Sailor Bob Adamson, born in 1928, came to Nisargadatta Maharaj in Bombay in 1976 after years of seeking through other Indian teachers, including a long period with Swami Muktananda. He was with Nisargadatta for several months across two visits and left with the instruction to go home and share what had been understood. He did that, in a quiet way, for the rest of his life. His Melbourne living room was a destination for an international circle of seekers for nearly fifty years, until his death in February 2025 at the age of ninety-six. Several of the better-known teachers in this stream, John Wheeler among them, trace their own resolution to afternoons in that room, and the weekly meetings continue with the people he left to carry them.
His teaching is the Nisargadatta teaching pared back further. The pointing is to what is, before the thought. Awareness is not a thing one possesses, it is what one is, and the apparent person is a movement of conditioned thought arising in awareness like clouds in a clear sky. The notion I am the body is a mistake of identification, not a fact. He returns again and again to the same plain question: what’s wrong with right now, unless you think about it?
An example of the teaching
The question is meant to be tested, not admired. Take any moment of ordinary discomfort, he would say, and pause the thinking for a second or two. Nobody can stop thought for long, and he never asked anyone to. But in that brief gap, look: is anything actually wrong? Seeing is still happening, hearing is still happening, breathing carries on. The problem cannot be located until the mind starts up again and resumes the story of past and future, me and mine.
From there he turned the looking onto the storyteller. The word I arises, and we assume it names something solid that owns the anxiety or the search. He invited people to look for that something. Try to find the centre the thoughts refer to. What turns up is a sensation here, a memory there, another thought, and no fixed entity anywhere among them. The self that seemed to have the problem is a label without an owner, and the awareness in which the whole display appears was never disturbed in the first place. He called what remains presence-awareness, just this and nothing else.
Where to start
- What’s Wrong with Right Now Unless You Think About It?: the book that made his pointing widely known. Short, direct, transcribed mostly from his Melbourne meetings.
- Only That: The Life and Teaching of Sailor Bob Adamson: Kalyani Lawry’s portrait, part biography and part dialogues, with photographs from Bob’s own collection.
- The official site: books, audio, and details of the continuing Melbourne meetings.
