By John Sherman

Article first published in The Messenger.

Among human beings, there is a deep sense that there is some reason for being here in these lives, that there is some purpose to it, something without which the life is not the magnificence of the leela, but flatness, dullness, meaninglessness — a false promise.

We are all spending these lives incessantly trying to find out, or figure out, or get a glimpse of who in the world we are — who we should be, what we should not be, what our parents tell us we are — or our church, our society, the movies, the therapists, the preachers say we should be. The one thing that we don't do is turn this quest into explicitness, because that would of course require owning up to the fact that we don't have a clue who we are, or where we came from. We spend our lives in a frenzy of trying to do everything we can in order to figure out who we are — always failing.

In retrospect, everything I did in this life was done in the attempt either to figure out or to create someone, so that I could know who I was. It never occurred to me to just look and find out. I did everything I could to create something that was reasonably coherent and permanent that I could say, "That's me, that is what I am talking about when I say 'me': the communist revolutionary, the machinist, the philosopher."

What a surprise to discover that all along I was looking in the wrong direction. I was looking out there. "Out there" being the thoughts, the emotions, the intentions, the desires, and you: how you looked at me. What you thought of me, what I thought you thought of me. And what I had to do either to become that or to reject that.

Ramana Maharshi has said that the purpose of your life is to find out who you are. And how do you find that out? You look for your self. This is the direct, absolutely uncontaminated path. Once you get it that all you are doing is trying to find out who you are, then the direction of your attention immediately becomes obvious: you look for your self. You look in the only direction where there is even the slightest possibility of finding your self, and that is inward, toward the seer, because you are the seer. Toward the doer, because you believe yourself to be the doer, and the thinker, and the sufferer. Instead of looking out there at all the ideas of who you might be or ought to be or ought not to be; instead of looking out there at all the spiritual concepts of what you are (emptiness, pure consciousness, God, etc.), you look directly inward toward the one who is looking. And you look there constantly. Toward the looker. Toward the doer. Toward the thinker. Toward your self.

© 2003 John Sherman. All rights reserved.