Find Out The Truth

Adapted from A Meeting with John Sherman
San Anselmo, California - April 17, 2005

Ramana Maharshi says that the only thing standing between you and self-realization is the belief that you are not already fully realized. This is a truly radical, outrageous, incomprehensible suggestion. It lays to rest all the ideas about what I have to do with myself in order to find truth. All the ideas about all the things that stand in the way, or distract me, or carry me away from the truth of my nature. If what he has suggested is true, then there is no fixation that is a problem for you. There is no thought, there is no pattern of behavior, there is no history, there is no karmic consequence bearing fruit in the present; there is nothing whatsoever standing between you and the immediate permanent realization of the truth of your nature, other than the belief that you are not already that alive true realization of reality.

Everything else that Ramana has to say, every other conversation that he has with people is nothing other than guidance, instruction and help in losing that belief. And the thrust of everything that Ramana suggests to us is that the only possibility for being finished with the idea that there is something wrong with you, that there is something that needs to be fixed with you; that there is some new experience, some new state that must appear in you in order for you to be what you are already, is to find out directly for yourself your actual nature.

No spiritual idea is going to help you there. No ideas about enlightenment or realization or awakening, practice or no-practice, action or non-action, or anything else whatsoever can help you in the effort to know, in this moment, in every moment, the actuality of your nature. And it is Ramana's claim, and I second that, that once you have seen directly the actuality of what you are in this moment, the entire array of story, of history, of fixation, of thought, of emotion, of good and bad states, of happiness and unhappiness is wiped out. It is not to say that history disappears, or fixation disappears, or thought disappears, or wrong ideas disappear, or right ideas disappear, or right or wrong action disappear; it is just that their relevance to your happiness is revealed to be inexistent. Then, whatever is done from there is fresh, and not burdened with the heavy weight of the idea that I am doing something in order to be happy, or I am doing something in order to be alive or awake or realized, enlightened. That I am doing something upon which my entire life depends; something upon which the usefulness, the purpose of my life depends. Then, whatever is done from there is done as play only, of no consequence.

This is the claim of Ramana Maharshi and this I second, in my own experience. The only thing standing between you and self-realization is the belief that you are not already realized. That means that you are absolutely awake, open-eyed, unresisting consciousness, now and forever. And nothing can change that. Nothing can taint it, nothing can pollute it, nothing can cover it, nothing can deny it to you. No thought, no fixation, no bad behavior, no karma, nothing.

This is really outrageous. It is really important to see how preposterous this claim is. Otherwise, it just becomes one more spiritual idea to be filed among all the other spiritual ideas, because all the other spiritual ideas say the same thing. They just don't say it quite as starkly as Ramana has. It is not a mantra to be repeated, to be mimicked, to be faked. It is a challenge.

I would like for us for the rest of this day to forget every other spiritual idea. I think maybe these intensives ought to be called "working intensives", because what we are here for is to work, to spend this day, to devote this day to find out if there is any truth to what Ramana suggests. It is really wonderful, the feelings and states of peace and freedom and so forth that naturally arise when a group of people gather together in the name of truth, but we are not here for that. That is a by-product. And we don't have to refer to anything whatsoever. This is the hugeness of the gift of Ramana: we don't have to refer to anything else whatsoever. We don't have to decide whether what we are doing is right or wrong; we don't have to decide whether it conforms with all the other spiritual ideas and spiritual announcements and pronouncements that we have heard. All we have to do here today, is do what Ramana has asked us to do, which is to discover directly our own nature. The actual reality of our own nature. It is really to put it all to the test.

Usually, we use spiritual ideas to test ourselves. We hold this burden of spiritual conceptualization and we use it as a way of comparing our present state to determine whether it conforms to the state that we imagine to be being referred to in all the spiritual announcements and discussions. We are not doing that today. We are not trying to determine whether our state is the state of realization and enlightenment and awakening. We are going to find out whether or not these spiritual ideas that we have received have any truth to them. Because you see, I may be wrong, but it is my experience that the hallmark of spiritual maturity is that there is nothing else by which we can gauge spiritual maturity apart from the fact that we have really understood that nothing we have done in this life has worked. And including, especially all of our spiritual activities. That nothing whatsoever has worked. Nothing has given us what we want. Nothing we have done, nothing we have learned, nothing we know, no experience that has come to us in the past and disappeared, no experiences of oneness and peace and bliss that appears in satsang, none of our practices, none of our meditations, none of our acquisitions, none of our attainments. Nothing, nothing, nothing has worked.

And the natural and rational conclusion that would come from the acknowledgement that nothing we have done has worked; that still there persists this sense which I think of as something not quite finished, something missing, something still lacking, some reason to constantly monitor my state, is that all of the spiritual teachings must be false. All of the big ideas, all of the wonder of enlightenment and realization and awakening, all the ideas of oneness, of emptiness, of awareness, that they all must be false, since they have done me no good except to stir up a wish; they're kind of like Santa Claus. They have stirred up a wishfulness, a willingness to suspend my own critical judgment in order to hope, "Dear God, please let it be true that I am eternal consciousness." A kind of superstitious unwillingness to confront, critically, the usefulness of all this spiritual business.

So, for today, what we are doing as far as spiritual concepts are concerned, is determining whether there is any truth to them. If there is any truth to them, then that truth must be here now. And if there is any truth to Ramana's distillation of every spiritual idea that has ever been uttered, in which he tells us that the only thing that stands between us and the final realization is the belief that there is a final realization apart from what I am now, just as I am, nothing changed, nothing made to stay, nothing made to go away. I have not read or studied all of the spiritual utterances over our entire history, but so far as I can tell, Ramana is unique in that he actually gives us a way to verify. And he is totally and completely practical in his suggestions. He doesn't tell us to believe anything, he doesn't tell us to engage in some practice that mysteriously, in some unknowable way, will result in revealing the happiness of our nature. He tells us, quite practically, step-by-step, what to do in order to verify the truth of what he claims.

So this is my prayer, we are going to find out together, today, whether Ramana is lying. Whether the Buddha is lying, whether they are all lying. If we take that as our goal, rather than enlightenment or awakening, we can reach that goal right now. We don't have to wait.

Copyright © 2005 John Sherman. All rights reserved.