Adapted from a Meeting with John Sherman
Santa Monica, California - July 10, 2005
In times like these, in crazy times like the times we live in now,
the whole spiritual context can come to be seen, seemingly justifiably,
as self-indulgent. The world is in flames, as if it has never been in
flames before. The activities of the human beings are insane, murderous,
inexplicable, and irrational, as if this has never been the case before.
In times like these, it is quite common and quite to be expected that
the mind will present beautiful justifications for stepping away from
matters that are spiritual; beautiful justifications for continuing
the outward-bound energy of individual consciousness, such as, "It
is self-indulgent for me to be concerned about my internal spiritual
well-being, my eternal happiness, when all around the world people are
blowing each other up." It is not only self-indulgent; it can seem
quite risky. I mean, "My God! If my attention is inward, what can
happen? Who is that next to me on the bus?"
If something bad is about to happen, there is no time for the whole
idea of me devoting my attention, devoting my life's energy to discovering
the truth, to really seeing and knowing the truth of what I am, is there?
There are too many other things happening. "We've got to do something
about Bush, about Iraq, about Osama bin Laden." "We have to
do something to protect ourselves from the horror of the possibility
of getting blown up in a subway or in a bus." "We've got to
pay attention; life is risky, and I have no right to turn my attention
away from all of these pressing matters in order to find the truth."This
is self-indulgent. There are other times for that and this ain't one
of them."
Of course, this is just more of the same old-same old. It really doesn't
matter whether the world is on
fire or just my life is on fire;
there is no end to the possibilities whereby the individual consciousness
can persuade itself that what it is doing in indulging and wallowing
in misery and ignorance is justifiable: "I might lose my wife;
I might lose my job, I might forget to balance the checkbook."
Really, there is no end to the excuses and they are all excuses.
Consider this: in the ten thousand years or so that we have been on
this planet nothing has changed, nothing. In the ten thousand years
or so that we have kept track of what we have done on this planet, what
we have done on this planet pretty much is always the same. Murder,
rape, pillage, terror, theft, hatred -- nothing has changed. That seems
to be what we do as human beings and, generally speaking, when we are
in the midst of doing it, we are also in the midst of rebelling against
it. "What can I do to change it?" "How can we change
it?" "Let's go march on the streets." "Let's change
the political system, let's do away with slavery; let's do away with
feudalism; let's do away with patriarchy; let's do away with matriarchy;
let's do away with Islam. Let's do away with religion entirely. Let's
fight for peace."
The truth is that, as a species, we have tried everything. We haven't
tried everything once; we have tried everything thousands upon thousands
of times. We have tried everything political; we have tried everything
religious; we have tried everything military; we have tried to conquer;
we have tried to surrender; we have tried to be passive; we have tried
to actively change things. What has it gotten us? Same old-same old:
people blowing themselves up; people stealing, raping, pillaging, committing
genocide, starving, hating, destroying. We have tried it all. We have
tried God; we have tried kings, we have tried religion; we have tried
science; we have tried everything and nothing works. That is the lesson
of our ten thousand years of history: nothing works, nothing. We have
tried it all and nothing works.
God knows I am among those who have tried to put an end to the madness
in the world by inflicting more madness upon it! It is my experience
that all of these things we try, with the justification that we are
trying to make things better -- whether we are doing it in the world
at large or we are doing it in our individual lives or in our individual
mind streams, sitting quietly by our self watching television -- all
of the things we are doing are done only for one reason: to escape from
the truth. All the murder, all the anti-murder, all the hatred, all
the anti-hatred, all the religion, all the anti-religion, all the politics,
all the anti-politics, all of those things have their components in
the world at large and their components in my own individual life and
my own individual mind stream. Politics, anti-politics; religion, anti-religion;
peace, anti-peace; war, anti-war: all of it. All of these things have
no purpose. How long does it take us to see that what we have been doing
doesn't work? We have seen it for a long time. How long ago did the
prophets say in Ecclesiastics that, "There is nothing new under
the sun?" and "All is vanity." We have known it for a
long time. We are really not that stupid not to see, not to understand
that what we are doing makes no sense.
But we do it and we continue to do it, only in order that we can escape from the truth. We even seek the truth in order that we can escape
from the truth. We seek God, so that we don't have to be consumed in God; we seek the truth in order that we don't have to be eaten
alive by the truth. Always out there; always looking for solutions
out there in thought and ideas, in the projection of thought and ideas
onto action.
When we turn to the spiritual path, we turn there in the same manner
in which we have conducted all the other business in our lives: to get
or get rid of something. That is all we can do, that is our two tricks.
That's it and we can't do that, really. What we can do is want
to keep and want to get rid of.
All the rest of it are beautiful fantasies built from those two energies,
those two projections of desire, those two reifications of this fire
of being that, at all costs, we must avoid; we must get rid of, we must
escape from, lest it will eat us alive.
Even when we come to satsang, we hear the invitation of Papaji to "Stop.
Call off the search," and we get really busy stopping and calling
off the search, in order that we can be
happy. We hear this invitation and something breaks open in us:
"Ah! It feels so good!" And then, the good feeling passes,
as feelings do, and we want it back. We want to get rid of the feeling
that has replaced it; we want that good feeling of awakening back. We
don't want life as it is; we
want to kill off life as it is.
Any thing is better than this; anything is better than this fire within
me. And we have been doing this for as long as we have been here. That
is the story of humanity and everybody knows it. Everybody knows how
crazy we are. All the great ones have known it and told us, "Hey
people, get a grip! It is so simple; it doesn't require any kind of
understanding of the truth; in fact, it really requires being
finished with any kind of understanding of the truth.
Nothing works. I mean, it works in the sense that we keep ourselves
away from the truth of our nature, and God knows that 99.9 percent of
humanity has probably managed to do that for all their life long, until
they fall into the grave. But it doesn't work with doing away with any
of that; it doesn't work in reforming humanity; it doesn't even work
in reforming me. The harder I
try to make myself better, the more perverse, self-destructive and filled
with self-hatred I am. The more I try to make the world of humanity
better, the worse things become. Well, you can see it: everybody is
out there trying to make humanity better. They've got troops in Iraq,
troops in Afghanistan; they've got terrorists flying planes into buildings,
blowing up subways, blowing up themselves, all to "make humanity
better."
All of it is driven by a deep determination to do away with evil. But
it doesn't work, nothing we have done has worked. Nothing we have done
has worked in the world; nothing we have done has worked in our lives,
so it is time, I think, for a fresh
start. That is the real invitation of Ramana and Papaji and Gangaji:
a fresh start. Throw away the spiritual stuff, throw it all away! It
is a weight and a burden. Put it all in the trash.
According to Ramana Maharshi, the only possibility of finally and forever
breaking this endless cycle of outward-going madness is to find
what your actual nature is. Not what some guru has told you your
actual nature is; not what Ramana has told you it is; not what Papaji
has told you it is; not what Gangaji has told you it is -- and certainly
not what I have told you it is. Not what some religion has told you
it is; not what some secular religion has told you it is, but to find
out for yourself directly, immediately, in this moment, your actual
nature -- before the story, before any understanding.
Here's the truth: all the war is here in me.
All of it: all the murder, the hatred, the destruction, the rape, the
murder, the genocide, the pillage, the destruction of the planet, all
of it is here and no where else. The story that it is somewhere out
there is a story that maintains the cycle of murder and hatred. It is
all here. It begins with the
first movement of arising energy that says, "I don't want that.
Let me get rid of that. I would rather have that." This is the whole war; that is all of it.
In that first movement is contained every baby that has been slaughtered
in Darfur; every person that is slaughtered in wars and murders; everyone
that has been raped; every piece of property that has been stolen. Every
horror that has been inflicted upon humans by humans is contained in
that first movement, in your own heart, that says, "I don't want
that. Let me get rid of that; just let me not have that.
Let me instead have this."
This can be anything. It can
be a love relationship, it can be a lot of money, it can be fame, it
can be power. It can be enlightenment, it can be awakening, it can be
God. And this that I don't want, well, it can be anything too: fear,
worthlessness, hatred, anger, grief, sorrow -- let me get rid of that.
I can rid of it by projecting it on you -- "You are the problem, you've got to go." -- or "You
are the solution; you've got to stay." Every act of hatred and
violence ever committed in the history of humanity is contained in that
first movement within your own heart to do away with this and keep that.
Who is it that does that? Who is it that makes that movement? Who is it? What is it? What am I,
really? Well, "I am human, I am angelic, I am consciousness itself."
"I am the devil." "I am emptiness, I am Buddha mind,
I am nothing." "I am viciousness, I am hatefulness, l am love,
I am God, I am awake, I am realized." All of it out
there -- none of it real. All of it made up. The good and the
bad, all of it made up.
This isn't the teaching of Ramana Maharshi, which is all I ever really
have to talk about. The teaching of Ramana is that what you are is here.
It has nothing to do with any name, any story, any idea. All names,
all stories, all ideas whatsoever are distractions; they are places
to go to protect myself from myself. What I am is here now, always now.
It is absolutely inescapable. If it were escapable, we would have escaped
from it long ago, because God knows we have tried everything!
The teaching of Ramana is that, if only we will, just once, just now
in this moment, find what the energetic sensational experience is that
I am talking about with the story "I", this will do it. "I"
is a story; "I" is a name for something present. What is it?
Where is it to be found? Where does it end? What does it feel like? What am I? This possibility stops the willingness, the determination,
the earnestness, the true desire to know the truth finally once and
for all. It puts an end to the outward-going mind; it is all that will
do it. We have tried everything else; this is what does it: this willingness
to look at, taste, feel, see, understand, do nothing except know
myself, know what I am.
This doesn't take anything, this doesn't take any merit; it doesn't
take any training; it doesn't take any understanding. You can't escape
from yourself, here you are. All it takes is the willingness to arrest
the outward-going energy that has afflicted all of us for all the time
that we have been here and bring it home to its source, to this fire
of being, the silent fire of being that is your actual nature and is
absolutely known already.
© 2005 John Sherman. All rights reserved.
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