TRANSITIONING TO THE SILENCE OF THE HEART

Before we move on to another Robert Adams transcript, please ponder deeply the transcripts we have already explored.

Robert repeatedly warns you not to read too much about spirituality, not to go from guru to guru seeking truths about yourself, not to spend $500 on a three day retreat to receive Shaktipat, because his way, the way of the Jnani, is not to add new concepts or states, but to gradually subtract all concepts, all spiritual states, so as to see and experience yourself directly, without a filter of understanding, which is the mind.

You have to get "before the mind" comes into existence, to a deeper level of awareness that you find when you stop thinking and living with your awareness centered in words and concepts, and instead have it centered in the silence and emptiness of your heart. Thus the title of his only book: The Silence of the Heart."

When you read a lot, you look for books with concepts and words that "resonate" with you, meaning the words sound and feel true to you, meaning the words conform to what you already believe and hold true, and maybe expand those truths a little.

But you never get to know who you are by having correct words or concepts. Any words or concepts "filter" the real through your intact network of thought. You have to get rid of all understanding and dwell for a long period of time in a state of complete unknowing, of being dumb as a rock as Seung Sahn advised repeatedly. This is not a state comfortable to many, because we tend to worship knowledge and those who appear to know, or those who can do. How often to we worship someone so simple that they understand nothing. It is a big step to take for the average person and an even bigger step to take for a highly intelligent and highly educated person.

In a sense, the highly educated person whose life centers on thinking and reaching solutions, a lawyer, a scientist, an economist, are much like the rich man that Jesus speaks of, where it is more likely that a camel will pass through the eye of a needle, than a rich man enter the kingdom of God. For Jesus the attachment that most blocked an awareness of God was an attachment to the external world. For Robert, it is an attachment to one's own intelligence, to one's own pride in being able to solve problems.

Now the spiritual seeker who reads many books and seeks many different teachers is loading up even more heavily on concepts which further filter a direct experience of one's own self, as well as a direct experience of the external world, innocently, openly.

Seung Sahn here states one must achieve what he calls a "don't know mind," one where you are as dumb as a rock. Actually, once you escape from your own negative judgement about such a state and actually experience it, you will find it infinitely enjoyable, because in that state, you no longer have the pressure to figure things out. It is a state of being very active, but of no longer planning any responses or solutions. You find out thinking is not really that necessary to live and perform in everyday life because most actions are quite routine, and having no mind allows you to experience day to day life from moment to moment, without the mental filter.

The feeling stupid state, the heavy mind state, the don't know mind state is a by product of your center of awareness dropping from your brain into your heart. It is a state that needs to be embraced rather than shunned.