Finding the Light in the Heart
An awakening experience revealed ‘I’ am all
‘Liberation is not of the person but from the person.’ Nisargadatta Maharaj
When the book finally arrived, I had almost forgotten ordering it.
Silence of the Heart by the American Robert Adams, who had dismissed all attempts to label him during his lifetime, is hard to source.
Few outside obscure and limited circles have heard of him. His book, a series of discourses, details his sudden and complete awakening while taking a maths’ test at school aged 14.
‘I felt the body expanding,’ he writes, ‘and a brilliant light began to come out of my heart. I happened to see this light in all directions. I had peripheral vision that this light was really myself.’
From that moment everything changed and Adams knew himself as both all and nothing, the one consciousness that pervades all things. He had come home.
For the first seven years of his life since the crib, a wizened old man, perhaps two feet tall, had appeared in his room talking ‘gibberish’.
Later, he would happen upon a book by the great sage Ramana Maharshi, seeing the ‘little man’ of infancy staring back at him, although the ‘gibberish’ was now comprehensible in keeping with his enlightenment.
By 18, he was in Tiruvannamalai at the base of Arunachala mountain in south India, spending three years in silence with the sage who taught largely without words, sitting in the consciousness that we all are, but have forgotten due to the elevation of the mind.
Adams understood the mind had stolen the divine throne and sits in state, a usurper sometimes equated to Satan. It is no coincidence that his guru called the mind a demon, seducing deluded humans to their doom.
Ramana had given him some sage advice: it was good to help people but as the ultimate truth is there are no others, whenever 15 or more people gathered around him, to get up and move, and see what happened somewhere else.
Adams did as he was told, his light drawing ‘others’ like moths to a flame yet without fanfare or publicity. Like Ramana’s contemporary, Nisargadatta, he had no desire to be pinned down.
That would be like trying to catch water in a net. No ashram, church or institution perfectly reflects the nature of the Self, which is total freedom and complete emptiness.
Anyone can have an epiphany. We can all see the light although most awakenings are slow and subtle rather than sudden and dramatic. Such revelations indicate prior lifetimes of significant spiritual practice and dedication.
They do not confer specialness. How can anyone be special if we are all the same consciousness and in fact, not separate, despite appearances?
Either no-one is special or we all are. That’s why status and self-image is a trap, a giant hell hole, as the rapper P Diddy is just finding out.
I was 22 when I woke up to reality as a light shone on even the least salubrious of circumstances. It was after a court case when I had lost my driving licence and didn’t really understand what was happening to me.
I had gone home and up to my room where I sobbed uncontrollably. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I experienced the freedom Adams and others described. All earthly concerns, thoughts and feelings left, to reveal a joyous, unhindered freedom and the certain knowledge that ‘I’ had the power to do anything.
This ‘I ‘was fully awake and knew itself as everything and nothing, the very substratum of the universe. The experience was of a giant cloud lifting and floating away shooting the little ‘me’ everywhere until all was myself. Without knowing it, the same cloud burdens all of us, shrinking our lives.
As I have written before, an earlier experience on my third birthday in hospital was the herald to what came later.
In that moment, there was no doubt that I was the Self. This experience of reality without the mind lasted for three or four hours before I was returned to the ego-I to my great disappointment.
Yet I had seen what was necessary, and had both hope and fuel to work through karma already accrued (as well as foolishly creating more) and return to living life as a person while knowing the real ‘I’ as infinite love and expansion.
Although initially I lodged complaints with myself about this sudden evaporation, I soon realised this was how it was meant to be and that I would need to undergo significant earthly mileage before I could return to the promised land.
(Notice here the limits of language and use of the ‘I’ which is not the real I of course but the usurping vehicle.)
The light Adams details is of the Atman, or soul, but is universal and all-encompassing.
The irony is the ‘I’ cannot be enlightened because it is the illusory vessel that hinders seeing.
All this was revealed, but I remained bound to experience despite being advised to pursue a more spiritual life like Adams when a mentor suggested I follow her hero Alan Watts and leave to train at the Zen centre in San Francisco. Instead, I fell in love.
Duality and the world of experience beckoned for as long time, until it was done with me. Eventually, we discover that seeking winds down, and a better way is found.
Once the seed is sown, there is really no return to one’s former state, just an appearance, perhaps a delay, yet the gates have clanged open and the light calls, ever more insistent.
Even the most resistant therapy clients working at the most basic level find after some time that there is no going back; they have seen too much. The veils are lifting to great revelation.
And so, the work begins. First, on the biography and history of the personal self that needs to be honoured; then, if appropriate, on understanding the archetypal and mythic layer of life, and finally into shifting identity and recognising the Self, formerly obscured.
The rest seems to be about paying attention, resisting the mind’s attempts at control and dominance and loving the ineffable through meditation.
We are always home, only imagining we left, but like night dreams, day dreams are incredibly real. We must learn to put down anxieties and fears and see that all fear is about the annihilation of an ego that never really existed.
Venture within and check for yourself. There is no identity we could call ‘me’.
As another Ramana Maharshi student Annamalai Swami says, ‘If you can give up duality, Brahman alone remains, and you know yourself to be that Brahman, but to make this discovery continuous meditation is required.’
It’s a price worth paying.
Copyright Simon Heathcote
