Self-inquiry with John Sherman
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Click here for full details. - Sunday, February 11, at 3 pm PT (-8 GMT) John will offer satsang using Skypecast, a free, online broadcast service by Skype. This is the second online meeting. This form is a great opportunity for people all over the world to meet together in satsang with John.
Meetings will be audio only. John will speak for some time and then he will open for questions and discussion.
Sunday, January 21st, at 2:30 pm
Joslyn Park - Crafts Room
633 Kensington Road
Santa Monica, California 90405-2417
Please plan to arrive 5-10 minutes early.
The meeting will last approximately 2 hours.
Meetings in Satsang are free of charge. All are welcome.
Donations for the support of satsang are always welcome and gratefully accepted.
For more information, please call 805-646-0994.
Saturday, January 13, at 7:30pm
Deux Hall
202 Canada St.
Ojai, CA 93023
Please plan to arrive 5-10 minutes early.
The meeting will last approximately 2 hours.
Meetings in satsang are always free of charge. All are welcome.
Donations for the support of satsang are welcome and gratefully accepted.
For more information, please call The River Ganga Foundation: (805)646-0994
Driving Directions to Deux Hall from 101 South or North:
Exit on 33 to Ojai.
11.2 miles from 101, 33 turns left at a large “Y” intersection with traffic lights. Von’s is in a shopping center on the left before the light. You should bear right at the light. It feels like you’re just staying on the same road.
Continue for 2.8 miles to Canada Street, which is on your left.
Turn left onto Canada St.
The next cross street is Matilija St.
Deux Hall is located on the corner of Canada St and Matilija St. The entrance to the room is on Canada St.
Park anywhere on the street.
Click here for full details. - Sunday, January 14, at 3 pm PT (-8 GMT) John will offer satsang using Skypecast, a free, online broadcast service by Skype. This will be a great opportunity for people all over the world to meet together in satsang with John.
Meetings will be audio only. John will speak for some time and then he will open for questions and discussion.
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 »
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 »
Self-inquiry will not make of you anything that you are not already, but it will, over time, destroy the false belief that you are this body, this mind, this story, this life.
That false belief is the root cause of all human suffering whatsoever.
