Robert Adams

“All of a sudden I felt myself expanding. I never left my body, which proves that the body never existed to begin with. I felt the body expanding and a brilliant light began to come out of my heart. I happened to see the light in all directions. I had peripheral vision, and this light was really my Self. It was not my body and the light. There were not two. There was this light that became brighter and brighter and brighter, the light of a thousand suns. I thought I would be burnt to a crisp.

“This brilliant light, of which I was the center and also the circumference, expanded throughout the universe and I was able to feel the planets, the stars, the galaxies, as myself. And this light shone so brightly, yet it was beautiful, it was bliss, it was ineffable, indescribable.

“After awhile the light began to fade away, and there was no darkness. There was
just a place between light and darkness, the place beyond the light. You can call it the void, but it wasn’t just a void. It was this Pure Awareness I always talk about. I was aware that I Am That I Am. I was aware of the whole universe at the same time. There was no time, no space, there was just the I Am. The word “I” encompassed the whole universe.”

~ "Robert Adams (1928 – 1997) was an American Advaita teacher. In his late teens, he was a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi in Tiruvannamalai, India. In later life Adams held satsang with a small group of devotees in California, US. He mainly advocated the path of jñāna yoga with an emphasis on the practice of self-enquiry.

Adams' teachings were not that well known in his lifetime, but have since been widely circulated amongst those investigating the philosophy of Advaita and the Western devotees of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. A book of his teachings, Silence of the Heart: Dialogues with Robert Adams, was published in 1999." ~ Wikipedia