John Sherman Podcast

Just One Look Results - Part 1

These are reports of the results of the looking by eleven people from all over the world. They were recorded via telephone in July and August 2011. Click on the links to read the written versions posted in our Community Center forum:

Carlee Paddock (Easley, South Carolina), Bill Corcoran (Cleveland, Ohio), Nancy Margalit (Garmish-Partenkirshen, Germany), Tyson (Melbourne, Australia), Patricia Crane (Muncie, Indiana), Deon Ashton (United Kingdom), Helen Waterhouse (Carbunup River, Australia), Caspar Seip (Oslo, Norway), Paul (Toronto, Canada), David Bortman (Ashland, Oregon), Thomas Küng (Lucerne, Switzerland).

For more reports, visit our Community Center forums.

 

MP3 File

Length: 55 min
File size: 13.13 MB

Just One Look Results - Part 2

These are reports of the results of the looking by eleven people from all over the world. They were recorded via telephone in July and August 2011. Click on the links to read the written versions posted in our Community Center forum:

A. (Atlanta, Georgia), Jan Stoll (Düsseldorf, Germany), Y. (New York, New York), Travis Eneix (San Francisco, California), Peter Duggan (Perth, Australia), Patti Foy (Jemez, New Mexico), David Bailey (Chesterfiled, Missouri), Mike (Flagstaff, Arizona), Tim (San Francisco Bay Area, California), David Parrish (Media, Pennsylvania), Lida (Los Angeles, California).

For more reports, visit our Community Center forums.

 

MP3 File

Length: 56 min
File size: 13.36 MB

Just One Look Results - Part 3

These are reports of the results of the looking by nine people from all over the world. They were recorded via telephone in July and August 2011. Click on the links to read the written versions posted in our Community Center forum:

Lera Chacon (Boca Raton, Florida), John (Eureka Springs, Arkansas), Julia (Montreal, Canada), Brian Allen (Dallas, Texas), Mark Speert (Atlanta, Georgia), Santharaj (Bangalore, India), Andre Best (Phoenix, Arizona), Derek Robinson (Toronto, Canada), Veetkam Gin (Easley, South Carolina).

For more reports, visit our Community Center forums.

 

MP3 File

Length: 57 min
File size: 13.5 MB

A Worldwide Meeting - October 8, 2011

"I am not a spiritual teacher. Spiritual aspiration is a perfectly legitimate human pursuit. So is physics. So is psychology. So is philosophy. So is art. All perfectly legitimate human pursuits, none of which has anything to do with what I try to speak about -- and any resemblance is purely coincidental." John Sherman

Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on October 8, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 1 h 26 min
File size: 41.01 MB

Open House Meeting - October 5, 2011

"Here's what the looking brings in the end: sanity, a deep satisfaction with your own life, and a sense of unconditional forgiveness." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on October 5, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 52 min
File size: 25.04 MB

Open House Meeting - September 28, 2011

"The luck of the draw that brought about the appearance of self-consciousness in human beings also brought about the fear of life itself. This fear is like an autoimmune disease in which the human creature fears its own life. In the absence of this disease, sanity prevails. It's that simple." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on September 28, 2011.

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Length: 1 h 01 min
File size: 14.67 MB

Online Intensive - Meeting 5 - July 8, 2011

John reviews and summarizes each meeting of the intensive:

1) This work is not a spiritual teaching;
2) The fear of life; the healing of the wound of alienation and disaffection with your life;
3) The act of looking as the effective way to heal the wound;
4) The resulting compassion: what it is and what it isn't;
5) Conversations.

Complete recording of Meeting 5 of a Five-Day Online Intensive with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 8, 2011.



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Length: 1h 52 min
File size: 26.85 MB

A Worldwide Meeting - September 10, 2011

"The irresistible inclination to turn yourself into an abstraction, into some concept of how it would feel to be free, such as "the one who is looking", "awareness", "love", "heart", "emptiness", "consciousness", and the like actually poisons the spiritual teachings themselves and transforms them into things that can be dealt with within the context of fear and the never-ending project of trying to protect and perfect the apparatus of personality. The only goal of this movement into abstraction is to keep me safe from my own life. At the bottom of it is always the unseen assumption that life is dangerous, that I am in grave danger here." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on September 10, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 2 h 05 min
File size: 30.17 MB

Open House Meeting - September 14, 2011

"The way to check if you're making progress is to look and see if the distance between you and your life is shrinking. That's the important thing, not anything else. Not the attainment of perfect peace, or perfect clarity, or perfect understanding. You are here to experience your life. That's the only reason you're here." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on September 14, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 59 min
File size: 28.44 MB

Online Intensive - Meeting 4 - July 7, 2011

"I think the reason compassion is seen to be the road to enlightenment is because the rise of compassion is a result of being free from the fear of life. Compassion is not a love sensation, it's unpleasant. Compassion is nothing other than your experience of someone else's pain." John Sherman

Complete recording of Meeting 4 of a Five-Day Online Intensive with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 7, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 1h 56 min
File size: 55.69 MB

Open House Meeting - September 7, 2011

"It's not that I have any objection to spiritual aspiration and it's not that I don't see the deep beauty and value of spiritual teachings and spiritual understanding. The case is that the spiritual bubble, the spiritual point of view, the spiritual outlook actually makes it difficult for anyone to accomplish this simple, non-spiritual act of trying to get a direct taste of what it feels like to be me." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on September 7, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 58 min
File size: 13.96 MB

Online Intensive Meeting 3 - July 6, 2011

"It is our default assumption that there is something wrong with me. That there's something about my character that needs to be changed. That there is something I understand wrongly, or something that I need to understand and don't. That there's something that I need to know and don't. That there's some idea I have that's off, and not right. That my fate is tied to the nature of the thoughts that rise and fall within me, the nature of the desires that rise and fall within me, the nature of the aversions that rise and fall within me. That my fate is tied to those things. Looking at yourself does away with all of that." John Sherman

Complete recording of Meeting 3 of a Five-Day Online Intensive with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 6, 2011.



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Length: 1h 45 min
File size: 25.18 MB

Online Intensive - Meeting 2 - July 5, 2011

"We've tried everything we can try, except this. Sometimes, in the spiritual realm, we've even come very close to the actual act that I'm urging upon everybody I speak to, the act of looking at yourself. We've tried, we've come close, but we have done so wrapped in a container of spirituality and transcendence that makes it impossible for us to see just how simple it is, how easy it is, and how little is required to do it." John Sherman

Complete recording of Meeting 2 of a Five-Day Online Intensive with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 5, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 1h 48 min 
File size: 25.09 MB

Online Intensive - Meeting 1 - July 4, 2011

"The looking at yourself I speak of is not a spiritual teaching. It is an action that can be taken by any human being, which will cure the human being who takes it of the disease of distrust and antagonism toward their own life. Once you are cured from that disease, you can live life however you want to live life, you can pursue whatever you want to pursue. And you will do so with much more satisfaction and success than is possible now, when you're afflicted with this underlying difficulty that nothing else has managed to eliminate." John Sherman

Complete recording of Meeting 1 of a Five-Day Online Intensive with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 4, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 1h 32 min
File size: 22.09 MB

Open House Meeting - July 27, 2011

The one thing that distinguishes what I speak of from what everybody else is saying, past and present, as far as I can tell, is the use of the personal pronoum. It really is that simple. The search for spiritual solutions over the centuries has occurred within the context of a mind that is itself insane and premised on the idea that there is something wrong with the life and something has to be done about it. Because of that, the possibility of speaking about you and me becomes impossible within that context of consideration and discussion, so that nowhere -- not in religion, not in spiritual practice or philosophy -- do you find people talking about you as you. It's always you as the "I Am," or "Self," or "Awareness," or "Consciousness," a whole wide range of abstractions that seek to make you something other than this ever-present, ever-the-same sense of being the personal me. Now, if I tell you to look at you, there is only one thing that actually the word "you" is pointing to, and that's what you call "me."

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 27, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 60 min
File size: 14.4 MB

Open House Meeting - July 20, 2011

"Looking at yourself is not a goal in itself. We're not doing it to get better at it, or to be able to do it for longer periods of time, or even to have an experience of seeing what we're looking at. The point of the looking is to take it as medicine. The looking snuffs out the cause of the problem (which is the fear of life), and dissolves the problem itself (which is the wound of separation, the gap between you and your own life)." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 20, 2011. 

 MP3 File

Length: 59 min
File size: 14.18 MB

Open House Meeting - July 13, 2011

"The fear of death is a storyline created by the mind to make sense of the senseless separation between me and my life that is the default relationship with life for those of us who are afflicted by it. It's an explanation for the endless feeling of being at stake. The horror of having this distance between me and my life is not even conscious. We don't see it as an idea. We see it as the fact of the matter. But in the end, it goes and it never comes back." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 13, 2011.

MP3 File

Length: 60 min
File size: 14.55 MB

A Worldwide Meeting - July 9, 2011

"It is really important to see that looking at yourself is not a psychological exercise. It is not intended to produce -- and it does not produce and it cannot produce -- a direct effect on the symptom picture that has appeared within your life. The only effect looking at yourself has is to render absurd the whole project of defending yourself from your life. The only thing the attempt to get a glimpse of yourself does is to close that gap of alienation from the life. And once that's finished, then anything you do within the content of your life to straighten things out will certainly be much more effective." John Sherman

Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on July 9, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 1 h 45 min
File size: 25 MB

Interview with John Sherman - July 19, 2011

"I am convinced that the moment of terror that strikes almost all of us at birth sets us in a relationship with life that is antagonistic, distrustful, and alienated, and opens a wound of disaffection that keeps us forever apart and fearful of our own life. That wound is the actual cause of all the misery and trouble that follows." John Sherman

Complete recording of an interview broadcast live from Chapel Hill, North Carolina on July 19, 2011. John Sherman is interviewed by Trip Overholt and John Troy for their radio show Conversations with Avant-Garde Sages. 

MP3 File

Length: 59 min
File size: 14.04 MB

Open House Meeting - June 22, 2011

"If I can speak to anybody at all in a way that is uncomplicated, simple, direct and clean enough for them to hear it, so that they can hear this one simple suggestion to turn their attention to see if they cannot get the direct experience of the reality of their own nature, of what it feels like to be that person, they will automatically try to do it. This act is just so simple and straightforward, so lacking in any qualification whatsoever: you don't have to believe anything, you don't have to disbelieve anything, you don't have to do any practice and you don't have to stop any of your practices. All that's needed is that you take one fraction of a second to see if you cannot get a taste of what it feels like to be you. Anybody who tries this must succeed. You can't fail in the effort to get a taste of what it feels like to be you. After all, it's you. It's not awareness, or consciousness, or god, or silence, etc. It's you. It is my conviction that anyone who hears this suggestion will try it and, having tried it, will certainly succeed. Over time, the end of the alienation from their own life is certain and sanity prevails." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on June 22, 2011.

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Length: 1 h 15 min
File size: 26 MB

Open House Meeting - June 15, 2011

"We seek to free ourselves of the fear of life, which has ruined all our previous efforts to be helpful to anyone, including ourselves, and the truth is that before we can be of much help to those around us, we have to recover from the effects of the fear ourselves. We need to see that during that process of recovery the sense of having been opened to the suffering of humanity can be very intense, but it will pass. To really be of help, we can't be insane." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on June 15, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 55 min
File size: 13 MB

Open House Meeting - June 8, 2011

"There is no way to make this suggestion more attractive to the individual mind. This suggestion is simple beyond any way to even denote its simplicity. This act requires only one thing: the intent to turn attention inward to try to get the direct experience of the reality of our nature. That intent just has to arise, and that's all. It doesn't matter whether that intent arises and is met with distaste, or fear, or dismissal. If the intent arises, the looking will occur and, if the looking occurs, the end is certain. I do the best I can to find more palatable and understandable ways to present this act to people, but the fundamental thing is to bring the suggestion itself directly to those who can hear it -- and watch what happens. It's not to make this suggestion pretty -- or even ugly -- but just to find a way to suggest it and to have it heard by the person. And the suggestion is heard without the need to wrap it up in any kind of consideration for what the person's own psychology might make of it when this suggestion is heard." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on June 8, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 1h 1 min
File size: 14.49 MB

 

A Worldwide Meeting - June 4, 2011

"We have an intuitive sense that the problem has something to do with separation, and we project this understanding onto the world and assume that it is the sense of being a separate individual being that needs to be eliminated. We learn to yearn for an end to that separation and we try to accomplish that by homogenizing the wild diversity of life itself and by trying to sink back into undifferentiated awareness. But without the existence of subject and object, without movement, shape, color, and noise, there is no awareness. Our only conceivable purpose here is to perceive the wildness of existence, and all our efforts to erase the sense of separation bring only frustration and heartache. Actual awakeness is the sense of being something in an ocean of other somethings, enthralled by the unfolding of reality. All our efforts to silence reality, no matter how sincerely they may promise awakening, are nothing more than the effort go back to sleep." John Sherman

Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on June 4, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 1h 56 min
File size: 27.9 MB

Open House Meeting - May 25, 2011

"We delude ourselves with the idea that what we need is the complete cessation of all conflict. We think that all of life's complication has to go for us to be happy, and until all that complication goes, there is still something I am doing wrong. But life is not about being finished. Life is the endless, irrepressible and incomprehensible pandemonium of ever-changing phenomena in which we have our being." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on May 25, 2011. 

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Length: 1 h 2 min
File size: 14.8 MB

Open House Meeting - May 18, 2011

"The sense of self-consciousness, of being aware that I am a separate being is not a problem; it is actually a gift. The problem is the alienation and sense of separation from my own life, the sense that I am at stake here and that I have to keep life at arm's length." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on May 18, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 59 min
File size: 14.2 MB

A Worldwide Meeting - May 7, 2011

"This work has nothing to do with looking for silence, or the absence of thought, or awareness, but trying to look at you, trying to get a direct contact with the actual experience of what it feels like to be you. It's very important that the effort be made to get what it feels like to be you, and not just the absence of thought, the spaciousness, the oneness, or any of that." John Sherman

Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on May 7, 2011. 

MP3 File

Length: 1 h 56 min
File size: 27.88 MB

Open House Meeting - May 4, 2011

"Once you start the effort to turn the beam of your attention inward, trying to get a taste of what it feels like to be you, that's the medicine. The act of trying is the medicine. Over time, the sense of an antagonistic relationship with your life just vanishes. And since what happens is a vanishing, it is often the case that you don't even know that it has happened." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on May 4, 2011.

 

MP3 File

Length: 57 min
File size: 13.72 MB

Open House Meeting - April 20, 2011

"In the looking, it would be best to start from the assumption that you've never done this before and you don't even know what it is." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on April 20, 2011. 

 

 

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Length: 54 min
File size: 12.87 MB

Open House Meeting - April 13, 2011

"The point of the looking is not to make you more aware of yourself. It is to rid you of the belief that life is treacherous and dangerous and to make you safe and sane in your own life." John Sherman

Complete recording of an Online Open House Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on April 13, 2011.

 

 

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Length: 1 hr 4 min
File size: 15.33 MB

 

A Worldwide Meeting - April 9, 2011

"What has led us astray and driven humanity insane is the staying power of the point of view that sees life itself to be the problem with life; the point of view that can find no solution other than to reform, transform, transcend, or escape from life itself. The solution to this insanity is to rid oneself of the idea that life is the problem, and the way to do exactly that is simply to look at yourself. The mere act of looking, of trying to get a direct taste of what it feels like to be you, unmediated by past beliefs or understandings, snuffs out the fear of life, and restores sanity and intimacy. In time, you will find yourself home, safe and sane, fully engaged in the wonder of life as a human being." John Sherman

Complete recording of a Worldwide Online Meeting with John Sherman broadcast live from Ojai, California on April 9, 2011.

 

 

MP3 File

Length: 1 hr 48 min
File size: 25.8 MB