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Ramana Maharshi |
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As a sixteen-year-old boy, in an absolutely unexpected circumstance, Ramana found that the story that he believed to be himself vanished and yet he remained. He left his home; he left the people he knew. He went to Tiruvanamalai, and he sat in the basement of the temple there. He was honored and venerated by the Hindu priests and holy people there, and he spent the next twelve years not speaking to anyone. During those first twelve years, he learned from all traditions; he learned about different ways of looking at self-realization. He created for himself a vocabulary of concepts and words that seemed to be consistent with his own experience. And he found in the ancient texts and in the ancient teachings, the idea that one could find directly, consciously, the reality of what one is, and that nothing else is of any value. For the rest of his life, in all of his meetings with the people who came to see him, he always came back to the rock bottom foundation upon which he stood and that was the question "Who am I?" All things whatsoever with Ramana — all questions, confusion and wanderings — were brought back to this question, "Who am I?" which he puts in our face all the time. What is offered in the self-inquiry of Ramana Maharshi is absolutely practical and down to earth. It does not require the intervention of any divine being or any guru. What is required is the determination within oneself to know what is true, what is real, and the recognition that I must find this for myself.
From a Meeting with John Sherman in October 2006
Thanks to the Sri Ramanasramam and the Baghavan Ramana Maharshi website, we are now offering the following Ramana Maharshi books as free downloads. All books are published by Ramanasraman, Tiruvanamalai, India. All of the files on this page are in Adobe Acrobat PDF format inside a ZIP Archive. Please download the ZIP file and extract the PDF file to your hard-drive. Any ZIP utility will be able to extract the file.
Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi Qui Suis-Je? (Who Am I? - French translation)
More books, as well as articles, newsletters, the Mountain Path Journal, accommodation and travel information to the ashram, photographs and video clips are also available as free downloads from the Ramana Maharshi Website.
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Read the letter from John and Carla. Read the Update from John and Carla 2009 Fundraising Progress
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| Worldwide Online Meeting | |||||||||||
Saturday, July 4 at 1 pm PDT (GMT/UTC -7) People all over the world gather together online with John for a couple of hours. John is available to listen to your questions, and to help you sort out any difficulties you might experience in your own practice of the vichara. |
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| Featured Letter of the Month | |||||||||||
| 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. | |||||||||||
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| Podcast | |||||||||||
A Worldwide Meeting - June 20, 2009 For 5,000 years and more, we have focused all our efforts on trying to solve the underlying problem of human existence by looking outward, trying to fix our mind, our life, our behavior, etc. Pretty much all of our practices have been focused on creating the states and relationships that we have come to believe characterize the peace and freedom we so desire. In the desire for freedom, all of this is a waste of time. There is nothing that can be done effectively to shape your personality, your persona, your life that will fix them in such a way that they become what you want them, and you, to be. |
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Meeting # 1 - November 2, 2007 Beginning on July 1st, and every Wednesday for eight weeks, a complete video of one of the meetings in this retreat will be posted. The meetings will be posted in order, and after 8 weeks, the videos of the entire 2007 Retreat will be streaming on our website. You will be able to download the videos in different file formats and each video will be accompanied by the complete transcription of the meeting. |
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Our Work First, last, and always, my advice is only to look at the feeling of being you, without the mediation of understanding, the need to resolve paradox, or the requirement that this looking lead to any conclusion. Simply make every effort just to look, and persist in that effort as often as you can. In this effort, understanding is irrelevant, belief is irrelevant, even duration is irrelevant -- the briefest look, repeated over time, does all the work. A Message from John Sherman, videotaped in Ojai, California on May 15, 2009. Length: 8 minutes |
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| Our work is to bring the vichara to all who are interested. 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. Although our meetings are free of charge, they are certainly not free of cost. The money needed for this work must come entirely from the generosity and compassion of those who, like us, have seen for themselves the immense worth of spreading this good news to all humanity. Please help provide financial support for the work of making this method more widely available in the world by making a donation or a monthly pledge in any amount now. All donations to the RiverGanga Foundation are fully tax-deductible. |
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| RiverGanga Foundation PO Box 1566 Ojai, California 93024-1566 Phone: (805) 649-1600 Email: info@riverganga.org RiverGanga Foundation is a public not-for-profit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the IRS Code. All donations are tax-deductible according to IRS regulations. |
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