2009 Events and Activities

All of our programs and services are available free of charge, without regard to religious, spiritual, philosophical, political belief or any other affiliation.

• We conducted three Five-Day Online Intensives in 2009 (30 hrs total), with 39 people attending from all over the world.
  
  
• We hold Open House meetings most Wednesday afternoons, where John is available online to speak with anybody who shows up and answer questions. In 2009, we held 38 Open House meetings (38 hrs total), with a total of 316 people attending.
  
  
• We had 10 in-person Open Meetings (formerly Public Meetings) (20 hrs total) in Ojai, California attended by a total of 102 people; 11 Open Meetings in Santa Monica, California (22 hrs total) attended by a total of 209 people; 1 Open Meeting in Berkeley, California (2 hrs total) attended by a total of 75 people; and 1 Open Meeting in Escondido, California (2 hrs total) attended by a total of 24 people. All together, our in-person Open Meetings had a total attendance of 410 people in 2009.
  
  
• We offered 15 Worldwide Online Meetings, attended by a total of at least 710 people. This is the total of computers logged in. Sometimes groups of people attend meetings using a single computer, so we don't have the exact numbers.
  
  
• We had 2 in-person Afternoon events in Ojai, California (8 hrs total) attended by a total of 51 people, 1 Afternoon event in Berkeley, California (4 hrs total) attended by a total of 67 people, and 1 Afternoon event in Westlake Village, California (4 hrs total)  attended by a total of 14 people. All together, our Afternoon events in 2009 had a total attendance of 132 people.
  
  
• Our annual Five-Day Retreat at the Ojai Retreat in Ojai, California began on November 6 and ended on November 10. It was attended by 28 people from all over the country and abroad, in a total of 11 meetings (22 hrs total).
  
  
• We had 1 online meeting where a group of 30 people in New Jersey got together to meet with John online and 1 online meeting where a group of 13 people all over the world got together to meet with John online. These two special events had a total of 43 people attending.
  
  
• John had Private Conversations with 21 people in person, on the phone or online (17 hrs total).

Note:  In keeping with our goal of reaching the largest number of people possible with news of the simple act of looking at yourself, all of the events listed above were offered absolutely free of charge. 

• Several dozens of people, all over the world, are in active correspondence with John, receiving guidance and advice by e-mail. In 2009, John received approximately 1,543 emails and letters from 133 different people living all over the world.
  
  
• Translations of texts by John Sherman into German, Dutch, Italian, French, Danish, Hebrew, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese are available free of charge on our website. In 2009, we added 10 new translations of transcriptions of complete meetings. There are now 76 translations of different texts in 9 different languages on our website. Several people showed up this year willing and able to create these translations. We are very grateful for this opportunity to be heard by more and more people around the world.
  
  
• John's ebook, Meeting Ramana Maharshi, Conversations with John Sherman (ISBN: 978-0-9718246-0-7), first published in 2004 and republished in 2008 in a revised version, is available as a free download on our website and was downloaded more than 625 times in 2009. Total downloads as of December 31, 2009: 1,715.
  
  
• A French translation of John's ebook, Meeting Ramana Maharshi (French title: Une rencontre avec Ramana Maharshi, Conversations avec John Sherman ISBN-13: 978-0-9718246-1-4) was published in October 2008.  The ebook is available as a free download on our website and was downloaded 14 times in 2009. Total downloads to date as of December 31, 2009: 19.
  
  
• A Dutch translation of John's ebook, Meeting Ramana Maharshi (Dutch title: Kennismaking met Ramana Maharshi, Gesprekken met John Sherman  ISBN-13 978-0-9718246-2-1) was published in March 2009. The ebook is available as a free download on our website and was downloaded 68 times in 2009.
  
  
• All these ebooks are also available as free downloads in a number of unaffiliated websites such as Archive.org, Scribd.com, etc.
  
  
• Our RiverGanga browser toolbar provides direct and immediate access to all the excerpts, complete transcriptions, audio and video media available on our website, through a simple browser interface. The free software can be downloaded from our website and customized according to personal preferences. It was installed by 58 new users in 2009. Total installations to date as of December 31, 2009: 268 users.
  
  
• John's blog, Truth Is All That Matters, receives an average of about 1,980 visitors every month.
  
  
• Taking into consideration the power of social networks, John and Carla created accounts both on Facebook and Twitter to spread our message. We have a total 112 followers on Twitter and 288 friends on Facebook who receive constant updates about our work and our website.
  
  
• In 2009, we added 28 new recordings of recent meetings with John Sherman to our podcast. There are now 103 recordings of meetings with John on our podcast and streaming all over the internet from johnsherman.org through a number of different aggregator sites. These audio files have been streamed or downloaded approximately 36,720 times as of December 31, 2009.
  
  
• In March 2009, we created two new video blogs on our multimedia website (www.johnsherman.org). We added 14 new videos of different lengths (from 10 minutes to two hours) for a total of approximately 15 hours of material. The two video blogs combined had a total of 2,130 individual, unique viewers and a total of 25,920 page views in 2009.  All of these videos and some videos recoded before 2009 can also be found throughout the Internet on a number of websites, including YouTube, Viddler, Google Video, Archive.org, etc, and they are also available on TiVo. Since August 2006, when we started our channel on YouTube, our videos have been viewed or downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and the channel had 405 subscribers as of December 31, 2009.
  
  
• We added 12 new complete Transcriptions of Meetings to our multimedia website in 2009. There are now 30 complete transcriptions available on the website. These transcriptions also are the work of a group of volunteers who have come forward and offered to help in this way to broaden the reach of this work. The transcriptions blog had a total of 23,760 page views in 2009.
  
  
• There are now 22 excerpts from meetings available on the Excerpts blog in our multimedia website. The excerpts blog had a total of 4,680 page views in 2009.
  
  
• We added 2 new Articles about John Sherman to our multimedia website in 2009. There are now 9 articles available on the website. The articles blog had a total of 4,456 page views in 2009.
  
  
• We published 12 issues of RiverGanga News, our monthly e-mail newsletter, to approximately 2,000 subscribers in 2009. We also sent out 61 weekly e-mail event reminders and other email notifications to all those on our mailing list.
  
  
• Our website (www.riverganga.org) receives an average of about 3,000 individual, unique visitors every month. In 2009, the website received 40,061 individual, unique visitors, 73,886 visits, 571,718 page views, and 1,581,775 hits.  Click here for a map displaying their location around the world.

Note: All services, downloads, transcripts, ebooks and streaming media on our website are always offered free of charge.

Our work is financed entirely by gifts from those who have seen the value of this work in their own lives and are moved by generosity and compassion to help make it freely available to all.

Please consider helping us in this work by making a donation or a monthly pledge in any amount.

John & Carla Sherman
Updated on April 25, 2010.