Robert Adams was born in New York in 1928. His early life, as he later told it in his talks, was unusual from the start. As a child he had spontaneous visions of a dark-skinned Indian man whom he later recognised, when he saw the photograph in a book at sixteen, as Ramana Maharshi. In 1947 he travelled to India and spent time at Sri Ramanasramam in Tiruvannamalai. He always pointed to that meeting as the central event of his life. He travelled in the years afterward, knew Nisargadatta and various other Indian teachers, and lived for many years in obscurity.
Only in the late 1980s, after settling in southern California and despite the steadily worsening Parkinson’s disease that finally killed him, did he begin to teach openly. He held small satsangs, never larger than twenty or thirty people, in living rooms and rented halls in Hollywood, Los Angeles, and finally Sedona. The recordings of those talks, mostly preserved on cassette tape and transcribed posthumously, are notable for their pace, their long silences, and their warmth. He was, by every account, an unusually gentle presence in a tradition that has not always been gentle.
His teaching is the Ramana teaching simply restated. The self-inquiry Who am I? is the central practice; I-am-ness is the immediate object of attention; the apparent person dissolves under sustained looking. He died in Sedona in 1997. Silence of the Heart, his only book, was assembled from the talk transcripts in the years after.
Where to start
- Silence of the Heart — the central printed collection, drawn from the southern California satsangs.
- The collected talks (Robert Adams Infinity Institute) — the most extensive online archive of his recorded talks and transcripts.
