Truth Is All That Matters

In 1993, I was in a federal prison in Englewood, Colorado in the fifteenth year of my imprisonment for a number of politically motivated bank robberies and acts of sabotage I had done in the ’70s. At that time, I was absolutely, utterly uninterested in anything spiritual. I had long since persuaded myself that all things spiritual were just stories we told ourselves to get us through the days without dying from despair at the obvious uselessness and hopelessness of our lives – lives that were in the end just dead meat walking and talking until it fell down dead again. I really didn’t have any interest in anything spiritual. But in September of 1993, a friend of mine invited me to a meeting with a spiritual teacher who was coming to the prison – according to him, a gorgeous, blonde, southern American woman – bringing some exotic, Indian spiritual teaching. He asked me if I would like to come to the chapel and spend a couple of hours with her. Well, of course I would. Her purpose was beside the point. I’m offered the chance to spend a couple of hours in a small group with a gorgeous, blonde Southern woman with some exotic teaching to offer. What could possibly be the down side to that? Continue Reading »

In ancient times, humanity — that is we — dealt with the horror of inexplicable existence in a harsh and unforgiving world by first creating and then worshiping with unconditional fear and devotion, gods and spirits; we bowed down to them as the source of all things, good and evil, that befell us. We sought ways to placate and protect ourselves from these dark and incomprehensible forces and their inscrutable movements in the world by sacrifice; by the intervention of shamans, rituals, superstitious rites and so forth; and by abject submission to what we imagined to be their will. Continue Reading »

Spiritual teachers must answer to a higher standard of behavior and accountability than their students; we can not be excused for abusive, cruel behavior on the basis of any idea that we are inherently immune from criticism by virtue of our advanced state of realization.

We are, after all, those to whom people come for help resolving the most profound and disturbing aspects of all human existence; we are those to whom they come seeking final release from the universal suffering that seems to be the natural lot of human life. And as such, like it or not, we are looked upon as being outside and above the norm, different from them, and answering to a higher call than service to ourselves and to our own happiness and gratification.  Continue Reading »

We will start from nowhere, knowing nothing but that we are here, as human beings, and that there seems to be something fundamentally wrong with life as a human: it seems that it should be better, easier, sweeter than it is.

I want to persuade you to try Ramana’s self-inquiry for yourself because I am certain that if you do, it will naturally energize your interior life and will, in the end, bring to an end the delusion of personal suffering in which we somehow come to see our lives as broken promises; the sensations of life that come and go in our bodies as objects of fear and lust and loathing; our minds as fearful dark jungles of confusion, our friends and neighbors and family as enemies; and the sweet, sweet world itself as a hostile encampment.

To begin self-inquiry does not require you to abandon anything you are doing now or trying not to do now, neither does self-inquiry require you to decide for or against any spiritual practice, for the self-inquiry of Ramana is not spiritual practice at all in the sense that we normally think of spiritual practice. Self-inquiry is unaffected by any of it; self-inquiry bypasses all mental and spiritual activity whatsoever, and does its work silently. Continue Reading »

My dear friends,

In the seven years or so that I’ve been the servant of Ramana’s simple, perfect teaching of self-inquiry, I’ve come to see very clearly that no matter what we might think we want, or have been told that we should want, certainty about one’s actual nature is all that’s ever really wanted by anyone.

And I’ve come to see from my own experience in this life, and from the reports of the experience of many who have been in satsang with us, that the simple act of turning attention toward the actual, naked experience of being whenever possible resolves all problems and will in time erase all inclination to project on others my misery, to take from others what seems to be needed for myself, and to destroy others in the belief that others are the cause of my suffering.

The reason for this, according to all the great ones who have tried to bring us to this water of life, is that all problems are false; rooted in the false belief that I am the story about me; the history of my life, my attainments, my failures, my friends, my lovers, my enemies, my needs and desires. Continue Reading »