I have been the servant of Ramana's simple teaching for 7 or 8 years now. And that's the way I think of myself, as the servant of this teaching. My first contact with any spiritual teaching, or ideas at all, if you discount my earlier neurotic relationship with Christianity, was 1994, twelve years ago, when I began going to see the Tibetan Buddhists in a federal prison in Colorado.

I was reflecting on this today, and if my experience is any indication, I think that most of us come to the spiritual world, to the spiritual life without a clue what we expect to get from it. When I first started listening to the Tibetan Buddhists, I was swept away by the beauty, grandeur and mystery of what they seemed to be offering, but it seemed to me that it was incumbent upon me to tease out of the general exposition that was offered to me, some sense of what I was supposed to get from it, and what I was there for. I knew about the Buddha and how he had woke up sitting under the tree, and so forth, but I didn't really know what that was. I mean, what is it to wake up?

Complete recording of a Meeting with John Sherman in Ojai, California on August 5, 2006.

Length: 1h 14 min File Size: 18.22 MB




MP3 File