It has been some time now since I've posted to this blog, mostly because there is so much to do in the way of practical maintenance of the material foundation of our work that little time is left for the work itself beyond the in-person and online meetings. Financial management, website maintenance and development, equipment maintenance, IRS filings, editing and publishing audio files, video files, editing and typesetting transcripts and so forth are all extremely time-consuming, but inescapable necessities with no one but Carla and I to do them.
And this is to say nothing of the thousands of wonderful emails I receive from people who express their gratitude, their progress in vichara, their problems, and their solutions. I read every single email, but I've only been able to reply to maybe ten percent of them. There are many, many more that I would love to answer, but just cannot find the time, and even the few replies that I manage to write are of use only to me and the individual person I reply to. I keep all the emails that I would like to answer in a folder, thinking that the time may come when I will be able to return to them and respond, but that never seems to happen. As I write this, the folder with unanswered emails contains 2,097 emails.
Truth is that all of these emails, and even my few responses, might be of great value to all of us if they were part of the public conversation, rather than private; if they were available to all rather than just to me and the writer. So I'm going to try something new here.
From now on, I will post to this blog all emails sent to me that strike me as interesting, useful, or expressing a genuine need for help. If I can, I will include my response, but even if I cannot supply an immediate response, I will post them here and you can read them and comment on them yourselves if you are moved to do so. They will be edited for clarity and nothing about the writer will be revealed so as to preserve their privacy. When an email is posted here, I will send an email to the writer with a link to the post.
From now on, if you email me directly at johnsherman@riverganga.org you will get an automatic response explaining this, and directing you to this blog.
In addition, if you would like to be able to make postings to this blog yourself, send me a request at the same email address, and I will consider adding you to the list of moderated authors and provide you with full instructions.
I'm eagerly looking forward to the unfolding of this blog as a practical tool for those who seriously want to be finished with the fear and the alienation from life that spoils our lives, and to be able to finally see for themselves the total wonder that is the actual nature of human life un-reformed, un-transformed, and un-transcended.
Another thing: Carla and I have just finished a month of recess from meetings, in which we worked on the material infrastructure of our work that I mentioned in the beginning of this post. We made good progress on simplifying and catching up on the practical tasks that are required of us to keep the organism alive.
We have also almost completed work on a new version of our website at riverganga.org that will make an enormous difference in the time needed to maintain it. The new site is 100% CSS based, and employs custom Dreamweaver templates of our own design. Those of you who know something about websites will see immediately how great a leap this is for us and how effective this will be in actually freeing up time for us to devote to other tasks. Those who are not interested in the technical matters will, we hope, find the new site pleasant to navigate and much easier to use than before. We expect the new site to be ready for testing soon, and if you would be interested in spending some time beta testing it (no technical acumen required – only lively interest) send us an email at: webdevelopment@riverganga.org, and we'll let you know when it's ready and provide you with a way to tell us what you think.
And one last thing: I spent some time this last month working on a book — not a book of transcriptions of meetings, but a book in which I can speak directly to the reader with more clarity and succinctness than is possible in any other format. It should be ready in a month or so. When it is finished, Carla will typeset it and we will see about either finding a publisher or publishing it ourselves. It has taken ten years for my ability to express what I see to develop enough to do this, and I can hardly wait to see how it turns out.
I thought you might like to see the title and chapter outline to get a sense of where I'm going with this:
Being Human
The Secret of Eternal Happiness
Chapter One: Being Human
Wherein I explore the apparent brokenness of life as a human being; what it feels like to believe oneself to be at the mercy of life, trapped in a body, a mind, a false promise from which I cannot escape and about which I can do nothing useful. My purpose is to show the reader that human misery is the same everywhere for everyone, and to earn the reader's willingness to see what I have to say about it.
Chapter Two: The Mistake
Wherein I propose and develop the insight that the actual cause of human misery is an unavoidable misunderstanding that occurs in the moment of the cataclysmic birth of a self-conscious human mind. Confronted with the immense, churning cauldron of phenomenal sensation that is the ocean of consciousness itself, the infant mind, innocent of any experience or understanding at all inevitably reacts with terror and contraction, thereby embarking on a lifelong obsession to find safety and salvation; protection or escape from life itself.
Chapter Three: The Secret
Wherein I set forth the actual secret of eternal happiness, the totally obvious and simple human activity that can alone actually bring an end to human misery.
Chapter Four: Being Human
Wherein I try to reveal to the reader what it feels like actually to be human without the fear — what Ramana called the 'natural state'.
Chapter Five: Truth
My first, last, and only attempt to present a philosophical and metaphysical context to our work.
Enjoy yourself always.
John
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