives.

However, at some point the person being indoctrinated into the world of Advaita Vedanta has to begin to practice self-inquiry so as to first see the dark Void and explore it by looking for its source, and then "feeling" for its source.

I think Robert's first transcript is entitled, "You have to have your own experience."  Until you have your own experience of the dark void and then the lighted void, it is just a concept for you, a concept Robert gave you to help you escape from this world.

The easiest way to experience the essense of the Void, the lighted essence of the real I that permeates everything, is to drop your awareness into your heart.  That is, you use mind to focus your attention in your heart area.  Robert has at least four transcripts where he talks about taking refugee into your heart area.  Your whole center of attention must descend out of your brain into your heart area where you float in boundless, empty space, free of thought, and with the beginning experience of subtle energies and bliss.

This is why Robert says "Your mind is the enemy," because it has so many concepts that create the world you live in, a world of problems, messy relationships, disease and death--a mundane and not too interesting world.


Robert wants you to drop down out of your mind into your heart through practicing self-inquiry by inverting your attention from being entirely outwardly directed, to being inverted into an inner awareness, your inner world of space, light, energies, peace.


Those who actually practice this way find their heads growing heavy, their brains feel as if they have become frozen, or become like a brick.  Thinking becomes impossible.  It feels like you are going asleep or unconscious because your energy and attention are leaving your brain and going towards your heart. Sahn Su-Nim  refers to this state by saying, "You need to become as dumb as a rock."  This is altogether opposite of how we live in life by thinking our way into and out of problems.  To deliberately shut off thinking, to most, is unthinkable.

Then one day for the first time, you will go entirely unconscious accept for an awareness afterwards that you were aware during that interval, but the mind was not present to witness your everpresent awareness.  But now you have escaped the mind, and very suddenly, and almost shockingly, your awareness will drop down into your heart, or even into your gut, and suddenly a whole new world is born.

In this new world, your awareness has expanded to everywhere.  You have become the absolute space that comprises both the inner and outer worlds.  You have become pure light.  You have become the singing bird outside and the airplane that passes over.  You have become the wind in the trees you can hear outside, and your body does not exist anymore.  You have also become complete unbounded joy, total freedom, filled with ecstatic energy.

Then, after a while you return to ordinary consciousness once again.  You mind has returned and taken over.  But, you have already awakened to your true nature, and you know how to get back there by going deep within and sinking your attention into your heart where the mind does not exist except as an afterthought. The light has gone on, you now know a bit about what the spiritual world is like, and practice begins in ernest because this world is no longer just an idea to strive for, but your own direct experience through self-inquiry of various methods.

This is the totality of Robert's method: to seduce you into belief of a world beyond that in which you now live in order to take your attention away from your present network of thought that keeps you trapped in your own unreal Matrix.  Then through the practice of self-inquiry, you actually enter that world for 15 minutes, an hour, a month, a year and get to know the infinite side of existance until the spiritual world becomes solid and real.

At this point you can make the turn outwards again and reclaim your life as a human, as divine spirit, infinite spirit, compressed into a body living in a Matrix.  You are now like  Buddha living among men, self-realized, but living among all people giving light and example.

Do you see how different Robert's message is that those who teach there is no I, there is no path, there is nothing to obtain.  This is true in a sense, for the expanded inner spiritual world have always been within you, but you were blinded to it by your mind, the artificial Matrix of the mundane world you had lived in.  But there was before discovering that world, the hard work of transcending the Matrix, the mind.  Actually, you practiced self-inquiry to get before the mind, deeper than the mind, more subtle than the mind.

If you listen to those who say there is nothing to learn, nothing to attain, nowhere to go, you will never break the Matrix and enter the world of infinite space centered in your heart.