Robert used to open Satsangs saying, “You don’t exist. You are not real. You
have been hypnotized into believing you are a fixed human being with a
body and mind, living in a larger container world context. You are not that at all. This is only a
mirage, an appearance. What you are is
entirely beyond that.”
Ponder this: All that you know or experience has come to you
through your consciousness. You have been taught you are a body/mind within a
context of a larger physical world. You
go to college and learn that the appearances within this
consciousness-appearance world has underlying laws such as Newton’s Laws of
Motion, Einstein’s relativity theories, quantum mechanics, inorganic and
organic chemistry. Studying these things
make the world more solid and real to you because you reinforce the “truth” of
entities that are self-exosting and independent from you.
HOWEVER, the more you study these sciences, the more often
you find the current and most advanced teachings are saying: nothing exists; emptiness permeates
everything; the universe collapses into blackhole, dimensionless
singularities. The more science pushes
the boundaries of knowledge, the less substantive its “solidity” appears.
Robert’s firsthand experience confirms what science is
currently finding, and that is ultimately nothing exists, everything is an
appearance within the field of consciousness, which ‘I’ observe (see, feel,
hear, taste, touch, intuit). All
objects, happenings, and processes are merely appearance and not real.
THIS INCLUDES YOUR EXPERIENCE AS BEING AN INDIVIDUATED BODY,
SEPARATE FROM OTHERS AND FROM THE WORLD.
Nothing you experience is real.
It is just an appearance in consciousness.
If you are still, very quiet, letting your body relax
entirely, so much that your mind stops with its endless thoughts about how you
as a body/mind, are required to do next, such as eat, pay taxes, find a job, do
a Google search, or buy a laptop. The
endless self-talk about the external world and your place in it, is precisely
that which prevents you from looking within more deeply to find the underlying
beingness of your “truer” existence as the totality of consciousness.
Quieting the mind by sitting in silence, going within begins
the path of self-inquiry where eventually you find out that you have notning to
do with this world. You are merely and
observer, one who is self-aware that it is observing the flow of appearances in
consciousness, and itself is untouched by this “play.”
When I wa a Mt. Baldy sitting in meditation in the Zendo,
after a few minutes of sitting, the human I would disappear and I would become
the totality of consciousness. No me,
just I am one with everything (all appearances in consciousness), yet, from
time to time I would note to myself, that although I felt one with the entirety
of everything that I perceived, from time to time a different kind of silent
thought would arise, that pointed out to me, the observer, that I was in a
state wherein I identified with the totality of my experience of consciousness,
you I, as observer, was still separate in the sense I was aware that I was THE
witness of the whole show.
Then, when the meditation period ended, I returned to being
a human, dressed in black robes, walking down a snow-filled path towards the
chanting hall, or upwards towards Roshi’s cabin, for our face-to-face meeting
to check my mind.
I used to wonder which state was real—the unity with
consciousness state found in meditation, or the black-robed human body state.
The answer is: what is true depends on YOU in the
moment. You can take yourself to be a
human when you allow it, or you can be in unity with consciousness, and also
its observer, if and when you prefer this hugely expanded and hugely more
peaceful “reality.” But, when you decide
to fully reenter the human state, you are also aware or your different level of
existence as everything, and also as nothing within that everything, and that
you are even beyond that everything as its self-aware witness that itself
cannot actually be witnessed, because it has no form, or characteristic, no feeling,
by which it can be seen itself or experienced itself.
That witness is entirely beyond consciousness
and IS not of this world.
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