How do you react to life? When a person displeases you, what do you do? Curse him, become angry or violent? How do you handle it? How do you react? Be honest with yourself. It’s the only way. Start from where you are. No human being is perfect. We all make mistakes. Do not feel sorry for yourself, but start from where you are.
Where are you? You are consciousness. This is your true nature. Learn to love everything. Learn to see only the good. Realize there’s a reason for everything. If a person displeases you, simply look the other way and forget it. Learn to stop your mind from thinking. You do this by immediately catching yourself when you react to a condition and enquiring within yourself, ‘Who is becoming angry? Who feels out of sorts?’ ‘I do. “I”.’
Realize you’re dealing with the personal ‘I’, and that all the anger, all the frustration, all the karma, all the samskaras are all attached to that personal ‘I’. Consequently, when you get rid of the personal ‘I’, everything else will go with it. So, don’t try to solve your problems. Do not try to become a better person. Do not try to run away from your life. Simply see who it is who is running, who it is who needs to be a better person. Who has all these problems? ‘I’, ‘I’, always ‘I’. Hold onto that ‘I’ with all of your might, but do not concentrate on the ‘I’. You concentrate on the source of it, which is consciousness, God.
Everybody asks me, over and over again, ‘How do I hold onto the “I”?’
By asking, ‘Who am I?’ or just saying, ‘I-I, I-I, I-I.’ Automatically you will notice the ‘I’ going deeper, and deeper, and deeper and deeper within your Heart, and one day you will become free. But you’re already free. Why not wake up right now? Why go through anything? Everybody is different.
If this appears too difficult for you, if vichara appears hard, then your next best bet is to surrender completely to God. Surrender everything, your problems, your ego, your body, your mind, your work, your world.
Say, ‘Here, God, take it, I want no more of this. I am yours. Do with me as you will. Thy will be done.’
This means you no longer have anything to worry about. If you truly surrender, you will immediately become radiantly happy, for you have given your ego to God. And what’s left is God. You have no body. You have no mind. You have no work. You have no problems. It has been your ego all the time fooling you, making you believe that something is wrong, and you’ve been playing hide and seek, trying to find God here, there and everywhere, when all the time God was within yourself as yourself.
Begin to see the truth. Begin to stand up tall. Become fearless. Become strong. Leave the world alone. It’ll take care of itself. There is a mysterious power that guides the world to its right destiny. It doesn’t need any help from you. If you’re meant to do certain work in the world, it will be done, but you have nothing to do with that. It doesn’t mean that you have to leave your job, or go sit in a cave, or give up your life. Wherever you are, right now is where you’re supposed to be.
Excerpted from David Godman’s blogspot. The 90th birthday of Robert Adams was celebrated on January 21
Robert Adams
