Consciousness, the Absolute, inferring the latter from the former, and how Robert and Nisargadatta met their deaths

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Without mind, you become all things.

Here is a bit of information that will help you understand both Robert Adams and Nisargadatta a little better.  Often they use different terms to signify different kinds of experiences or states.  Nisargadatta talks about two different kinds of consciousness.  One that could be best described as “bare awareness,” which is consciousness that does not move, that lacks concepts, that lacks mind.  He also calls it “BalaKrishna, “or “Baby Krishna.”  Robert Adams refers to the same state of bare awareness, BalaKrishna, as the gap which one perceives when you first awaken in the morning between the sleep state, and the moment that the mind floods into the brain.  This is awareness without awareness of either subject or object or of things.

Nisargadatta describes this well on page 97 of Consciousness in the Absolute:

“Consciousness opens the gate for you to understand consciousness.  There are two aspects; one is conceptual, dynamic consciousness which is full of concepts, and the other is transcendent consciousness.  Even the concept “I am” is not there.  Conceptual, qualitative Brahman, the one that is full of concepts and is qualitative, is the outcome of the functioning of the body.  This consciousness is dead to me; it is gone.  I have transcended that.  So whatever is, is that other consciousness, that one which is without concepts.  I abide in the state where there is no mind.”

This is the same state that Robert talks about.  He was always arguing against the mind, saying either that the mind is not your friend, or the mind is your enemy.  Seung Sahn Soen Sa would say something very similar, and actually describe subjectively, experientially, what that process is like to go from conceptual consciousness, then becoming like a rock with a brain frozen and unable to think, and then the breaking of the mind, entering the no mind state, or Turiya, by way of passing through the state of unknowing otherwise known as the Causal Body, with the inability to perceive, where body disappears, awareness disappears and there is only conscious sleep before the mind breaks and you enter the total space of the unity consciousness where all things are not separate from you anymore.  The entire world perceived by you, is you.  There is no longer a barrier between you as the meditator and the external world.  There is no longer duality between inside the skin and outside.  You are the totality of manifest consciousness.

I described the coming of these states of unity consciousness as I experienced them at Mount Baldy in 1970:

“At some point in a period of meditation, my "brain" would “freeze” and I would feel as if I were going to sleep.  My brain felt like it became hard as a rock and so dense that no thought could penetrate.  I also felt that simultaneously I was going deeper and deeper into myself, towards the center of my awareness, but it certainly was not in any physical direction.  It felt more like ‘I‘ was going deeper, but not somewhere,  such as towards the heart chakra or my gut.  Then I would totally disappear.  My awareness of myself, my I am-ness, my body, the waking mind would all disappear into a kind of waking sleep.  My mind totally disappeared and I could not remember who or what I was.  I could not even remember how to perceive.

“Then, all of a sudden, it felt like my mind had been flushed down a toilet and a whole new reality appeared. I would disappear as a body mind and awaken into a world of unity consciousness, where I was totally empty space and filled with all the sights and sounds of the world.  I would hear the sound of a bird flying overhead calling, and I would become that bird.  I felt my body in motion along with the bird, simply flying.  Then I would hear the sound of the wind, and I became the trees blowing in the wind.  I became my experience of all things around me, but I did not feel like I had a body, because there was nothing separate from me such as a body, or the world.  I was immersed in everything, the so-called totality of consciousness.

“As Ken Wilbur would say, there were no boundaries. This must have happened three or four times a day for the entire time I was at Sasaki’s Zen Center during the winter of 1970-71. I never knew what to make of these experiences of unity-Consciousness, except to enjoy them.  It felt wonderful to have such freedom to be all things rather than locked up in one small body.  I was utterly free, utterly spontaneous being-ness.  These states did not last; they took maybe five minutes to get into, and lasted 15 or 20 minutes, then I returned to the human world. I asked myself was this the true reality revealed, or just a special state-experience that meant little or nothing.”

But you see, it was just this state of no mind, of being one with everything, that Nisargadatta points to.  There is no longer an individual.  There is no longer a personality.  I identified, if one can say I identified with anything, with the totality of everything that I experienced.  Thoughts would come sometimes, but mostly rarely, and they were simple thoughts like, “My God what is this?”  I was so stunned by the change from every day human consciousness, to this wondrous state of absolute freedom from my body and my mind and unity with the world.

Nisargadatta goes on to state that the consciousness that moved and was filled with concepts, otherwise known as the mind, was dead to him.  He lived and endured as the total functioning of consciousness.

To experience this no-mind state, this non-conceptual consciousness, the gap in its fullness, one must be willing to be absolutely stupid, absolutely know-nothing.  One’s brain feels heavy.  Thinking becomes more and more difficult until it is impossible.  Within the darkness of the causal body moves into awareness and you disappear as does the world.  And then you drop through into Turiya, which is the sense of I Am before the mind arises.  Then you dwell in the utter happiness of the no mind state as long as you can in order to imbibe its flavor and formlessness from a universal viewpoint, rather than as stuck in or pasted to a physical body. 

It is not easy for most Westerners to let go of understanding, to let go of concepts and knowing, because people take such comfort in all of their wisdom and knowledge gathered in books and from reading, and from television.  And you feel utterly stupid before the mind drops out, and you wonder what is happening to you, because you are no longer in control, the totality of consciousness is everything.  As long as you hang onto any knowing, any knowledge of the external world of your own self as a psychological or physical being, you cannot enter the state.

More about this later.

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EXPANDED VERSION OF IT IS NOT REAL

What does "It is not real" mean for Robert Adams, Ramana 

Maharshi, and Nisargadatta?  July 10, 2017

Robert Adams:

All I can do is tell you about my own personal experiences, not what I read. I can tell you that nothing exists the way it appears. Everything is an appearance, and we get pulled into these appearances. We react to them as if they were real, as a result of falling for a false premise, and the false premise is that the world is real.

In fact, the world is not real and neither are you. What we have to do is stop reacting to anything. And the only way to do that is to discover who you are. When you discover your true nature, when you awaken to your true nature, everything becomes perfectly clear. You're at peace. Your feelings have been transmuted. You no longer feel what human beings feel. The world comes and goes. One day the world is like this, the next day it's like that. But what does it have to do with you? Nothing, you are free. You are not the world. You are not your body, you are not your mind.

--August 30, 1990

Ramana Maharshi:

The world is a totality of the five kinds of sensations, namely sounds and the rest, and nothing else. All these are only mental impressions. Hence, the world is nothing but the mind.  Only when their minds are functioning does the world appear to men. Therefore, the world in the waking state is mental, as it is in dream.

The truth that the world is unreal is taught by the sages only to him who aspires to attain the highest state by the quest of the Self. It is not addressed to others.  (Editor:  That is, it is a teaching device used to help the seeker become aware of that which precedes and succeeds his body and the world.)

All the divisions experienced in worldly life appear as real only in relation to the body.  (Editor: the world is real if one accepts one’s body as real; from that viewpoint alone is the world real and the objects therein.)

Ramana Paravidyopanishad, unknown date, paragraphs 120 through 126.

Nisargadatta:

The “I” which appears is unreal.  How unreal it is I have proven.  The moment the “I” is proven unreal, who is it or who knows that the “I” is unreal?  This knowledge within you that knows the “I” is unreal, that knowledge which knows change, must itself be changeless, permanent.  You are an illusion, Maya, an imagination.  It is only because I know that I am unreal, that I know you also are unreal.  It is not like this: because I am real, you are unreal.  It is like this: because I am unreal, everything is unreal.

—Consciousness in the Absolute— May 1, 1980

The concept that your experience of your body and your experience of the world are illusory, is a very complex subject with many different ways to explain it.

The simplest explanation is that stated by Raman in the quote above.  Without mind, there is no body, no world, no existence.  When mind functions, the world is discovered as is your body.  In sleep, when the mind does not function, there is no you, no I Am sense, no body and no world.  When you awaken, at first you are only aware that you are awake.  Then, some fraction of seconds later, you become aware that you are a body, with an existence, with a name and form, living in the world. Once awake, we accept the reality of name and form, that I exist as a body in the world.  Not once do we think of investigating that I-thought or I-feeling in an effort to “unpack” it into its various components in order to see if any of those components exist in any way, or are just words that point to nothing.

As long as people identify with their bodies and consider themselves solid and real, they will also experience all the objects in the external world as equally real, meaning substantial, objective, solid.  Until a person through meditation, self-inquiry, or listening to the words of a self-realized person, has experiences of transcending both body and consciousness, the phrase "neither I nor the world are real," will lead him to try to understand the phrase "not real" as some variant of negating the reality of one’s body, such as by coming up with the analogy of a dream body.  “My physical body is like a dream body, existing only while aake.” Or one might think in terms of space, that the space that contains the body is more real than the body, and that the body is unreal in comparison.  The same holds true for the concept of consciousness, where we conceive of the body as being an appearance in consciousness, but consciousness itself permeates all appearances and is greater than any appearance.  That is, consciousness is everywhere and eternal, and is the substance within which objects appear.

But until one has examined all levels of one's own experience of oneself, from experiencing the physical body, to experiencing the mental body, to experiencing the subtle energy body, to experiencing the great void within, the emptiness that pervades everything, and even the experience of not experiencing, will he or she understand how these three gurus use the terms real and unreal, because then they will have the same exact knowledge as the teacher.  The same exact knowledge is available to all who study the self.

In the short essay below I will try to cover all the different approaches or ways to explain what is meant by the term unreal applied to experience, to the body or to the world.

I want to most forcefully and explicitly state they do not mean you should stop eating, or deny yourself shelter, or deny yourself clothes, or not own a car, or not have a job because they are all unreal.  They are not saying the world or your body are not real, therefore live like a zombie totally bereft of feelings, reactions, or needs relevant to sustaining your body.  It does not mean that you should not protect yourself financially and avoid scammers.  It does not mean you should not have insurance if people depend on you.  It does not mean that if someone in your family or others in the community have desperate needs, you should not help them because they are not real, that they are some sort of fake news.  They do not mean that if there is a dire political situation, such as a tyrant arising that will destroy the nation, you should not insist that they be stopped.

By "not real," they mean that all external and internal forms, such as your body, your sense of presence, your thoughts, your emotions, your house, the tree outside your door, are all temporary, are all ephemeral, all pop into existence, exist for a while, and then cease to exist.  No appearance is permanent.  Therefore, every situation in your life is temporary, a brief appearance that will pass, so do not get too involved in relationship to them, for you, the perceiver, are always there, outside of consciousness, outside of the world, outside of your body, existing only as an observer, while your mind fills in the details of the situations surrounding you, giving it meaning and drama.  Without the mind making up stories about your situation and your body, you would be unperturbed by all internal and external events.

This is it.  This is their message.  Do not be too concerned about the external world, because everything in it is just momentary.  The real you, to be discovered through self-inquiry and meditation, is the ultimate observer, the witness, the principle of knowing, of sentience, of cognition.  You are the ultimate knower, seer, hearer, smeller, taster, feeler, and ultimately of all knowing and sentience.  As such you are beyond the physical and mental worlds altogether, so turn your attention within and find this, which we give the name That.  That is the only real because it is beyond all appearances of consciousness which are effervescent, ephemeral, and passing.  The Real, is that which cognizes the unreal, the not real, the play of consciousness.

But if you take "it is not real" literally, from the viewpoint that you are human body, a thing, then “not real” means there are no things, every-thing is only a dream, or a passing nightmare of consciousness, and you could easily become a zombie, a homeless person, not eating any meals because your body is not real, your hunger is not real, your need to pee and to take a crap, are all unreal.  Your wife is unreal, your children are unreal, your mother and father are unreal, therefore pay them no heed, no attention whatsoever.  Ignore them and their problems, because they are not real.  And the naïve seeker then expands this attitude to all things, shouting aloud “Nothing is real!”  Like a crazed Facebook guru.

There is no need to buy insurance, because nothing is real.  Robbers are not real.  Murders are not real.  Tyrants are not real.  Trump is not real.  Hitler was not real.  They are all just passing appearances, just as is your hunger, or your thirst, or your feeling chilled or too hot.  None of these are real, so just sit in one place and observe the world, observe your body, observe your emotions and thoughts, and take no heed of them.  Just turn your attention inside and find your true self, the only real, the only permanent.

The next important thing you have to understand with regard to investigating your self-experience and its reality is: “it is not real” is a teaching message from the teacher to the student who has not yet realized who or what they are, or for other persons in the audience who may be suffering from the loss of a loved one, debilitating physical disease, or psychological or physical pain.  This is a message to look within instead of without into the world, and by looking within one can find your own permanent truth of who you are.  However, after you discover who you are, the journey inwards has essentially ended, because the division of inward and outward disappears, and you discover you are the source of everything and that everything rests inside of you including the world and your body.  That is, the message “it is not real” is meant for a student, or someone suffering.  It is not meant for someone who has realized themselves as Self.  That person is fully aware of the rather trivial nature of the external world and the body compared with the direct apprehension of one’s own self and its eternal existence.  But after realizing the self, one just cannot continually turn within, because the division between inner and outer is dead.  One is everything. By this I mean, wherever consciousness is, I am aware of what it is showing.  Whatever appears, I am there as its witness, whether it be  my body, something felt by it, or a nebulae seen through a telescope.  I am the witness of it all.

 Let me go into this a little more deeply. After realizing through meditation or self-inquiry, that the boundary between the external experiential world and one’s internal and experiential sense of presence within an all-pervading emptiness no longer exists, you become immersed totally in the vastness of consciousness: the Void.  That empty void is the background or container of all experience, external of the world, and internal of the various states of consciousness within.  This Nisargadatta calls the totality of the manifest consciousness.  This is everything.  This is all cognitions, all thoughts, of all sentient beings with no separation into apparent individual entities.  This is the life of the universe itself, everything experienced by every sentient being everywhere, throughout time.  Identity within individual body or an individual personality is lost.

Yet there is one more step that needs to be taken before one becomes a Jnani. 

Just resting in this experience of thoughtless now-ness, just resting in one’s own sense of presence within the totality of experiential existence and emptiness, is what Nisargadatta ultimately means by resting in your sense of I Am.  After doing this for some time, something begins to happen.  You begin to escape from feeling totally immersed in your experience of your body, the world and the totality of consciousness.  Up till this time you felt yourself to be a little cog within the vastness of the extension of your consciousness.  You begin to be able to grasp or apprehend consciousness as a whole, and all at once, as an object that you are witnessing.  After consciousness begins to transition from self to object, how it affects you also begins to change, because you see you are separate from it; it is not you.  You begin to see that all the vagaries and appearances within consciousness, all the various states such as sleep and waking state, all the thoughts that you have, all the sights you see from mountains, to valleys, to storms, to the ocean, all are not you.  You are separate from all of them.  You are not touched by anything in consciousness, where before you thought you were a body that had consciousness.  Now you see that both are “not-real” in the sense they are not self-sustaining, they depend on you cognizing and being aware of them, both as separate apparent objects, and as the ultimate substratum of universal consciousness.  Everything depends on you, the source, the witness.  Without you sentience does not take place.

Most emphatically, "It is not real" does not imply ignoring injustice or abject stupidity or abject brutality in the world.  "It is not real" means do not take the world too seriously until it hits you in the ass, and you are forced to take stock, just as you would be if you found you had a cancerous tumor, or were having a heart attack, or a potential murderer was threatening your life.

Remember, all the while that Robert was teaching about the world not being real, to take nothing seriously, and to turn all your attention inside, he was in fact living as a family man, raising two children, as well as fostering children.  He had various jobs as a handyman, teaching non-smoking classes, producing pirated audiotapes, etc.  It means that he had extensive dental work done during the last year of his life at age 69 because his teeth were so bad.  He had a whole mouth reconstruction during the last year of his life.  Nisargadatta ran the family business of selling cigarettes from the time he was 36 to the end of his life at 82.  He spent many years speaking with friends and other devotees of Siddharameshwar regarding the nature of reality, of consciousness, of birth and death, while he worked on his final understanding as expressed in his talks in 1978 to 1981, his final teachings, including those of unreality.

To make this a little more real, pardon the pun, we must realize these are the teachings of an 80-year-old man who has seen everything and done everything.  For him, the world had no reality, no meaning.  He had seen and done everything.  There was no more interest in the world for him.  He was through with it.  From that point of view, of being a tired old man that is seen and done everything, nothing in the world was of any value to him.  Even his own consciousness was of no value to him any longer.  He repeatedly says in his last three years, he was waiting to die, and get the whole thing over with, hopefully without too much pain or trouble in the process of dying.  He wanted to throw away the whole world and consciousness because they disturbed his peace which he found in his deepest depths.  Compared to that peace that lay closest to his soul so to speak, nothing was of any value.  And in that sense it was not real to him.  He was selling this philosophy to other people who were suffering, as did Robert.  In this sense, the phrase "it is not real" is a universal solvent dissolving all suffering based on one's experience in the external world including pain in the body, rheumatism, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, poverty, lawsuits, and the scorching heat of the Arizona desert.  They exhort others just turn within and find that peaceful center and take refuge there in the deepest part of your Self.

Q: I really appreciate your continuing efforts to explicate this fundamental issue, which is so misunderstood. I see it as the "form" aspect of the form and emptiness dimension. So many neo-Advaita influenced folks on Facebook seem to (sort of-mostly intellectually) get the emptiness aspect. They then become so enamored of emptiness that there is a "sleep and forgetting" of the real world we all still live in where real suffering occurs and very, very few realize experientially-in the marrow of their bones- that nothing is real.

Ed: Yes, so true. But emptiness itself is still experiential, is still consciousness, and nothingness, the so-called real, is the not knowing of nothingness, not the spaciousness of emptiness or the Void. Robert always said you have to go beyond emptiness, because emptiness itself is still consciousness, and itself is a fraud from an experiential point of view, as a human.

Q2:  Much needed clarification. Edward Muzika could you please clarify whether or not the inward and outward are 'different' in terms of how they are perceived in the statement "the division of inward and outward disappears and you discover you are the source of everything and that everything rests inside of you including the world and your body." I understand that they are both a manifestation of my consciousness, but if I close my eyes and go inward after being fully self-realized, is the inward perception the same as with eyes open or different yet realized as my consciousness. Do you ever meditate inwardly even though you fully realize this fact about the inward and outward?

Ed:  The experience varies over time for most. The initial experience is of total emptiness within, which is experienced as one with the space without. Then, for functional reasons, the boundary returns. But after that, you are always aware of 1. the unity; 1. all objects are permeated by emptiness all thoughts and forms are transient; even consciousness is transient.

Then, later one re-realizes this in other experiences, such as the realization that everything is consciousness, including the I Am sense, the body, the external world, emptiness. Just variations of appearances in consciousness.

Yes, after attending to duties in the external world, I will invert, sink within to utter peace.

Q3:  good post, but this is where i take umbrage with the dead guru's. "all that changes or passes" is also this that sees. this that is aware, this that is. simply, if there is "no other", then even the so-called temporary things in life is also a manifestation of This One. I am the dream, the dreamer, the ever changing play. and even the dream is not "un-real", the old saying: "To say- It is not real, does not mean it is devoid of existence"........ but what I always end these rants with is, "this is what i see so far, subject to change as this path seems endless.”

Ed: I have no idea about what you just said. If I were you, I would focus more carefully and thoughtfully on expressing your intuition as clearly as you can. I think you might find trouble doing that, but when you can, you will understand your own internal confusion, which will allow you to break through.

Q4: Can a pot be real without the clay, the essential substance pervading the pot.. Pot is name and form that makes clay pot...Clay can exist independently.. Can pot exist independently without clay. Can name and form exist independently without the essential substance pervading the name and form...

When world is described as unreal is from this point...World strictly speaking like the pot, is name and form with an essential substance pervading the world, which is the ultimate Truth...

Ed: This is strictly an analogy and is not at all an explanation.  The essence of all is like clay.  So what does that tell me?  This explanation might send me to a beach or a swamp looking for various kind of dirt or clay.

The explanation often given is that everything is consciousness including all the appearances within consciousness.  But this is still just a concept.  You have to first have the experience that everything is consciousness, which is a kind of awakening, rather than using well-worn analogies that really do not help anyone understand anything.

Q5:  I have always wondered why only the permanent is Real, why not the transient and passing also be Real. It feels like a kind of dogma we are told to believe in. Isn't Real what exists whether forever or temporary? Why the duality?

Ed:  Actually, when you :feel" that which is beyond consciousness, all elements of consciousness "feel" unreal. It is an expression about how the world, one's body, and one's emotions and mind feel when you discover the source. Then you are far more interested in the source, and the world seems useless in comparison.

Q5:  useless? not what you said above about caring for cats, opposing Trump, etc. and isn't Compassion what blossoms after enlightenment?

Ed:  You have not been reading my posts and certainly you never really read this post. All is explained here, above. Read it. Go to those before and after. Would you fail to feed cats in a dream? Would you drown babies in a dream? Would you fail to eat or pee in a dream because it was not real?

Q6:  I think it depends on your level of insight. If a revelation has come and you now see the world as a substanceless image like a dream or mirage or even further nothing but emptiness, dark infinity then it would be untrue to yourself not to voice this. With God also, if you believe in God or not, its only a belief, you are really an agnostic. You don't really know. But of you have seen the Oneness in all things then there is a basis to assert the reality of God.

Ed:  It is not really that way. You "see" and apprehend all experiences, all of life and consciousness in an entirely new way, because you can grasp consciousness as a whole rather than being immersed in its hugeness. In a sense, you become bigger than the entire world or consciousness, apprehending it/them as objects depending on you for their existence. Only you are felt to be real, not the objects you apprehend.

Q5:  i have been reading your posts and I know of your humanity. I just was reacting to the word "useless"

Ed:  See, caught by words. React to words and concepts. I am telling you how both Robert and Nisargadatta felt about life and the world. They had no use for it.

SUNDAY SATSANG AT 11 AM CALIFORNIA TIME. LINK TO MEETING WITH APPEAR BELOW AT 10:30

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Ed is an old guy living on social security and very rare work editing.  He spends most of his time studying himself, Robert Adams and Nisargadatta, and writing about them and himself for his students and readers. Satsangs are free on Sunday, as are all these posts answering students' questions.  His single book is posted free on wearesentience.com, his website, and queries are answered by email, on his blog, or Facebook.  He takes care of his own 7 cats at home, and helps feed several hundred homeless cats in Los Angeles.  The cats need the money to eat and so does he in order to help you.  Do not feel obligated, only if you are so moved.

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What does "It is not real" mean for Robert Adams and Ramana Maharshi?

I think it is very unfortunate that Ramana, Robert, and Nisargadatta all refer to the world as not being real without explaining in detail what they mean by "not real."

I want to most forcefully and explicitly state they do not mean you should stop eating, or deny yourself shelter, or deny yourself clothes, or not own a car, or not have a job because they are all unreal.  They are not saying the world or your body are not real, therefore live like a zombie totally bereft of feelings, reactions, or needs relevant to sustaining your body.  It does not mean that you should not protect yourself financially and avoid scammers.  It does not mean you should not have insurance if people depend on you.  It does not mean that if someone in your family or others in the community have desperate needs, you should not help them because they are not real, that they are some sort of fake news.  They do not mean that if there is a dire political situation, such as a tyrant arising that will destroy the nation, you should not insist that they be stopped.

By "not real," they mean that all external and internal forms, such as your body, your sense of presence, your thoughts, your emotions, your house, the tree outside your door, are all temporary, are all ephemeral, all pop into existence, exist for a while, and then cease to exist.  No appearance is permanent.  Therefore, every situation in your life is temporary, a brief appearance that will pass, so do not get too involved in relationship to them, for you, the perceiver, are always there, outside of consciousness, outside of the world, outside of your body, existing only as an observer, while your mind fills in the details of the situations surrounding you, giving it meaning and drama.  Without the mind making up stories about your situation and your body, you would be unperturbed by all internal and external events.

This is it.  This is their message.  Do not be too concerned about the external world, because everything in it is just momentary.  The real you, to be discovered through self-inquiry and meditation, is the ultimate observer, the witness, the principle of knowing, of sentience, of cognition.  You are the ultimate knower, seer, hearer, smeller, taster, feeler, and ultimately of all knowing and sentience.  As such you are beyond the physical and mental worlds altogether, so turn your attention within and find this, which we give the name That.  That is the only real because it is beyond all appearances of consciousness which are effervescent, ephemeral, and passing.  The Real, is that which colonizes the unreal, the not real, the play of consciousness.

But if you take "it is not real" literally, as it is only a dream, or a passing nightmare of consciousness, you would become a zombie, a homeless person, not eating any meals because your body is not real, your hunger is not real, your need to pee and to take a crap, are all unreal.  Your wife is unreal, your children are unreal, your mother and father are unreal, therefore pay them no heed, no attention whatsoever.  Ignore them and their problems, because they are not real.  And the naïve seeker then expands his attitude to all things. 

There is no need to buy insurance, because nothing is real.  Robbers are not real.  Murders are not real.  Tyrants are not real.  Trump is not real.  Hitler was not real.  They are all just passing appearances, just as is your hunger, or your thirst, or your feeling chilled or too hot.  None of these are real, so just sit in one place and observe the world, observe your body, observe your emotions and thoughts, and take no heed of them.  Just turn your attention inside and find your true self, the only real, the only permanent.

Here is the next important thing you have to understand: “it is not real” is a teaching message from the teacher to the student who is not yet realized who or what they are, or for other persons in the audience who may be suffering from the loss of a loved one, debilitating physical disease, psychological or physical pain.  This is a message to look within instead of without into the world, and by looking within one can find your own permanent truth of who you are.  However, after you discover who you are the journey inwards has essentially ended, because the division of inward and outward disappears, and you discover you are the source of everything and that everything rests inside of you including the world and your body.  That is, the message “it is not real” is meant for a student, or someone suffering.  It is not meant for someone who has realized themselves as Self.  That person is fully aware of the rather trivial nature of the external world and the body compared with the direct apprehension of one’s own self and its eternal existence.  But after realizing the self, one just cannot continually turn within, because the division between inner and outer is dead.  One is everything.

You see the consequences of selectively saying certain things are real, while other things are not real, so take no heed of them, like the present crisis in the United States of the Mafia-like Trump family, and Trump administration that has promised to drain the swamp, yet has hired 193 corporate lobbyists, and former corporate insiders, to run the Trump administration of the United States according to Elizabeth Warren.  So, do we just watch Trump destroy our country, destroy Medicaid, eviscerate Social Security, create a huge databank on every potential voter in the United States that can be used for voter intimidation and other forms of suppression?  Do we ignore the fact that there are 60 million people that are so dumb that they cannot see through Trump's constant lying and changing positions on everything, or his naked self-interest in everything he is engaged in?  To ignore the fact that Trump is utterly fawning around Putin, ignoring all the other leaders of the world but meets privately with Putin for three hours, perhaps discussing Russia's loan agreements with Trump's family business, or perhaps discussing Boudin's videotapes of Donald Trump engaging in various sexual situations with Russian hookers?

Most emphatically, "It is not real" does not imply ignoring injustice or abject stupidity or abject brutality in the world.  "It is not real" means do not take the world too seriously until it hits you in the ass, and you are forced to take stock, just as you would be if you found you had a cancerous tumor, or were having a heart attack, or a potential murderer was threatening your life.

Remember, all the while that Robert was teaching about the world not being real, to take nothing seriously, and to turn all your attention inside, he was in fact living as a family man, raising two children, as well as fostering children.  He had various jobs as a handyman, teaching non-smoking classes, producing pirated audiotapes, etc.  It means that he had extensive dental work done during the last year of his life at age 69 because his teeth were so bad.  He had a whole mouth reconstruction during the last year of his life.  Nisargadatta ran the family business of selling cigarettes from the time he was 36 to the end of his life at 82.  He spent many years speaking with friends and other devotees of Siddharameshwar regarding the nature of reality, of consciousness, of birth and death, while he worked on his final understanding as expressed in his talks in 1978 to 1981, his final teachings, including those of unreality.

To make this a little more real, pardon the pun, we must realize these are the teachings of an 80-year-old man who has seen everything and done everything.  For him, the world had no reality, no meaning.  He had seen and done everything.  There was no more interest in the world for him.  He was through with it.  From that point of view, of being a tired old man that is seen and done everything, nothing in the world was of any value to him.  Even his own consciousness was of no value to him any longer.  He repeatedly says in his last three years, he was waiting to die, and get the whole thing over with, hopefully without too much pain or trouble in the process of dying.  He wanted to throw away the whole world and consciousness because they disturbed his peace which he found in his deepest depths.  Compared to that peace that lay closest to his soul so to speak, nothing was of any value.  And in that sense it was not real to him.  He was selling this philosophy to other people who were suffering, as did Robert.  In this sense, the phrase "it is not real" is a universal solvent dissolving all suffering based on one's experience in the external world including pain in the body, rheumatism, arthritis, heart disease, cancer, poverty, lawsuits, and the scorching heat of the Arizona desert.  They exhort others just turn within and find that peaceful center and take refuge there in the deepest part of your Self.

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Beyond the body; beyond consciousness; what am I?

If you assiduously practice self-inquiry, either in the form of looking for the I thought, or where it arises rises or sets, or looking for the sensation that you exist, the I-am sensation, and resting there, you become aware of that which before you were not aware.

For example, you discover emptiness everywhere, it is like the feeling analog of internal space.  It has a visual quality as well as a feeling quality.  It seems to permeate everything, your body, and all internal mental objects, including your sense of presence.

Your sense of presence, your feeling of an internal and slightly external extending energy body, the so-called Subtle Body, also permeates your body and extends into the surroundings around you.  In it, you feel bliss, you feel love, you feel emotions, you witness thoughts, and you have kundalini experiences, witness and travel in astral worlds and dimensions.

Eventually you get to the point where you no longer consider yourself your physical body.  Usually meditation alone will not convince you of this fact.  Usually you have to do something like read transcripts of Robert Adams talks, Ramana Maharishi’s talks, or Nisargadatta’s talks.  While they provide only conceptual understanding, there is something deeper within consciousness that begins to understand what they are talking about on a deeper level.  They all say you are not the body, you are consciousness, that everything you know is in, and known by consciousness.  Sometimes when you hear this it feels like you are being pounded in the head by a huge hammer, stunned by a new interpretation of the world and your beingness that you never expected.

If you keep this up for a long while, you begin to be able to grasp consciousness as a whole.  This is hard to describe, but it is like you are stepping outside of consciousness and watching your consciousness do its thing, with its ever-changing presentations, temporal limitations, random appearances that come and go, and consciousness itself as the illuminator of both the external and internal worlds of yours.

When you begin to be able to watch consciousness itself, you see that even your body is just an appearance in your consciousness, and that your consciousness itself does not have any stability.  Just like the world with all of its myriads of entities and appearances, all of which come and go, so too does consciousness.  In the morning it passes between the nothingness of deep sleep, into a gap where there is awareness, but without awareness of self or of the world, and then it passes into waking consciousness.  At night waking consciousness gradually fades into nothingness, and you are no more.  Then there are sometimes dreams that arise out of this nothingness, spontaneously, with a beginning and end in time, for consciousness itself creates all-time.  Without consciousness there is no time, nor is there space, nor is there a world of appearances.

When you can watch the totality of consciousness, already you have transcended the body and also are in the process of transcending identification with consciousness itself.  Already you have transcended almost all concepts, except the concept that consciousness exists.  Gradually even that disappears.  You see that consciousness is not solid, it is rather decrepit, is constantly changing and going through various states, and it sprang out of nothingness and became you over a period of time, and at the end of your body’s life, will disappear into nothingness again.  As such, with such a fickle and shallow existence, you begin to see that consciousness itself is an impurity dropped onto you, who is witnessing that play of consciousness.

In other words, all of human existence, all of life, is a fraud.  It does not belong to you and has nothing to do with you.  It only appears to have something to do with you when you identify with the body, or with the mind, or with consciousness.

Even when it comes to advancing spiritual insights, some people measure spirituality in terms of bliss, kundalini experiences, astral bodies, and astral worlds, and thus still are identified as related to physical or energetic existences.  Astral worlds may transcend the body, and may transcend every day consciousness, but they still posit as existent alternative realities that have the same qualities as your present experience of your body in the world.  One could say they are just on different frequencies, but such a concept explains nothing.  Altogether, all these alternative worlds as well as this one, are no more substantial or solid than the dream you have at night.  They are just longer in duration, and duration is just a quality of consciousness.

At this point you become aware of an amazing truth: none of that which you perceive, including the external world, your own body, your inner world of space and sense of presence, nothing has anything to do with you.  You are apart from all that activity, all that storm and drama, peacefully watching the play of consciousness.

At this point, you realize that you, your real nature, has nothing to do with the consciousness in the world that you watch, is entirely beyond it, but is in itself ungraspable, unknowable, not an object of knowledge.  But what you do know about what you really are, is that it extends its awareness through all continuums of consciousness, all the related worlds, all the astral worlds, the physical world, your physical body, your mental body, your sense of presence—all of that is in you because you are everywhere that consciousness is.  It is you that grasps consciousness.  And since consciousness is as infinite as the furthest galaxy, as large as the universe itself, and is small as the tiniest subatomic particle, you too can be described as infinite.  And since time exists only in consciousness, you are beyond time.  It is wrong to say that you are eternal or immortal, because that means in respect to time-limited and the imminent.  In fact, you as the unchanging witness of the activities in time of consciousness, are altogether apart from time itself.  You even transcend eternity.

The more deeply you understand consciousness, the more deeply you understand that you have nothing to do with consciousness.  Although this knowledge about yourself is known in consciousness, there is a kind of “apprehending,” or “apperceiving” of what you are truly as pure awareness, the subject, ParaBrahman.  Since you have no attributes as pure awareness, or the subject, or ParaBrahman, are not known by the senses or the mind which  only deals with concepts, but by a direct grasping of what you are as the center of everything and at the same time extending to the limitless perimeters of the totality of the manifest consciousness.

The other thing that you apprehend clearly, is what you truly are is far more subtle, far more clean and crystal-clear than either the physical body, or the gross body, or even the most subtle and refined consciousness.  What you are has no qualities, no characteristics, no existence or nonexistence, and is not tainted in any way.  It is if these become imperfections imposed on you that you cannot wait to get away from the rest in your true nature as the absolutely pure source and sustainer of all.  You apprehend that the world and the play of consciousness is a total fraud thrust on you.  Consciousness illuminates the fraud, the mechanism of Maya, of illusion, and eventually you see it as it is, something that has nothing to do with you, and which you bought into by identify yourself as a player within this fraud, within the play of consciousness.

When this knowledge dawns, and one should really say pre-knowledge, because it is not conceptual, it is like a state of pre-verbal knowing, being unable to articulate that which is known because there are no words or concepts that can describe your intuition of what you are. You become free from life and death, from the world, from your identification with your body, with your troubles, with your relations, with your emotions, with your “apparent” life and death.

Truly you have gone beyond life and death, beyond the perceivable, beyond even the unknown, because you are that which is aware of both the perceivable, and the unknown, and have transcended all of that.  This is the nirvana goal of Buddha, or becoming the ParaBrahman of Nisargadatta.  You yourself do not exist, as existence is a fraud.  You yourself are beyond existence, untouched by birth and death, by war or peace, by life or death.  All of that is in the play of consciousness, and you no longer buy that limitation.

Death and the Unreality of Life

My mother's recent death taught me so much about the death process including the ending of identity with one’s body, personality, mind, and even consciousness, and the dissolution of consciousness, and that none of these have anything to do with who and what I am. I am not the body, not consciousness, not the soul, not God. What I am is truly unknown and a mystery. I can only be it.

https://youtu.be/w4zZxWeFsMc

IT IS ALL A FRAUD!

Almost 12 years ago I started a website called “it is not real.” That is still the name of my blog. In it I set forth the essence of Robert Adams teachings, and even posted some of the transcripts of his talks. However, in 2010 when I had my awakening experience to the divinity within, to the Lifeforce, and the power of sentience, of consciousness, along with the divine breath of bliss and being wiped clean of all guilt and shame, I started a whole new website with a new purpose, called “We Are Sentience,” meaning basically that we are awareness, or we are that which gives life to inanimate bodies.

However, because of closely watching my mother’s death, and those same elements of consciousness and material which I had considered to be me, namely the body, mind, and consciousness, I can say with full surety, that the totality of human life, of my life, and your life, is a fraud. Truly a tale filled with sound and fury but to no particular end except as entertainment. I watched as consciousness and the Lifeforce had activated her body, and then left, leaving an insentience shell. I saw that she was transitioning away from identification with her body, her personality, and her life in her home in Peoria Arizona. And I saw that it was all unreal. Unreal in the sense of being an activity that goes on spontaneously and along its own course, with entities appearing and disappearing, growth and decline, but none of it has anything to do with you. That body that you imagine yourself to be, has nothing to do with you, nor the consciousness by which you know you are the body. That too has nothing to do with you. You are entirely beyond all of that.

To give an analogy, our lives are like a series of movie sets, with workmen creating the external props of buildings, infrastructure, railroads, and the inside scenes and kitchens and bedrooms, while the crews are the Lifeforce that make everything work, that direct the show, direct the actors, put them through the paces, shoot the scenes, and do post production. They are the driving force, similar to the Lifeforce.

Thirdly is the light of consciousness which lights the set, impacts the light sensor or film, and projects that to the audience—so that you, can witness it.

Exactly so is your life. Your body has nothing to do with you, although you may identify with it now. Nothing at all! Indeed, the life force which you may have discovered in yourself some time ago and with which you may still identify, also is not you. It has nothing to do with you. It is part of the movie set, part of the activity of making a movie. And that bliss that you might at feel at times, those energetic movements, the fears, depression, anxiety, love, and anger that you feel, also have nothing to do with you. They are expressions created by the director of the movie, which you, as the audience are supposed to feel as your own, and mostly you do.

But see it like I do, there is just his body which last for 10 or 100 years which you identify with, but really, you have nothing to do with the body, you are far beyond the body, far more pure than the body and immortal, not subject to time, so in a sense, even beyond immortality, beyond any attribute, beyond any experience. It is the process of identification that chains you to body, ideas, ideologies, or consciousness, and you make them into you.

And then there is consciousness and the Lifeforce within, all that which you discover once you turn inwards: the light of consciousness, the all-pervading emptiness or void, emotions, bliss, ecstasies, energies, imagination, images, dreams, waking state, deep sleep state—all have nothing to do with you. But, you had to first deeply explore each of these levels of experience to discover that you are nowhere to be found in anything that is found. You are not the body. You are not your mind. You are not your thoughts. You are not your I am sensation. You are not emptiness. You are not even consciousness or the Lifeforce. All of those have nothing to do with you. It is all just the play of consciousness, an article manufactured by a divine movie industry, arising from some unknown source, for unknown reason, playing perhaps for our entertainment, or the greater entertainment of Shiva, of God, of awareness.

When you see this, your body crumbles in unimportance. It is a leftover. You feel tricked. You have been sold a bill of goods that is temporary and rotten. The body grows for a while, and gets old and dies, and the same of all the bodies you see around you, all your pets, your parents, your children all are here just very briefly, appearing to be alive, appearing to be a personality, but it is all just a show, which you have nothing to do with. It is just entertainment for you. If you identify with your body, you always fear death. If you identify with consciousness, you will always have the problems of consciousness, the negative emotions, the desires, the vulnerability, for consciousness does not last any longer than the body you experience in you as consciousness.

None of these experiential-elements have anything to do with you. The external world, your body, your consciousness, are not really yours at all. They were identifications thrown at you and what you have accepted over time, but wisdom breaks those identifications allowing you to laugh at the totality of the fraud perpetrated on you and the entire human race if indeed it exists at all and is just not part of your personal movie, created by some unknown joker, or perhaps flowing out of your own unmanifestness.

In order to enjoy a movie, you have to throw yourself into it, and take it as real, you ignore the incredible aspects that would make it not real or not believable. You throw away your guardedness and discrimination in order to participate and be entertained by the unreal. But after awakening to the unreality of it all, you know it is really a fraud, all of life, the sound and fury of it, the attachments, the emotions, your body. None of it has anything to do with you. You are not touched by it. They come to you unspoken, unasked for, and you as a patsy take them as yours for real.

You are entirely beyond them. You are beyond the world. You are beyond your body. You are beyond your own consciousness and beyond your own mind. You are utterly free of all of it, but you imagine yourself still as contracted into a body, contracted into human being, but that is just the movie. This is exactly what the director was aiming for, to get you attached to the movie to see if you can break free. Or, as Robert said repeatedly in his last Satsang the words, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

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Be always mindful of this:

You never really experience the external world.  You experience your consciousness’s representation of that external world.  In fact, the external world may not exist, and you would not know any better if your consciousness were to continue to inform you about a nonexistent external world.

Consciousness itself, at least in your case as an individual entity, is not immortal, it does not remain in any way after the death of the body, such as found in the concept of an immortal soul.  What you are really, is even beyond the concept of an immortal soul, but realizing this deep mystery is difficult indeed.

After you have learned how to detach yourself from your body, having lost identification with the body as you, you then begin to live for a period of time identified with consciousness itself.  By that I mean with your own sense of presence, the so-called energetic body associated with your human physical body, as well as all the objects that arise in your consciousness which you consider to be either yourself or the external world.  All of that is a happening or appearance in your consciousness, which itself is just a temporary bubble containing all of your universe, from the experience of your little toe, to all your thoughts, to all your emotions, to the entire external universe you appear to be part of.  All of this occurs in your consciousness, and consciousness begins to reveal all of its mysteries to you once you can grasp all of her at once, as separate from you.

Now consciousness itself, just like the physical universe that appears within your consciousness, and its individual manifestations are impermanent, but the totality of consciousness, the totality of living sentient beings from mosquitoes and worms to humans, to angels and to God, the entire manifest universe may appear to be infinite, and it may appear that you partake of that infinity by being part of the manifest consciousness, but all of it, even the totality, is time-limited.  Just like the physical universe began, so will it end; and the same is true for the totality of consciousness.  One day from nothingness it appeared, just like one day out of nothingness you came into being, and gradually developed a sense of self.  And one day it will end.

This sense of self may seem very solid and real to you.  Your personality may feel solid and real.  Your experience of your own existence may seem very powerful, solid and real, and the external world itself may appear to be very solid and real, but all it is, is your consciousness, and in a sense, your creation because even though you do not direct the show, you are the single audience for that show, and the whole thing belongs to you in that way.  It is your show only.

I know that there are teachers that teach that since you are the audience, and the only audience for what your consciousness presents to you, as that only audience, you can be considered the creator of all that is seen and experienced, even though you as an individual do not appear to have any control over the events that you see.  These teachers state that you can become the creator, the director, of the show that you call the totality of you in the external world.  They state that you can through different techniques, such as directed “intention,” energy or phase matching and manipulation, through using techniques that raise your “energy” state, can allow you to create an alternative universe from the one you were in before you began to take control of your own destiny.  There are many New Age teachers around like this who talk about mastering your destiny, fully realizing your divine potential, etc.

This concept of empowerment may or may not be true to a limited extent, the creation of alternative worlds through various types of mental or energy manipulation within your bubble of consciousness, but my teacher, Robert Adams, certainly did not recommend any of this New Age creationism, nor did my second guru, Nisargadatta Maharaj through Jean Dunn, my second  worldly teacher.

The best that you can do, the most sublime thing you can do, is to realize that you, as the audience for consciousness, are not consciousness, and are not the physical body within the imaginary external world created by your consciousness.  What you are is total freedom from that consciousness, and the trials and tribulations that that consciousness presents to you as its one and only audience within your consciousness bubble.

You become aware that you are not consciousness, nor the stories created by consciousness.  You just watch consciousness.  You just watch your emotions.  You just watch your thoughts.  But most of us imaginatively embrace that what we see as real is more than merely moving images, sights and sounds within our bubble of consciousness, which we give life, which we give reality, and which we give a storyline.  Yes, we can invent a different story line to explain and explore where we are within consciousness and as consciousness.  Psychologists call this “reframing.”  That is, we change the storyline of thinking about ourselves, from being a victim, to being a victor, from being a pawn, to being King.  But this is all within the new storyline we create, which means you still are entirely identified with elements within your bubble of consciousness and merely changed the imagined relationships between the appearances in your bubble of purported reality.

Robert Adams and Nisargadatta both invited you to go deeper into yourself, into your consciousness, into the source of consciousness, and much deeper entirely into yourself as that which is beyond consciousness and which has no name, no existence, no affect, no existence, yet is there in some unimaginable way apart from existence or beyond or before existence.

Robert Adams rarely spoke of getting prior to consciousness, because he thought that most people would never understand or agree to this as a spiritual way.  He did a few times, but was very guarded in his statement of this theme.  Instead he mostly talked about you as being the infinite, the eternal, Brahman who had many characteristics of transcendence.  But more often, he talked of nothingness, nothingness which was beyond even the void and emptiness, but is hard to imagine because we merely try to magnify any experiences of the void or emptiness into a bigger emptiness or a bigger void.  But by nothingness, Robert meant the absence of anything including the void or emptiness, which is which the advanced meditator always experiences about himself or herself, which is the emptiness that pervades all of consciousness, all appearances within consciousness, all sights, all sounds, all tastes, all touching, all smell—all are permeated by emptiness or the Void as experiences.  The Void pervades and also contains all objects or mind, the mind itself, and objects of the senses.

Robert and Nisargadatta both thought only about the ultimate peace, the peace beyond any understanding, so deep that your soul, your body, your mind, even your Void finds complete rest in being self-contained, and no longer needing or desiring anything from the so-called external world.  You are complete.  No desires race and rage through you.  You do not wish to change the world.  You do not wish to get anything from the external world anymore.  You take whatever comes to you as yours and yours alone, to deal with it as yours alone.

Robert and Nisargadatta were both Princes of Peace.  They taught avoidance of involvement in the external world dream, that nothing there is of import to the ultimate you.  You, the witness of all this, are entirely separate from the dreams produced by your consciousness.  You are entirely separate from consciousness itself.  Robert would say you are Brahman the creator and destroyer of the world, while Nisargadatta would say that the true you, the deepest you, is entirely beyond the body and the physical world, and is also beyond the consciousness that is your instrument for experiencing your body and the external world, and you have nothing to do with it, with the instrument, nor with the external world viewed by you.

Robert and Nisargadatta both would say that any alternative storyline created by you, may provide you an imaginary life of higher actualization and fulfillment, but you are still caught within a different story line that is just as mortal and temporary as the one you left.  In addition, you have spent a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of effort in creating this new fulfillment that really does not help you escape the Play of Consciousness. You have just built a different role within that play by a new identification and shifting the storyline.  Your only real hope for peace is by escaping all storylines and all identifications with appearances within consciousness, with the body, and with consciousness itself, escape from the totality of consciousness itself to recognizing and being your true self, which is beyond consciousness.

This can sound negative, this Netti, Netti, point of view meaning not this, not this, which means I am not this, I am not that, gradually losing identification with everything until you have no identification left.  It sounds negativistic, it sounds escapist, but only when put in this context or the storyline of a renunciation, renouncing identification with his body, with his family, with the earth, and with consciousness.  But in actionality, what really happens is the gradual decent of an ever deepening peace, an ever widening piece that wipes out your anxieties, desires, and even your storyline, the one you are living, as well as any you might create.  All fall away, leaving you in a deep peace.

However, there is a great potential danger awaiting that potential sage who desires to go beyond his or her own consciousness, and that is the tendency to dry out and get lost somewhere in the Void, as did I for a long period of time.  The solution to this drying out is to first having discovered the greatness of love, and how having love for everything in your heart, including yourself, is a safeguard from the potential Jnani drying out.  At some point, the aspiring Jnani, the aspiring sage, must become a lover of the world and the object therein, and even after attaining freedom from the known, from the world, from his or her own personality and consciousness, he or she must continue to love it all, worship it all, care for it all, otherwise one just dries out and dies as empty dust.

          I just watched my mother disidentify from the world, from her personality, from her consciousness, and watched her transition into the witness beyond all that appears as real, and this was the story she showed me ever so clearly: The utter mystery of going beyond the Void to the Absolute, about which nothing can be said.  Words and stories are only about consciousness and the plays within consciousness.