Adapted from a Meeting with John Sherman in Ojai, California on October 20, 2006.
I am no guru, but I am a teacher of sorts, and I do not conflate the teaching with the teacher. I am a teacher of sorts and I am trying to learn how to teach what I have to offer, I am trying to learn how to pass it on to you. Sometimes it seems like there is some success; other times it seems like I just cannot get it right, but that is what I am here for. I am not here to bestow upon you any good experiences or any bad experiences. They come and go on their own, with no help from me or anything you can do about them. I am not here to give you enlightenment. I am not here to show you the path to enlightenment. I am not here to bestow on you samadhis or experiences of oceanic consciousness. I am not here to give you something new to believe about yourself, for example, that you are Self, or God, or Oceanic Consciousness. I am here only to try to bring to you what worked for me, and what seems to me to be the only thing that has any possibility of ridding you of this cancerous, stupid idea that there is something wrong that needs to be fixed, which leads to all the horror in the human world today, yesterday and tomorrow.
For twelve years now, since I first met Gangaji, and for eleven years, since I first took Ramana Maharshi seriously — which is really the starting point of this adventure that I am on — I have known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is nothing wrong. For eleven years now, there has not been the slightest shred of confusion in my mind that says there is something wrong that I need to do something about. And, for eleven years now, I have tried and failed to find a way to offer this reality to anybody who comes to me, by offering Ramana Maharshi's method.
So, that is what I am here for. And, in order to do that, I'm going to suggest to you, I'm going to fight with you and argue with you. I’m going to do whatever I have to do with you to get home the fact that what I am talking about has nothing to do with changing anything at all about the person that you believe yourself to be. I don’t care if you are Saint Theresa or George W. Bush. I don’t care if you are hard headed and judgmental, or just as open and receptive to everything and everybody as can be. I don't care if you really can’t get it, or if you are really brilliant and full of understanding the truth. I don’t care about any of that, because all of that is part and parcel of the story of you that you unconsciously believe yourself to be. So, nothing that I have to say has anything to do with anything that is going on in your mind. What I seek to accomplish is to bypass that whole apparatus by using the apparatus itself and to bring your attention to its source: which is the reality of what you are.
Now, this ought to be easy, because you are, after all, here. You are undeniably, with absolute certainty, here. You can't deny that. There is no way you can get around it. There are no spiritual ideas and understandings that you can bring to bear that can negate the fact that you are here. You are always here. No matter where you go, as the saying goes, there you are. You are never absent. You are never missing.
Nothing about your story is important. Nothing within your story is at stake. The only thing that makes your story important and puts things at stake is your involvement with it, your energetic conviction that it is you. What we want is to do away with that belief. And the only way to do away with that belief is to repeatedly, deliberately, with huge intent, find a way to have the direct, unmediated experience of the reality of what you are, again and again. This process does not happen like a lightning bolt, it is not like sudden awakening. It is more like medicine, which is taken patiently, over time. It is more like tasting, looking, knowing all the while that what you are doing is stupid, knowing that you cannot possibly find it, knowing that you cannot feel awareness. How can you feel awareness? Knowing that and yet, trying, looking, trying, tasting, getting a glimpse, just a taste, seeing, “That's me; that's never changed. Wow!” And then, back into the story. Back into the story and then, back again to tasting, to trying to find this water of life, this medicine, just to get a sip again. It is not a lightning bolt, it is not a sudden blasting open of ego, but just a sip of the medicine.
Over time, these minuscule doses of tasting reality wipe out, silently destroy, in ways that cannot be even explained or understood, this underlying belief that I am the story. And by the time this belief is gone, you don’t even know it's gone. You just see there is no new thing for you to get, and there is no enlightenment possible for you. You are everything you have ever wanted. You are that -- that's really the truth. You are that, but it's not possible to know that without ridding yourself of all the false ideas that you are something else. And the only thing that does away with those false ideas is the medicine of the repeated tasting of reality.
That is the self inquiry of Ramana Maharshi. That is what Ramana offers to us, that is what he begs us to do: look, find out who you are. Forget about what you know. Forget about enlightenment. Forget about bliss. Forget about Brahman. Forget about it all. Just find out what you are, here and now, in this moment. Right now, what are you? What is it to be you? It's no big thing, is it? It's simple. What are you? How do you know you are here? Investigate, again and again. Then, off into the story. It's okay. That doesn't count. It doesn't matter. You can spend eons off into the story, “All right I get it, I understand. Now I get it. I see. And this leads to that, and then, finally I will be like Ramana. I will be radiating silence and emptiness and...” That's okay, because in the midst of all of that, comes the memory, "Yes, but what am I? What am I really, now? I am here now. What am I really?" Taste that.
The story will not be transformed into enlightened consciousness as a result of this practice. The story is just a story, and the story is actually enlightened consciousness. What else could it be? The story will not become transformed into a new guru as a result of this practice. The story will not be all fixed and sweet and perfect because of this practice. This practice destroys the belief that you are this story. Everything that you do to try to make the story conform to spiritual ideas enables and encourages the belief that you are the story. So just do this. Do what Ramana asks of us. What am I, really? Who am I, really? For whom is this thought? From whence comes this thought?
The one thing that is helpful within the story is to see that all that you have ever wanted is to know what you are. Every thought, every action, every spiritual aspiration, every lustful activity, every avaricious activity, every movement to get or to get rid of, everything whatsoever that has ever been done in your entire life has been done in service to this endless desire to know what you are. It takes the form of trying to know what you should be, what you will be, what you want to be, what you should not be, what you want not to be, what you want me to be. And all of this, every second of your life is driven solely by the desire to know what you are. If you see that, you also see that the habitual ways in which you have been going about it have no hope of success.
The only way to satisfy the most fundamental desire of life is to deliberately, with every ounce of energy you can possibly bring to bear, turn your attention to finding out what you are. Think about it. You can think about it, if you want to. It's not spiritually incorrect to think about it. Well, maybe it is, but it's okay. Bring all the forces you have at your disposal to this one quest to know with certainty what you are. All the time that is spent forgetting this quest is of no consequence. It doesn't mean a thing. The only time that means anything is the time spent absolutely involved in deliberately trying to see what you are. The rest of it is beside the point, it is really irrelevant.
I tell you from my heart, and I give you my word that, if you take this upon yourself, just this one goal to know what you are, knowing that nobody can tell you how to do it, and knowing that here you are on your own, all will turn out right. I can't give it to you. I can't make you see it. I can't tell you what you are. I can't even do a very good job of telling you how to go about looking for yourself. Here, like the Buddha, you are on your own. But I promise you, if you take this to be the one thing in your life that you are determined to see, you cannot be denied. And I promise you, with Ramana, that all will turn out right. Not in any way that you can foresee, but all will turn out right. And the false belief about what you are cannot stand before your deep intention to know the truth. That's a promise.
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