Ramana Maharshi gave no one any encouragement to follow him in any way whatsoever. He only instructed us, consistently, and again and again, to find out for ourselves what is real, what is here, what we are. He did encourage us, and the encouragement he provided was by his own example, and by his own experience that the effort to find out for ourselves what is real would give us everything we have ever wanted. So far as I know, in all of the time that I spent reading Ramana and thinking about Ramana, he never told anybody to go out and teach in his name or in the name of his teaching either. Nor did he ever suggest that he was part of or the beginning of any lineage.
The whole essence of Ramana's offering is that there is only one thing worth doing in life, only one thing that has to be done in order that life can be seen as the wonder and the gift that it is. And that is to cut through all of the conditioning, the mental chatter and the mind's insanity and look with all your heart, trying only to see yourself.
Live recording of a Worldwide Meeting with John Sherman on January 19, 2008.
We receive many, many beautiful and useful letters. Every month we try to feature one here that seems especially valuable and instructive for one reason or another.
La nouvelle version du livre Meeting Ramana Maharshi, Conversations with John Sherman, révisée en 2008, vous est présentée maintenant en traduction française.
There is no point in making an effort to establish a connection between the spiritual terminology and the reality that you already see. Once you enter the vichara consciously, in time, you simply lose interest in all of that. No matter how true and inspiring the spiritual and religious discourse may have been, it has not done you much good. There are many things that can provide you with some passing comfort and clarity, but none of them works to put an end to the idea that life is suffering, and that you are in danger here. The only thing that works is to look at you -- ordinary, everyday you.
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Our work is to teach the method of the vichara (self-inquiry) to all who will receive it.
The only problem anywhere to be found is the false belief that you are at the mercy of your life, and the only solution is the truth, which is everywhere and always present and self-evident. Ridding oneself of the false is as easy as repeatedly tasting the truth of being here, unmovingly, unchangingly here. This repeated looking directly at oneself is the infallible method of the vichara.
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